Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) reported that production has started last week at Chinook field in the Gulf of Mexico. Production is connected to the BW Pioneer floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel—the first FPSO to produce oil and gas in the US portion of the gulf.
The Chinook No. 4 production well was drilled and completed in lower tertiary reservoirs, a promising offshore exploration frontier in the gulf, at a depth of 8,000 m.
The FPSO, which lies 250 km off Louisiana, is also connected to Cascade field, which initiated production in late-February (OGJ Online, Mar. 2, 2012). The vessel has the capacity to process 80,000 b/d of oil and 500,000 cu m/day of natural gas. Petrobras is the first company to develop an oil field in the gulf using an FPSO.
Chinook is owned by Petrobras 66.67% and Total Exploration Production USA Inc. 33.33%.