Saudi oil and gas drilling services provider ADES announced that it has secured new contracts and lease renewals for two of its jack-up drilling rigs.
According to publicly available information from ADES, the company has entered into a new charter contract with Nigerian oil and gas exploration and production company Belop, under which Belop will lease ADES’s “Main Pass IV” jack-up drilling rig for operations in Nigerian waters. The contract has a fixed term of one year, with an option to extend for another year without a price; the fixed-term contract is valued at approximately US$48.2 million.
The “Main Pass IV” has completed its previous operations in Nigerian waters and is currently preparing to fulfill a new charter contract. It is expected to enter the waters in the third quarter of 2026.
The charter extension agreement involves the “Shelf Drilling Winner” jack-up drilling rig, currently chartered by Tenaz Energy and deployed in the Dutch North Sea. With the extension of the charter, the original one-year fixed charter period for the drilling rig has been directly extended to a three-year fixed charter period, while the original optional terms remain unchanged.
The original charter contract for the “Shelf Drilling Winner” commenced in mid-November 2025, with a fixed charter period of one year and two one-year extension options. Including the new fixed charter period and all optional renewal periods, the total potential value of the contract is approximately US$221.93 million.
Amidst a market environment of continued tight supply of offshore drilling rigs and scarcity of high-quality assets, the charters secured for the two drilling rigs represent a new fixed order backlog of US$270.13 million for ADES.