Tech Talk - The Rise and Fall and . . . . of Brazil

Brazil seems to be appearing in the news a little more regularly these days. Whether it is because the President objects to NSA activities or because Unilever is buying 3 million gallons of algae-produced oil from Solazyme, to be produced at a new plant in Brazil that will generate 30 million gallons a year, the emphasis has switched from a focus on their growing oil and ethanol economy, perhaps because it has stopped growing.

Back when The Oil Drum first started (where the last post has now gone up) one of the earliest posts noted that Petrobras was seeing a 14% increase in production, as they reached 1.82 mbd, back in May 2005. This was at the time that discoveries were being made offshore in what is now known as the Pre-salt deposits.

Figure 1. Nature of the offshore deposits that are being developed from under the Salt Layer. (Seeking Alpha )

Part of the problem with the development of these deposits comes from where they are and what they are. Rock salt is one of those materials that will flow under pressure. (One of the more interesting examples of this is in the Polish salt mine at Wielicza where old mining tools were found encased in salt in a region of the mine that was thought to have never been worked.) This poses some problems with drilling – although these are now relatively well understood. The other problem is that the reservoir rocks under the salt are recognized to be very weak, which makes it more difficult to drill long lateral holes, and keep them open. (The genesis of the basin has been described by Schlumberger).
Note: this post has been updated to include the new discovery in the SEAL-11 area.

Exploration first found the Espirito Santo, Campos and Santos basins and this was followed, in 2006, by the Tupi province which held the promise, at the time of discovery, of producing 8 billion barrels of light oil and natural gas.

Figure 2. The initial Tupi discoveries offshore Brazil (Offshore Technology )

Because of the location offshore the oil and natural gas would be recovered using a Floating Production Storage and Offloading unit (FPSO) and the first of these to be dedicated to the site was contracted in 2009, the first crude being produced in May, 2009. An earlier FPSO, the Cidade de Sao Vincente, was already in use as a test platform for the field. At the same time further development showed that three offshore fields (Tupi, Iara and Guara) held the potential to supply up to 40 Tcf of natural gas. Guara was discovered in 2008, and was initially anticipated to have 1-2 billion boe potentially available. Iara was also discovered in 2008, and holds a potential 3-4 billion barrels of light oil and natural gas. By the end of 2010 the collective potential for the three fields was estimated at 10.8 billion boe.

Figure 3. The development blocks around Tupi (Rigzone )

A second FPSO was ordered in June of 2010 with a capacity of 120 kbd of oil, and 5 mcf of natural gas. Initial production from the first FPSO, the Cidade de Angra dos Reis, began in October 2010 with a target of 100,000 bd, and an additional eight FPSO’s were ordered in November of that year, increasing capacity by up to 150 kbd each, although collectively they are anticipated to reach maximum production in 2017 at 900 kbd.

At the end of 2010 the Tupi development had been renamed as the Lula field, in honor of the retiring President, and two more FPSO’s were chartered to increase production by another 150 kbd each, from the fields of the region. By May the first well connected to the FPSO Cidade do Angra dos Reis was producing over 28 kbd as the first of six wells connected to the platform.

As the development of the platforms to commercial production became closer Petrobras also commissioned the construction of 2 more FPSO’s, noting that these would be able to inject some 200 kbd of water back into the formations, in order to assist with production and the maintenance of pressure.

By June of this year the first production was received on the Cidade de Paraty a third FPSO, although only at 13 kbd, rather than the target 25 kbd as the vessel and support structure was still in process. The platform will ultimately receive oil and gas from 7 production wells (for a total capacity of 120 kbd) while feeding water back through 6 injection wells.

The potential is thus evident for Brazil to become a significant producer to meet not only their domestic demand, but also to start exporting oil and natural gas, given the potential for these offshore fields. But, to date, this promise has yet to be fulfilled. Ron Patterson has been plotting production and I have taken this plot from his site.

Figure 4. Production of crude and condensate from Brazil (Ron Patterson )

As I noted last time, the EIA had been projecting that Brazil would be producing up to 2.8 mbd by the start of this year, rising to 3.0 mbd at the end of the year. The OPEC MOMR suggests that they will only make 2.67 mbd by the end of this year, but at the above chart shows, that would still be a considerable improvement, and reverse the drop.

The gain is anticipated to come from the FPSO Pappa Terra, which is the renamed Nisa, and which will be moored at the Pappa Terra field. This is in the Campos Basin, and is a heavy crude (API 14 – 17 degrees) with the potential to yield 380 million barrels.

