I had a coffee and a long chat with my brother in law yesterday,...

I had a coffee and a long chat with my brother in law yesterday, he has worked on rigs on the NWS for several of the majors for many years.
With Shell keeping a tight lid on newsflow regarding Palta i hoped that he may have heard something that could shed some light on the situation...I wasnt dissapointed.
He has friends at Shell who are involved with the Palta drill and had spoken to one of them very recently.
Discussion on other threads has centred around a possible BoP event. This is correct. Apparently, whilst drilling ahead one of the lower pipe rams malfunctioned and closed off mid drill. This is a major event resulting in the drill pipe being completely severed.
TD for Palta is rougly 5500m and it seems that the BoP malfunction occured somewhere around 2-3000m, so they are still someway from TD. Its unclear from my conversation whether or not they will replace the entire BoP or just the faulty section of the stack.
Once they repair the BoP and fish out all the pipe they will need to cement and kick off/deviate to continue drilling.
So it looks like they are some way off from a result.
I notice that some posters on whn and oxx are watching marine traffic, i guess a return to normal activity at the rig will signal that hey are drilling ahead.