Recent wells drilled in the Brazilian pre-salt

Over the last 15 months, 75 wells have been drilled in the Santos, Campos and Espírito Santo basins, including 13 exploration wells. The drilling of new exploration wells can be seen as the rebirth of exploration in the pre-salt province.

During the downturn in the oil industry in 2014-2018, only development wells in existing fields and appraisal wells in areas with previous hydrocarbon discoveries were drilled. However, since the beginning of 2019, we have seen appraisal wells being completed in the central area of the Santos Basin, as well as exploration wells in the Cabo Frio and outboard regions. Unfortunately, the data from these wells are not yet public, preventing us from conducting complete postmortems. That said, we ran a qualitative evaluation of the latest pre-salt outcomes (1-BRSA-1363-RJS, 1-BRSA-1373-RJS, 1-SHEL-31-RJS, 3-SHEL-30-RJS, 3-SHEL-32D-RJS and 1-SHEL-33-RJS) using the new BPSMAPS section of the BPS Geodatabase, in-house information and the official publications available on the ANP website.

According to these internal studies, it seems the existence of source rock and reservoir systems should not have been a problem for any of these wells, although the facies predictions may have ambiguities and velocity models and trap geometry problems could have been important killing factors at scale for the P90s of the traps. Our main conclusion is that the pre-drill analysis must be reviewed by multiple hypothesis tools, with petroleum systems modeling being especially important to drive pre-drilling decision making in the future.