Figure 5. Location of the Pappa Terra Field (Offshore Technology )

The vessel left China at the end of last year, and was completed in Brazil before sailing to the field in June.

Figure 6. The Pappa Terra FPSO (Shipbuilding Tribune )

On the other hand Brazilian production of ethanol had gone up by 6%.

UPDATE: Just after I had finished writing this Reuters carried a story which they had pieced together from other reports, and which indicates that Petrobras and an Indian partner have found a new large field of light crude about 1,000 miles north of the developments in the Lula area. The new discoveries have the advantage of not being covered with the salt layer, and so will be easier to develop. Currently production is anticipated for 2018.

Figure 7. Location of the new field off the coast of Brazil. (Energy-pedia)

There are a number of different development wells being drilled in the region, and they have found sufficient success to allow their results to be congregated into a field with a potential reservoir of 3 billion barrels of light oil. of which perhaps 1 billion will be produced.

Figure 8. The drilling blocks in the Sergipe Basin. (Petrobras) ,

To Forbes - A Gentle Cough of Correction at TOD's end

Forbes recently issued a commentary on the closing of The Oil Drum, which deserves some rebuttal, since, as with many stories on the "Peak Oil" topic, it conveys too many incorrect statements and false assumptions.

Just over eight years ago I became irritated by several articles in the Main Stream Media that were clearly technically wrong. (My academic research includes many years of making holes in geological media, an interest that began with my doctoral work in the late 1960’s). I began writing about some of the misconceptions in regard to the approach of Peak Oil in a blog I was writing at the time. Shortly thereafter I agreed to join with Kyle, who was then writing his own blog, under the nom de plume of Prof Goose, to jointly create the website The Oil Drum.

In the beginning, Kyle handled the site management issues (a task he later passed on), and my main contribution has been the intended one of writing on the more technical sides of the situation. This was particularly the case during the events surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster, where readership of TOD rose to around 60,000 a day. But writing to a site that began to achieve some technical credibility had its drawbacks. Very early on I got into the habit of referencing almost every fact I cited, given the questions that arose whenever I appeared (at least to my audience, but also, at times, in fact) to misspeak. Working for the site has made me a better writer, but it was clear almost from the start that the two of us could not sustain the interest that the site very quickly drew.

Over the years I felt very fortunate that Kyle went out and found funding, and innocents willing to carry the burden of editing the increasingly large talent of folk that were kind enough to contribute to the large interest that the site engendered. The site was fortunate to attract some really perceptive folk, and if I hesitate to name them it is only from the fear of missing the odd one and causing offence to people that I have acquired great respect for over the years. Many of those now have their own sites, and so TOD acted in some small way as an encouragement for that effort and to broaden and grow the community that is concerned about the coming point where the production of oil, at a reasonable price, will be unable to keep up with demand and the unpleasant consequences that will then arrive.

I was watching the hearing before the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee this past Wednesday on the public understanding of climate. In response to a question, Ralph Lee of Factual, Channel 4 and David Jordan, Director of Editorial Policy and Standards for the BBC pointed out the difficulty in sustaining the level of stories on Climate Change, because of the need for these to generate significant new material to justify publication. They noted that repetition of the basic information, beyond a certain point, was counter-productive. So it is with the Peak Oil story. The facts, in neither case, change, but the amount of new information while accumulating (vide the superb work that Leanan has done with Drumbeat over the years) is often repetitive or confirmatory of earlier stories and thus harder to turn into interesting and exciting new material. There are developing stories that justify continued interest in the topic, but the slow pace with which some of the stories unfold make it difficult to sustain interest.

The transition of Egypt to an importing state for example, revealed in the Energy Export Databrowser figure shown a few weeks ago illustrates a growing problem that their new government must address, but it can only be covered a few times before interest wanes.

Figure 1. Change in oil consumption and the need for more imports for Egypt (Energy Export Databrowser)

And this holds true for many of the topics covered in the past years. The perceptive articles written at TOD on Saudi Arabia by Stuart Staniford (who now writes Early Warning), Euan Mearns and with JoulesBurn’s images from the satellites showed how Ghawar was in significant decline. But there are only so many photos of oil rig sites in the desert that can be made interesting. Aramco are switching to the heavier oils offshore. Manifa has just started new production and Safaniya is being expanded. These are needed to offset the permanent declines in production from the older fields, but again, other than chronicling these steps it is hard to sustain interest in an inexorable process that takes years to play out and where the route to Peak Oil is following along many of the predicted lines.

