Paragon Offshore has won new term employment for two of its drilling rigs, but contract terminations by Petrobras have forced the bankrupt company to stack two of its vessels in Puerto Rico.
Paragon’s semi-submersible drilling rig MSS1 has won a new contract with Nexen in UK waters of the North Sea. The rate was fixed at $110,000 per day, according to the company’s fleet employment report for July 2016.
The rig will commence the new contact in late August and will work until late October this year.
Meanwhile, Total has extended its existing contract on Paragon’s jack-up drilling rig C20051. The rig will conduct light well intervention services in Dutch waters in the North Sea during the extension period, which runs from late June to mid-August.
The daily rate for the extension is $65,000, which is the lowest rate of all Paragon’s rigs currently employed in the North Sea and some way below the $135,000 per day the rig has been earning since the contract began in January.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Paragon has stacked its drillship DPDS2 (built 1981) and its semi-submersible drilling rig MSS2 in Puerto Rico.
The drillship is at the centre of a legal dispute between Paragon and Petrobras, which cancelled the rig’s contract in September 2015, almost 18 months ahead of schedule. “We will pursue all legal remedies available to us under the contract,” Paragon commented in the report.
The semi-submersible concluded a five-and-a-half-year charter to Petrobras in April.
Including these vessels, Paragon now has 12 jack-up rigs stacked in the Gulf of Mexico region; three jack-ups and a drillship laid up in the Middle East and two jack-ups stacked in both the North Sea and West Africa.
The Houston-based rig operator filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 in mid-February after racking up around $2.7bn in debt. Its restructuring plan aims to cut about $1.2bn of that debt, but has come under fire from some of the firm’s lenders.
