Slow repair work for Sea Drill-5
Repair work on the Sea Drill-5 jack-up rig (earlier called Ekha) is proceeding slowly at the Keppel FELS dry dock in Singapore.
Visitors to the dry dock last week tell PETROWATCH repair work on the rig will likely be finished by mid-June or beginning of July this year. On 27th January, ONGC issued a LoI to hire Sea Drill-5 for a three-year drilling campaign on the Mumbai High from November this year.
Repair work is taking some time, we hear. Its unlikely the ONGC contract can begin before mid-April or May next year.
Before it starts work with ONGC, Sea Drill-5 is contracted to drill two wells for operator Gazprom and GAIL at NEC-OSN-97/1 offshore West Bengal. After completing the Gazprom wells, Sea Drill will sail to Indonesia for Premier Oil before sailing back to Indian waters to start the ONGC job in May next year.
In February this year, Sea Drill-5 suffered a punch-through when it was about to spud the first Gazprom well.