Dubai-based Gulf Marine Services has won a new long-term contract award for one of its Large Class vessels.
The vessel will start a four-year charter (three years firm with a one-year option) at the end of Q1 2015 on completion of its current assignment in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region.
The new charter is for a MENA-based national oil company (NOC) with a day rate in line with that previously indicated for the region for this class of vessel. The vessel will be supporting the client’s opex work in the area.
The latest charter award, taken together with the other contracts in place as at 1 January 2015, gives a backlog of US$739 million for GMS. The group’s entire fleet of self-propelled, self-elevating support vessels is currently chartered, supporting brownfield oil and gas recovery, well services and maintenance work in the MENA region and in North West Europe.
Duncan Anderson, GMS' CEO, said: "The signing of this new contract is testament to our long-standing partnerships with national oil companies in the Middle East. It also demonstrates that demand remains strong for our technically advanced, flexible and fast manoeuvring assets for brownfield oil and gas operations, which is very encouraging in the current low oil price environment. Our ability to adapt from our normal multi-move well intervention activity into supplying a large capacity accommodation barge from the same design validates and reinforces our strategy to keep our designs flexible and thus ensure market-leading utilisation. We will continue to focus our efforts on providing our clients with efficient and cost-effective solutions to support their recurring opex-based activities.”
