Noble Corporation Brand Guidelines: Lloyd Noble’s 1921 Oklahoma Rig, Maersk & Diamond

An Oklahoma drilling company of 1921.

Noble Corporation traces its line to Lloyd Noble, an Oklahoman born in Ardmore in 1896, who founded the Noble Drilling Company on 1 April 1921, according to English Wikipedia. Wikipedia says the young company used the Hughes Simplex rock bit made by the Hughes Tool Company and was noted for taking up new technology. The company’s own history says its growth took off after the discovery of the Seminole field in 1926, and that in 1930 Noble and his partner Olson divided their rigs and went separate ways, with Noble choosing to keep the crews rather than the equipment.

In 1932, the company says, Lloyd Noble added an oil-producing business, Samedan Oil Corporation, to run the producing properties he had acquired. Samedan later became Noble Energy, a separate company that Chevron acquired in October 2020, Noble says.

The war years are part of the record. During the Second World War, English Wikipedia says, Noble Drilling answered a British request for help raising the country’s oil output and drilled 106 wells in Sherwood Forest between March 1943 and March 1944, lifting the small field’s production from about 700 to more than 3,000 barrels a day; Wikipedia adds that the company took no profit from the work. Noble’s own history also records, in the 1940s, the first well drilled off the Atlantic coast, at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina.

In 1945 Lloyd Noble set up the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, devoted to agricultural science. From 1950, the company says, Noble Drilling and Samedan were owned by the foundation and run as its wholly owned subsidiaries until the late 1960s. Noble says that in the early 1950s it became the first company to drill offshore using electrical power from shore, at Bay Marchand off Louisiana; that it first sold shares to the public in the 1970s, under the ticker NOBL; and that in 1981 it began its first newbuild campaign with two rigs, the Noble Ed Holt and the Noble Sam Noble.

From Noble Drilling to Noble Corporation plc.

The modern company took shape in 1985, when Noble Affiliates completed the spin-off of Noble Drilling Corporation, English Wikipedia says. Noble says its late-1990s EVA upgrade programme turned five rigs that could work in 70 feet of water or less into units able to drill in 6,000 feet and more, and that by the end of 1997 its fleet numbered 45 rigs.

Its legal home then moved several times. In 2002, Wikipedia says, the company moved its domicile to the Cayman Islands and made Noble Corporation the parent holding company; in early 2009 it moved to Switzerland, and in 2013 to the United Kingdom. Today the listed parent is Noble Corporation plc, organised in England, and its website lists its North American service company and its NobleAdvances training centre in Houston.

The 2010s reshaped the fleet. Wikipedia records the purchase of Frontier Drilling in 2010 and, in 2014, the distribution of Paragon Offshore to Noble’s shareholders; Noble says 34 jackups, five drillships and three semi-submersibles went to Paragon, while it added 17 new rigs through acquisitions and newbuilds over the decade.

Then came a restructuring. In July 2020 the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and it emerged in February 2021, Wikipedia says. In April 2021 it acquired Pacific Drilling, a drillship owner. In November 2021 a merger with Maersk Drilling was announced, with the combined company to keep the Noble Corporation name; Wikipedia gives the completion date as 3 October 2022. Noble says the merger brought together more than 150 years of combined experience in deepwater and harsh-environment drilling.

In June 2024 Noble announced that it would acquire Diamond Offshore Drilling, the Texas offshore driller, and it completed the purchase in September 2024, according to English Wikipedia’s article on Diamond Offshore; Diamond no longer trades as a separate company. In December 2025 Noble agreed to sell five jackups to Borr Drilling of Bermuda, two of them to be chartered back for a time, and Wikipedia reports that the sale was completed in January 2026.

Wikipedia also records an incident in 2012, when the drillship Noble Discoverer, working for Shell, lost its mooring and drifted close to shore; no injuries or environmental damage were reported.

Design and documentation.

Drilling contractors sell time on machines that most of their customers’ shareholders will never see, so their public image leans heavily on photographs of the machines themselves. Offshore companies favour the long view: a drillship or a semi-submersible standing alone on open water, its derrick the tallest thing for miles, or a jackup rig on its three legs with the sun going down behind it. Land drillers tend to show a single rig on flat, open ground, with a line of trucks and a wide sky.

People appear too, and usually in working clothes. Derrick crews in coveralls and hard hats, gloved hands on pipe, and teams on the rig floor are the standard human images of the trade. Many contractors also run named safety campaigns aimed at their own crews, with slogans, posters and stickers that become part of the visual language of a rig as much as of the company.

Much of a driller’s graphic output is financial and technical rather than promotional. Listed contractors publish fleet status reports, which list each rig with its type, location, customer and contract dates, and investor presentations full of rig diagrams, maps and backlog charts. These documents are read closely by analysts and customers, and their layout is often plainer and more consistent than the company’s marketing.

Names carry a lot of the weight. The industry has been shaped by mergers, so many contractors are the sum of older firms, and rigs often keep a predecessor’s name or a numbered series long after the company that built them has gone. A contractor’s identity can therefore be read in its rig names and its logo on a hull as much as in any brochure.

“First Choice Offshore.”

Noble’s present-day voice is built on a small set of phrases. Its mission, the company says, is “Drilling to power the world responsibly,” and its vision is to be “First Choice Offshore,” a phrase it uses with a registered-trademark sign across its website, careers pages and investor pages. Its five core values are arranged so that their initials spell the company’s name: N for “Navigate with Integrity,” O for “Own Your Actions,” B for “Be Respectful,” L for “Listen, Learn, Lean In” and E for “Excel in Everything We Do.” The company describes itself as a contract driller focused largely on ultra-deepwater and high-specification jackup work.

The fleet carries the company name. Every rig on its fleet page begins with “Noble”: Gusto P10000 drillships such as the Noble BlackHawk, Noble BlackLion and Noble BlackRhino sit beside units such as the Noble Bob Douglas off Guyana and the Noble Claus Bachmann, a Moss CS60E semi-submersible working in Norway. In November 2026 that page listed 28 rigs across drillships, semi-submersibles and jackups, while English Wikipedia gives 38; we give both figures with their sources. Noble publishes a fleet status report every quarter, the latest dated 26 October 2026, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange as NE.

For a design guide, Noble Corporation shows how a company can keep one family name across a century of mergers, from an Oklahoma land rig to a merged offshore fleet, by putting that name on every rig. Compare Borr Drilling, the jackup owner that bought five of Noble’s rigs, and Seadrill, which outbid Noble for Smedvig in 2006. For this guide we use a harbour navy and a rig orange on sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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