The Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) recently announced that it had purchased two sister drilling ships, the West Draco and West Dorado, from Norway’s Eldorado Drilling for US$490 million and plans to deploy them in Libya and southern Turkey.
It is reported that Eldorado sold each drilling ship to TPAO at a loss of US$245 million. After its establishment, the company purchased three newly built seventh-generation ultra-deepwater drilling ships, “Zonda”, “West Dorado” and “West Draco” from Samsung Heavy Industries, but only “Zonda” successfully obtained a contract and reached an agreement with Petrobras, with a daily rental of about US$450,000.
The West Dorado and West Draco have not been able to secure leases and have been moored in South Korea and Malaysia, respectively. The sale may be the best outcome, as it would cost approximately US$80 million to return each drilling ship to service. In addition, the mooring cost for each ship is approximately US$20,000 per day.
The acquisition of these two drilling ships brings TPAO’s drilling fleet to six ships. The company’s four existing drilling ships, “Fatih,” “Yavuz,” “Kanuni,” and “Abdulhamid Han”, are currently engaged in development drilling operations at the Sakarya oil field, which is estimated to contain 540 billion cubic meters of natural gas. The two new drilling ships are expected to be deployed at the recently discovered Göktepe oil field, which is estimated to contain approximately 75 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
It is understood that the “West Draco” was built in 2014 and the “West Dorado” was built in 2015. The two ships are 228 meters long, 42 meters wide, with a variable deck load of 22,000 tons, an operating water depth of up to 12,000 feet, a drilling depth of up to 40,000 feet, and can accommodate 200 crew members.