Valaris to reactivate stacked drillship for Petrobras

Offshore drilling contractor Valaris has been awarded a contract with Petrobras offshore Brazil for a stacked drillship, Valaris DS-4.

Valaris said on Tuesday that the contract is for a minimum term of 548 days. The Valaris DS-4 rig is currently preservation stacked in the UK and will transit to the Canary Islands, where it will be reactivated and then mobilized to Brazil.

The contract is anticipated to start by the early second quarter of 2022 but no other details have been revealed.

The 2010-built drillship was first stacked in Spain from around April 2020. After that, it arrived in Scotland in late December 2020 for a lay-up period where it was involved in an incident.

Namely, in February this year, the drillship broke free from moorings off the North Ayrshire coast and began to drift without power, prompting a rescue operation. The rig was secured with tugboats and was later returned to shore. There were no injuries and no damages resulting from this incident.