SBM Offshore and a Brazilian partner have unveiled a robotic tool designed to clean crude oil tanks on floating production, storage and offloading vessels, taking one of the offshore industry's dirtiest and most dangerous jobs out of human hands.

The announcement, reported by Offshore Energy, gives SBM another entry in its push to automate work on the FPSOs it designs, leases and operates across Brazil's pre-salt and other producing basins worldwide.

Tank cleaning on an FPSO is not a small chore. Sludge builds up in crude storage tanks over years of service, and clearing it has traditionally meant sending crews into confined spaces filled with hydrocarbon vapour — slow, costly and among the higher-risk routines on any floater.

The new robotic tool is built to do that work instead.

What does the tool actually do?

The device enters the oil tank and performs the cleaning mechanically, removing accumulated residue without requiring personnel to spend extended shifts inside the confined space.

SBM Offshore paired with a Brazilian player to develop and unveil the system. Brazil is the natural proving ground: the country's pre-salt province off the southeast coast hosts the world's densest concentration of FPSOs, and SBM has a long track record there leasing production units to Petrobras and its partners in the Santos and Campos basins.

The takeaway is simple: this is about taking people out of hazardous confined spaces on floaters that must keep producing.

Why does this matter for FPSO operations?

FPSOs are the workhorse of deepwater Brazil and West Africa, storing crude onboard and offloading it to shuttle tankers. Every day a tank is out of service for manual cleaning is capacity tied up, and every man-entry job carries confined-space and gas-exposure risk that operators spend heavily to manage.

Robotic cleaning addresses both problems at once. It cuts the exposure that comes with human entry, and it can shorten the outage window on tanks that form part of the vessel's storage and offloading chain.

For a leasing company like SBM, uptime on its fleet is the product it sells. Tools that trim downtime or risk on those units go straight to the economics of the lease.

In short, automation here is an operational play first, not a showcase.

Where does it fit in SBM's wider push?

SBM Offshore has spent recent years building out digital and remote-operations capability across its fleet, alongside its core business of designing and delivering FPSOs for deepwater developments.

The tank-cleaning robot joins that effort, targeting a maintenance task that repeats across every vessel in the fleet. If the tool proves out in Brazilian service, it becomes a candidate for the broader SBS-operated fleet — and a reference point for other FPSO operators weighing the same confined-space problem.

The watch item now is field performance: how the robot behaves on a working crude tank, and whether SBM moves to deploy it fleet-wide.