ExxonMobil said Thursday it expects to spud a deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico within weeks, after getting permission Tuesday to resume operations halted by the US drilling moratorium following the Macondo incident.
"We have a newly built, state-of-the-art drilling rig standing by and we are prepared to spud the well within a few weeks," ExxonMobil spokeswoman Margaret Ross said.
A spokeswoman for Danish rig owner Maersk Drilling earlier Thursday (See story, 1411 GMT) said the company had already begun drilling the deepwater exploration well and predicted the job would take five to six months to complete.
But Ross said only staging operations had resumed.
The rig is on a four-year contract to Statoil in the US, but has been farmed out to ExxonMobil, said the Maersk spokeswoman. She said the contract is for the drilling of one well, and she did not provide the value of the contract.
On Tuesday, the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement granted a permit to ExxonMobil to drill a well in the Keathley Canyon Block 919 in 6,941 feet of water, about 240 miles off the coast of Louisiana. It was the fourth of five deepwater permits issued by BOEM since the moratorium was lifted in October.
