Surprise! The dream team of Vice President J.D. Vance, New York real estate developer Steven Witkoff, and the American President’s son-in-law, nepo-baby Jared Kushner, did not succeed in negotiating a peace deal with Iran over the weekend in Pakistan. I'm starting to think that maybe Kushner and Witkoff just aren't good negotiators. And, as defeated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán can testify, Vance’s involvement seems to be the kiss of death in any venture.
Now the United States says that it will block the Strait of Hormuz, which was exactly what Iran was doing, and which Washington had previously condemned. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the Emirates must be despairing. Of course, the situation may have changed ten times between me writing this and you reading it; however, we can expect oil prices – and bunker prices – to ricochet around violently again in the week ahead.
Now that even Iranian tankers will not be able to leave the Persian Gulf, this will further squeeze global oil supplies. I doubt that Greek tanker magnate George Prokopiou will want to chance his vessels running through the strait and being seized by the US Navy, either.
Physical supply shortages remain a risk in many countries, so energy security is once again at the fore. This means drilling in diverse locations and it means a bumper year ahead in Brazil. In 2025, Brazil's oil production averaged 3.77 million barrels of crude oil per day, and 82 per cent of that came from deepwater pre-salt fields.
Not surprisingly, Brazil’s fragmented offshore support market has seen some consolidation, and frontier exploration plays and production projects long mothballed elsewhere are viable again at US$100 per barrel.
In March, we covered the announcement that Tidewater had agreed to buy Brazilian platform supply vessel (PSV) operator Wilson Sons UltraTug and its fleet of 22 ships in a US$500 million deal. A week later, Brazilian rivals CBO (a company Tidewater had considered buying but rejected) and OceanPact announced they were merging in an all-stock transaction to create a national champion with a 73-vessel fleet of diverse types of offshore support vessel.
Brazilian offshore deals seem to be like primary colours, Olympic medals and wise men at Epiphany – they come in threes. The third deal, which we missed, was the end of a long saga – the final sale of Maersk Supply Service in Brazil.
In 2024, the Maersk family foundation sold Maersk Supply Service and its fleet of 13 anchor handling tug supply vessels (AHTS), eight subsea construction vessels, and the US$95 million cable-layer Maersk Connector, in a US$1.12 billion deal with Norway’s DOF. Maersk Supply Service became DOF Denmark and promptly embarked on a shameless cost cutting exercise that saw hundreds of European seafarers served redundancy notices in 2025, even as the company announced bumper profits.
Excluded from the sale, however, was Maersk Supply Service’s Brazilian operation. Maersk kept the eight vessels working in Brazil, six AHTS and the aged 2006-built, Brazilian flag PSVs Maersk Vega and Maersk Ventura.
In the middle of 2025, Maersk agreed to sell one of the Brazilian anchor handlers, the 260-ton bollard pull ice class 1A vessel Maersk Maker, to Kistefos, the privately owned investment company of Norwegian tycoon Christen Sveaas. Kistefos owns 83 per cent of the shares in Viking Supply Ships, but controls over 87 per cent of the voting rights. Mr Sveaas also controls Sea1 Offshore with around 52 per cent of the shares, after the breakup of Siem Offshore.
Last week, Kistefos entered into an agreement to sell the AHTS to Viking Supply Ships on the same terms as agreed between Kistefos and Maersk. The vessel will be renamed Tor Viking and following the acquisition, Viking Supply Ships will control a fleet of eight AHTS, of which four are ice class 1A and two are ice class 1A Super. Two of the right vessels are bareboated in.
No price was named for Maersk Maker, but since Viking is listed in Stockholm, one might expect this figure to be disclosed in the next quarterly report, especially since the company only made a profit of less than US$6 million for the whole of 2025, and generated negative cash from operations, as per its recently issued annual report.
That sale left Maersk Supply Service with just seven vessels in Brazil.
Now, after over fifty years in the supply vessel industry, the whole Brazilian business has been sold to a curious consortium of two little-known private equity companies. Davidson Kempner and the Fortress Investment Group, this is not. Maersk has finally exited offshore supply.
It retains a single offshore wind turbine installation vessel (WTIV), having agreed with Singapore’s Seatrium to set aside their legal differences and take delivery of Maersk Viridis in Singapore, where the WTIV was named. Maersk Viridis is bound for the USA for its inaugural assignment at Equinor’s Empire Wind project off New York, where it will install 54 Vestas V236-15 MW turbines.
As Maersk exits offshore supply, new players have entered to take it place. An agreement was signed last month for the acquisition of Maersk Supply Service by a consortium led by ASM Texas Corp (managed by Tarik Darian and Omar Darian) and FV Star One (managed by Heitor Gioppo).
