Odfjell Drilling Brand Guidelines: A Bergen Shipowner’s 1973 Rig Company & Its Deepsea Fleet

A Bergen shipowner joins the first licence round.

Odfjell Drilling grew out of a Bergen shipping company. The Norwegian encyclopaedia Store norske leksikon says the brothers Fredrik and Abraham Odfjell founded AS Rederiet Odfjell in Bergen in 1915; the trade magazine Energy Industry Review, in a 2018 article, and English Wikipedia date the family’s maritime roots to 1914. From the 1960s the shipowner moved into tankers and chemical tankers, the encyclopaedia says.

Oil came next. When Norway announced the first licence round for its continental shelf in 1965, Energy Industry Review reported, Odfjell joined the Norwegian Oil Consortium, known as NOCO, which was awarded ten blocks. In the early 1970s the company turned from oil production to drilling and, with the shipbuilder Aker, started work on the Aker H3, which the magazine calls the first Norwegian-designed drilling rig.

On 8 February 1973 Odfjell put its offshore business into a separate company, Odfjell Drilling & Consulting Company. By then it already had two Aker H3 units on order, Energy Industry Review says: the first, Deep Sea Driller, was delivered in 1974 and the second, Deepsea Saga, in 1975. Store norske leksikon describes the same moment as a split of the shipowner in two, with shipping kept in AS Rederiet Odfjell and the offshore work in the newly formed drilling company. The “Deepsea” prefix used in 1975 still names most of the fleet.

A family split, a listing and a demerger.

The business then followed one branch of the family. From March 1980, Store norske leksikon says, the Odfjell companies were divided between two branches: one took the deep-sea chemical tankers that became today’s Odfjell SE, and the other, led by Johan Oddvar Odfjell and his son Abraham Odfjell, took the small tankers, terminals and the offshore and rig business, gathered in J. O. Odfjell AS. The offshore side widened. Energy Industry Review says Odfjell Casing Services was added in 1982, running tubulars on rigs in Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Norway.

Ownership of the offshore business later passed to Abraham Odfjell’s daughters, Helene and Marianne Odfjell — in 2005 according to the encyclopaedia, in 2007 according to English Wikipedia. The family held it privately until 27 September 2013, when Odfjell Drilling Ltd. was listed on the Oslo stock exchange under the ticker ODL, as the shipping news site All About Shipping recorded on the day. At the listing the company described itself as an integrated offshore drilling and oil-service group that, besides owning and operating mobile drilling units, worked in platform drilling, engineering and well services.

That mix did not last. In March 2022, English Wikipedia says, the group split in two: a new company, Odfjell Technology, took the well services, engineering and platform drilling businesses, and Odfjell Drilling kept the rigs. Kjetil Gjersdal, who joined the company in 2000 and had worked as rig manager and in operations roles, became chief executive of Odfjell Drilling AS that month, the company says.

Rigs, contractors and owners.

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.

Deepsea semi-submersibles for harsh water.

Odfjell Drilling’s fleet is made up of semi-submersible rigs built for harsh environments, the company says. English Wikipedia names offices in Aberdeen and Bergen and lists its working areas as the North Sea, West of Shetland, the Barents Sea and deep water off South Africa. The company’s fleet page names Deepsea Aberdeen, Deepsea Atlantic, Deepsea Stavanger, Deepsea Nordkapp, Deepsea Bergen and Deepsea Mira, along with Deepsea Yantai, Hercules and Beacon Pacific, with clients including Equinor, Aker BP and OMV.

Deepsea Atlantic, delivered in 2009, is typical of the core fleet. The company describes it as a sixth-generation, dual-derrick, dynamically positioned unit of an enhanced GVA 7500 design, built at DSME in South Korea and rated for water depths of up to 3,000 metres; Deepsea Stavanger and Deepsea Aberdeen are its sister rigs. In April 2026 the rig had an equipment-handling incident in which a blowout preventer was dropped; the company said on 3 August 2026 that the preventer had been recovered and the rig had returned to work after 106 days off hire.

On 2 November 2026 Odfjell Drilling announced that Serica Energy had signed a drilling contract for the semi-submersible Beacon Pacific, which Odfjell will manage, taking the fleet it runs to nine rigs, its chief executive said; the programme is scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2027 and has not started at the time of writing. The company states a target of net zero by 2050 and says it has introduced a hybrid flywheel solution. Its stated vision reads “Powered by People. Defined by Culture. Enabled by Premium Assets.” It names five core values — committed, safety conscious, creative, competent and result oriented — and describes a “Zero Failures and Injuries” philosophy as the cornerstone of its operations.

For a design guide, Odfjell Drilling shows how a family shipping name and a single repeated prefix, Deepsea, can carry a rig fleet across five decades. Compare Seadrill, another offshore driller with Norwegian roots, and Transocean. For this guide we use navy, mist and a muted orange with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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