Even drawing back the curtains of hype over the Bakken and Eagle Ford production, which Rune and Art have so ably done, can only be written about at a certain low frequency before folk see it as repetitious.

Much of the story of the future supply will, in my view, come from activity outside the United States. There will always be a need to update activities in and offshore Alaska, and in the US shales and other formations where future production will have to come from, but as we are likely to see by the end of this year, the gilt on that gingerbread is very thin. Thus the posts that I have been writing recently (and which will continue on Bit Tooth Energy – my own home site) will likely focus on the situations abroad, such as the Middle East, where the political upheaval has a much greater potential to disturb overall global supply than the changes in the US. Similarly Japan is moving toward a more militant attitude as China moves to extract fuel from disputed fields in the East China Sea. This however, again, is a potential tragedy unfolding in slow motion.

At the beginning of the year the EIA were predicting that gas prices would fall this year and pundits that suggested that gas prices would stay down after the recession still appear with regularity to quote their lines of optimism, even as gas prices stay stubbornly high and potentially may rise through the rest of the year. Why is that? Well the OPEC nations need a certain level of income and adjust their production each month to help sustain prices – something these optimists seem unwilling to recognize.

The problem, however, is that if global demand rises at (for the sake of discussion) 1 mbd a year, then a point will be reached, fairly soon when increasingly this OPEC supply becomes no longer capable of filling the demand. Prices will then rise again, balancing supply against those able to pay for their demand at that price. Stating that this is not going to happen because "a way will be found" is to remain an ostrich.

No, gentle readers, the closing of TOD is, in my opinion, based on a deliberate but IMHO faulty management decision made in that group a couple of years ago. It was predictable at that time, but it has nothing to do with the coming of Peak Oil, and is not even symptomatic of much of a delay in that arrival.

And with that off my chest I will return to writing about the evolving problems. My hope at the founding of TOD was that it would chronicle the events through the Peak, it got to nearly the Peak, though I don’t anticipate that this will be a pleasant story beyond that point. But, that coverage will now shift to being only at a new location at a time chosen by the TOD editors.

Revisiting my Climate Change predictions from last year

This time last year I wrote a post on The Oil Drum of sufficient controversy that it ended with my being dropped as an Editor at that site, and the creation of this site. It was meant, when I wrote it, as a bit of a prediction. Given that it is now just over a year later, and we have had Climategate, and may soon have Thermometergate, so it seemed to be a good time to review the original post. A couple of the links aren’t available and I have changed (or commented) where that is the case. Here is the post:

One of my most enduring memories of Washington D.C. occurred while attending a meeting on Geothermal Energy Development, back in the days before the Iron Curtain fell. In the evening after dinner, I took a colleague from Eastern Europe, on his first American visit, for a walk down the Mall. We walked, almost alone, on a still, bitterly cold, dark evening with fresh snow on the ground, and stars peppering the sky above us to see the sights, including the Lincoln Memorial. We stood staring, like backwoods tourists, through the windows of the Air and Space Museum.

We came back to the hotel for alcoholic refueling, thinking that the energy problems of the time would guarantee unending research funding into new forms of energy, and that our future was assured. That was about thirty years ago, and we were, of course, wrong, at least in terms of the funding and sustained interest in unconventional energy sources. Now we are walking back over some of the same ground. Again, fluctuations in oil prices have removed the immediate perception of the need for alternate supply, and have also weakened the credibility of those of us who try to suggest how to deal with the problem.

Prophecy, particularly when it deals with the near term future runs the risk of being corrected by the actual turnout of events. The ups and downs of energy demand, and available supply–-particularly when tied to the economic fortunes of nations, can make logical projection under one condition, but become apparently hopelessly in error when that condition doesn’t happen. Thus, at the moment, with the declining price, and apparent glut of oil, the public no longer feels that there is a crisis; the credibility of those forecasting a crisis is damaged, and can only be reconstructed over a longer period of time and changing circumstance.

I thought of that this past week. While the driver of “energy independence” has become the discredited cry of the outgoing Administration, it has been replaced with the need to find alternate energy sources in order to prevent climate change because “the science is indisputable”. The over-riding driver is that we are seeing global warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide.

For those who forget, back in 2007 the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA should regulate the emissions of the greenhouse gases that include carbon dioxide. It noted in passing:

Given EPA’s failure to dispute the existence of a causal connection between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, its refusal to regulate such emissions, at a minimum, contributes to Massachusetts’ injuries.

