Brazil’s SENAI Institute for Innovation in Renewable Energies (ISI-ER) installed a LiDAR in the Paracuru municipality in the state of Ceará on 3 April the last piece of equipment of what is said to be the largest offshore wind resource monitoring network in Brazil Through an agreement with the Ministry of Science the study into Brazil’s offshore wind potential includes six measurement points from the state of Rio Grande do Norte to the state Amapá covering 38.6 per cent of the country’s coastline in an area known as the Brazilian Equatorial Margin The resource mapping project is the largest focusing on offshore wind energy in Brazil According to the ISI-ER Research & Development (R&D) coordinator the objective is to gather data that will be compared with simulations that are also under development The final data will then be validated before the Institute presents the results which it expects to take place in November 2025 at the 30th UN Conference on Climate Change (COP30) to validate our modeling, but the idea is that the equipment we installed will also be used after this period as permanent measuring stations,” Antonio Medeiros said.  Project measurements began in 2022 in Rio Grande do Norte one of the Brazilian states that could see the largest offshore wind investments with 14 projects awaiting licencing at the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) The region the state is located in has a very strong potential for offshore wind and low-carbon hydrogen but other areas that are now part of the resource mapping activities lack information and are now undergoing unprecedented studies “From the state of Maranhão to Amapá there are no observational data and few studies have been done to map meteoceanographic and anemometric variables so when it comes to studying these areas with an eye on energy use when environmental mapping and mapping of meteorological characteristics are done you have clarity and definition of the scenario director of SENAI in Rio Grande do Norte (SENAI RN) and ISI-ER says that the planned investments in the Brazilian offshore wind industry total billions “And it’s time for us to have more reliable data so that the decision-making of this investment takes place in the best areas,” Rodrigo Mello said this is one of the advantages that wind resource mapping in the Brazilian Equatorial Margin brings to the sector “The results of these measurements will provide primary data for the validation of simulations reducing the uncertainty of the energy potential of the Equatorial Margin This will make these investments optimized Having this data is a matter of strengthening the business attraction environment for this new industrial activity that will be very important for Brazil,” Mello said The projects that are being processed for licencing at IBAMA are based on secondary data and modelling and this study will make a significant contribution to the development of these projects and the offshore wind industry in Brazil SENAI says that the idea of mapping the Brazilian Equatorial Margin arose in 2020 after 13 of the 16 municipalities in the state of Amapá suffered a 22-day blackout in what was considered the largest blackout in the country’s history As a result of articulations by the senators of the Republic Davi Alcolumbre (Amapá) and the then-senator of Rio Grande do Norte an agreement for the development of the initiative was signed between the MCTI and the ISI-ER Besides studying the country’s offshore wind resource ISI-ER has also ventured into testing offshore wind technologies off the country’s coasts ISI-ER and SENAI RN submitted an application for a 22 MW pilot offshore wind project in Rio Grande do Norte which the Institute now expects to be approved in the second half of this year Daily news and in-depth stories in your inbox Leveraging 20 years of experience with offshore windDecember 2023 will forever mark a milestone in our company history as we became part of the world-wide CS WIND group The acquisition goes beyond a mere change in ownership; it marks a leap into a future where our combined strengths will pave the way for optimized production […] PGS GeoStreamer 3D datasets are positioned to give explorers in Ceará and Potiguar the best opportunity to de-risk these play fairways and prospects Significant shallow water discoveries have been made in both the Ceará and Potiguar Basins while the largest oil-producing region in Equatorial Brazil is the onshore portion of the Potiguar Basin where production is from the syn-rift to transitional successions only a few deepwater exploration wells have been drilled in the Equatorial Margin from the Amazonas Cone to the Potiguar Basin The offshore plays are structural and stratigraphic traps in the Upper Cretaceous reservoir section Tests of these reservoirs along the conjugate margin in West Africa have precipitated a move by explorers to examine the Equatorial Margin from Brazil to Guyana from a new perspective Zaedyus in French Guiana was an early geologic success and Liza and