Deepsea Stavanger in Drilling Start at Maria
Tuesday 21 March 2017
Odfjell Drilling’s semi-submersible Deepsea Stavanger has now started work on its contract for production drilling at Wintershall’s Maria field being developed off Norway, with another of the contractor’s rigs reportedly lined up for a further drilling job for Statoil.
The first development well is set to be drilled imminently at the Norwegian Sea field after the semisub gained an acknowledgement of compliance for operations off Norway from the Petroleum Safety Authority earlier this month, Odfjell said in a statement.
It follows preparatory work on the Deepsea Stavanger carried out at the Coast Center Base and formal acceptance of the rig by the German operator.
The sixth-generation semisub has been chartered by Wintershall on a 574-day contract worth $175 million signed in 2015, yielding a dayrate of around $305,000 that is relatively high in the current depressed drilling market, where rates for such units have sunk to as low as $150,000.
It has subsequently been lined up for a one-well deal off South Africa with an undisclosed client, understood to be a re-entry of the earlier suspended Brulpadda-1 well for France’s Total.
Meanwhile, Odfjell’s sister rig Deepsea Atlantic, which has been carrying out production drilling at Statoil’s giant Johan Sverdrup field being developed off Norway, has been lined up to sink a pair of wells at the state-controlled operator’s Utgard field early next year, according to Norwegian news site Petro.no.
A Statoil spokesman was quoted as saying the rig has performed efficiently at Sverdrup and therefore has available capacity to drill the production wells at Utgard, scheduled for the second quarter of 2018, under the existing charter deal with Odfjell.
However, this means other contractors will be unable to compete for the drilling job at Utgard, which is being developed in the North Sea as a subsea tieback to Statoil’s Sleipner facilities and is due on stream in the fourth quarter of 2019.