Noble Delay Rig Delivery Following Shipyard Incident
Noble Corporation, a UK-based offshore driller, will have to postpone a rig delivery to its client Statoil, following a crane collapse incident that happened in a Sembcorp Marine shipyard in Singapore on February 28 in which three workers were injured.
According to the company, an initial investigation into the cause of the incident has been completed and damage is believed to be confined to a crane onboard the rig and some cabling.
Following the investigation and based on the findings, Noble now expects delivery of the rig from the shipyard to be delayed an estimated 30 to 60 days, to early-to-mid third quarter of 2016.
Consequently, delivery of the Noble Lloyd Noble to the client is now expected in early-to-mid 4Q 2016. The driller did says that the revised dates of delivery were subject to change, pending completion of the investigation.
Construction on the Noble Lloyd Noble was expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2016. Following mobilization of the rig to the UK North Sea, the rig was expected to start a four-year primary term contract with Statoil on its Mariner development. Once it embarks on the contract with Statoil, the rig will have a dayrate of $447,000.
According to previous reports, the rig was to start the pre-drilling of wells at the Mariner in the second half of 2016, with four to six production wells ready prior to the Mariner start-up in 2018. To remind, in October 2015, Statoil said it would delay the start of production from the Mariner field, in the UK North Sea, from 2017 to the second half of 2018, due to delays with delivery of the topside modules for the Mariner A platform.
