Hello, everyone. First of all, welcome to the Dolphin Drilling First Quarter 2023 Presentation. This is our second presentation since the company was listed at Euronext Growth on the 28th of October last year. It will be not possible to ask questions throughout the presentation, but if you look at the top, there's a Q&A button where you can submit your questions. Let's move quickly to the disclaimer. As always, for those who wants to read about risks, please read through page two, the disclaimer called Important Information. Today's presenters. My name is Bjørnar Iversen. I'm the CEO of Dolphin Drilling, and with me today, I have Stephen Cox, our Chief Financial Officer in Dolphin Drilling. Let's have a quick look at the agenda. The agenda for today, I will take you through the Q1 2023 highlights.
Stephen will take the slides on the quarterly results and the key metrics. I will take the operational slides and also do a deep dive into the market outlook. Then end this session with a quick summary before we go through the submitted Q&As from you guys. Let's have a quick look at today's Q&A, sorry, Q1 highlights. Blackford Dolphin commenced her drilling contract in Nigeria for General Hydrocarbons on March 25th. Blackford also signed a new contract with Peak Petroleum in Nigeria. This increased our firm revenue backlog by $39 million and approximately $100 million in additional option backlog. This will secure continuous work for Blackford in Nigeria until August 2025, subject to that all option periods are exercised.
We also executed the Special Periodic Survey for the Blackford that was completed during the quarter, we spent $14.88 million in February. We have limited CapEx plan for the next four or five years for the asset. We are very happy with that. We had a budget on $15 million, and we came in on $14.8 million. The team did a really, really good job with the SPS at Las Palmas. We have continued strong support from our main shareholders. They are providing a $15 million unsecured loan at interest rate of 8.5%. This is to secure bid bonds for current and future tenders that we're currently working with.
Commenting on subsequent events, we had a successful startup on Blackford following the completion of all approval and licenses in Nigeria, and we have also received the first monthly payment from our client, GHL. Let's go more into the specific figures and the key metrics. Stephen, please.
Yes. Hello, everybody. Q1 2023 results for Dolphin Drilling as presented here. I will just run through the main points and the drivers behind the numbers. As Bjørnar mentioned, we were successful in getting the Blackford on contract in late March. We have approximately seven days of revenue showing in the P&L as a result of that, giving us the $1.5 million of charter revenues. As everybody will know, there are certain elements in Nigeria of withholding taxes that are deducted directly from the revenue numbers here. We also received our full mobilization payments as we entered Nigeria and through the course of Q4 last year and Q1 this year.
We've followed the appropriate accounting on that, so the majority of the mobilization revenues are deferred, in line with the mobilization costs. Those revenues and costs will come back through the P&L in future quarters as we execute on the contract. There are some impacts as we enter into the forward months with the licenses. We do expect to experience a few days of zero rates through the month of April, but those numbers are not yet finalized. OpEx is as expected. Again, as you dive into the details of those and look inside our income statements, you will see there are impacts from project costs.
Again, those are related to the mobilization, as IFRS requires us to do, what we have done there is expense out any costs in Q1 2023 that are in excess of the mobilization revenues that we have taken, there's no loss carry forward in the mobilization. That does have a one-time impact on the Q1 results. The number is approximately $1.6 million, so you should consider the OpEx in Q1 higher than the normal run rate by approximately that number. Our view right now on how the Blackford is operating, how our G&A looks, and how we're stacked cost against our Bideford and Borgland assets are very much in line with expectations, that's around about the $200K, just below $200K per day number.
Things are holding there. Cash flows, obviously, as we completed the SPS, as Bjørnar referenced, and got up and running, we are paying down our supplier base there, so negative impact on cash from operations as we go through the quarter. We did obviously pay down the CapEx. CapEx is a combination of the SPS work and some operational upgrades that we wanted to do to the asset to ensure we have a nice clean five years of runtime. On the rig, we have no CapEx on either the Bideford or the Borgland in the quarter. As Bjorn already mentioned, we have received very strong shareholder support.
We did pull some liquidity in during Q1, the $8 million that you see here. That's for supporting liquidity as we look to some of the longer term work we are now seeing and contracts we're seeing becoming evident in the international markets. More on that to follow. If we flick to the next page, headline data then. Backlog for the company increased approximately $122 million. Market cap, everybody can see, obviously impacted by general market conditions right now. That number's around about $130 million today. We remain at net debt zero. Obviously we remain very focused on that, maintaining that position, and ensuring the company has sufficient liquidity as we move forward.
