Main Challenges and Strategies to Develop Santos Basin Sub-Salt Fields, Deep water Brazil

Abstract Santos basin of Brazil is a hot area of oil and gas exploration and development in the world. Many sub-salt oil fields have been discovered in recent years. The reservoirs are mainly composed of microbial carbonate rocks with strong heterogeneity, which has developed a variety of storage space types. The fluid is complex with high gas oil ratio and CO2 content. The re-injection of produced gas brings uncertainty to the production performance and the stability of facilities. The project investment is huge due to many factors such as deep-water, deep buried and far away from the coastline. The complexity of reservoir and high investment of project make the economic and effective development of reservoir full of great challenges. This paper describes the development strategies of Brazil’s sub-salt deep-water oilfield and the main successful methods to maximize recovery and profits under uncertain conditions. It includes the following three aspects: (1) abundant information acquisition to reduce the main uncertainties; (2) development plan with robustness and flexibility to deal with potential risks; (3) multidisciplinary comprehensive research to evaluate reservoir mode and development mode.