“Happy Thanksgiving From Five Thousand Feet Of Water” Featuring The Transocean Deepwater Atlas Team

We’re so pleased today to be able to bring you what is now the fourth in a series of COBT Thanksgiving episodes. When we think about the joys of Thanksgiving Day, it’s striking how many of those things are connected to energy. The energy to warm our homes, to cook our food, to help our families fly and drive to see us, to power everything from the TV to the refrigerator, etc. The list goes on and on. What’s always struck us is that not only is energy needed for this great holiday, but so many of the people who make our energy possible are actually working on Thanksgiving Day. We love highlighting the hardworking men and women in energy who make this all possible.

Our previous Thanksgiving-focused COBT episodes have included:

• Thanksgiving 2022 | Episode Linked Here Featuring energy workers in oilfield equipment and services
• Thanksgiving 2021 | Episode Linked Here Featuring energy workers in power plants, fracking, and LNG
• Thanksgiving 2020 | Episode Linked Here Featuring energy workers on rigs, at a refinery, fracking, and monitoring pipelines

This year, as we were thinking about difficult jobs in the industry, we thought about offshore drilling rigs. We reached out to the team at Transocean and their team helped make today’s episode possible.

Joining us for COBT from Transocean’s Deepwater Atlas drillship are Tyler Riley, Captain, Jeff Bruno (“Bruno”), Drilling Superintendent, Dennis Walton, Senior Subsea Supervisor, and David Galatenau, Driller in Training. They literally joined us from five thousand feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Captain Riley first provides fascinating background on the 130+ hardworking men and women on the ship, highlighting their work schedule, lifestyle, and team dynamics, and also provides background on the drillship. As you’ll hear, the Deepwater Atlas is one of only two 8th generation drillships in the world and has 20,000 psi well control capabilities and a 3.4 million pound hoisting capacity. Bruno and Dennis each share thoughts about their roles and their respective teams, discuss the support and camaraderie they share, and even tell us some good fishing stories. David is a recent graduate from Texas Tech and is a participant in Transocean’s accelerated program to become a fully trained driller. He also shares his perspective as a young, talented person interested and passionate about an energy career.

Before letting the guys get back to work, we of course ask the team about their plans for Thanksgiving Day (including the menu). Each of the guys also gives a shoutout to their loved ones and to their companions also working on Thanksgiving Day. We are so very thankful to the men and women of the Deepwater Atlas and hope everyone on the ship sees this COBT in their honor!

Mike Bradley kicked us off today by highlighting that broader equity market indices continue to rally and are up over 10% from late October lows as they continue taking their trading cue from lower bond yields. He noted that broader equity markets are technically overbought and possess some near-term trading risk. He flagged the surprising Argentinian Presidency election win last weekend by Javier Milei, which initially rallied the Argentinian MERVAL Index by 8% (total of 20% since Friday), and shares of YPF by over 40%. He discussed that crude oil markets are laser focused on the OPEC meeting this weekend and that crude oil prices have caught a bit of a bid this week due to growing optimism that OPEC will not only extend 1mmbpd of production cuts through Q1’24 but also increase the level of production cuts. He also mentions the significance of NVIDIA’s (NVDA) quarterly earnings. He rounded out the lead-in by noting that offshore drillers & offshore services have been the best relative YTD oil service performers.

We want to sincerely thank the team at Transocean for giving us an insider’s view of their team and drillship. We hope you enjoy this special conversation as much as we did.

On behalf of all of us at Veriten, have a fantastic Thanksgiving. We are thankful for you!