Brazil’s Petrobras has stalled on plans to contract out a major chunk of the engineering and design work for the development of Libra, a giant field in the Santos basin pre-salt province.

Earlier this year Petrobras invited companies such as Worley­Parsons, Doris Engineering, Wood Group’s JP Kenny and Genesis to submit conceptual engineering solutions for a basic development project covering a field that extends for 1548 square kilometres in the ultra-deepwater portion of the Santos basin.

Field