A lack of drill-ships is slowing development of new oil fields around the world. An oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

By JAD MOUAWAD and MARTIN FACKLER

A shortage of ships used for deep-water offshore drilling is impeding any rapid turnaround in oil exploration and supply.
Even as oil trades at around $137 a barrel - up from $68 a year ago - the world’s existing drill-ships are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said.
Demand is so high that shipbuilders, the biggest of whom are in Asia, have raised prices since last year by as much as $100 million a vessel to about half a billion dollars.
“The crunch on rigs is everywhere,” said Alberto Guimaraes, a senior executive at Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company that has discovered some of the most promising offshore oil but has been unable to get at it.
“Almost 100 percent of the oil companies are constrained in their investment program because there is no rig available,” he said.
Record prices have spurred a new wave of drill-ship construction. Shipyards from South Korea to Norway are working overtime to meet a huge influx of orders.
Robert L. Long, the chief executive office of Transocean, the world’s largest drilling company, said he has nine deepwater rigs under construction, eight of which are already under contract for periods ranging from four to seven years. He expects to receive the ships between the beginning of 2009 and the end of 2010.
Transocean believes the deepwater market will continue to be constrained until at least 2012. Over three-quarters of the drillships currently under construction have already been contracted to oil companies, Mr. Long said.
Petrobras, whose full name is Petroleo Brasileiro, is expected to drive much of the growth in the booming new market. The company has outlined an aggressive program to increase its drilling capacity, and plans to contract or build 69 deepwater drillships by 2017.
Brazil stunned the oil world when it announced the discovery of a vast oil field 320 kilometers south of Rio de Janeiro last November. Energy experts said the field could turn out to be just a small part of the largest oil discovery in 30 years.
But Petrobras has only three rigs capable of drilling in waters that exceed 2,000 meters, like the sites of the new fields. Explorers are scouring ever-more remote corners of the globe in their hunt for hydrocarbons. That quest has found petroleum reserves off the shores of Africa and Brazil, and opened up promising exploration regions in the South China Sea, off the shore of India, and around the coast of Australia. But those sites will remain largely undeveloped until the new drill-ships arrive.
Most new orders for drill-ships have gone to Asian shipyards. Companies in Singapore and China have benefited, but South Korea’s big three shipbuilders - Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering and Hyundai Heavy Industries - have gotten the bulk of orders for the most complex and expensive vessels.
“The market for offshore exploration is now the hottest sector in the global shipbuilding industry,” said Lee Jae-kyu, shipbuilding analyst at Mirae Asset Securities in Seoul.
At Samsung’s sprawling shipyard on the southern Korean island of Geoje, next to the gigantic hulls of half-finished supertankers, cranes and dry docks work overtime to construct odd-looking drill-ships like the West Polaris. “The oil reserves that were easy to reach are all drying up,” said Harris S. Lee, vice president in charge of Samsung’s offshore drilling rig business. “The future is in exploring the deep seas and harsh environments.”
The 56,610-metric-ton West Polaris was ordered by Seadrill, a Bermuda-based offshore exploration company, for $453 million.
In May, Samsung announced it had received a $942 million contract to build an even hardier type of drill-ship made specifically for Arctic conditions. The vessel, ordered by Stena Offshore, a Swedish company, will have a hull strong enough to break through ice, withstand 15- meter waves and insulate the men and machinery inside from outside temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero. Samsung’s sales of all types of offshore drilling vessels jumped to $7.
8 billion last year, up from $1.5 billion in 2005.
The last such boom in orders came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when exploration rose after the 1970s oil shocks. In the 1990s, low oil prices and overflowing oil supplies led oil companies to cut back on exploration drastically.
“It will certainly mean more drilling activity and more discoveries in the deepwater side,” said Tom Kellock, the head of consulting and research at ODS-Petrodata.