SPE Brazil awards Petrobras professionals for technical excellence

The Brazil section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), the world's largest association of professionals working in oil and gas exploration and production, awarded Petrobras professionals for exceptional contributions to the sector. They received seven of the eight trophies in the technical category. All are career professionals from the company, with projects and work recognized by the industry.

The Industry Technical and Professional Excellence Award recipients are from the areas of Climate, Reservoirs, Wells, and the Petrobras Research Center, Cenpes.
 
“I have no doubt that environmental and social performance are an increasingly relevant element of competitiveness, in addition to being an ethical commitment. It is a pride to participate in so many relevant moments in Petrobras' sustainability trajectory and interact with so many brilliant people. Recognition brings pride, serenity and more desire to continue contributing”, says Viviana.

Sustainability and Social Responsibility

The winner of this category, Viviana Coelho, is the executive manager of Climate Change and Decarbonization and a member of the Executive Committee of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative.  A chemical engineer and biologist, she has a master's degree in environmental technology and executive training at international institutions such as Insead.

Projects, Facilities, and Construction

Also, with a degree in chemical engineering and a postgraduate degree in oil processing, Fábio Passarelli works in the area of Research, Intelligence, and Innovation in Production Development at the Petrobras Research Center (Cenpes), where he leads the development of disruptive production concepts as well as the implementation strategy for major technological projects.

The engineer's recent achievements include an innovative, disruptive, and unique technology: the HISEP® (abbreviation for High-Pressure Separator). It is a cutting-edge technology that revolutionizes the production process by separating the extracted oil from the associated gas produced, rich in CO₂, which is reinjected directly into the reservoir from the seabed. HISEP is a project with Brazilian DNA resulting from years of research, patented, and with investments of more than US$ 1 billion. It is capable of increasing the efficiency of Petrobras' operations, and it is also a technology that captures carbon and will help the company achieve its emissions intensity reduction targets. The first application will be in the Mero field, the third largest in the pre-salt, where the technology will be validated on a commercial scale.

Passarelli also created an innovative, simpler, and cheaper method for gas dehydration, which is now being used on the company's new generations of platforms. "I believe the award was given because I am a professional who dedicates his career to innovation. I'm very restless, and I believe there can always be a potential gain in incorporating technologies and in the transformational capacity of innovation to do more and improve. We need to make people aware of this," he says.

Management

Jaime Turazzi Naveiro is a production engineer with a postgraduate degree in Petroleum Engineering and a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering. He has worked at Petrobras since 2006, where he currently holds the position of general manager of Research, Development, and Innovation for Energy Transition and Sustainability at Cenpes.

His achievements include designing the production systems for Búzios, the company's main asset, delivering the field's Master Development Plan, and organizing the teams and pre-operation processes for seven new FPSOs (platforms that produce, store, and transfer oil).

"Our industry plays a fundamental role in providing energy for society, which moves and feeds industries and services, providing quality of life for the population. This result is only achieved thanks to the hard work of thousands of professionals and the advancement of science and technology led by professionals of extraordinary technical excellence. SPE is the leading community of professionals in the oil and gas industry, and it is a source of great pride to have received this recognition. I believe in the strength of our purpose and also in the importance of allocating time to volunteer work, engaging young professionals, attracting and mentoring talent for our industry, contributing to its sustainability and technical excellence."

Completion Technology

With over 34 years of experience in the oil industry, Manoel Feliciano da Silva has coordinated and led several technological projects, filed patents, written a book, and published several articles. An engineer with a master's degree in applied mechanics and a doctorate in oil and energy, he works as a consultant at Cenpes, where he excelled in the development of equipment and systems that enabled "intelligent open-well completion" in the pre-salt. Completion is a set of operations designed to equip wells and make them operational. Manoel is currently leading the development of equipment and systems to electrify the completion stage.

"PACI 2 is an intelligent completion configuration limited to two production zones. The project developed equipment that made it possible to apply the configuration. The benefits include reduced well construction time and increased operational safety. The new completion configuration has been widely implemented since 2019, contributing to financial reductions of around US$10 million per well." I believe that these projects have brought the SPE recognition, explains Manoel.

Production and Operations & Reservoirs

Rogério Leite and Marcos Machado, both petroleum engineers, won awards in the Reservoirs area. Rogério is a consultant in Flow Assurance at Petrobras. He has a degree in Industrial Automation and Control Engineering, a master's degree in Fluid Mechanics, and a postgraduate degree in Data Science. Rogério has worked at Petrobras for 19 years in the Lift and Flow area. He has extensive experience in deepwater operations in the Campos Basin. Since 2021, he has been responsible for leading Petrobras' flow assurance technical committee. He has published more than 20 papers and filed four patent applications related to the behavior of fluids in subsea lines and the guarantee and flow of production.

"I have always sought to work on various innovation fronts in my area of activity, such as developing a solution using artificial intelligence within the scope of the Petrobras Connections for Innovation program. I believe that this continuous search for improvements for Petrobras and the industry contributed to my nomination for the award." The Connections program promotes the company's interaction with the innovation ecosystem and has reached R$1 billion in signed contracts.

Marcos Machado has a PhD in Reservoir Engineering and a post-doctorate in the area of energy transition from the University of Texas. As a senior consultant, he promotes combining different multidisciplinary approaches to optimize development projects for Petrobras' main oil production assets, including giant fields in ultra-deep waters.

"I believe that SPE's recognition is mainly related to my work in the support and technical evaluation of different production development projects at Petrobras and the dissemination of knowledge through methodologies, technical articles, software development, and a book in the area of numerical simulation of oil reservoirs," says Marcos. He is also a professor in Petrobras' Petroleum Engineering training courses and PUC-Rio's Graduate Program in Mechanical Engineering. He has recently been working on developing methodologies for modeling the storage of gases such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

Health, Safety, and Environment

Civil engineer Victor Nazareth specializes in Petroleum Engineering from Petrobras. He has an MBA in People and Leadership (FGV) and a master's degree in Human Factors (Lund University, Sweden). He has worked in the areas of reservoirs, drilling, well completion and maintenance, and in executive positions such as manager of Completion, Coating and Cementing, and Operational Safety. He works with Human Factors and Learning through events and is a postgraduate lecturer at PUC-RS.

"I believe that this award granted by SPE relates to the contribution made in the area of risk-based operational safety and to the dissemination of the topic of Human Factors, everything that influences people's performance in the social, organizational, and individual spheres of the O&G industry," he sums up.

Through professionals with proven technical excellence, Petrobras has received numerous awards and is the national record holder in patent filings over the last three years. Its R&D budget of US$3.6 billion for the period 2004-28 is the largest in the company's history.

Professional

In addition to the winners in the Technical category, Juarez Filardo, from Petrobras' Wells area, was recognized in the Professional category. As a civil engineer specializing in petroleum engineering with a master's degree in science, petroleum engineering, and data science, Filardo has been with the company for 39 years, working in offshore oil well construction and marine drilling. 

In the area of data science, he worked in the research and development of innovative, good models at Cenpes and, more recently, became responsible for knowledge management in the management of specialized good projects. Juarez has been on the board of directors of the SPE Macaé Section since 2012, which has won the most important international awards from SPE International, such as the President's Award for Section Excellence. Filardo also volunteers at seminars, workshops, and mini-courses with companies, government bodies, and universities looking for solutions to problems in the oil and gas (O&G) industry.

Petrobras has a significant record in the awards. In 2021, there were five winners; in 2022, six professionals received trophies. The figures include the regional stage, which also considers professionals from Latin America and the Caribbean. It takes place after the national trophies have been awarded and will still be held for the 2023 winners.