Thank you, Stephen. Let's jump into a quick operational update to give you a little bit overview of where we are. As we said, Blackford commenced a drilling campaign for General Hydrocarbons Limited on the 24th of March, currently drilling her 7.5 inch section on the first well after a successful mobilization and startup of operations in Nigeria. On the right side of the slide, you see our current fleet. The Blackford, the Borgland Dolphin, the Bideford Dolphin, that's our current assets, of course, the two assets at the Keppel yard. We are currently marketing heavily the Borgland Dolphin and the Bideford Dolphin, also the two Keppel assets. We see an increased interest in the two Keppel assets that we have the marketing rights for, as I mentioned also in our last presentation.
I will come back to the specific markets in the market section, and what should I say? The summary from that is that it's increased demand basically in all segments, but we would have a deep dive into that shortly. Commenting quickly on the five-year SPS on the Blackford. We had the execution of over five-year SPS at Las Palmas with 0 accidents. We spent approximately 110,000 man-hours in that SPS, which is a significant number. The guys and girls did a fantastic job, including the yard. I think it was close to optimal execution, and we were able to deliver that SPS and mobilization on budget. The budget was $15 million, and we executed it on $14.8 million.
I would say, the organization did a fantastic job there. Let's look a little bit on a deep, a little small dive into how we basically take in a rig into a new market. During the quarter, of course, we took the Blackford into Nigeria, and to bring in a rig, it's complicated, and particularly in some countries, extra difficult and cumbersome. Of course, Nigeria is one of those countries. We have been in the industry for 58 years, and we have built up a robust procedure and an execution model for bringing assets into different markets. This process, and let me take you through a typical process for Blackford entering Nigeria. First, local company accreditation, step one, establish relationship with local partners, obtain the local permits.
In some countries, harder than others. We've done that in Nigeria. Well done by the team. Of course, we have the inspections from the local authorities to approve the rig technically and operationally and the systems. Typically, when we operate in the market, we have down to assistant driller. We have typically the standard, and the Dolphin Drilling crew, and then we have local crews that we recruit locally. An extensive recruitment campaign for local crews. We train the crews ahead of the contract in line with our standard, and that standard is equal all over the world. We establish the Dolphin Drilling subsidiaries in the local country, and of course, all the details related to bank accounts and bank bonds and all the other formalities that needs to be done.
We manage intragroup transfers of the rig, and of course, to get this optimal for the group. That's a typical setup. Of course, this takes up to, would normally take up to, I would say, 3 to 6 months to do. This was also successfully done now in the setup, our setup in Nigeria, and of course, built on that 58 years of experience. Let's then have a closer look at the markets and the latest development in the market. If we look at the global offshore rig fleet, I would say it's sold out or close to sold out, and that is basically in all markets. I will have a comment on how this plays out.
If we look at the next page, we see an improving market in the step out of the day rates, and we see basically day rate increase in all segments, of course, with the ultra-deepwater market leading the way and sucking the harsh environment assets with the deepwater capacities out of the harsh segment. This is creating and will create a vacuum in the harsh environment segment for 2024, 2025 and onwards. This is particularly driven by a very good UDW market, ultra-deepwater market, deepwater market in Namibia, West Africa, Australia, Brazil, and some other international markets. Here we see on this page, we see some of the ongoing harsh environment rig inquiries in process. There are more than 20 in here and there's more in the make. We see a strong market.
We see demand in South America, we see in West Africa, we see in India, we see in Asia, including Australia, we see Norway, we see in the Med, and we see coast of Africa. There's more to come. We will have a deep dive a little bit into the moored semi fleet on the next page. If we look at the moored fleet, and as we said in the last quarter, that fell from 140 rigs to 36 rigs. Here we have the 36 rigs available in the market. 15 on them are tied up in China or landlocked in the Caspian Sea. 15 of the 36 is not available.
We have 12 per today, 12 on contract, which is out of the market, and we have 5 rigs with a higher reactivation cost. That means there's four rigs available, free and available rigs in the market, of which Borgland and Bideford are two, and of course both of them warm stacked, smart stacked. In addition to that, we have Deepwater Nautilus and Essar Wildcat on that list, which brings the free and available fleet up to four rigs. We think there's a high probability with the current opportunity set that I just showed you on the last page, that the rigs will get a job in the future or in the near future. Let's take a deeper look into the U.K. semi-submersible market.
