4 ms·

A steal. Given what the going rates for rental of these things are.

• trollied 6y ago
  I do wonder what they're worth purely for the steel scrap value.
  • steerablesafe 6y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if they worth negative value in that regard.
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      Depends where you scrap 'em. There are massive improvised "ship breaking" yards e.g. in Bangladesh.
      • RobertKerans 6y ago
        Yes, but you need to get them there, even then it's going to be negative money so owners would want subsidies. So for example, as the North Sea fields die, the Cromarty Firth in North East Scotland is getting rigs at an increasing pace, they just mothball them in the firth in the hope they can get a refit or sell them, but they rarely seem to be able to do either these days (there's a set of jack up legs that have been there for at least 15 years for example). Nobody's buying them for scrap and paying to drag them halfway across the world any more (there was a suggestion money was going to get pumped into a breaking yard down the coast in England, at Middlesbrough, but looks like wasn't financially viable). Financial incentives aren't there, so it's easier to just find a coastal location to moor them that's cheap, where they rot. There's no cash value in them, it's usage that makes money and that ain't happening a lot now, the owners of the ones Musk's bought will have bitten his hand off. Edit: for clarity, it's a massive financial bet building a platform -- they have specific purposes and take a long time to plan and build, but the deployment environment (physical/political/economic) is volatile relative the build timespan. That doesn't matter in boomtime, any hits are absorbable, but it is not boomtime. The above Scottish example, a fair % of the rigs in the firth at any one time are "new" (as in unused). They get kept in hopes of refits, not scrapped; it's too expensive to scrap.
• throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  The rental rate reflects potential productivity of the platform. Once they're old enough to not be useful as oil rigs the price falls to the scrap floor pretty quickly. The scrap value is still pretty high since they're chock full of all sorts of industrial and maritime machinery that can simply be unbolted and sold.
• chasd00 6y ago
  i would imagine they're very polluted. it's surprising the price isn't negative, in that someone pays you to take ownership because the EPA is forcing a clean up.