[vampyregirl]

Petrobas has found oil about 235km off the coast of Rio de Janeiro at a depth of 2,266 meters. The discovery is estimated to contain 4 billion boe. Its contains a medium grade of crude.

[Ron Patterson]

The figures for this find keep changing. From May 24th. Search:
Offshore oil: Petrobras hits oil at Florim well in Santos Basin
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')Petrobras has completed drilling and conducted a formation test in the well discovered in the Santos Basin pre-salt cluster...

The well was completed at a depth of 6,004 meters ...

The Rights' Transfer agreement sets a volume of 467 million barrels of oil for the Florim area and, according to the contract, the exploratory phase ends in September 2014.

[Pops]

The Lula field was discovered 7 years ago, it was called Tupi originally, est. at 8Bn bbls. They've started signing some contracts lately I read.

Here is what I wrote a couple of years ago regarding the "sub-salt" FWIW:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')y take, fwiw, is the GOM sediment has a "floor" of salt (evaporated seawater) from back when it first was formed and engineers had previously thought anytime they hit salt they were at the bottom of the sediment so no reason to continue drilling.

Turns out that salt "flows" under pressure so it can squeeze around and even over oil, trapping it deeper (and hotter) than previously thought. It's like looking for the remote under the couch but not under the rug because it "can't" be there.

[Tanada]

Interesting.

Well I guess every little bit sustains the plateau a little bit, but it sure feels like we are grasping every straw at this point.

[ROCKMAN]

Pops – That’s a very apt description. But the salt movements were even much more dynamic in some areas. It’s been documented that very large blocks of rocks (tens of thousands of acres) had been ripped loose and flip completely upside down. They discovered this by paleo: as they drilled deeper they kept finding younger and younger fossils. Think of an iceberg but made of rocks…and then flipped upside down. Though extremely slow action but imagine the force involved.

Eventually they discovered there were even some subsalt plays onshore. They found that the classic mushroom shaped salt dome didn’t always extend all the way down to the massive salt layer but were more like giant tear drops of salt floating in the rocks. As far as temps go it wasn’t so much that the oil was more stable (the thermodynamic don’t change with where the oil is found) but the found temps in the DW GOM much lower than anyone anticipated at those depths.

The last DW well I was on set a couple of records. Shallowest penetration of salt: 600’ below the sea floor. And thickest salt section drilled: 24,000’. Think of a long shaft of salt poking up. Drilled another 9,000’ after exiting the salt. We were going to be the deepest well drilled in the western hemisphere but at 33,000’ they didn’t have any hope of finding pay deeper so we stopped. Then we just plugged and abandoned a $98 million hole in the ground.