Transocean has stacked three of its rigs – one which is currently in the UK North Sea – due to the drop in market demand, and is offering two of its older, shallow-water rigs for sale, according to its latest monthly fleet report.
While it is not yet clear what impact UK Chancellor George Osborne’s ill-advised UK Continental Shelf tax grab will have on drilling activity this year, Energy believes this has helped tip the decision in favour of parking the JW McLean, which was used for the Bentley field production test last winter.
Expectation is that it will be stacked in the Cromarty Firth, so joining the heavy-duty Galaxy I jack-up which has been held off the market for a significant period, rather than let operators get hold of it for anything but a premium rate.
The other semis being pulled off the market are the Transocean Richardson and Sedco 601.
The Richardson has been drilling off Angola on behalf of Chevron at a day rate of $340,000, while the JW McLean and Sedco 601 (working offshore Malaysia) were on day rates of $250,000-plus.
The units offered for sale are the GSF Britannia and GSF Labrador, which Transocean acquired when it bought Global Santa Fe for around $17billion in mid 2007.
As the UK North Sea drilling market stalls, despite oil prices soaring above $100 per barrel, it is likely that other rigs will be placed in stack or removed from British waters entirely.
The UK Government is coming under increasing pressure to do a U-turn on the $2billion a year additional tax burden imposed by Osborne without any form of consultation with the offshore industry.
A crisis summit between the industry and the Treasury took place last month to no avail for the sector.
The Treasury’s chief secretary is Danny Alexander, who has been accused of bragging about the Osborne plan to pilfer £10billion from North Sea operators over the next five years.
Alexander, a former press officer and now Lib Dem MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey, has been branded “economically illiterate” by north-east Lib Dem veteran Malcolm Bruce.
Indeed, Alexander’s bragging over the £10billion tax raid on North Sea oil revenue landed him in hot water with Scottish Lib Dem colleagues, as widely reported. One senior Lib Dem went as far as saying that the chief secretary to the treasury should resign over the issue.
If he were to resign, Alexander would be the second Lib Dem chief secretary to stand down. Although, with rumours circulating that David Laws could be about to return to the government, perhaps Laws could be returning to his old role sooner than expected.