Jack-up rig hired for drilling on gas field offshore Turkey

Canada-based oil and gas producer Trillion Energy has signed a definitive offshore drilling services contract with Romanian GSP Offshore SRL (GSP) to secure a jack-up rig for its 2022 – 2023 drilling campaign on its SASB natural gas field located in the Black Sea offshore Turkey.

The contract was signed by Trillion Energy’s 100 per cent subsidiary, Park Place Energy Turkey Limited, and announced by Trillion on Wednesday. It follows a memorandum of understanding between the two companies from February 2022.

The contract provides a daily rig services rate of $95,000/day and a minimum of 100 days of drilling time, however, Trillion anticipates the total project time of eight to nine months. Trillion has made an advance payment of $1 million and a mobilization cost of $0.8 million.

Following the completion of its current operations in Romania, the mobilisation of the Uranus jack-up rig from Romania is expected in late July 2022, arriving onsite in August 2022. The rig was built in 1980 and rebuilt in 2013.

Trillion said it intends to drill five wells from existing wellhead production platforms using the Uranus rig, which allows the company to put the wells onto production as soon as they are completed. The first well may be spud August 2022 and each of the subsequent four new wells is expected to take approximately 40 days, plus completion time.

In addition to drilling operations, the same rig will be utilised for re-entry and re-completion of two existing wells, which still have behind pipe reserves proved using PNN logs.

Arthur Halleran, Trillion CEO, stated: “The company is excited to have secured one of the best and most suitable drill rigs located in the Black Sea area. The SASB drilling program will provide instant online natural gas reserves production during a time of historically high natural gas prices.”

The SASB is a shallow water conventional gas field, which consists of four discovered non-produced gas pool reserves and numerous development gas pools with very good seismic, geophysical, geological, and expensive engineering data. The company has been active in the area for over 20 years.