As part of this transition, Tarik Darian will assume the position of Executive Chairman, working closely with the existing leadership team to deepen his knowledge of the company’s operations over the coming months. He might want to read our back editions, and we welcome him to the industry.
"The acquisition of Maersk Supply Service is a source of great joy and fulfilment for me and my family," wrote Mr Darian. "We are all from the maritime sector, and the respect and admiration for what the company has built here were decisive for our decision to participate in this operation. We are truly supported by the legacy. The new company will preserve its DNA enhanced by the strength of the Brazil team."
The company has been keen to stress that it will continue to operate normally, honouring all contracts and commitments in force, with no forecast of changes in day-to-day operations or organisational structure as a result of the sale.
A.P. Moller Holding will remain involved until the conclusion of the transaction and will work closely with the new shareholders to ensure a structured transition and the maintenance of the high standard of quality of services.
After what happened in DOF, will the new owners respect the employees and honour the values set out on the company’s website, which states that “people are our greatest asset,” and “our word is our bond”?
One hopes so. It remains to be seen whether this is just another exercise in asset speculation that will see the business flipped shortly for a profit, or whether there is a long-term strategy to build on the strong legacy of Maersk in Brazil’s offshore sector.
Whilst Mr Gioppo and the Darian family are venturing into a new area, so is Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO).
In September 2024, fresh from deepwater exploration success in the Black Sea and the acquisition of a fleet of high specification drillships, the Turkish state-owned oil company sent a seismic survey vessel to Somali waters to search for potential oil and gas drilling targets. Oruç Reis was supported by five warships from the Turkish Navy.
At the same time, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a decree for the deployment of Turkish military personnel to Somalia to support the country’s security efforts, “against terrorism and other threats.”
Now, our favourite Somalian English language publication, Goobjoog News, has reported the arrival in Somalia of TPAO’s 2024-built drillship Çağrı Bey, the former West Draco, which Eldorado sold to TPAO in 2025 for US$245 million.
What do you mean you have never heard of Goobjoog, the Mogadishu equivalent to the Wall Street Journal, the Straits Times and the Sydney Morning Herald?
This will be the first well that the rig has ever drilled and it is not clear how many wells will be included in this campaign. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who heads the Federal Government of Somalia, commissioned the rig at the Port of Mogadishu last Friday, and made a celebratory speech to mark the start of the country’s first deepwater offshore oil exploration campaign.
The rig is now bound for the Curad-1 well location, which is 372 kilometres from Mogadishu. TPAO expects that the Curad-1 well will become the world’s second-deepest offshore well at a depth of 7,500 metres, targeting a reservoir 4,005 metres below the seabed in a water depth of 3,495 metres.
Offshore Somalia remains one of the last truly frontier passive margins in the world. Only two exploration wells have been drilled offshore along the 1,000-kilometre-long margin, and both were in the shallow nearshore area in less than 100 metres water depth drilled more than forty years ago. Shell planned to drill again in 1991 but the onset of the country’s civil war led to the cancellation of the programme. Saudi Aramco has made large gas discoveries in the Red Sea to the north, whilst Eni has drilled several dry holes in Kenya to the south, so Somalia could be “on trend” or not.
The rig will be supported by three Turkish-flagged PSVs and protected by a flotilla of Turkish Navy vessels.
This campaign is a reminder of the geopolitical rivalry in Africa, as Israel recently announced diplomatic recognition for the breakaway state of Somaliland, which President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and the Federal Government of Somalia do not recognise. DP World of the UAE has invested US$442 million at Berbera Port in Somaliland.
Meanwhile, the United States, China, France, Japan, and Italy all operate military facilities the capital of neighbouring Djibouti. With Yemen engulfed in civil war for a over decade, and now the prospect of deepwater exploration in Somalia, the region has moved up the geopolitical chessboard at a time when countries are scrambling to secure natural resources and to control the Bab el Mandeb Strait.
If Somalia is new to the offshore exploration game, one country that sorely needs to raise its oil and gas game is economically suffering, politically troubled and corruption-prone Great Britain Nigeria.
We have documented how Nigeria’s oil and gas production has slumped as as the country's sluggish bureaucracy, excessive local content requirements and endemic corruption have reduced production and investment. In 2025, Nigeria produced approximately 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day (bpd), well below the government's target of 2.06 million bpd, and far below the two million bpd produced in 2015.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation aims to increase production to two million bpd by 2028, with plans to reach three million bpd by 2030.
