Reporting by Jad Mouwad and Martin Fackler
As oil trades at more than $135 a barrel — up from $68 a year ago — the world's drill-ships are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said.
Demand is so high that shipbuilders, the biggest of whom are in Asia, have raised prices since last year by as much as $100 million a vessel to about half a billion dollars.
"The crunch on rigs is everywhere," said Alberto Guimaraes, a senior executive in charge of developments in the Gulf of Mexico at Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company that has discovered some of the most promising offshore oil but has been unable to get at it.