Petrobras is paving the way to charter up to nine flexible pipelaying support vessels, as the Brazilian oil giant looks to secure a new batch of deep-water specialised vessels to help in the challenge of developing its pre-salt assets in the Santos basin.
Petrobras, which already contracted six such PLSVs a year ago for a total price of $2.9 billion, received technical and commercials proposals from a few companies via its own intra-network on 1 November, according to sources.
It is understood that Subsea 7, plus the Seadrill-SapuraKencana consortium and an alliance between Technip and DOF Subsea submitted bids in the tender, although the secrecy of the process made it almost impossible to detect any potential additional players.
“Bids were submitted online, but Petrobras opted not to disclose the prices immediately. They are first going to run a technical review to qualify the offers, and only after that commercial proposals will be revealed,” said one source.
Petrobras is seeking newbuild PLSVs with different tension capacities, and has divided the tender into three packages, with charters on offer for five or eight-year periods, depending on final prices.
The first and second lots featured 550-tonne and 650-tonne vessels capable of operating in water depths of up to 3000 metres.
The third package included smaller 300-tonne units with a mandatory requirement that these vessels must be built in Brazil. The oil company’s original goal was to have all vessels manufactured in Brazil holding a high local content, but Petrobras later relaxed that rule, giving contractors the option to build the larger PLSVs abroad.
SapuraKencana chief executive Shahril Shamsuddin told Upstream that the Malaysian player and its partner Seadrill bid together for five PLSVs in the latest tender.
The duo is already building three PLSVs for Petrobras, two abroad and one 300-tonne vessel at the OSX shipyard in Rio de Janeiro state. Shamsuddin said he expects the value of fresh vessel contracts to be “similar if not bigger” than the previous awards.
Another source said the Technip-DOF Subsea bids may include some 300-tonne units with the proposed construction in the STX OSV shipyard in Rio de Janeiro, as the two companies have worked there in the past on the construction of the Skandi Vitoria and Skandi Niteroi PLSVs for Petrobras.
The bidding rules state that first delivery for the bigger vessels is scheduled for about 42 months after the signing of the contract. If a company is awarded multiple contracts, each subsequent vessel will be delivered with an interval of six months between them.
Characterised by their high pipelay tension capacities, the 550-tonne and 650-tonne PLSVs will be employed mainly to install umbilicals, flexible flowlines and risers to connect subsea wells to floating production, storage and offloading vessels in the ultra-deepwater portion of the Santos basin.
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