Brazil
Pre-Salt Brazil: Record Output From a Handful of Santos Basin Fields
Key Takeaways
- •Brazil produced a record 3.770 million barrels of oil per day in 2025 and 4.897 million barrels of oil equivalent per day including gas (ANP production bulletin no. 184).
- •Pre-salt reservoirs supplied 79.63 percent of national output in 2025; post-salt fields 15.45 percent and onshore fields 4.92 percent.
- •The Santos Basin produced 77.79 percent of Brazil's oil in 2025, and Tupi and Búzios alone supplied about 42 percent of offshore oil.
- •Fields operated by Petrobras produced 89.82 percent of Brazil's oil in December 2025.
- •Net crude exports reached about 1.7 million barrels per day in 2025, while domestic refineries ran at about 86.4 percent of installed capacity (ANP consolidated data).
What the 2025 numbers say
Brazil's oil output reached a record 3.770 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2025, and with natural gas included, total production averaged 4.897 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d), about 12.7 percent above the previous record of 4.344 million boe/d set in 2023. Gas output also set a record at 179 million cubic metres per day. December 2025 was higher still: 4.015 million b/d of oil and 5.237 million boe/d in total (ANP, Boletim da Produção de Petróleo e Gás Natural no. 184, December 2025 and 2025 consolidation, checked October 2026).
The record has a narrow base. Almost four fifths of it comes from pre-salt carbonate reservoirs beneath a thick salt layer in ultra-deep water, most of it from the Santos Basin, and almost nine tenths of the oil comes from fields operated by Petrobras. Brazil is therefore a growth story that can be tracked unit by unit: a new floating production vessel reaching full rate moves the national total in a way no single well in a shale basin can.
The month-by-month climb through 2025
The annual average hides a steady ramp. Oil production (crude plus condensate) by month, from the same ANP bulletin:
| Month | Oil (thousand b/d) | Month | Oil (thousand b/d) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2024 | 3,421 | Jul 2025 | 3,959 |
| Jan 2025 | 3,449 | Aug 2025 | 3,896 |
| Feb 2025 | 3,488 | Sep 2025 | 3,915 |
| Mar 2025 | 3,621 | Oct 2025 | 4,030 |
| Apr 2025 | 3,632 | Nov 2025 | 3,773 |
| May 2025 | 3,679 | Dec 2025 | 4,015 |
| Jun 2025 | 3,757 |
Source: ANP bulletin no. 184, "Histórico de produção de petróleo", checked October 2026. Condensate is 6,000 to 8,000 b/d of each monthly total.
From December 2024 to December 2025 output rose by about 594,000 b/d, or roughly 17 percent. The path was not smooth: October 2025 crossed 4 million b/d for the first time in the series shown, November fell back by about 257,000 b/d, and December recovered. A drop of that size in a single month is the kind of move that normally points to planned stoppages at large offshore units rather than to reservoir decline, which is why the installation stoppage table in the bulletin is worth reading alongside the headline.
Who publishes Brazil's oil data
The primary source is the Agência Nacional do Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis (ANP), the federal regulator. Its monthly Boletim da Produção de Petróleo e Gás Natural reports output by field, operator, installation, basin, state and reservoir type, built from data that operators load into the ANP production database. Each January edition carries a consolidation of the previous year. Two features of the bulletin are worth knowing before reading it:
- Units. Oil is in barrels per day (bbl/d) and gas in thousand cubic metres per day (Mm³/d). Totals in barrels of oil equivalent per day combine the two.
- Contract splits. Several pre-salt fields straddle more than one contract regime, so the ANP divides their production between contracts. Búzios, Atapu and Sépia are each split between a transfer-of-rights contract and a production-sharing contract (Atapu 39.5 and 60.5 percent; Sépia 31.3 and 68.7 percent), and 3.5 percent of the Mero deposit is booked to an area that is not under contract and belongs to the federal government, represented by Pré-Sal Petróleo S.A. (PPSA).
Readers who want the barrels behind these units should start with our barrel of oil explainer.
Where the oil comes from: pre-salt, post-salt and onshore
The ANP splits output by geological setting. The 2025 shares, measured in oil equivalent:
| Setting | Share of 2025 output | Change vs 2024 | Change vs 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-salt (offshore, below the salt) | 79.63% | +15.25% | About 4 times larger |
| Post-salt (offshore, above the salt) | 15.45% | +6.78% | 57.62% lower |
| Onshore | 4.92% | +5.24% | 25.72% lower |
Source: ANP bulletin no. 184, 2025 consolidation, checked October 2026.
The table holds the whole decade in three lines. The older post-salt fields of the Campos Basin and the onshore basins of the Northeast have both shrunk since 2015, and the pre-salt has more than made up for it. Every percentage point of national growth since then has come from below the salt.
