VERA LÚCIA COUTINHO BARBOSA

Petrobras reservoir engineer and one of the first women on Brazil's offshore frontier

When Vera Coutinho reported for duty in Macaé in 1975, a supervisor informed her there was no ladies' room on the offshore support base. By Friday there was one, with a hand-lettered sign in her handwriting: “Engineer. Please knock.”

Born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1950, the daughter of a customs clerk and a baiana who sold acarajé on weekends, Vera was the first in her family to attend university. She graduated in engineering from the Escola Politécnica of the Federal University of Bahia in 1972, one of four women among two hundred, and joined Petrobras in 1974, the year a huge new field was discovered in the Campos Basin.

For thirty-one years she modeled oil reservoirs, first at the Macaé base and then at CENPES, the company's research center in Rio, helping to coax production out of fields others had written off. Younger engineers, many of them women, remember her as a tireless mentor who would explain a decline curve on a napkin and then refuse to let you leave until you could draw it back from memory. She was nobody's idea of a delicate flower, and she was always the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Away from the office she sailed Guanabara Bay in a leaky little boat named Dendê, cooked a Bahian moqueca that her friends still try to replicate, danced samba de roda at any family party and followed Esporte Clube Bahia with the devotion of the long-suffering. She married Eduardo Barbosa, a marine biologist, in 1977, and they made their home in Niterói, with a view of the bay she insisted on calling “my office window.”

Vera died on 30 May 2021, aged seventy-one, at home in Niterói after a long illness, with the bay glittering outside. She is survived by Eduardo, her daughters Luciana and Mariana, three grandchildren and her brother Jorge.

“A reservoir is like a person: it only gives its best to someone who listens.”