Spotlight: Where Petrobras' technology, innovation projects stand

Brazil’s federal company Petrobras is boosting investments in the modernization of its production units, asset reliability, optimization of processes and innovative technologies, particularly on the digital front.

In the first nine months of the year, the oil giant’s total capex was US$10.9bn, an increase of 19.5% over the same period of 2023, part of which went to innovation and digital-backed efficiency.

The company previously announced capex of US$102bn for 2024-28, some 31% more than in the previous five-year period, including investments in new digital projects and technologies.

On the tech front, core focuses have been on advanced processing through high-performance computing and supercomputers, digital twins, robotization, decarbonization solutions, and AI-powered equipment and software, for both back-office and front-end operations.

The offshore-focused firm has invested, for example, in underwater mini-drones, low-code development and 3D printing. In connectivity, it is close to going live with a major underwater fiber backbone to connect its main production units, a project carried out by Blue Marine Telecom.

Petrobras stands among the biggest ICT buyers in Brazil and its top tech suppliers include SAP (core ERP), Salesforce (CRM), Microsoft (AI, cloud), AWS (cloud) and Nvidia (GPUs).

Its portfolio also includes several dozen suppliers of specific and complementary technologies, as well as integrators and consultancy services.

BNamericas updates the status of some of Petrobras’ key tech initiatives.

Digital twins

After two years of testing, Petrobras validated the digital twin technology for oil production and oil flow developed by Brazilian company ESSS and will now scale the use of the application to most of its units.

According to Petrobras, the FPSO Cidade de Anchieta and the P-57 platforms, which operate in the Jubarte field in the pre-salt and post-salt of the Espírito Santo basin, participated in a pilot project with the ESSS tool. 

This pilot, said the oil company, proved the effectiveness of the platform, which was capable of increasing production by approximately 1%.

Petrobras divides the use of digital twins into two layers: digital twins for macroprocesses, which involve larger and more complex projects involving major industrial assets such as platforms and refining units; and “specialist” digital twins, comprising virtual representations of certain assets and specific equipment.

In the first case, the company has over 20 projects underway, involving reservoirs, wells, the subsea and topside parts and refineries.

Supercomputers

As BNamericas reported at the time, Petrobras selected Lenovo and is investing over 500mn reais (US$86.5mn) in five new supercomputers to be supplied by the Chinese company, powered by Nvidia GPUs.

Lenovo beat offers from rivals Dell and Atos. According to Petrobras, assembly of the Lenovo machines will begin this year and they will start operating in 2025. 

The contract includes over 2,000 Hopper 100 GPUs by Nvidia.

Petrobras is a leader in supercomputers in Latin America, with around 10 such machines, some of which are among the most powerful in the world. 

Fiber

During November, Blue Marine Telecom will begin installing the main trunk of Brazil’s Campos basin submarine fiber optic network to interconnect Petrobras' production units in the region.

The roughly 500km of cable arrived in Brazil in August from China. The supplier is HMN Tech, formerly Huawei Marine Networks.

The Campos basin project also encompasses construction of a cable landing station in Anchieta, Espírito Santo state, and the expansion of one in Barra do Furado, Rio de Janeiro.

The stations will be connected through the fiber to 12 offshore oil and gas exploration and production units. 

Blue Marine expects the project to be operational next year.

Startups

In September, Petrobras launched a new call for startups under its Connections to Innovation program, this time looking to invest 16mn reais (US$2.8mn) n tech projects focusing on the energy transition and asset management.

At the end of the process, winning companies can receive up to 1mn reais for soft tech challenges, such as software development, or up to 2mn reais for deep tech challenges, for the development of hardware and materials, for example.

Petrobras claims to be one of the country's leading investors in open innovation. Since the program's launch in 2019, the federal company has invested 54mn reais in 53 startups, encompassing 63 projects.

Back-office

Regarding back-office, earlier this year Petrobras completed the migration of approximately 100,000 SAP Governance, Risk, and Compliance Access Control (SAP GRC-AC) users to the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services private cloud.

Petrobras is a major user of SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

In 2022, it completed the migration of its core ERP platform to the SAP S/4 HANA version. The project took about three years and was coordinated by Deloitte as lead consultancy together with SAP and Microsoft.

Forfaiting 

Still in back-office, since December 2020, Petrobras has had a program to encourage the development of the oil and gas production chain called Mais Valor (More Value), operated by startup Monkey Exchange on a 100% digital platform.

By using this platform, suppliers who want to sell their accounts receivable may launch a reverse auction, in which the winner is the financial institution offering the lowest discount rate.

“The financial institution becomes the creditor of invoices advanced by the supplier, and Petrobras pays the invoices on the same date and under the conditions originally agreed with the supplier. Invoices are advanced in the Mais Valor program exclusively at the discretion of the suppliers and do not change the terms, prices and commercial conditions contracted by Petrobras with such suppliers,” the company says.

As of April this year, the program had involved over 24.4bn reais in invoices.

In July, 2016-founded Monkey Exchange raised 67mn reais in a series B round led by L4, B3’s corporate venture capital fund, with participation of German development bank DEG as well as Quona and Kinea.