Sorry to all the armchair experts here, lets put things into perspective. I work in the industry but not in the drilling side, so enough enough to be dangerous so to speak, You're gonna ring up a rig company and say: "Hey guys, we want to drill one well, can you send your rig to Australia for us." Rig Company "Yeah sure, but it's gonna take a massive effort to pack it up, prepare it for shipping, get it shipped (p.s. it doesn't fit in shipping containers, so ya'll gonna have to put for a break bulk ship), then you're saying it's only gonna work for about 45-60 days, then we pack it up and send it back?" Central Shareholders: "yeah" Rig Company "Ok, we'll anything can be done for a price, so here's a breakdown:
Cost to service and pack ready for shipping, call it the mobilisation fee: At least $350k
Cost to ship it here. Most rigs this size are 120-150 loads, so you're looking at $1M+ for shipping
Import duties and taxes: Guess what, you Aussies are paying that too, so there goes a good $500k for a few months even if you can claim it back.
Standby rate whilst Shipping: We'll be nice and just put it in at $5k/day. Let be generous and say they come to a deal where it's capped at 4 weeks. = $150k
Cost to ship from port to the middle of Australia (literally, the middle of Australia) - $120 loads x $6k/load, plus everything to make it happen - port fees, cranes etc etc = Approx $900k
Misc consultant fee's to make sure it's the right rig, conduct inspections, organise all of the above etc etc = $150k+ at the very least
Labour wont come cheap as you either gonna have to pay for the American crew to come over, oh which won't happen with the current COVID stuff, so lets assume you're lucky and can get a couple of Americans to come over to train up at Aussie crew. Now you have 40+ people being trained for a good 30+ days. This exercise alone is gonna be a $250k+ hit
Local compliance with hazardous area rules, pressure containing equipment etc etc etc etc, this will be a significant cost and amount of time. Probably not much change from $350k.
I haven't even thought about much else but you can see where I'm going.
So now you have it on location, and you're about $3M+ in the hole before you've even raised the mast.
I'm sure there are 11ty other things at play, including what has been suggested such as just sending the high pressure control gear over, along with modifying a rig locally. I'm sure all of the engineers working on this have done their best to find a way, and I'm sure if there was an economical way, it would be getting done right now. Lets not forget all of the planning that has to go into this, it's an extremely high pressure well, everything is going to be at a premium, all the drilling tools, casings, services etc etc.
Your $10m is going to run out very quickly, and that assumes you get it done on time...looks how Dukas-1 went, wasn't exactly a quick exercise. Costs can blowout very very quickly.
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