Oil & Gas News

Petrobras Finds a Second Oil Zone at Amapá’s Morpho Well

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Petrobras has identified a new oil-bearing interval at its Morpho exploration well off the coast of Amapá state, the Brazilian state-controlled oil company disclosed on October 2, in a filing with securities regulators. The find, in ultra-deep water at the FZA-M-59 block, is the second oil-bearing zone confirmed at the same well and adds to a discovery Petrobras reported there in August.

A second strike at the same prospect

The Morpho well sits in roughly 2,886 meters of water in the Foz do Amazonas basin, part of Brazil’s Equatorial Margin off the country’s northern coast. According to the company’s disclosure, the latest interval confirms the presence of oil at a different depth than the zone found in August, when Petrobras first reported both oil and natural gas shows at the same prospect. Taken together, the two finds point to a working hydrocarbon system at Morpho, though Petrobras has not yet released flow-test results or a volume estimate for the discovery, and the well has not been declared commercial.

Brazil’s least-proven frontier

The Equatorial Margin is a largely unexplored stretch of Brazil’s continental shelf, in contrast to the mature, prolific pre-salt fields of the Santos and Campos basins further south, which already anchor the bulk of the country’s electricity and oil output. Brazil’s oil extraction hit a record 4.475 million barrels a day in June, national oil regulator ANP has reported, with pre-salt fields supplying about 82% of combined oil and gas production. Pre-salt reserves are well mapped after more than a decade of drilling; the Foz do Amazonas basin is not, and a 2023 bid by Petrobras to drill an earlier exploratory well near the mouth of the Amazon drew years of delay over environmental licensing before regulators granted approval. A government planning study has put the Equatorial Margin’s recoverable potential as high as 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent, a figure that remains an industry estimate rather than a confirmed reserve.

More wells before any investment decision

Petrobras has said it plans to drill three additional wells in the area starting in January to test whether the Morpho discoveries extend across the block and to gather the data needed to judge commercial viability. Any decision on production infrastructure, which in ultra-deepwater frontier basins typically means a floating production vessel and subsea tie-backs, would follow a longer appraisal campaign and is not expected in the near term. For Petrobras, proving a new basin matters for production growth once the pre-salt matures; for Brazil’s energy security, a confirmed discovery in the Equatorial Margin would open a new hydrocarbon province far from the Santos and Campos basins that currently define the country’s oil map.