Offshore dayrates continue to set records. Transocean Inc., Houston, reports that its deepwater drillship, Discoverer Enterprise, has received a three-year contract extension with BP for $519,600 per day starting in December 2007 for operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The contract is expected to generate a total of $569 million in revenues for Transocean. Calyon Securities (USA) Inc. analyst Mark Urness says, "To put this into context, the Discoverer Enterprise's current contract has a rate of about $182,500 per day, and our $13-per-share 2008 peak earnings forecast assumes the rig will earn $475,000 per day. The rig's new contract lowers the number of 2008 operating days available in this subset of eight drillships from 29% to 16%." Urness says the strength in the dayrate environment is a function of a rig shortage that will exist at least through 2008. Separately, Chevron Corp. has signed three contracts with Transocean that total about $1.7 billion in value. And, India's privately held Reliance Industries Ltd. has awarded Transocean's fifth-generation deepwater drillship Deepwater Frontier a three-year contract extension for drilling operations offshore India, expected to begin around December 2008. Potential revenues during the extension could total up to $522 million. Worldwide drilling contractor GlobalSantaFe Corp., Houston, plans to provide a customer with a new ultra-deepwater, semisubmersible rig under a seven-year agreement valued at approximately $1 billion. Keppel Fels Ltd. will build the rig, to be named the GSF Development Driller III, at its Singapore shipyard for delivery in early 2009. The estimated construction cost is about $590 million. GlobalSantaFe Corp. reports that its worldwide SCORE (Summary of Current Offshore Rig Economics) for January 2006 was 106.1, up 3.1% from the previous month and 82.5% from January 2005. The SCORE, whose baseline began at 100 in 1980, saw its highest rate reached in May 1982 at 104, until January 2006.
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