Cost Benchmarking

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

September 2026·9 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 small dataset of nine Brazilian FPSOs from public sources — trade press, the winning contractors' own announcements, Petrobras communications — to see how far a $/ton comparison could honestly go. The answer: not very far. Here's the data, and why.

The dataset

† Total value over the full firm charter term — see below before comparing this to anything else in the table.

Only one of nine clears the bar

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. Walk the table with that checklist and it thins out fast.

1. Weight data is the first casualty

Only two of the nine platforms report any weight figure at all, and they aren't even the same kind of weight. P-78's 43,000 tonnes is topside weight — the modules sitting on the hull, reported directly by Keppel, the yard that built them. Almirante Tamandaré's 460,000 tonnes is displacement — the full loaded weight of the entire structure, hull included, ballast and cargo included. Those are different physical quantities describing different things. 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.

2. The closest comparable pair still can't be compared

P-78 and P-79 are, on paper, the nearest thing to a matched pair in this dataset: same EPC model, same $2.3bn headline value, same 180,000 bpd design, same 2,100m water depth. If any two platforms here should yield a transferable $/ton figure, it's these two. But P-79's weight was never published — and P-78 and P-79 were built by entirely different contractors (Keppel/Seatrium versus a Saipem–Hanwha Ocean joint venture, in different yards). There's no basis to assume they weigh the same, so the one clean $/ton figure in this dataset — roughly $53,500 per tonne of topside, from P-78 — stays a sample size of one.

3. 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. Before either charter figure means anything next to an EPC or BOT price, it has to be annualized and stripped down to whatever portion is asset cost versus operating margin — and that split isn't in the public record for either contract.

4. Even "sister" hulls don't move together cleanly

SEAP-I and SEAP-II are as close to identical twins as this dataset gets — 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). That could be a real scope difference, or it could be imprecision somewhere in the press chain — the public record doesn't resolve it either way. When even sister units built by the same yard don't move in a predictable direction, it's a reasonable prior that nothing else in the dataset will either.

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. 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. What it 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 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 nine well-documented Brazilian FPSOs, exactly one data point survives that discipline. That ratio is the actual finding here — not the $53,500-per-tonne number itself.