Driller Selloff? Sweet!

I'm so happy to see the offshore drillers selling off with the rest of the energy sector this past month.

No, I'm not being sarcastic again. I really mean it -- I'm thrilled!

I've been praising these contract drillers for well over a year now, yet I haven't gotten around to actually buying shares. If you haven't either, it's time to get greedy.

Why? Just look at the comments from ENSCO International (NYSE: ESV  ) on Wednesday. The company reported some killer quarterly results, but the outlook is even brighter.

The company's current cash creator is mainly its high-quality fleet of jackup rigs, which operate in relatively shallow water. Dayrates strengthened a tad, and utilization was a dreamy 95%. For now, ENSCO has only one deepwater asset, working for Chevron (NYSE: CVX  ) in the Gulf, but that will soon change.

Let's go back to the shallow water for a moment. So many jackups have fled the Gulf of Mexico, locally known as the Dead Sea, that ENSCO's pricing power has begun to strengthen there. Further, the company notes that it put in the effort to maintain and upgrade its fleet before the market upturn, and competitors with old iron may find it prohibitively expensive to put the money in at this point in the cycle. That spells attrition, and it means more share for ENSCO in an increasingly busy basin.

As for the deepwater, ENSCO has certainly seen the light. Along with Atwood Oceanics (NYSE: ATW  ) , the company has been bulking up its order book lately. Two new semisubmersible orders this quarter ratcheted the newbuild program to six vessels, to be delivered from this fall through 2012. ENSCO has had no problem signing contracts on these vessels, with Anadarko (NYSE: APC  ) and Nexen (NYSE: NXY  ) among the awardees.

Petrobras (NYSE: PBR  ) , with its staggering development ambitions, looms ever larger in the global deepwater market and is making other operators worry about where their next rig is going to come from. Management noted that "you can throw all the money in the world you want at it and you can't speed up shipyard deliveries at this point, so there's a finite amount of capacity that can be added there."

Blistering demand meets finite supply. Feeling greedy yet?

ENSCO is rated a full five stars in Motley Fool CAPS. Share your own perspective with the rest of the Fool community.

Related Foolishness:

• This leading operator's been piling on the Petrobras contracts lately.
• Petrobras is one half of a potentially explosive deepwater duo.
• ENSCO says that lifting our offshore drilling bans would put a serious strain on capacity.