Petrobras to launch tender for oil platform
BARINGO: Alphabet began offering the world’s first commercial high-speed Internet using balloons to villagers in remote regions of Kenya’s Rit Valley.
The service is run by Loon, a unit of Google’s parent Alphabet, and Telkom Kenya, the East African nation’s third largest telecoms operator.
“Kenya is the first country to have base stations high up in the sky. Now we will be able to cover the whole country in a very short span of time,” said Information Minister Joe Mucheru ater launching the service. The technology has been used before, but not commercially. US telecom operators used balloons to connect more than 250,000 people in Puerto Rico ater a 2017 hurricane.
The project aims to provide affordable fourth generation (4G) Internet to under-covered or uncovered rural communities. It has been more than a decade in the making.
“We are effectively building the next layer of the mobile network around the world. We look like a cell tower 20 km in the sky,” said Alastair Westgarth, Loon’s chief executive.
The floating base stations have a much wider coverage, about a hundred times the area of a traditional cell phone tower, Westgarth said.
The large, translucent balloons are fited with a solar panel and batery, and float in the upper atmosphere, high above planes and weather.
They are launched from facilities in California and Puerto Rico and controlled via computers in Loon’s flight station in Silicon Valley, using helium and pressure to steer.
They also have sotware equipped with artificial intelligence to navigate flight paths without much human intervention.
During the launch of the service in the vast, semi-arid county of Baringo in the heart of the Rit Valley, Mucheru placed a video call to President Uhuru Kenyata.
RIO DE JANEIRO: Petrobras is preparing to launch a tender to build Brazil’s largest-ever oil plaform, according to two people with knowledge of the mater, as the state-controlled oil firm pushes ahead with ambitious plans to boost deepwater production.
Petroleo Brasileiro, as the Rio de Janeiro-based producer is formally known, plans to launch the leasing tender for the floating plaform, known as an FPSO, by the end of August, the people said.
Equivalent vessels for deepwater production have cost between $2.5 billion and $3 billion to build. Winners build and own the plaforms, and lease them to Petrobras in contracts with daily rates of up to $1 million that oten last longer than 15 years.
An FPSO, or a floating production storage and offloading unit, is effectively a massive ship that is vital for deep water production in some offshore basins.
It will be the seventh FPSO in Buzios, Brazil’s second most productive field and one of the biggest deepwater discoveries this century, the people said. Petrobras is considering a unit able to process 225,000 barrels per day, more than Brazil’s current largest plaform, owned by Norway’s Equinor ASA in its Bacalhau field, said one of the people.
The request for bids shows the state-controlled producer is moving ahead with investment plans for its most prolific fields despite the recent contraction of crude prices. The novel coronavirus pandemic has kept consumers at home and sapped demand for several fuels.