Cost Benchmarking — EPC / EPCC

FPSO EPC/EPCC Cost Analysis: What Seven Turnkey Contracts Actually Show

September 2026·10 min read·Public data only

What EPC/EPCC actually means here

Under an EPC (or EPCC, when commissioning is explicitly bundled in) contract, the yard designs, builds, and commissions the unit for a fixed lump-sum price, hands it over, and Petrobras owns and operates it from first oil onward. The contractor's financial exposure ends at delivery — it carries construction risk, not a multi-decade operating bet. That structure is exactly why an EPC/EPCC price is the closest thing in this market to a real, one-time "cost of the asset": there's no bundled charter revenue, no operating margin baked into the headline number, and no ambiguity about what period the value covers.

That clean structure is also why EPC/EPCC is the only bucket in the whole FPSO dataset where a $/ton comparison is even methodologically defensible in the first place — which makes it worth isolating from BOT and charter contracts rather than averaging all three together.

The dataset

‡ Only a combined figure exists (110,000t for P-80 and P-82 together) — not split by unit in any public source.
§ 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.

One contractor family, five of seven hulls

The most useful thing this narrower dataset shows that the full eighteen-platform view blurs: Seatrium — Keppel O&M before its 2023 merger with Sembcorp Marine — is either the contractor or a direct predecessor entity on five of the seven EPC/EPCC units (P-78, P-80, P-82, P-83, P-84, P-85 — six, actually, once P-82's pre-merger Sembcorp Marine attribution is folded into the same corporate lineage). Saipem, paired with Hanwha Ocean under the SAME Netherlands BV joint venture, built P-79 — the one clear outlier in the contractor column.

That concentration matters for anyone reading EPC pricing as a competitive signal. A yard with five-plus hulls in a single field's build-out has scale, repeat-design efficiency, and negotiating leverage that a first-time or occasional bidder doesn't — all of which show up in price, but none of which show up in a bare $/ton number. Treating Seatrium's pricing as "the market rate" and a newer entrant's bid as directly comparable is a common way this kind of benchmark gets misused.

The one comparison that survives

A defensible $/ton figure needs a real published value, a real published weight figure, and — this is the part isolating EPC/EPCC solves automatically — a matching contract model. Of the seven units here, three (P-78, P-80, P-83) report topside weight specifically, from the same contractor family, in the same field. That's the tightest comparison this dataset allows anywhere.

That ~15% spread, at the tightest comparison EPC/EPCC data allows, is the actual finding. If P-78, P-80, and P-83 — same yard, same buyer, same basin, contracts signed within a few years of each other — can differ by that much, a $/ton figure for anything outside this narrow set (a different contractor, a joint contract with no per-unit split, a combined weight figure) should be treated as a rough order of magnitude, not a number to anchor a bid position on.

The wider comparison: $/bpd

Weight is only reported for three of these seven units. Oil capacity (bpd) is reported for all seven, and published alongside a real value for five of them — P-79 joins the $/ton trio, plus P-82, whose weight is only ever reported as a combined figure with P-80 but whose own value and capacity are both independently published.

P-82 is the interesting addition: its weight is unusable on its own (only the combined 110,000t figure with P-80 exists), but its $/bpd sits right at the top of the band, in line with the other four rather than as an outlier — a useful cross-check that the combined-weight problem is a reporting gap, not a sign that P-82 itself is priced unusually.

Where the data runs out

P-82's weight only exists as a combined figure — 110,000 tonnes shared with P-80 in the public record, never split by unit. P-84 and P-85 were awarded in a single joint contract with no public per-unit value breakdown at all. In both cases, dividing a shared number by two would produce a number that looks like a fact but is actually an estimate — exactly the kind of figure that survives into a slide deck unlabeled. Both are left blank here rather than inferred.

Combined, these two data gaps mean four of the seven EPC/EPCC units in this dataset simply can't support a $/ton calculation yet, regardless of how the other columns look. That's not a flaw in the collection — it's what the public record actually contains, and it's worth stating plainly instead of papering over with an inferred number.

See also: the full 18-platform benchmarking piece, BOT & charter cost analysis, and local content strategy across platforms.