Another offshore rig sinks.

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Venezuela Offshore Rig Sinks
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: May 13, 2010


LIMA, Peru — An offshore natural gas exploration rig leased to Venezuela’s national oil company sank off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and forced the rig to evacuate all 95 of its workers, President Hugo Chávez announced early Thursday.

In an attempt to calm nerves after the explosion of an offshore drilling rig last month in the Gulf of Mexico, Venezuelan energy officials said that the sunken natural gas rig posed no environment threat and that no workers had died. The cause of the sinking was unclear.

Mr. Chávez, who made the initial announcement about the sunken rig via his account on Twitter, the social networking site, also said that two Venezuelan Navy patrols were sent to the waters by the rig, which is owned by Aban Singapore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aban Offshore, India’s largest oil rig company.

“You know this platform is semisubmergible,” Mr. Chávez told his followers on Twitter. “At midnight it listed, took on water, ceased operations and they evacuated,” he said.

The sinking of the rig, called Aban Pearl, is a setback to Venezuela’s efforts to upgrade its energy industry with the help of foreign oil companies. Just hours before the sinking, Mr. Chávez had celebrated on Wednesday the signing of major new oil contracts with companies, including the Chevron Corporation of the United States, calling them “vital for our socialist project.” Senior officials in Venezuela had recently been celebrating the Aban Pearl rig in particular. The planning minister, Jorge Giordani, last week called the rig “a motive for pride of national engineering.” The rig was drilling for gas in the Mariscal Sucre gas exploration project off the coast of Sucre, a state in northeastern Venezuela in waters near Trinidad and Tobago.

An official at Aban told the BBC that the Pearl was on contract to a Venezuelan state-owned firm and was being used to drill for natural gas. The rig could be used to drill up to 1,250 feet, according to the company’s Web site, and is one of 20 ships and rigs Aban owns.

Officials at the firm could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.