Petrobras to Start Up Four New Platforms in Q4

Brazil's state-controlled oil company Petrobras will start pumping pre-salt oil from four new platforms between October and December, the company's director for production and technology development Hugo Repsold said on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters at an oil industry event, he said Petrobras could study building its own platforms after 2022 and predicted the company would head towards sustainable growth of oil production in the next few years.

The four new platforms in the Santos basin are the P-67 and P-69 in the Lula oil field, and the P-75 and P-76 in the Buzios fields. A fifth platform planned for this year, the P-68 in the Berbigão field, will start in 2019.

Repsold said Petrobras was well on the road to recovery and was starting up platforms that had been delayed in recent years and which will now ensure continued growth in output.

He said the drop in Petrobras oil production in June to 2.03 million barrels per day - 1.5 percent less than May - was due to maintenance work on some platforms.

A revised business plan that should be published in the third quarter, he said, will include having the company's own platforms that would enter production from 2023 onwards.

(Reporting by Marta Nogueira; Editing by Sandra Maler)