Vantage Drilling cancels contract with Lukoil to drill on Romanian shelf in 2026 - media
MOSCOW. Nov 12 (Interfax) - Vantage Drilling has cancelled a contract to drill in 2026, which, industry sources told the Reuters news agency, was with Lukoil , sanctioned by the United States and UK, for exploration at its Romanian Black Sea Trident gas discovery.
The agency said the Oslo-listed Vantage Drilling initially announced the cancellation of a 260-day contract for its drillship Platinum Explorer on October 19 without disclosing the location or client. Britain had imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft three days earlier. The U.S. announced its sanctions on October 23.
Vantage Drilling declined to comment for Reuters on the claim the contract had been with Lukoil. "Vantage terminated the contract because the applicable sanctions made its performance unlawful," it told the agency.
Lukoil received the rights under a concession agreement in 2011 to explore and develop the Est Rapsodia and Trident blocks offshore Romania. As a result of drilling in 2014-2015, the company completed three wells, including one at the EX-29 Rapsodia offshore block and two at EX-30 Trident. The company drilled the first exploration well, Lira-1X, in October 2015 and found a gas-bearing zone 46 meters wide. Subsequent calculations showed that the reserves of the discovered field could exceed 1 trillion cubic feet of gas.
The company withdrew from the Rapsodia EX-29 project in 2016, but received a permit to continue exploration at EX-30 Trident. Lukoil drilled a third well, Trinity 1X, at the EX-30 Trident block at the end of 2019. Drilling the well resulted in the confirmation of a seismic model for the region.
Lukoil said later that it had written off around 5.8 billion rubles of expenditure on drilling a dry well in Romania. The company thought about abandoning the Romanian shelf and began looking for companies that might be interested in its stake. One option for taking the project forward was to supply gas to existing infrastructure.
