Drilling technology provider Tomax inaugurates new base in Macae as part of its Brazil strategy, and identifies local content as key to future growth.
The new operational base and workshop, an investment of approximately US$ 10 million, will offer maintenance services, storage and operational support.
The company which is headquartered in Stavanger, Norway, has been present in Brazil since 2012. It was founded in 2005, and technologies for preventing drilling vibrations is the development focus of the company.
Local content
The Brazilian government recently eased the local content rules for the oil industry by extending the concept of local content in the calculation of nationalization indexes.
The use of local manpower at the Macae base will contribute to increasing the local content of Tomax´Brazil operations.
«Tomax recognizes the importance of the Brazilian local content policy for the growth and development of the national industry, and this is why we are investing heavily in local content. This is a win-win situation, good for us and good for the country, and we are committed to Brazil», Tomax’s operations manager, André Gutgold, says.
«We are already certified by the local content certifies ABS, and want to increase our local content. Today we offer services, but we want to produce locally as well. We are in the process of evaluating suppliers in order to start manufacturing our equipment in Brazil, which will elevate our local content.»
Tomax believes that the current down cycle in the Brazilian oil and gas market will come to an end and that the activity level will increase in a few years.
«This is why we see this as an indispensable investment. We have a long term view and firmly believe in improvements. It might not seem as the best moment to invest, but this is part of our strategic planning. Brazil has huge reserves and resources to be explored. By investing now we are able to build up our organization at a lower cost and position ourselves for the future», Mr, Gutgold says.
Pre-salt
Tomax, which is currently negotiating to offer testing services for the Petrobras-operated Libra field, has already integrated service packages for other projects in Brazil, such as drilling in the Pão de Açúcar field for Repsol Sinopec. Total and Petrobras, through Haliburton, are also using the technology, and Statoil has since the beginning been a major driving force in the development and use of the technology.
«We are negotiating with Shell and Petrobras on the Libra prospect and hope to be a part of this project», Mr. Gutgold says.
The technology developed and offered by Tomax could be particularly interesting for drilling operations on pre-salt fields.
«On pre-salt there are rock formations that are very hard to penetrate, it is really a challenging drilling scenario and our tool contributes to prolonging the lifetime of the drill bit.»
The technology can be applied for improving drilling efficiency where heave and motion characteristics is a challenge.
«This is a new technology developed by us, and the main objective is to save money for the client, by saving time. This has been proved on several projects already, and Tomax has also presented papers and won awards. All the big international operators are our clients. As our objective is to make drilling operations more effective and this way help the operator save money, our technology becomes even more attractive in this time of crisis, where everyone needs to cut costs. You can say that the crisis works as an incentive for using our technology.»
By Runa Hestmann, NBCC journalist
(runa.tierno@nbcc.com.br)
: