Insights/Cost Benchmarking

Cost Benchmarking

Benchmarking FPSO Costs: Why $/Ton Comparisons Break Without Matching Contract Models

Updated September 2026·16 min read·Public data only

Every FPSO cost conversation eventually lands on the same shorthand: dollars per ton. It's an easy number to reach for, and a reasonable one when you're comparing two ships built to the same contract, by the same yard, in the same year. The trouble starts when people use it to compare FPSOs in general — because most of what gets called a "cost" for an FPSO is not the same kind of number at all.

I built a dataset of eighteen Brazilian FPSOs from public sources — trade press, the winning contractors' own announcements, Petrobras communications — to see how far a $/ton comparison could honestly go, and this update adds a second lens: $/bpd (dollar per barrel of daily oil capacity), which is reported for nearly every platform instead of the small handful that report weight. This is an update to an earlier, smaller version of this piece: the Mero field's four FPSOs (Guanabara, Sepetiba, Marechal Duque de Caxias, Alexandre de Gusmão) are now in the dataset alongside the five newer Búzios-field platforms added previously. Here's what the full picture looks like, and why it still doesn't support the kind of one-line comparison most benchmark reports imply.

The dataset

† Total value over the full firm charter term — see below before comparing this to anything else in the table.
‡ Only a combined figure exists (110,000t for P-80 and P-82 together) — not split by unit in any public source, so left blank rather than inferred.
§ P-84 and P-85 were awarded in a single joint contract (~US$8.15bn combined, per one source) with no public per-unit breakdown.
‖ Only project financing has been disclosed publicly (Sepetiba US$1.6bn, Alexandre de Gusmão US$1.615bn) — that's debt raised to fund construction, not the charter's total contract value, which is a different and larger number (see below before treating financing as a price).
‖‖ No contract value or financing figure located in a primary or trade-press source at all — Guanabara's is simply undisclosed, and the only figure found for Marechal Duque de Caxias is an unconfirmed analyst estimate (~US$5.8bn), excluded here rather than presented as fact.
First oil dates for the eleven producing units are as publicly reported (contractor/operator announcements or trade press). Dates for the seven units still under construction are contractor-announced targets, not confirmed dates, and are subject to change.

Download this dataset (CSV, 18 FPSOs) — public sources only; blanks are deliberate, see notes above.

Three points survive the checklist — and they still don't agree

A defensible $/ton figure needs four things to line up at once: a real (not estimated) headline value, a weight figure, a matching contract model, and — for charters — a contract normalized to a comparable time window. Of eighteen platforms, exactly three clear all four bars: P-78, P-80, and P-83. All three are EPC contracts, all three were built by the same contractor family (Keppel, now Seatrium, post-2023 merger), all three sit in the same field and basin.

That ~15% spread, inside the tightest possible comparison this dataset allows, is itself the finding worth sitting with. If three near-identical contracts from the same yard can differ by that much, a $/ton figure pulled from a platform with a different contractor, a different contract model, or an unconfirmed weight should be treated as a rough order of magnitude at best — not a number to build a bid position on.

$/bpd: a wider — and tighter — comparison

Weight is the scarce data point in this dataset: only four of eighteen platforms report it. Oil capacity (bpd) is the opposite — every EPC platform with a published value also has a published capacity, which means $/bpd (dollar per barrel of daily oil capacity) supports a five-point comparison instead of three, all still EPC-only, all still one-time construction prices, not bundled charter or BOT value.

That's the most useful single number in this whole dataset: not because 9% is small in absolute terms on a multi-billion-dollar contract, but because it's the tightest spread this exercise produces anywhere, on the largest matched sample it produces anywhere. $/bpd doesn't replace $/ton — a platform's physical scale still matters — but where weight data is missing (which is most of the time), $/bpd is the more honest fallback, not a guess at what the weight might have been.

The same caveat from the $/ton section still applies without exception: this $/bpd comparison only holds across contracts on the same contract model. A BOT contract's $/bpd (SEAP-I: ~$35,833; SEAP-II: ~$34,167 — a further ~5% spread between two sister hulls) bundles years of operating value into the same-shaped ratio, and a charter's $/bpd bundles decades of it — see the BOT & charter cost analysis for that comparison on its own terms, normalized by contract duration instead of left as a raw multi-year total.

