March 13, 2026 [Offshore Technology]- TotalEnergies has announced the start of production at the Lapa South-West project in the Santos Basin, situated nearly 300km offshore Brazil.

Lapa South-West is an expansion of the deep-water Lapa field operated by TotalEnergies (48%), with Shell (27%) and Repsol Sinopec (25%) being the other stakeholders.

Sanctioned in 2023, the expansion project involved the drilling of three wells, which have been linked to the existing floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit at the Lapa field.

Lapa South-West is intended to increase output from the Lapa field by 25,000 barrels per day.

Aker Solutions was engaged by TotalEnergies to deliver the subsea production system, tools and all associated engineering, procurement, construction and installation interfaces for the Lapa South-West project.

TotalEnergies exploration and production president Nicolas Terraz said: “The start-up of our operated Lapa South-West project marks another important milestone for TotalEnergies in Brazil, a key growth country for our company.

“This project, which leverages the available capacity of the existing Lapa facilities, delivers low-cost and low-emission oil production in line with our company strategy and contributes to the achievement of our objective to grow our production by 3% per year until 2030.”

Prior to achieving the milestone at Lapa South-West, TotalEnergies announced first oil production from its non-operated Mero-4 project in the Santos Basin in May 2025.

Mero-4 is an expansion of the Mero field on the Libra block, located 180km off Rio de Janeiro’s coast. The project involved drilling 12 wells, which were connected to the Alexandre de Gusmão FPSO unit.

TotalEnergies’ share of production in Brazil is expected to further ramp up with the anticipated start-ups of Atapu-2 and Sépia-2 in 2029.

In Brazil, TotalEnergies currently takes part in nine exploration and production (E&P) licences, four as operator. The French oil and gas major reported an average daily output of 184,500 barrels of oil equivalent from Brazil in 2025.

Last month, TotalEnergies signed a letter of intent with Glenfarne Alaska LNG to procure liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Alaska LNG project. Under this agreement, TotalEnergies will purchase two million tonnes per annum for more than 20 years.