The onshore tail
Onshore Brazil is small but not trivial. The five largest onshore fields together produced 30 percent of onshore oil in 2025, so onshore output is spread across many more fields than offshore output. Carmópolis supplied 9.3 percent of onshore oil and Canto do Amaro 7.28 percent. Onshore production rose 5.24 percent in 2025 but remained 25.72 percent below 2015. Independent companies such as PetroReconcavo and 3R appear in the ANP operator tables alongside Petrobras, and the bulletin lets readers filter fields the regulator classifies as mature (maduro) or of marginal economics, which is a quick way to see how much national output comes from late-life fields.
By basin and state
In 2025 the Santos Basin produced 77.79 percent of Brazil's oil, up 0.84 percentage points, and the Campos Basin 19.67 percent, down 0.60 points. Gas follows the same map: Santos 77.72 percent, Campos 7.75 percent, and the onshore Solimões Basin in the Amazon 7.51 percent. By state, Rio de Janeiro accounted for 76.90 percent of national gas output, with Amazonas at 7.87 percent and São Paulo at 6.02 percent, and it increased its share of national oil output by 0.77 points.
The fields that make the total
The ANP's 2025 consolidation reports that the five largest offshore fields supplied about 65 percent of offshore production. Tupi produced 21.36 percent of offshore oil, and Búzios, whose oil output rose 17.84 percent in 2025, produced 20.47 percent. Between them, two fields supplied about 42 percent of the oil Brazil produces at sea.
The December 2025 bulletin gives field-level rates for the pre-salt:
| Pre-salt field (December 2025) | Oil from pre-salt reservoirs (b/d) | Total pre-salt production (boe/d) |
|---|---|---|
| Tupi | 875,527 | 1,149,384 |
| Búzios | 811,365 | 1,033,671 |
| Mero | 631,109 | 891,956 |
| Itapu | 158,255 | 177,481 |
| Sépia | 155,596 | 192,915 |
| Atapu | 151,476 | 185,565 |
| Berbigão | 126,802 | 151,479 |
Source: ANP bulletin no. 184, table "Distribuição da produção dos campos do Pré-sal", checked October 2026. Figures rounded to the nearest barrel.
Worked example: how concentrated is Brazilian supply?
Using the December 2025 figures above and the national oil total for the same month (4.015 million b/d):
- Tupi plus Búzios: 875,527 + 811,365 = 1,686,892 b/d, or about 42 percent of national oil output.
- Adding Mero: 2,318,001 b/d, or about 58 percent.
- All seven fields in the table: 2,910,130 b/d, or about 72 percent.
Three fields produced well over half of the country's oil that month. Compare a shale basin, where thousands of wells and dozens of operators make up the total. The practical consequence is that Brazil's monthly numbers can swing on maintenance at a single vessel, and the bulletin's list of installation stoppages ("Paradas de Instalações Marítimas") is often the best explanation for a weak month.
The largest single installation
The highest-producing installation in December 2025 was the FPSO Almirante Tamandaré on Búzios, at 238,960 b/d of oil. Other units named in the same bulletin include the FPSO Alexandre de Gusmão on Mero and the FPSO Bacalhau, operated by Equinor Brasil, on the Bacalhau and Bacalhau Norte fields. An FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading vessel) processes oil and gas from subsea wells, stores the crude in its hull and offloads it to shuttle tankers, which is how pre-salt fields hundreds of kilometres from shore reach market without pipelines for oil.
Operators: one dominant company and a growing second tier
In December 2025, fields operated by Petrobras produced 3,606,173 b/d, or 89.82 percent of Brazil's oil. The next operators by oil output that month, among the largest listed in the bulletin, were much smaller:
| Operator (December 2025) | Oil (b/d) |
|---|---|
| Petrobras | 3,606,173 |
| PRIO Tigris | 102,769 |
| PRIO | 60,042 |
| TotalEnergies EP | 36,772 |
| Enauta Energia | 33,018 |
| Trident Energy | 22,669 |
| 3R Petroleum | 18,998 |
| 3R Potiguar | 18,952 |
| Karoon Brasil | 18,177 |
| Perenco Brasil | 15,888 |
| Equinor Brasil | 12,828 |
Source: ANP bulletin no. 184, "Produção de petróleo e gás natural por operador", checked October 2026.
Operatorship is not ownership. Many Petrobras-operated fields have international partners, and in production-sharing areas PPSA receives the federal government's share of profit oil, which the ANP books separately from the contractors. The operator table therefore shows who runs the fields, not who sells all of the barrels.
Three contract regimes
Brazil uses three upstream regimes, all of which appear in the ANP data:
- Concession, the original regime after the Petrobras monopoly ended: the company owns the oil produced and pays royalties and, on large fields, a special participation.
