Petrobras is the Brazilian national oil company. It is vertically integrated involved in exploration, production, refining, transportation, and sale of oil and oil by products. In 2003 it is producing 1,612 million barrels of crude oil and 1,740 million m3 of natural gas per day. Eighty percent of this production comes from offshore assets. It has 93 fixed offshore production platforms in relatively shallow water and deepwater facilities (see below).

Petrobras is the world leader in the exploitation of deepwater assets. For example, in 2002 it was producing 84,000 bpd from its Roncador field in water depths of 1,400 metres, the deepest producing field at the time, and was drilling in 2,800 metres.

Reasons for Participating
If successful the prototypes from the "Sure2GRiP" systems developed as a result of this project are expected to dramatically reduce the spending on direct inspection. Further savings should accrue from the fact that plant downtime will be reduced by shorter inspection times, less workplace disruption through the use of lower radiographic energy levels and more accurate feed back to risk based inspection systems. Petrobras therefore see the opportunity to access a large reduction in plant ownership costs through a successful output from the Sure2GRiP project.

Role in the project
Petrobras will provide information on conflicts that may apply when deploying the system in a wide range of operating conditions.