Editor's note: To view Offshore's exclusive content, please sign in or subscribe (it's FREE) to watch the video. This interview took place Feb. 27, 2025. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Bruce Beaubouef: Hello, my name is Bruce Beaubouef, managing editor for Offshore magazine.
Robert W. Eifler: Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be speaking with you today.
We've been very busy over the past few years with these different mergers and acquisitions, and I'm extremely proud of where we brought the company. We've got a fleet today of 41 rigs, and we have the largest fleet of seventh generation dual bop drillships in the entire industry. So we're very confident with our asset base right now—the one that we've been able to build through these acquisitions.
But I would say that we're just as proud of the people that have come along with it, and the accomplishments that we've made as we've integrated these various companies and come together as one Noble. Today we have, I think, more capabilities than, I would argue, any of our competition, but certainly a great deal more than when we started this journey a few years ago.
Beaubouef: OK, great. And since March 2020, we have seen the drilling market recover and rebound such that marketed utilization rates are above 90% and day rates are reaching up to and above $180,000 for jackups and over $500,000 for drillships. Is the drilling market still hot, or do you see it cooling off?
Eifler: It's a great question, and it's one that we're all thinking through right now. The reality is that 2025 will be slightly slower than we had hoped to call it a year ago, which I think is easily explained by oil prices. There's a slightly lower spot pricing, and if you look out to the middle of the forward curve, slightly lower.
But my optimism about the future is as high as it's ever been. All of our forward indicators for growth are very strong, and despite this short-term lull, we have FIDs that are where projects are being sanctioned at a very high pace.
Our customers' capex will be flattish this year. But if you look year on year through the last several years, it is up and up, and then orders from other types of services like subsea trees and FPSOs, etc, all indicate a very good backlog of work that would eventually move into drilling services. So I think today rates are probably ... have been flat for a little while in the 500s. As you indicated, and you know, perhaps they're the maybe high 400s right now, but we definitely see enough work in 2026, and then 2027. Beyond that would suggest that perhaps there's room to get back into the 500s, and perhaps a little higher from there.
Beaubouef: And what are the emerging or hot spots, regionally speaking? How do you see the market evolving in 2025?
Eifler: For deepwater rigs, all the action remains in the Golden Triangle—US, West Africa and South America, and I don't think that's going to change. We are drilling in each one of those regions.
I would say, for Noble, we're particularly active in Guyana. We're the largest drilling contractor in the country there, in what's arguably the best offshore play in the world right now.
And so I think in '25 the US is likely to remain relatively flat, and I think you've got Brazil that has the opportunity to grow slightly. And you have Ghana and I'll pull in Suriname as well... that region, and even Colombia, could grow a little bit, but is more likely to be something closer to flat.
Then you have West Africa, which really I think is a growth region for the deepwater business from what we see today. And honestly, this slightly flatter 2025 versus where we'd hoped to be a year ago... I know I mentioned oil prices before, but I think that's had the biggest effect really on West Africa. So we think that growth and demand for our services could return, and that's likely to return through West Africa.
Beaubouef: Great. And so one of the key issues that's been facing the market for many years is there was an “overhang” of newbuild rigs in the drilling market, with many languishing in shipyards and others being cold-stacked. More recently, we have seen many of these rigs being snapped up. How does the market stand today with the demand for newbuild rigs?
Eifler: Well, it's a great question. And, you know, supply is always a key issue in our business, so I'll say two things. First of all, the risk of true newbuilds is extremely low, as close to zero, I think, as you could get. To build a new, say drillship, today would cost you nearly a billion dollars per unit, and it would take probably four years to build, and that's after you've negotiated a build contract and everything. So the way we think about the math associated with all of that is that someone would need a 10-year contract at over $600,000 a day after they waited four or five years to get their rig in order to justify something like that. So about a 15-year time horizon, with materially higher day rates than we see today. So we see that as a null risk right now.
The overhang of already built but yet-to-be-delivered rigs, which is what you were asking about is, you know, a little bit more of a near-term threat. We just mentioned in our last earnings call that we believe the call for those rigs is greatly diminished because of this slightly flatter 2025. In fact, we just took the decision to dispose of the two rigs that we had cold-stacked in our fleet.
So as demand builds back up, as I've predicted, eventually you're going to need the very best of those rigs that remain sidelined. However, we think that that's probably pushed out a year or two, and we also think that there are a number of rigs that fall into that category that are unlikely to be competitive over the coming years, even with this improved demand scenario that I've outlined.
