Roddie Mackenzie
Analyst · Tudor Pickering Holt & Company.
Yes, so let me deal with the U.K. side first. A little bit lower specification on the assets, but really the U.K is dominated by the independents, and of course the uncertainty brought by COVID and the oil price war makes getting funding for them tough, right, so certainly when they do have funding they are going to be very cautious about how they spend that. Really, what’s happened in the U.K. side of things is that a lot of the stuff has been pushed out, so you’re basically sitting on a significant number of prospects that are drill ready but are struggling for lack of funding. In the meantime, what’s happened on that side of the North Sea is that a lot of rigs have been scrapped. We’ve seen some extensive cold stacking of rigs, so the active supply has basically been cut in half. You’re going from about 15 rigs down to about 7 or 8 rigs. Again, going through the reactivation costs and expectations of making some margin going forward, as COVID does subside and we hope that happens sooner rather than later, you will see these guys being able to get some funding and when that does happen, the number of available rigs for the North Sea is not going to be that many. Then when we think about Norway, which is the higher spec that you alluded to there, as Jeremy mentioned, it was good to see fixtures being made. Equinor are pretty active. But you know, Norway has really moved beyond COVID now. They’re really back up and running - schools are all back in, people are back in offices, and Equinor is very active, and not just Equinor but we’re hearing the likes of Lundin, [indiscernible] once they get through the IPO, Neptune, etc., they have the better part of perhaps a dozen prospects that expect to move forward, and a lot of that has been driven by the tax breaks. So again, great to see the Norwegian government essentially stimulating investment by putting together a tax relief package that has really cut breakevens by as much as 40%. Even mature fields like Troll, breakevens are now in the 20s instead of the 40s where they were before, so that’s all just really positive. We really think on the high spec side, the Norway side of things, that that demand just picks up steadily through the rest of this year as everybody comes to grips with the tax relief package, and it could be a very tight market in ’21.