Nielmar de Oliveira
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Rio - President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva participated today (23) in the christening of platform P-50, which will be the country's largest petroleum and natural gas production unit, with an average daily output of 180 thousand barrels. The new platform, which is 35% Brazilian-made, cost US$ 634 million and was responsible for the generation of 4 thousand direct and 12 thousand indirect jobs in the country.

The christening ceremony took place in the Mauá-Jurong shipyard, in Niterói, along the shore of Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro. The P-50, which was adapted by the Jurong Shipyard company, from Singapore, will be the last floating-type unit built by adapting the hull of an oil tanker, in this case, the Felipe Camarão. From now on, Petrobras will use a project developed by the Cenpes (the company's research center) to construct the hulls for this type of unit.

The P-50 should depart from Guanabara Bay before the end of the year on its way to the East Albacore field, in the Campos Basin, off the northern coast of Rio de Janeiro state.

Some of the contracts for the platform's construction were executed in Italy and the United States. One of 36 projects expected to make the country self-sufficient in petroleum production in 2006, the P-50 will add 12.4% to Brazil's annual domestic output.

The platform, which is a floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) unit, will have the capacity to compress 6 million cubic meters of natural gas and store 1.6 million barrels of oil.

The East Albacore field, where the unit will be installed and which Petrobras considers as essential as it does the P-50 itself for the country's conquest of self-sufficiency in petroleum production, is located approximately 120 kilometers off the coast of São Tomé Cape (RJ) and covers an area of 141 square kilometers, at a depth of between 800 and 2 thousand meters.

Translation: David Silberstein