This was germane since Massachusetts had to show that it had standing to bring the case, which it did since the rising sea levels would threaten the state’s well being. This has been reinforced by the recent decision by the EPA Appeals Board that EPA has no valid reason not to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Thus new plants will have to revisit their submissions to EPA for permitting, as the permits relate to their emissions.

Revisiting EPA submissions will be a time-consuming effort. EPA will first have to write some regulations, so that the permitting of new plants will be likely considerably delayed. Also, as I have noted in an earlier post, shortfalls in the power that the nation needs may develop as a result, particularly if it continues to get colder in winter.

An increasing level of acceptance and public support of global warming has been achieved, in part, by the repetition of stories that the world is warming, and that we can anticipate, as a result, that the ice fields of Greenland, the Arctic region as a whole, and Antarctica will melt, causing sea levels to rise dramatically. There is, however, as they say, a slight technical hitch to this concept. Nature is not co-operating, and the predicted events are not occurring with the inexorability that was initially projected (see for example here ).

Now some of these shortfalls are beginning to be noticed on an increasing scale, although to quote Upton Sinclair (from the trailer to “An Inconvenient Truth”), “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And there are a lot of folks these days who have salaries that are tied in some way to the perception of global warming. To give but a few examples that suggest the need for more of a scientific debate, graphs of temperature rise do not show the continuous increase that had been projected ten years, ago, but rather seem to indicate a leveling and decline.)

Ed. Note Shortly after I posted the graph shown below it was removed from the GISS site – the number of sites that are sampled has now been reduced dramatically and the selection is such that those remaining are apparently not showing the temperature stability or decline that would apparently otherwise be evident. I expect this to be one of the news stories of 2010, and that in the process Dr. Hansen’s attempt to apportion the blame for this to his colleagues, and thus “throw them under the bus,” will become also a more debated topic. )



Greenland itself does not appear to be getting any warmer.



Glaciers in Alaska may be starting to grow again, under the changing snow patterns. And the Antarctic ice fields have been growing to record size.

(Ed. Note the original page on growing Alaskan glaciers from the Anchorage Daily News is no longer available, but the story was also covered on Daily Tech. There are stories of glaciers now growing around the world including Argentina and India.)

Now it may be that there are good scientific explanations for these events; they may be transient events that can change with time. But to the public, these are, like the short-term fall in gas, an indication that the pundits are wrong. It is comfortable if those forecasting global warming turn out to be incorrect, because then the uncomfortable changes to a different energy source or more conservation may not need to be made. In part, the problem is that this is not being addressed as a scientific issue, but rather an extension of the topic as politics, as it has been treated so often in the past.

I was thinking of this when I read a post in the Washington Monthly this past week. It excoriated a writer at Politico for writing a piece that began with the paragraph,

Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.

What I found sad about the critique was the comment,

How many scientists are quoted defending the global warming consensus of the scientific community? Zero. Lovley's article reads like something one might find on World Net Daily.

This is one of the subjects where, as I showed above, it is possible rather easily to find the basis for scientific question. If someone comes into a room and says, “It’s raining,” one can look out of the window and see whether it is, or not. Having a debate by the assembled multitudes in the room as to whether it is or not, and whether their credentials make their opinion worthwhile, is not as informative as if the visitor coming into the room is wearing a wet raincoat, regardless of their background. Ad hominem attacks only work in the short term, and become increasingly less effective as evidence continues to pile up that there may be another side to the story.

The recent record snows in the Himalayas, for example, suggest that there may not be the predicted Asian droughts as the recharged glaciers will continue feeding water into the rivers. And in regard to the rising levels of the sea, there are studies that show that while sea level has been slowly rising for a quite considerable time, that there has been no acceleration in the rate, which runs around 1.3 to 1.5 mm per year, over the past 50 years. (This would mean that the sea level increase over the next 100 years would only be some 140 mm or about 5.5 inches). Web sites that collect such information are growing in number and popularity. One such tracks peer-reviewed papers that have evaluated temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period, frequently finding them higher than today.

Gradually this actual set of events makes its way into the public perception. If there has been no debate, then the proponents appear more starkly wrong when it all begins to be presented, and the initial position becomes discredited. (See for example President Reagan after Iran:Contra). Unless, that is, global warming has gone from being a scientific event, where events can be openly debated, to becoming a religion, where fanatical opposition to those who are not true believers brings attempted silencing by humiliation, excoriation, exorcism, excommunication and, in the past, immolation of such “heretics”. In such case, I suppose, then we face a different type of doom.