Why the other fifteen don't qualify

Weight data is the most common gap. Only four of the eighteen platforms report any weight figure, and they aren't all the same kind of weight. P-78, P-80, and P-83 report topside weight — the modules sitting on the hull. Almirante Tamandaré's 460,000 tonnes is displacement — the full loaded weight of the entire structure, hull included, ballast and cargo included. Dividing a contract value by displacement and calling it the same metric as dividing by topside weight isn't a rounding error — it's comparing a module to the ship it sits on.

Combined figures masquerade as per-unit figures. P-82's topside weight only exists in the public record as part of a joint 110,000-tonne figure shared with P-80. P-84 and P-85 were awarded — and are reported on — as a single joint contract, with no public split between the two units. In both cases, it would be easy to divide a shared number by two and present it as a clean per-unit data point. That number would be an estimate wearing the clothes of a fact, and it's exactly the kind of thing that survives into a slide deck unlabeled.

Charter values are a different kind of number entirely. Anna Nery's $5.5bn and Maria Quitéria's $5.2bn look, at a glance, like they belong in the same column as P-78's $2.3bn. They don't. Those figures are the value of a 25-year and 22.5-year firm charter — decades of day-rate revenue for operating the unit, bundled into one headline number. P-78's $2.3bn is a construction price. Comparing them directly is comparing the sale price of a house to the total rent someone will pay over a 25-year lease.

Even sister hulls don't move together. SEAP-I and SEAP-II are as close to identical twins as this dataset gets outside the Búzios EPC cluster — the same SBM Offshore Fast4Ward hull design, signed the same day, for neighboring fields in the same project. SEAP-II is publicly reported with higher gas-handling capacity than SEAP-I, yet its headline value is roughly $200 million lower ($4.1bn versus $4.3bn). The Búzios EPC cluster shows the same pattern in miniature: real variation persists even under the tightest possible matching.

What's next: the pipeline behind these numbers

The eighteen platforms above are the built and contracted record. What comes after them matters just as much for anyone reading this as a forward-looking market, not just a historical one.

Petrobras' 2026–2030 Business Plan puts total exploration-and-production capex at roughly US$109 billion over the period, with about US$91 billion already tied to projects in active implementation. Within that, the plan calls for 8 new production systems between 2026 and 2030 — 7 of which were already under contract at the time the plan was published — plus a further 10 projects targeted for 2030 and beyond. That's a multi-year pipeline still being built out, not a market that's finished contracting.

Two structural shifts are worth watching alongside the raw count. First, the Mero field cluster is now complete — its four FPSOs (Guanabara, Sepetiba, Marechal Duque de Caxias, and Alexandre de Gusmão, the last installed in 2025) are all in operation, closing out what was one of the largest concentrated FPSO build programs of the past decade. Búzios, by contrast, is still active: P-83 through P-85 are under construction as of this writing, on top of the nine units already producing there.

Second, and more relevant to everything above: Petrobras has been publicly signaling a shift toward the BOT model for future proprietary units, explicitly aimed at controlling costs after a run of expensive long-term charters. If that shift holds, the contract-model mismatch this piece keeps returning to — EPC construction price, BOT global price, and charter total value all describing fundamentally different economics — is going to keep getting more relevant, not less, as the mix of contract types in the Brazilian FPSO market changes under it.

What this is actually useful for

None of this means public benchmark data is worthless — it's the opposite of worthless, it's just narrower than the headline numbers suggest, and it comes with a margin of error that most reports never state. It's good for sanity-checking order of magnitude, for understanding who builds what kind of unit, and for spotting when a number being quoted to you doesn't match its stated scope. The ~9% spread on $/bpd — the wider, better-populated metric — is the more reliable working margin of error to assume for a clean EPC-to-EPC comparison; the ~15% spread on $/ton is a reasonable upper bound once weight, rather than capacity, is the basis. Either way, treat it as a margin, not a rounding error, for any less clean comparison — which is most of them.

What public data can't do is substitute for building a comparison field by field, with each contract's value tied explicitly to its own scope, duration, and weight or capacity basis — which is the same discipline that has to hold inside an actual competitive bid, not just in a public write-up like this one. Out of eighteen well-documented Brazilian FPSOs, five data points survive the $/bpd discipline and three survive the stricter $/ton discipline — and even the tightest of the two still disagrees by nearly 9%. That ratio, and that margin, are the actual findings here — not any single dollar figure.

Pedro Sotomayor, PMP® — Senior Cost Engineer on FPSO projects, 15+ years in offshore cost engineering and project controls (Jurong/Seatrium P-68/P-71, SBM Offshore FPSO Ilhabela). Writes from inside live Brazilian FPSO tenders, using public data only.

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