Here we see, it's close to sold out with our two rigs available in addition to two cold stacked rigs, the Transocean Leader and the Ocean Valiant, which has a higher mobilization cost than our rigs, which are kept warm. Of course, the windfall tax has postponed some of the contracts awards, but doesn't change the direction of the travel of the market. However, we think there are more opportunities for our rigs at higher day rates outside the North Sea than in the North Sea. What I'm saying there is that we see more activity on higher day rates than in the U.K. outside the North Sea. Let's have a deep dive into the Norwegian market, and we see some extreme changes going on over the last, I would say, 24 months. I use the word extreme.
We have available rigs are now being reduced, as you see from the figure to the left there from 32 rigs available in 2020, and that has come down to now 10. That means NCS might not have the necessary capacity to deliver the expected capacity needed from 2025, where the consensus level is 18-22 rigs going on, going forward from 2025. This is basically driven by the UDW market, where the rigs with ultra-deepwater capacity has left or are in the process of leaving the market.
This will be a demanding situation, we think for the Norwegian market, but of course it is good for our two new builds that we are currently marketing at from the Keppel yard in Singapore. Let's move over to a summary. If we look at this slide, we see improving market for our existing rigs, and we see more than 20 opportunities in the pipeline to take out the current rigs. As we just showed, there's four rigs in that market of which we have two. We see due to this extreme change on the NCS, we see an increased probability and interest for the Keppel new builds on the NCS.
We are currently, of course, bidding and in dialogue with several oil companies on the NCS. We also see there we are still chasing several management opportunities outside Norway to bolt on to our organizational structure. We are still chasing opportunistic growth for the company. We are working on all cylinders here on A, B, C, and D. As I said, improved market conditions for incumbent fleet. Keppel new builds has increased probability and a better market from 2025 and onwards in Norway created by this UDW market who has created a big vacuum in the market from 2025. We have management opportunities, concrete management opportunities that we're currently chasing, and we are still looking for opportunistic growth. We are the strategy, the core strategic priorities, we're still chasing all four of them.
Next, please. During this quarter, we have also prepared our first annual sustainability report. The company has worked to improve the environment for the last 58 years, and this year we have decided to publish our first annual sustainability report, and that will be released shortly. Of course, focusing on spill prevention, emissions, health and safety, diversity and equality, and anti-corruption, to mention some of the core focus areas. The summary slide. One, Dolphin Drilling generates net positive cash flow with the Blackford Dolphin on contract in Nigeria. That means the company is not leaking cash anymore, and Blackford is the cash generator. We have increased the order backlog by $33 million in the quarter, and we have added options for $100 million in total.
We have increased interest from for the Keppel new builds. We see significant increased tender activity for Borgland and Bideford, two of the few remaining available units in the moored semi-submersible market. Of course, we strive to build more on top of the efficient organization that we have with 58 years of in-house knowhow and licenses. Of course that is chasing growth opportunities both when it comes to management and also other growth opportunities. That sums up our quarterly Q1 2023 presentation. Now we are opening up for that Q&A. To repeat, there's a Q&A button on top there. It says Q&A. You can write your question to us there. We will try to answer as good as we can. Thank you very much so far.
Yeah. Thank you, everybody. As Bjørnar says, if you please type your questions in, it does lag a little bit, unfortunately, so I will do my best to monitor and ask those questions through to Bjørnar. I'll just kick this off now. I will combine a couple of things here just to make sure we don't repeat the same question. Bjørnar, a question come in. Can you please explain what seventh generation, like Keppel new builds mean in terms of what they can do and their situation in the marketplace? Related to that, with several harsh environment semis leaving the NCS for work elsewhere, do you believe the future for the Keppel units will be in Norway, or are you chasing opportunities for the pair outside the NCS as well?
Very good question. What is a seventh gen? I've been so lucky to work with harsh environment semis for 30 years, you can say the seventh gen takes into the newest technology and the sixth gens that was delivered and designed, I would say from 2003 to 2010, they did not take a couple of things into the equation. Number one, there's a lot of new technology that has arised during those years, that is coming in. It's particularly related to communication and technology and automation. That's Number one. It has a higher degree of automation and digitalization. Number two, when we designed the fifth and sixth generation rigs, there were no design criteria for green, for...
That means no regeneration of power, no batteries. As I simplistic always say, it's you're not becoming a Tesla just to put a battery in the trunk of a diesel car, it's a little bit the same here. The seventh generation rigs are designed to have an optimal energy consumption. One, it's higher degree of digitalization, taking new technology and automation in. Two, it's greener because the energy and optimization of energy, fuel, and emissions are in the design itself. Number three, it, this rig has a combination of DP2 and the 12-point mooring, which basically makes it super gives it super stability and extremely low carbon footprint. In addition to that, it also takes...
