Mark Mey: Yes. I would say that I think you’ve seen one or two anomalies that may have been disappointing for the market, but those are individual companies with motivations that are definitely not aligned with our own. So, for the majority of the long-term drillers, I think you’re clearly going to see rates well above $450. Even for term work, I think you’re going to see that there’s maybe a small discount for term work, but we’re talking about 10,000, 20,000 a day, we’re not talking about 10% or 15%. So, I think you’ll see plenty of long-term work awarded, but it’s going to be at very healthy rates. They might not be quite 5s, but they’ll be pretty close. Certainly, some long-term stuff will be awarded above that 500 marker.
But overall, the way we view it, as Jeremy has said, we’ve been very purposeful about which rigs get placed on which opportunities. So, needless to say, for our top-spec assets will ensure that they are on very positive contracts with strategic importance to us as well, not just dollars.
Fredrik Stene: All right. Thanks for all that color. And Mark, congratulations and thank you. I think the transaction now in April was a good final milestone.
Mark Mey: Thanks Fredrik.
Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Arun Jayaram with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Arun Jayaram: Yes, good morning. I was wondering if you could comment on just the 20,000 BOP market overall. One of your peers highlighted how the Paleogene in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the fastest growing plays kind of globally. And I’m wondering if you could just maybe talk about what you’re seeing there? How many rigs have that BOP capabilities and what’s the future prospects there?
Jeremy Thigpen: Yes, sure. You’ve basically got four, possibly four operators that are active or going to be active in the 20,000 market as we would describe it. So, there’s plenty of work there to occupy the rigs that we have. But going forward, we think there’s work to keep everything busy at the moment, not necessarily saying there’s a need for adding capacity in that market at the moment. But we’ll see how things shake out. There’s a lot of operators also believe that, that is a trend that will continue in the future. So as we go four, five, six years in the future, that more and more of those frontiers will require the higher pressures. But for the moment, I think we’re in a very good position. We may be slightly undersupplied for that demand at the moment. But certainly, I think the operator see the value in the — not only the equipment, but the expertise and how to do it. So we’re well-placed for both of our rigs at the moment.
Mark Mey: Yes. And Aaron, I think your other question was how many are capable of 20,000. There are only two rigs in the world with 20,000 BOP — Titan and the Atlas. So we’re in a very good position there.
Arun Jayaram: It’s a nice match. Maybe just broadly, could you talk about West Africa, obviously, Namibia is an area that the market is pretty excited about. But could you talk about kind of demand trends you’re seeing out of West Africa, I know in Halliburton’s call, they mentioned now in 2025, you could see more deepwater activity there next year.
Jeremy Thigpen: Yes, absolutely. So Mackenzie’s recent report was describing what’s going on and upstream investments expected in West Africa. And if you take specifically the deepwater sector, they expect to see an increase of 80% in spending between 2023 and 2027. So as we go through our chart of available opportunities in West Africa. That is the one piece of the golden triangle that’s finally popped. North America was doing great, Gulf of Mexico, and of course, South America, we’ve lamented just how many rigs have gone in there and how many more will, but this last quarter, we’ve really seen a lot of positive movement in West Africa. And it’s not just one or two countries, it’s across several different areas. So I won’t go through all the details on that.
But certainly, the traditional players, Nigeria is back with four tenders. Angola’s contracting activity has been very solid, and there’s still a couple more to be awarded. And then as we go through Mozambique and Ghana and what have you, there’s still plenty more scope to go there. So we do actually think that all the fleet that’s currently in West Africa will either be renewed, extended or put onto different programs, plus we’re going to need two to three additional rigs in the next couple of years. So I think West Africa is looking very positive at the moment.
Arun Jayaram: Thank you.
Operator: And we’ll take our last question from David Smith with Pickering Energy Partners. Your line is open.
David Smith: Good morning, and thank you. If I go to the data from a year ago and look at forward availability for the deepwater fleet, and just see what has been contracted since. It’s a much higher percentage of drillship availability that’s been contracted versus benign deepwater semis, and I was just hoping to get your thoughts on, or what you’re hearing from customers about the relative interest in drillships versus benign semis. And how we should think about the natural pricing premium for the average fixed gen drillship versus the average sixth-gen benign semi?
Keelan Adamson: Maybe I’ll try and answer that one, David, and then Roddie kick in. What we’re seeing from our customers, and it was a traditional view that development rigs were better suited, semis were better suited to fill developments, and drillships were better suited to — opportunities. Obviously, that has changed significantly over the last five to 10 years, and you will find drillships that are now a lot more versatile, our customers are perfectly comfortable developing fields with them, and actually enjoy the redundancy in space and size and capability that they have as opposed to the semis. Where the semis certainly have an advantage is perhaps in shallower water or an area where there’s a nation they prefer to move up that semi, but also have dynamically positioning capability in the event they needed for that particular area.
So I think that speaks to why the situation is what it is right now. I consider the drillships to be the preference from what I speak to customers about. But I’ll let Roddie maybe add a little bit more color to that.
Roddie Mackenzie: Yes. No, I think that’s spot on, Keelan. There are certain basins that we still have significant interest in the semis. So there’s a couple of programs starting in 2025 that will require exactly as Keelan described, where you have this combination of a mode unit that can also do DP work as well. So I think there’s it’s obvious that the drillship market is extremely hot at the moment. The semi market is good. So by comparison, it may not look as good, but it’s still pretty solid.
