Turkey’s state oil company TPAO has bought two sister drillships from Norway’s Eldorado Drilling.
The company bought the 2014-built West Draco and her sister 2015-built West Dorado drillships, and will look to use them in Libya and southern Turkey.
The pair will join the four other TPAO drillships, Fatih, Yavuz, Kanuni and Abdulhamid Han.
All four of TPAO’s existing drillships are working on the development drilling of the Sakarya field, which holds an estimated 540bn cu m of gas. The most likely destination for the two new rigs could be the appraisal of the recently discovered Göktepe field, which holds some 75bn cu m of gas.
Eldorado was forced to sell them for a loss to the Turkish oil and gas firm for a reported price of $245m per rig.
After being founded, Eldorado Drilling bought three newbuild seventh-generation ultra-deepwater drillships from Samsung Heavy Industries – the Zonda, West Dorado and West Draco.
It has been successful with getting work for only the Zonda, which got a deal in Brazil with Petrobras on a dayrate of around $450,000.
The other two rigs found no work and have been in layup first in Korea, then in Malaysia. The sale is maybe the best outcome since bringing the rigs into service would require around $80m. Apart from that, layup costs around $20,000 per day per unit.
