Brazil sees record oil and gas production in September

Brazil saw record oil and gas production in September, extracting 4.666 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, as per the oil authority ANP.

Oil production stood at 3.672 million barrels per day, up 6.1 percent from the previous month and 16.7 percent from September 2022.

Natural gas production in September was 157.99 million cubic meters per day, up 6.9 percent from the previous month and 10.4 percent from September last year.

The sources

The extraction of fossil fuels at sea is far higher than from onshore fields. Offshore wells yielded 97.6 percent of the oil and 87.2 percent of the natural gas.

The fields operated by Petrobras—both by itself and in consortium—accounted for 89.02 percent of the total output. The fields operated exclusively by the state-owned company represented 24.4 percent of the national production.

Oil and gas extracted from pre-salt layers made up 77 percent of Brazil’s production. The output reached 3.594 million barrels per day, up 9.5 percent from the previous month. This amount stems from 144 wells.

In September, the Tupi field, in the pre-salt Santos basin, was the top producer of oil and gas, boasting 902,40 thousand barrels of oil per day.

Of every 100 barrels produced in Brazil, 86 come from reservoirs geographically linked to Rio de Janeiro. Rio also ranks first in natural gas production, with 75 percent of the amount extracted. São Paulo comes second in the ranking for both oil and gas production.

Global ranking

According to the Brazilian Oil and Gas Institute, using data compiled in July 2023, Brazil is the world’s ninth largest oil producer and the first in Latin America. The US, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, in order, are the top three. Together, the three nations account for over 40 percent of global production.