Offshore drilling contractor Transocean is reporting that it has received a contract termination for its drill ship Discoverer India which has been operating in Egypt.
This is according to Transocean’s latest Quarterly Fleet Status Report dated April 16, 2020. The Discoverer India, constructed in 2010, has been under contract for Burullus in Egypt since September 2019.
The industry has been experiencing a surge of contract terminations and adjustments as companies seek to readjust their project portfolios to better weather the rough seas that low oil prices and the global coronavirus pandemic visited on the industry and economies. With E&P companies slashing budgets by as much as 30%, service providers and contractors in the oil and gas sector have been hit hard by loss of opportunities, contract terminations and project cancellations.
Further, Transocean reported also that its customer in the US Gulf of Mexico, Beacon Offshore, exercised a 41-day option with the contract for the Deepwater Asgard.
As a result of the exercise of this option, the Deepwater Asgard’s contract is scheduled to end in November instead of October 2020, the report stated. It gave the day rate for this contract as $240,000.
Transocean is a provider of offshore contract drilling services for oil and gas wells, specializing in technically demanding sectors of the global offshore drilling business with a particular focus on ultra-deepwater and harsh environment drilling services.
One of Transocean’s drill ships, Deepwater Champion, famously struck oil at the Liza Field in the Stabroek Block offshore Guyana in 2015, setting off a chain of events that has culminated with the South American country commencing oil production in December 2019, less than five years after the discovery.