associated prospects in Guyana have become the poster child for economic success in these play fairways on the South America Equatorial Margin The dip seismic line in the foldout (Figure 1) shows rotated fault blocks in the rift section which in turn transition to post-rift turbidite onlap facies There is an interval of additional sedimentation prior to Tertiary erosional events as well as volcanic intrusions there is a highly faulted and folded zone associated with the Romanche Fracture Zone to the north-west Spectral decomposition is a useful tool for showing geomorphology and depositional system components on high quality seismic data Figure 3 shows some of the details of a channel system as it meanders down dip to the basin floor The late Cretaceous reservoir play fairway has been penetrated by the Pitu and Pecem wells The Pitu well in the Potiguar Basin found oil gas and condensate at depths of 4,150m to 4,450m in Upper Aptian sands in the Pescada Formation The discovery well was spudded in 2013 in 1,731m of water 55 km offshore Brazil’s Rio Grande do Norte and the prospect is still considered to be in appraisal It reached a total depth of 5,353m and discovered a 188m column of intermediate 24° API gravity oil The Pecem well in the Ceará Basin (Mundau Subbasin) 76 km offshore from the county of Paracuru spudded in 2012 in a water depth of 2,129m and found a hydrocarbon column estimated to be 290m The oil-bearing sands are Aptian age in the Paracuru Formation The oil discovered in this well indicates a transitional environment source but could also include a contribution from the same Albian-Cenomanian source rock system present in the equatorial margin of West Africa The dip seismic line through the Pecem well location (Figure 1) illustrates the Pecem High and onlapping intervals above it The deepwater seals for both the Ceará and Potiguar Basins are regional shales from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary Mass-wasting events in the Upper Tertiary could cause seal failure for younger stratigraphic intervals PGS GeoStreamer 3D data improves attribute computations and reduces risk with more precise reservoir estimates than conventional streamer data An arbitrary well tie line (Figure 4) shows the Amontada The Albian/Cenomanian section contains turbidite fan/channel systems penetrated by the wells and illustrated on the full stack and Vp/Vs seismic data The Equatorial Margin of Brazil has four potential sources for exploration prospects and play fairways: The oldest source system in the Aptian/Barremian is characterized by highly cracked very mature oils and condensates sourced by a saline to alkaline calcareous black shale deposited in a lacustrine brackish to saline anoxic environment This petroleum system sources the majority of current production offshore Brazil The second oil system is characterized by transitional environments with the Late Aptian source rocks in the early to peak oil window stage Most of the Equatorial Brazilian continental margin basins have little salt in the transition from continental to marine environments as a few boreholes encountered evaporites in the Late Aptian stratigraphic interval indicating a restricted depositional environment Geochemical data from hydrocarbons recovered from oil fields in the Ceará and Potiguar Basins in northern Brazil indicate the presence of oil types similar to the ones that are present in the salt basins south of the equatorial transform fault zones the transform margin basins may share similar source rock systems Albian/Cenomanian/Turonian Marine Black Shales The third petroleum source consists of Albian/Cenomanian/Turonian marine black shales which are a major source for the oils in the West African salt basins Similar oils have also been recovered in the Amazonas Cone and Pará-Maranhão Basins and in five ultra-deepwater discoveries in the Sergipe Basin The origin of the marine hydrocarbons in these systems is related to Late Cretaceous global Oceanic Anoxic Events which occurred when the two plates were totally separated and the basins were influenced by worldwide sea level rises and falls The fourth source system consists of Tertiary source rocks deposited in deltaic environments in the Pará-Maranhão Basin The 1-PAS-9 and 1-PAS-11 sub-commercial discoveries as well as the gas accumulations in a number of wells drilled in past decades were sourced by these Tertiary source systems demonstrated by recent drilling and seismic stratigraphy combined with seismic attributes from high quality GeoStreamer data are generally underexplored on the Brazilian Equatorial Margin Since 2015 PGS has undertaken an extensive series of GeoStreamer 3D surveys to address exploration concerns and de-risk play elements in the Potiguar and Ceará Basins Future exploration using these excellent 3D seismic datasets should lead to continued successes for the oil and gas industry in Brazil Henk KombrinkHenk.Kombrink@geoexpro.com+44 77 8899 2374 Sales DirectorIngvild Ryggen CarstensSales Enquiries+47 974 69 090