Finally, higher oil prices and a more investment friendly government under President Bola Tinubu are starting to see long postponed projects some back onto the radar. Nigeria has never suffered from a shortage of oil and gas in the ground, but the country’s poor governance has conspired to make it unattractive to invest to bring it to production.
In 2024, Shell announced a final investment decision (FID) on Bonga North, a deep-water project that will have a subsea tie-back to the Shell-operated Bonga floating production storage and offloading unit (FPSO). The Bonga North project involves drilling, completing, and starting up 16 wells (eight production and eight water injection wells), modifications to the existing Bonga Main FPSO and the installation of new subsea hardware tied back to the FPSO.
Shell says that the project will sustain oil and gas production at the Bonga facility. Bonga North currently has an estimated recoverable resource volume of more than 300 million barrels of oil equivalent and will reach a peak production of 110,000 bpd, with first oil anticipated by the end of this decade.
Recently, Shell announced that it was seeking to restart its Bonga South West deepwater oil project, which will see more than US$8 billion invested in a new 150,000bpd production capacity FPSO in 1,400 metres of water to produce from an 800-million-barrel reservoir 135 kilometres off the coast. The FPSO will have minimum storage capacity of 1.8 million barrels and Shell anticipates the FID will be granted in 2027.
Last month, Upstream reported that Eni had reached an agreement with the Nigeria Government to proceed with the Zabazaba project in block OPL 245, which is also anticipated to be brough to production via a 150,000bpd production capacity deepwater FPSO.
The project had been the subject of bitter legal wrangling over (surprise) allegations of corruption over Eni's and Shell's acquisition of the OPL 245 production licence for the field in 2011. The western majors acquired the licence from Malabu, a company “linked” to former Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete, which had received the licence in 1998 from the now dead dictator Sani Abacha.
Unfortunately, most of the US$1.3 billion paid for the licence by Shell and Eni had immediately been sent by the Nigerian Government to entities linked with, er, Mr Etete. Nigeria’s Premium Times covered the story of the arrest of Mr Etete’s jet nicely here.
We covered the acquittal of Shell and Eni and some of their former and current executives in Italy in 2021, and we should stress that the companies and their staff rigorously denied all wrongdoing.
It would be a fitting end to the sorry tale if Zabazaba could finally be brought to production for the benefit of the Nigerian people, at last.
ExxonMobil recently highlighted the scale of the opportunity if Nigeria can manage to attract investment. The oil is there, but Nigeria needs to green light new projects.
ExxonMobil currently operates two deepwater FPSOs in the country and both are sorely underperforming due to lack of investment.
The Erha FPSO averaged production of around 63,500 bpd in 2025, well below its capacity of 210,000 bpd. The production sharing contract for Erha deepwater field has now been extended by the Nigerian Government to 2042, so ExxonMobil is now undertaking life extension works on the FPSO to increase production.
The company is also considering developing Bosi field, located adjacent to Erha, which Exxon says would require a new FPSO and associated pipelines. Production from the FPSO? That would be 150,000 bpd, as per sources, the same as Zabazaba and Bonga South West. The Bosi reservoir is believed to contain reserves of 600 million barrels.
As per newspaper Punch, ExxonMobil is also gearing up for potential new investments on the billion-barrel Owowo deepwater project, which will be developed as a subsea tieback to its existing Usan FPSO. Like the Erha FPSO, the Usan FPSO is under-performing due to reservoir depletion over two decades of production. Average production from the Usan facility was only 27,900 bpd in 2025, compared to nameplate capacity of 180,000 bpd.
ExxonMobile describes Owowo as a US$7 billion to US$8 billion project and its country manager has said that the company hoped to approve FID as early as next year.
Like Zabazaba, like Bonga South West and like Bosi, Owowo was discovered years ago and has sat there undeveloped since 2012. These are testaments to Nigeria’s greedy and incompetent regulatory framework.
The war in the Middle East provides a huge opportunity for countries like Brazil and Nigeria to raise their production as countries scramble to diversify their sources of supply. However, investment requires good government and stable laws. America and the UK could learn that, too.
Even Somalia might stand a chance in the oil business if TPAO strikes it lucky.
We’ll keep you posted.
Background reading
For all your Somalian news, Goobjoog News is your number one go-to site.
The Somalian Petroleum Authority website has some excellent articles on the background to the nation’s geology and oil and gas licencing rounds (of course it does).
If I had to choose between Ed Milliband, the UK Energy Secretary, and his Somali counterpart, Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Dahir Shire Mohamed, I would have to say Mr Shire Mohamed is doing a better job of promoting his country’s national interests and energy security. Shame on Mr Milliband.