How Brazil's Oil Giant Quietly Became the World's Carbon Capture Leader

Petrobras's massive pre-salt operation offers a powerful—and controversial—blueprint for the future of energy.

Introduction: A Climate Solution from an Unexpected Source

While the world's climate conversation often casts national oil companies as villains, a look deep beneath the Atlantic reveals a startling paradox: Brazil's Petrobras is not just experimenting with carbon capture, it's operating the largest program on Earth—and it's been doing so for over a decade. In the immense pre-salt fields miles below the ocean floor, the company has methodically weaponized its deep-water expertise to create a globally significant, economically viable decarbonization model that is now evolving into a national platform.

This isn't a story about greenwashing or small-scale pilot projects. It's about how an energy giant turned an operational challenge into a core competitive advantage. The journey reveals a strategic evolution from enhancing its own oil production to building the foundation for a national carbon storage industry. The five takeaways from Petrobras’s pioneering work offer a compelling case study in how legacy energy firms can pivot, leveraging their vast technical resources to build the infrastructure for a low-carbon future.

1. A Quarter of the World's Injected Carbon

The foundation of Petrobras's leadership is its sheer scale. The company's carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) program in its ultra-deepwater pre-salt fields is the largest in the world in terms of annual reinjected volume. In 2022 alone, Petrobras captured and reinjected a record 10.6 million tons of CO2. According to the Global CCS Institute, this single operation accounted for approximately 25% of the total CO2 injected by the entire global industry that year.

This is no recent development. The program began in 2008 and won the prestigious Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) Distinguished Achievement Award in 2015, underscoring its long-term credibility. By the end of 2022, Petrobras had reinjected a cumulative total of 40.8 million tons of CO2, with an ambitious target to reach 80 million tons by 2025. This is industrial-scale decarbonization in action, integrated across 21 offshore platforms.

2. The Win-Win of Greener Oil and More of It

Petrobras mastered this technology to solve a fundamental business problem: the natural gas extracted from its pre-salt reservoirs has a high concentration of CO2. The company needed a solution to avoid venting these emissions into the atmosphere. The answer was to separate the CO2 on the platform and reinject it back into the reservoir—a process that delivers a powerful dual benefit.

First, it prevents massive amounts of greenhouse gases from reaching the atmosphere. Second, it doubles as a method for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), as the reinjected CO2 helps maintain pressure in the reservoirs, increasing the amount of oil that can be efficiently extracted. This alignment of economic incentives with climate goals is the holy grail for industrial decarbonization, and Petrobras has proven it can work at a globally significant scale. The company continues to innovate, developing patented technologies like HISEP (High Pressure Separation), which separates CO2 on the seabed to reduce the footprint on platforms and lower costs.

3. The Secret to Low-Carbon Barrels

This mastery of CCUS-EOR didn't just improve efficiency; it yielded a crucial climate outcome. The oil produced by Petrobras in the pre-salt layer already has CO2 emissions up to 70% lower than the global average, and the company’s massive carbon capture program is a key reason for this significantly lower carbon intensity.

By capturing CO2 that would otherwise be released, Petrobras reduces the emissions footprint of every barrel it produces. As Viviana Coelho, the executive manager of Climate Change and Decarbonization at Petrobras, explains, this is a core element of the company’s competitive strategy:

"The oil we produce in the pre-salt fields (notably Tupi and Búzios) is among those with the lowest operational emissions in the world. Consuming oil produced with lower emissions is an immediate and relevant contribution to the reduction of global emissions. In the last 12 years, we have managed to reduce the emission per barrel of oil produced by almost half and our ambition is to achieve carbon neutrality. The mastery of CCUS-EOR technology is a lever to reduce emissions from various sectors and an element of competitiveness for Petrobras."

4. From Oil Fields to Saline Aquifers

Having perfected CCUS for its own operations, Petrobras is now making a strategic leap from enhancing oil production to offering pure carbon storage. The new "Projeto Piloto de CCS São Tomé" marks a crucial evolution, as it will be the first project in Brazil to inject CO2 into a deep saline reservoir—a porous rock formation saturated with brine—rather than an active oil field.

The key difference is that this storage is completely decoupled from oil production. The project is designed as a three-year pilot starting in 2028, with the goal of capturing and permanently storing up to 100,000 tons of CO₂ per year. This initiative serves as a vital learning platform to validate the technology and regulatory frameworks needed for future large-scale CCS hubs, which could store emissions from various other industrial sectors across Brazil.

5. An Open-Source Map for a Carbon-Free Brazil

The final stage of this evolution is an ecosystem play. In a move to accelerate decarbonization nationwide, Petrobras has launched "GIS CCUS Brasil," a free, online public tool that acts as a comprehensive "treasure map" for identifying and developing new carbon storage projects.

The platform centralizes an immense repository of public data, including the location of over 1,500 major CO2 emission sources, details on 18,000 infrastructure elements like pipelines, and geological information from 72 sedimentary basins. By making this critical data accessible, Petrobras is moving beyond a proprietary advantage and actively fostering a national ecosystem for decarbonization, demonstrating a commitment that extends far beyond its own operational boundaries.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Role of Energy Giants

Petrobras’s journey with CCUS provides a powerful, real-world blueprint for how decades of offshore engineering and geological expertise can be repurposed for climate action. The company has methodically progressed from an internal efficiency tool to a low-carbon product differentiator, and is now building the technical and data foundations for a national carbon storage service. This strategic arc demonstrates how a legacy energy firm can transform a core competency into a central pillar of its decarbonization strategy.

This model, while tied to ongoing fossil fuel production, presents a provocative vision for the energy transition. As the world desperately seeks proven, scalable climate solutions, the Petrobras case forces a critical question: Can the technical mastery of the world's energy giants be harnessed, and are they the unlikely key to building the critical decarbonization infrastructure of tomorrow?

Bibliographic Reference: 

PETROBRAS. Agência Petrobras. Petrobras aprova projeto piloto que vai capturar e armazenar 100 mil toneladas de carbono por ano. Postado em 17 set. 2025. Disponível em: https://agencia.petrobras.com.br/w/petrobras-aprova-projeto-piloto-que-vai-capturar-e-armazenar-100-mil-toneladas-de-carbono-por-ano. Acesso em: 01 nov 2025.

PETROBRAS. Agência Petrobras. Programa de captura de carbono (CCUS) da Petrobras é o maior do mundo em volume. Postado em 27 dez. 2023. Disponível em: https://agencia.petrobras.com.br/w/ccus. Acesso em: 01 nov 2025.

PETROBRAS. Agência Petrobras. Petrobras lança ferramenta digital que incentiva o abatimento de emissões de CO2. Postado em 12 ago. 2024. Disponível em: https://agencia.petrobras.com.br/w/inovacao/petrobras-lanca-ferramenta-digital-que-incentiva-o-abatimento-de-emissoes-de-co2. Acesso em: 01 nov 2025.

PETROBRAS. Agência Petrobras. Petrobras bate recorde anual em captura, uso e armazenamento de CO2. Postado em 23 fev. 2023. Disponível em: https://agencia.petrobras.com.br/w/petrobras-bate-recorde-anual-em-captura-uso-e-armazenamento-de-co2. Acesso em: 01 nov 2025.

PUCRS.Instituto do Petróleo e dos Recursos Naturais. Plataforma GIS CCUS Brasil. Porto Alegre: IPR, 2024.