Noble Corp. sees early end for jack-up deal, new gig for drillship

Offshore drilling contractor Noble Corporation has received an early contract termination for a jack-up drilling rig and a new contract for a drillship unit. 

Namely, Noble informed in its latest fleet status report on Tuesday that the Australian oil company Quadrant Energy exercised its right to early terminate the contract for the 2014-built jack-up drilling rig Noble Tom Prosser.

According to Noble, the contract is now expected to conclude during the second half of September 2016. The rig was working for Quadrant with a dayrate of $203,000 and it recently drilled the Driftwood-1 commitment well offshore Western Australia.

Further, the company said, the customer owes Noble a demobilization fee, plus 50 percent of the operating dayrate through the original contract expiration date.

Noble also said that the 2013-built drillship Noble Bob Douglas has been awarded a contract from Apache, offshore Suriname. The contract is scheduled to start in April 2017 and it will last until June 2017, but Noble did not disclose the dayrate for the drillship. The rig is currently under a contract with Anadarko in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico until mid-February 2017 with a dayrate of $635,000.

Furthermore, the driller decided to cold stack the 1999-built semi-submersible Noble Jim Day, while the 2014-built jack-up rig Noble Houston Colbert is currently under tow to UAE where it is expected to be warm stacked.

The newbuild jack-up Noble Lloyd Noble is under tow from Sembcorp Marine’s shipyard in Singapore to the United Kingdom. Following in‐transit and acceptance testing, the rig is expected to start a contract with Statoil in mid-October 2016 with a dayrate of$447,000. The rig will be deployed at the Mariner field development in the UK sector of the North Sea.

Offshore Energy Today Staff