- Transfer of rights (cessão onerosa), under which Petrobras was granted the right to produce a fixed volume in specific pre-salt areas.
- Production sharing (partilha), used for strategic pre-salt areas, under which the federal government takes a share of profit oil through PPSA.
Licensing continues under a permanent offer system. The 5th Cycle of the Open Acreage of Concession in June 2025 awarded 34 of 41 blocks to nine companies across the Parecis (onshore), Foz do Amazonas, Santos and Pelotas basins, with record signature bonuses of R$989.3 million. PPSA's 5th auction of federal government oil sold 74.5 million barrels of the Union's share from Mero, Búzios, Sépia and Itapu, with potential revenue of R$28 billion (EPE, Brazilian Oil & Gas Report 2024/2025, checked October 2026).
The government's total take from the sector, its participações governamentais (royalties, special participation and related payments), reached R$100.4 billion in 2025, up 1.4 percent (ANP, consolidated data for the regulated sector in 2025, published 30 June 2026, checked October 2026).
Refining and exports: more crude than the refineries use
Brazil's oil grows faster than its refining. The ANP's consolidated figures for 2025 put domestic refinery output at 2.2 million b/d, down 1.4 percent, at about 86.4 percent of installed capacity, and net crude exports (exports minus imports) at about 1.7 million b/d. Distributor sales of oil products rose 3.1 percent, and jet fuel sales 6.1 percent.
Set against production, that is a simple balance: of roughly 3.8 million b/d of crude produced in 2025, about 1.7 million b/d net left the country. Brazil exports crude and still imports some products, a pattern similar to the one in our US oil imports by country explainer, where a large producer trades crude both ways because refinery configurations and crude qualities do not match perfectly.
The refining system itself is mostly Petrobras. The EPE report lists the main product slate in the second half of 2024 as diesel A at 838,000 b/d, gasoline A at 516,000 b/d, fuel oil at 295,000 b/d and jet fuel at 101,000 b/d; "A" grades are the pure fossil fuels before the mandatory ethanol and biodiesel are blended in. Replan in Paulínia, São Paulo, is the largest refinery by installed capacity and added a diesel hydrotreater with 63,000 b/d of S-10 diesel capacity in 2025. The Abreu e Lima (RNEST) refinery in Pernambuco raised Train 1 to 130,000 b/d in March 2025, and Petrobras signed contracts to resume construction of a second train that would double the plant's installed capacity. Petrobras' 2025 to 2029 strategic plan allocates US$20 billion to refining, trading and marketing out of US$111 billion in total, with US$77 billion for exploration and production.
The next areas: Equatorial Margin and new pre-salt projects
Growth after the current wave of vessels depends on two things: new pre-salt projects already sanctioned and frontier exploration. On the first, the EPE report notes Shell's final investment decision on Gato do Mato in the Santos Basin pre-salt, with first oil expected in 2029 through an FPSO with 120,000 b/d of capacity. On the second, the Equatorial Margin off Brazil's northern coast, Petrobras' environmental licence for block FZA-M-59 in the Foz do Amazonas basin was in the final pre-operational assessment stage with the environmental agency Ibama at the time of the EPE report, with a drillship positioned near the block. The same geological margin hosts the producing fields offshore Guyana, which is why the area attracts attention, but an exploration well is not a discovery and a discovery is not production.
Flaring and associated gas
Not all gas reaches market. The ANP reports average flaring of 5,074 thousand cubic metres per day in 2025, up 17.02 percent, a rise that tends to accompany new units in their ramp-up phase before gas handling and reinjection reach full capacity. Much of the pre-salt's associated gas, which can carry high CO2 content, is reinjected into the reservoirs; the bulletin carries a separate ranking of reinjection by offshore installation.
Worked example: where Brazil's gas goes
Most pre-salt gas comes out of the ground with the oil (associated gas), and most of it never reaches a pipeline to shore. The ANP's gas movement table for December 2025 accounts for the 194.3 million cubic metres per day produced:
| Use (December 2025) | Million m³/d | Share of production |
|---|---|---|
| Reinjected into reservoirs | 106.6 | 55% |
| Made available to the market | 64.5 | 33% |
| Consumed on site (fuel for platforms) | 18.4 | 9% |
| Flared | 4.9 | 3% |
| Total produced | 194.3 | 100% |
Source: ANP bulletin no. 184, "Histórico da movimentação de gás natural"; shares computed by PetroEyes from the ANP figures and rounded, checked October 2026.
The ANP's own utilisation index for that month, the share of gas that was used rather than flared, was 97.50 percent. The table explains why Brazil's record gas production does not translate into a gas surplus for consumers: more than half of it is pushed back underground, both to hold reservoir pressure and to dispose of CO2-rich gas, and only about a third reaches the market. Associated gas was 176 million m³/d of the December total; non-associated gas from dedicated gas fields, mainly onshore, was 18 million.