Administrations start with a certain amount of good will from the public--they have a certain initial credibility and belief that will carry them through some tough decisions. If the issues are openly and honestly debated, then unexpected change can be accommodated. This honest debate is good, because it means that the momentum to find the alternate energy sources that we need can be continued, rather than having the need challenged and discounted.

Without continued momentum, it may be that when, in the future, I return to the hotel from an exhilarating walk around Washington, the room may be cold and dark, due to inadequate power supply. Neither wind nor solar work on still, dark nights, and we may still need additional research and development to provide sufficient alternative replacements at scale for coal and natural gas.
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After that original post I had intended to follow it with a second - the purpose of the two is explained, in part, by the second part (which follows), however there were additional consequences.
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I thought I would add this second part to the post to explain what I thought I was doing, since it seems as though it was only evident to a few.

The whole debate on climate change and its relationship to energy is about to go through a paradigm shift, I believe, as the incoming Administration applies the policies that they come to power propounding. This is relevant to our continued discussion since those who are charged with preparing our Energy future are all very concerned with climate change. And, as the lead item in Drumbeat on Sept 15th notes

If you think Washington's debate over whether to bail out General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC is acrimonious, wait until the debates over energy and climate change policy start. The auto bailout debate has become a proxy for the coming clashes over energy strategy.

Now I have to tell you that the readership, and commenters here have both made me proud and caught me out. When I first posted on the climate change debate, back a couple of years or so ago, I got 150-odd comments some 55-odd of which were ad hominem attacks, and 5 were constructive debates about the science. I had thought that I might get the same sort of percentage here, and thus had planned this second part as a comment on this (since I don’t think it will hold up as a credible strategy as the debate becomes more public).

Instead of which – of the 461 comments on the site at the time that I write, only 25 folk actually engaged in ad hominem – though some did it considerably more than once. On the other hand there were some 53 folk that engaged in a more productive debate (and while there many who deserve credit for this, let me take my hat off to Barrett808 who patiently debated beyond the point that I suspect my patience would have worn out).

I still feel, as I tried to imply with the post, that the tone of the debate is going to change. And it is going to change in a way more hostile to those who propound AGW, because they will now be the “party in power” and thus more exposed to the scrutiny that brings. Thus the “snow in Tibet” type stories, that have often from the pro-CC point of view appeared in Drumbeat in the past, will now become more common but written now more in the anti-CC mode – since challenging authority is not an uncommon habit of journalists. This will also become more the case if it becomes less evident (the weather outside) that the world is continuing to warm.

Thus, if the policies are to be understandable and accepted the sort of discussion that has taken place here should become more common rather than less. Stating that the science is irrefutable, when there is data that may argue the opposite is not the way I think this should go. And the debate has to be at a level that folk can understand.

One of the reasons that I helped found this site is that I believe, quite strongly, that we are all better off if we are aware of all the facts, and can thus make an informed decision. But the facts should be presented and debated in a way that folk can understand, and with the explanations obvious to someone below the level of even a “science-challenged lawyer.”

I, thus, disagree strongly with the 11 folk, who seem to feel that this site should be censored to stay away from this topic, particularly since I sense that the topics will be more and more inter-twined in the future. And, while censorship and trying to deride the presenters might work at a level such as a blog, it is unlikely to get much respect in the popular press.
(Ed. Note Boy was I wrong about that!!)

Thus, the point of the post, that more of the debate on climate change should be carried out in the public venue, rather than hidden away. Censorship, as an example, might preclude me from posting this addenda as a fresh post, or disallow commenting on the latest EPA memo relative to the Bonanza situation.

I'm heading out, may I wish you the Compliments of the Season.
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2009 Update
That was a year ago, and there was much criticism at the time, which led to the creation of this site, and my being dropped as an editor at TOD – a site which, in passing I will note was set up to write about Energy, but while it carries a link to RealClimate (where the Climategate folk give their side of what appears to be some relatively blatant scientific malpractice) does not link to this site, for example.

In the past year I would suggest that my predictions about the change in public attitudes in starting to come to pass. I expect, with the reports on Climategate and the review of Dr Mann, and the continued exploration of the GISS temperature data manipulation, that the stories will continue to grow in the next year.

Hopefully I’ll be back, this time next year to see how those predictions worked, and to see what changes have occurred (though I will continue to comment on them throughout the year on Saturdays).