Petrobras confirmed on Wednesday that the drillship NS-43 will leave the Santos Basin, where it works on the Búzios field, to drill three new wells off the coast of Amapá, in Brazil's far north. The wells sit in block FZA-M-59, in the Foz do Amazonas Basin, at the mouth of the Amazon River, where the state company has already found oil at the Morpho well, about 175 kilometers from the state's shoreline.

Before sailing north, the vessel will have its hull cleaned to remove biofouling, the organisms fixed to the steel. Ibama, Brazil's environmental agency, authorized the three neighboring wells, named Manga, PAD Morpho and Crotalus, on September 4. Petrobras chief engineering officer Renata Baruzzi, speaking at the Rio Oil & Gas trade fair in Rio de Janeiro, said drilling at Morpho should finish in October and the adjacent wells should start in January, once the NS-43 arrives.

Petrobras announced the oil find at Morpho on August 14 and is still assessing the quality of the crude, according to news site g1. If results confirm the area is commercially viable, production could begin within seven years, and the company would have to request a new environmental license from Ibama to develop the fields, the newspaper Folha de Pernambuco reported.

The Equatorial Margin

Block FZA-M-59 lies in the Equatorial Margin, a 2,200-kilometer stretch of the Brazilian coast running from Rio Grande do Norte to Amapá, formed when South America and Africa drifted apart. Petrobras has set aside US$ 2.5 billion for the region between 2026 and 2030. Of the five Brazilian basins in this margin, only Potiguar, in Rio Grande do Norte, currently produces oil.

The push mirrors moves next door. On the same geological trend, Guyana has accumulated discoveries since 2015 estimated at nearly 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil equivalent in the Stabroek block alone, run by ExxonMobil, and Suriname has confirmed reserves in block 58. Folha de Pernambuco notes that if the Amazon mouth potential is confirmed, the find could be compared to the pre-salt discovery of 2006.