It has the highest degree of safety embedded in the design based on these new technologies. It's safer by design, it's smarter by design, it's greener by design. That's the seventh gen. Question number two. Answering question number two. With this, rigs leaving Norway, is it a better market or higher probability to bring the Keppel rigs into the NCS? The answer is a crystal clear yes. We think, based on the latest moves with rigs leaving and more leaving, is that creates an opening for the rigs from 2025 and onwards. The probability for those rigs entering and drilling in Norway has increased significantly over the last six months. We think, yes, they will arrive in Norway and will come to Norway.
There are also opportunities outside Norway also for these rigs, but we think they belong in Norway, and we think they, and hope they will end up in Norway on the NCS. I think that's my answer, Stephen.
Perfect. Thank you. A couple of financial ones I'll just answer quickly here. There's one question around the $200K number that I quoted. Total expenses for G&A and smart stacking of the other two rigs plus the Blackford. All of our assets and our cost base across the entire company, OpEx plus G&A amounts to the approximate $200K per day figure. Just to clarify that one again, the $200K I quoted for cost is the entire cost base of the business. Hopefully that clarifies that one. There's a question around the krone exchange rate. How did that affect the financial result? The answer to that key one is it's relatively minimal.
We incur costs in Norwegian krone mainly on our onshore base in Norway, which is a relatively small number of people when compared to the OpEx in Nigeria. The U.K. expat crew and the local crew that we have down in Nigeria. We have got effective hedging in place that's worked well for us. Although our currency flows in Norwegian krone are minimal. There's not any concern from me on that perspective. I'm gonna try and combine these two questions, and these are in relation, Bjørnar, to the Borgland and the Bideford. The question is, what's a fair timeline for employment on these units given the tenders and opportunities?
Related to that, how many tenders have been completed during Q1 that we have lost out on, that Dolphin has lost out on for the Borgland and the Bideford?
Okay, let me try to answer that. Let's start for the first one. When do we think we can bring them back to work? Of course, it's always a difficult question to answer. We, maybe a little bit too positive at the end of last year due to this windfall tax in the U.K. that came and delayed a lot of projects in the U.K. As we said, that doesn't change the direction of the market in the U.K. It's flattened out, there's still things that is coming. How many we have lost out on? I think we are talking about two, I think two tenders that has been awarded that we have been bid on.
In the, in there now, I think we have more than 10 tenders submitted, and I think we are in the process or no, from now until the rest of May, I think we have one, two, three, four tenders in process. That's seen in addition. Of course, this is the standard moored segment that we're talking about. You saw the analysis there. We're talking maybe four, around four plus minus rigs available in that space. When will those be awarded? Very often the oil companies are indicating when they will award, but it has a tendency to slide a month or two down the line. We think and hope that we will have something. I would say we are now in May.
End of the quarter is end of June. That is two months. Probably, I would say between two and four, five months to process the 10 to 14 tenders that are in the pipeline. Something like that. I'm not too specific, but I think, between two and six months is something that is highly likely.
Yeah. Just related to that, couple of questions just popped in now. Why didn't you bid any rigs in the recent Brazil tender round?
Yeah. The recent Brazil tender is for ultra-deepwater activities. It's outside the scope. There's another tender for the mid-water scope coming up in Brazil. We are qualified to be on that round, and we will participate in that round.
Perfect. There's another question. Approximate OpEx per day in Nigeria, I'll take that one. We were anticipating when we went in, we would be in the $135-ish range. We're actually seeing coming in a bit less than that. We have a higher proportion of local crew, the way that we're managing our transit of our crew, as well. We think range-wise, we'll probably be in the $120K-$130K per day to answer that question for OpEx in Nigeria. Again, if anybody has any questions, please go ahead and drop them in because we have now covered everything that's there. Maybe just give it another 30 seconds or so to see if anything comes. No. Okay. Well, I think that's everything now covered in the Q&A session.
I think, Bjørnar, if you wanna close up.
Yes.
We are complete.
Yes. That is the complete presentation of the first quarter 2023 from Dolphin Drilling. We are very pleased to see that so many have called in. We are looking forward for the next quarter presentation. Thank you for following up and for supporting and showing interest for the company. As we said in the summary, we see improved activities in all segment. There's a lot of interest around our current assets. Just hang on and follow us going forward. Thank you very much.