Beaubouef: OK. So another topic that's been kind of hot in the drilling market lately... It seems like the growing carbon capture and storage market will be another opportunity for offshore drillers, and Noble is already making strides into this market. Can you update what Noble is doing in this arena, and describe the opportunities and challenges for offshore drillers?
Eifler: Yeah, look, I think CCS is a really exciting area right now. We have participated in a project called Project Greensand in Denmark, and so we consider ourselves through our support of that project to be leaders.
We've developed the industry's first modular CO2 grade drilling system, ensuring that the rigs can work safely and efficiently in a CO2 atmosphere, which has its own set of challenges that are not completely different from the challenges that we normally face but require, I would say, different mitigating measures when you're working with pure CO2. And so we spend a lot of time on that, and we think that it could be a real driver of demand for jackups, particularly in the North Sea where we're very active.
Beaubouef: OK, great. And just a more general question: What are today’s offshore operators expecting from drilling contractors, and have you seen a shift in their expectations in recent years?
Eifler: We spend a lot of time on this as part of our effort in growing the company. We want to be the leading offshore driller in the world. And so we say that we want to be first choice in offshore drilling, and of course that means first choice for our customers. And so we think our customers haven't necessarily changed what they've always looked for, which is safety and efficiency. But we think they're going about it very slightly, differently now. And we actually think that the scale that we've built as a company lends itself quite well to meeting that new approach that our customers are taking. So it's more collaborative today between contractors, service companies, [and] oil and gas companies. And it's all in the name of really driving safety and efficiency together as a team. And so we've always had somewhat of that dynamic.
But I think today there's more being asked of contractors. We are investing more back into our business today than we have in quite some time, and all of that, in the name of making our rigs safer places to work for the men and women that work there every day, as well as more efficient for our customers so that not only can they finish up their drilling programs more quickly but also they can get to their first oil or to their production gains more quickly. And that drives value really across the chain in upstream.
Beaubouef: Great. So, the research tells us that energy demand is only increasing, with the bulk of that demand coming from developing nations. How is Noble positioned to meet that increase where drilling for hydrocarbons is concerned?
Eifler: Well, with our growth—we're global today. We're effectively in every major basin around the world. We watch all of this very closely, and we have, I think, the right assets to work in the places where we think hydrocarbons are most likely to be explored, discovered, and produced in offshore, of course.
And so a lot of what I've talked about here around being first choice for our customers [and] reinvesting in our business... We've built a company that, while global in our asset distribution, centralizes a lot of the best practices [and] the SMEs that make our business run, so that we can pull in institutional knowledge and lessons learned to our central office, and then push them back out to our rigs where the men and women are working in more remote regions—hopefully more quickly than our competition.
And we think that that's a critical success factor going forward for a global business that's going to be asked to move very quickly wherever the next hydrocarbons are found.
Beaubouef: OK, great. And final question. One of the big topics in recent years has been emissions reductions on several fronts, whether it's drill rigs or platforms. So I'd like to ask what steps can offshore drillers take to reduce their emissions, and what has Noble done on this front?
Eifler: Well, we're committed to reducing emissions and playing our part in reducing emissions overall. We have a goal to reduce CO2 by 20% by the year 2030, which means we're going to have to take a multi-pronged approach. We have, I would say, empowered our rig crews. So that means everyone that's involved in the use of energy in our business... to identify and help us implement sustainable behaviors. We've done that through a program we call the Energy Wise program.
And we've also built real-time monitoring and tracking systems. So we know exactly what on our rigs is using fuel. And then from there we can develop strategies to use less fuel.
We've recently entered into some contracts that have financial bonuses for reduced emissions, and we do include that in not only the bonuses we set for ourselves internally but also in contracts we have with our customers. So we just received a bonus on the Noble Endeavor, and that's something that we discuss very openly with our customers.
I think it would take a very collaborative approach with our customers in coming up with ideas for how we can work together to reduce emissions on top of the things that Noble's doing on its own.
Beaubouef: Great. And so with that last question, we thank Mr. Eifler for spending some time with us today and offering his thoughts on the current and future offshore drilling market and Noble's role in that market. So thank you very much, sir.
Eifler: Thank you very much for having me. It's been great to be here.
