Brazilian ride: for Singapore shipbuilder SembCorp Marine
SembCorp to build Brazil shipyard
Singapore shipbuilder SembCorp Marine said today its Jurong Shipyard would build a new shipyard in Brazil to serve the region’s burgeoning offshore oil and gas industry.
SembCorp said in a statement Jurong had bought a 825,000-square-metre site with 1.6 kilometres of coastline about 80 kilometres north of Vitoria in Espirito Santo State. The site lies onshore from the Espirito Santo basin, which contains some of the recent pre-salt discoveries.
Brazilian state oil company Petrobras has also made several huge finds in the last three years mainly in the offshore Santos basin.
SembCorp Marine chief executive Wong Weng Sun said the new yard would be well positioned to build drilling rigs and drillships; production and storage vessels and topsides modules; to integrate floating production, storage and offloading vessels and to carry out ship and rig repairs.
Wong said Jurong was "effectively the main shipbuilding contractor" to Petrobras, having supplied offshore platforms that today produce more than half of the company's daily output of about 2 million barrels.
He said Jurong had built a total of 11 exploration, production and storage units for Petrobras for use on Brazilian fields. The company's ultra-deepwater semi-submersibles West Taurus, Ocean Courage and West Orion were also currently chartered to Petrobras for work off Brazil and in the Gulf of Mexico.
The yard will be owned by a locally incorporated Brazilian company, Estaleiro Jurong Aracruz (EJA), a wholly owned unit of Jurong Netherlands. Jurong Netherlands is itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Jurong Shipyard.
SembCorp said engineering design work for the yard had already started. It said the yard would include a drydock, berthing facilities, slipways and steel and piping facilities.
Wong said the yard would also bring employment and training to the local workforce in the state.
It said further details of the shipyard equipment and its capital expenditure would be released "when appropriate".
Brazil has emerged as a major oil producing region in the last few years after discovering billions of barrels of oil hidden beneath a thick salt layer in deep water off its coast.
The major pre-salt fields lie in the Santos block off Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo states, including Petrobras's Tupi discovery in 2007, which is believed to hold between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels of oil alone.
Together with two other major Santos finds and a fourth field in the Campos basin, the pre-salt play is estimated to hold recoverable reserves of between 10 billion and 16 billion barrels.