Cumulative volumes in 2025
Over the full year, Brazil produced 1.376 billion barrels of oil (up 11.97 percent), 65.422 billion cubic metres of gas (up 16.68 percent) and 1.787 billion barrels of oil equivalent in total (up 13.01 percent). The global oil production map shows where that volume places Brazil against the other large producers.
Caveats in the ANP series
- Monthly bulletins are revised. Operators can correct data loaded into the ANP system, so a monthly figure can change in later editions. Annual consolidations are the more stable series.
- Boe totals combine oil and gas. The 4.897 million boe/d figure is not oil; for oil alone use 3.770 million b/d.
- Field totals depend on contract splits. For Búzios, Atapu, Sépia and Mero, a figure for "the field" may cover one contract or all of them. The ANP's pre-salt distribution table sums the whole field, which is why it is used here.
- Operator share is not equity share. Petrobras' 89.82 percent is the share of oil from fields it operates, not the share it owns.
- OPEC status. Brazil is not an OPEC member and its output is not subject to OPEC+ quotas; how those quotas work for members is covered in our OPEC+ explainer.
Frequently asked questions
How much oil does Brazil produce?
A record 3.770 million barrels per day on average in 2025, according to the ANP. With gas included, total output was 4.897 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. December 2025 reached 4.015 million b/d of oil.
What is the pre-salt?
A set of carbonate reservoirs lying beneath a thick layer of salt in ultra-deep water off southeastern Brazil, mainly in the Santos Basin. Pre-salt reservoirs supplied 79.63 percent of Brazil's oil and gas output in 2025, and pre-salt output was about four times its 2015 level.
Which is Brazil's largest oil field?
By oil from pre-salt reservoirs in December 2025, Tupi (875,527 b/d) narrowly led Búzios (811,365 b/d). Over the full year 2025, Tupi supplied 21.36 percent of offshore oil and Búzios 20.47 percent.
How much of Brazil's oil does Petrobras produce?
Fields operated by Petrobras produced 89.82 percent of Brazil's oil in December 2025. Many of those fields have partners, and the federal government's share of profit oil in production-sharing areas is booked to PPSA.
Does Brazil export oil?
Yes. ANP data put net crude exports at about 1.7 million barrels per day in 2025, while domestic refineries produced about 2.2 million b/d of products and ran at about 86.4 percent of installed capacity.
Did Brazilian oil output fall at any point in 2025?
Yes, briefly. ANP monthly data show output reaching 4.030 million b/d in October 2025, dropping to 3.773 million b/d in November and recovering to 4.015 million b/d in December. Month-to-month swings of that size usually reflect planned stoppages at large offshore units.
What is PPSA?
Pré-Sal Petróleo S.A. (PPSA) is the state company that represents the federal government in production-sharing contracts and in unitised areas outside any contract. The ANP books the oil and gas appropriated to the government under those contracts to PPSA, separately from the companies in each consortium, and PPSA sells that oil in auctions such as the 5th auction, which sold 74.5 million barrels.
How much does the Brazilian government earn from oil?
The ANP reports that government participations, which include royalties and special participation, reached R$100.4 billion in 2025, up 1.4 percent on 2024. That figure excludes corporate income taxes and dividends paid by Petrobras.
Why does Brazil flare gas?
Mostly during the ramp-up of new production units, before gas compression and reinjection reach full capacity. Average flaring was 5,074 thousand cubic metres per day in 2025, up 17.02 percent on 2024.
References
- ANP. "Boletim da Produção de Petróleo e Gás Natural", no. 184 (December 2025, with 2025 consolidation): annual and monthly production, pre-salt share, basin, state, field, operator and installation tables, flaring and cumulative volumes. https://www.gov.br/anp/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudo/publicacoes/boletins-anp/arquivos-bmppgn/2025/dezembro.pdf (checked October 2026)
- ANP. "ANP divulga dados consolidados do setor regulado em 2025" (published 30 June 2026): net crude exports, refinery output and utilisation, government take, fuel sales. https://www.gov.br/anp/pt-br/canais_atendimento/imprensa/noticias-comunicados/anp-divulga-dados-consolidados-do-setor-regulado-em-2025 (checked October 2026)
- Empresa de Pesquisa Energética (EPE). "Brazilian Oil & Gas Report 2024/2025": licensing rounds, PPSA auction, Gato do Mato FID, Equatorial Margin licensing, refining output and Petrobras plan. https://www.epe.gov.br/sites-en/publicacoes-dados-abertos/publicacoes/PublicacoesArquivos/publicacao-197/topico-211/BOR_2024_2025.pdf (checked October 2026)
