Petrobras Contracts Halliburton for Four Wells in 100,000-Tonne CCS Pilot

Petrobras has signed a contract with Halliburton Produtos Ltda to drill and complete four onshore wells for the Sao Tome CCS pilot at the Barra do Furado station (Ebaf) in Quissama, Rio de Janeiro state. The pilot targets capture of up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, held for three years.

The well package is small and purpose-built: one vertical injector and three directional monitoring wells. Drilling, completion and the supporting infrastructure are scheduled for completion by 2028. Injection starts in 2029, running three years, followed by three further years of reservoir monitoring.

That sequencing matters more than the tonnage. A pilot sized at 100,000 tonnes annually over three years is a validation exercise for equipment, procedures and reservoir behaviour rather than an abatement instrument. Petrobras frames the contract as a step in its strategy to contribute to a carbon neutrality ambition by 2050.

What the operator buys with the wells is regulatory precedent. The project is structured as a Research, Development and Innovation initiative, opening the way for regulators including the Agencia Nacional do Petroleo, Gas Natural e Biocombustiveis (ANP) and the Instituto Estadual do Ambiente (INEA) to follow and validate procedures and standards across the CCS value chain in a real operating environment. For a national oil company, a rulebook tested on live wells is the asset that scales, not the volume injected.

The technical scope is written for measurement. Fibre-optic casing is specified to track the CO2 plume in real time, alongside a reservoir sampling system that avoids well intervention and CO2-resistant materials. Fibreglass casing in the monitoring well is intended to permit nuclear magnetic resonance logging. Each of those choices generates data on plume migration and containment that a commercial-scale project would otherwise have to assume.

The storage target is a saline reservoir rather than a depleted field. Sao Tome is presented as the first pilot in the country to move CO2 by pipeline and store it in a saline reservoir, and as the first in Latin America to capture, transport and store CO2 from industrial sources in a saline formation.

Saline storage is the pathway with the largest theoretical capacity and the thinnest operating record in the region, which is why the monitoring specification dominates the well design. Three years of injection followed by three years of post-injection surveillance is a data-collection window, not a production plan.

For an audience tracking capital allocation at the majors, the read is straightforward on the numbers alone. Four wells, a single injector, and a ceiling of 100,000 tonnes a year put this in the category of engineering de-risking. The commercially relevant output arrives at the end of the monitoring period, in the form of validated procedures and regulator-accepted standards, not in tonnes stored.

Industria News reported the contract on 17/08/2026 in its oil, gas and biofuels section.