Note: Each Friday in March, we are passing the keyboard to one of our readers to share perspective from the field. We hope you enjoy the thoughts these hand-picked contributors have to share. This week, former sell-side analyst Jeffrey Spittel joined us with a terrific look at the division in …
Read More »As The Offshore Drillers Wait For 2020, Some Will Pay To Work
Diamond Offshore was the first offshore driller to host its 4Q16 earnings conference call on Monday morning. In this post, we extract the most poignant statements management made on the call about the future of the offshore drilling business, identifying and corroborating some of the most important themes in the offshore …
Read More »I’ll Take The Worst Neighborhoods In O&G For $200, Alex
The hardest sell in the entire O&G industry right now is without question a newbuild offshore rig order. Demand for offshore newbuilds is actually negative. Contractors continue to push out delivery dates, in some cases paying up to avoid taking delivery. With little visibility on a recovery, shipyards are being forced to …
Read More »A Key Difference In The Industry’s 2nd BOP Outsourcing Deal Makes It Transformative
It’s fair to say that the blow out preventer (BOP) business model is being re-shaped as we write. 10 months ago, GE and Diamond introduced a new BOP arrangement to the marketplace – one that transfers up-time responsibility to the OEM. This week, the largest BOP supplier moved to implement …
Read More »In Offshore Drilling, Financial Restructuring Quietly Chugs Along As Noble And Shell Arrive At New Terms
Even when offshore drillers aren’t tapping the capital markets for debt or equity, financial restructuring is quietly continuing behind the scenes. Contractual terms continue to be renegotiated with customers, and price concessions are still being given. Literally hundreds of multi-year contracts that were in effect this time two years ago have …
Read More »Atwood’s Drillship Mortgages Are An Industry First
Offshore drilling contractors have been signing deals with shipyards to delay taking rig delivery for several years now. With no visibility on work, it’s better to leave rigs on the docks where they took shape than to store them somewhere harsher. This morning Atwood announced a delay deal on a pair of …
Read More »Making $40 Oil Great Again? Watch This Key Norwegian Development
An internal challenge set by the Statoil front office this year tasked engineers with something that would have once been thought impossible: turn a profit on a major new Barents Sea field development, the Johan Castberg, at $40 oil. Is $40 is the new $70? Statoil’s internal hurdle was lowered earlier this …
Read More »Just Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay… Half The Global OSV Fleet Is Rusting Away
As Infill Thinking readers are well aware, the protracted downturn for the industry as a whole has been particularly hard on offshore businesses. At the extreme end of the offshore pain spectrum sit the offshore supply vessel (OSV) contractors. Historically a commoditized service line with few barriers to entry, the OSV landscape now …
Read More »8 Interesting Things We Learned In The Past 24 Hours
It’s been a busy 24 hours. Since Wednesday morning, a dozen upstream management teams have provided business outlooks via quarterly conference calls. While drinking from this information firehose, we’ve been logging the highlights. In this post, we dissect the eight most interesting things we took away for the oilfield business at …
Read More »3 Quick Thoughts: A Leading Indicator Falls, Safety Pays, and Land Rig Reactivations
A quick round-up of three stories flying below the radar that we find important lessons in: i) a leading indicator of Norwegian mature field development just plummeted, ii) H&P just paid an injured rig hand $72mm, and iii) Patterson-UTI is finding it easy to return idle land rigs to work. …
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