Second - Uruguay - You may remember when i was spouting off about the rig that Petrol "bought"...It was a "Service Rig" - meant for doing maintenance on already drilled wells. Petrol got it "converted" to a drill rig I believe in Colorado. Inexpensive of course compared to buying/leasing/sub contracting a full blown drill rig. Im sure someone told DC that it would do the trick. He would not have made that call himself.
Then DC hired his own crew of contractors to steer this service rig into basalt etc. He was going to be the operator himself. ugh.
Im sure the transportation costs came into play and logistics/cost of hiring a sub contractor to do the lot - especially to site. Mind you, massive drill rigs are taken to places much harder to get to in North America so....most certainly came down to cost and risk.
So the "brand new rig" as they called it arrived in Uruguay and simply didnt have the hook pull or mud required - something along those lines. No drill crew can make that work, no specialist, no fancy bit etc. Albeit they tried it all. DC just kept throwing money at the drill instead of "failing quickly" as oilers should - im sure he wasn't sleeping at night. If you think about it it makes sense. Only thing to do is abandon fast and preserve capitol in these instances.
So moving forward I suppose they now have to either:
Get a new rig to site $$ ( why wasnt a rig sub contracted from brazil trucked down - plenty there for harsh terrain) - my only option. With the correct rig you will smash down to TD in a couple weeks with your eyes closed. Drilling basalt is not uncommon.
Reverse engineer the drill - select a better site that suits the rig, and run the risk yet again. Very bad choice.
This is all in my own opinion and not to be taken as fact. Just a hunch lol.
PRL Price at posting:
0.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held