McDermott Brand Guidelines: A 1923 Texas Rig Builder, Derrick Barge 4 & Two Restructurings

A father, a son and fifty wooden rigs.

McDermott began in Texas in 1923. English Wikipedia says Ralph Thomas McDermott, then 24, set up J. Ray McDermott & Company after winning a contract to build 50 wooden drilling rigs for a wildcatter in Luling, and made his father, John Raymond McDermott, whose experience lay in lumber and oilfield construction, a partner and the company’s namesake. The company’s own history places the founding in Eastland, Texas, and gives the founder’s nickname as “Mr. Mac.”

The business followed the oil booms. Wikipedia says it expanded from Eastland to Luling in 1930 and moved to Houston in 1932, where the family ran three businesses: J. Ray McDermott & Co., Elmax Construction and Stall & McDermott. A New Orleans office opened in 1937, and in 1938, both Wikipedia and the company say, it introduced floating drilling equipment in the low-lying marshlands of Texas and Louisiana. The following year it bought the J.G. McMullen Dredging Company, which it set up as the Olsen Dredging Company.

During the Second World War, the company says, it built floating dry docks and tank landing ships for the US Navy from 1942 to 1945, at shipyards in Louisiana, California, Illinois and New York. In 1946 the family businesses were merged into a single company, J. Ray McDermott & Co., Inc. of Delaware, Wikipedia says. The company’s timeline adds that it went public in 1954 and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1958.

Platforms, barges and a merger.

The move offshore came soon after the war. In 1947, McDermott and Wikipedia both say, the company designed and installed the first fixed steel platform built out of sight of land, in 20 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico for Superior Oil, and set up a contracting division that became its main business in the early years. The company says it commissioned Derrick Barge 4, which it describes as the first vessel designed specifically for offshore work, in 1949; Wikipedia dates it to 1950. Its timeline goes on to Derrick Barge 7 in 1953, with a 250-ton lift, and a double-wall storage tank for liquefied natural gas at Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1958.

From the 1960s the work spread abroad. The company’s timeline lists the Middle East’s first offshore platform in 1960, India’s first offshore platforms in the Bombay High field in 1975, and the Ardersier fabrication yard in the Scottish Highlands, opened in 1973 to serve the North Sea. It also credits PDM, a business later folded into McDermott, as stainless-steel fabricator and erector of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis in 1965.

The group changed shape in the 21st century. In 2010, Wikipedia says, shareholders agreed to spin off the government contractor Babcock & Wilcox, and the oil and gas business stopped using the J. Ray McDermott brand and traded as McDermott International. On 18 December 2017 McDermott and the engineering contractor CB&I agreed to combine; the deal was approved in May 2018, and CB&I’s shares stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 11 May 2018. In 2019 McDermott bought Siluria Technologies, a developer of methane-coupling processes. Wikipedia counts eight marine vessels in 2025, among them the deepwater pipelay and construction vessel Amazon, bought in 2017 and christened after an upgrade in 2022, the DLV 2000, which joined the fleet in 2016, the launch barge Intermac 650 and three derrick barges.

Design and documentation.

Offshore support vessel operators present themselves first through their ships. A fleet is usually painted in one house scheme, with a strong hull colour such as red, blue or orange, a mark on the funnel and a shared naming prefix, so that a client, a port or another crew can tell whose vessel is working a field. In Norway the prefix habit is easy to see: DOF’s ships sail as Skandi vessels and Solstad’s as Normand vessels.

On the web, the core of most operator sites is the fleet list. Vessels are sorted by type — platform supply vessels that carry cargo, fuel and water out to installations, anchor handling tug supply vessels that tow rigs and set moorings, and construction support vessels with cranes, large decks and remotely operated vehicles — and each ship usually has its own specification sheet listing deck area, crane capacity, berths and equipment, often as a downloadable file.

Beside the fleet sit pages on services. Many operators now describe work for offshore wind as well as for oil and gas, and many offer subsea services such as inspection, repair and maintenance, survey and ROV work, sometimes through a sister company or a subsidiary with its own name. Contract announcements, usually naming the vessel, the client region and the length of the charter, keep those pages moving.

Because many of these companies are listed, the annual report and the quarterly results presentation are part of the identity too, and in a sector shaped by mergers, restructurings and fleet sales, the company story page often carries the history. For a designer, the useful material is consistent: hull colours, funnel marks, vessel names, clear fleet tables and sober corporate typography.

Chapter 11, a Dutch plan and a refinancing.

After the CB&I combination, Wikipedia says, LNG projects at Hackberry, Louisiana, and Freeport, Texas, and power projects ran into difficulties. On 21 January 2020 McDermott announced it had filed for Chapter 11, the Houston Chronicle reported; the prepackaged case in the Southern District of Texas covered the parent company and 247 affiliated companies, and the existing common shares were cancelled. McDermott emerged from Chapter 11 in June 2020 with a new structure and strategy, Wikipedia says, and it now trades as McDermott International, Ltd, a privately held company incorporated in Bermuda and based in Houston.

A second process followed. The company says it reported a transaction support agreement with its owners and lenders in September 2023. To carry it out, two Dutch subsidiaries, McDermott International Holdings B.V. and Lealand Finance Company B.V., used the Netherlands’ WHOA procedure for court-confirmed out-of-court plans, and CB&I UK Limited used a Part 26A restructuring plan in England. On 26 March 2024 McDermott said all the courts had approved the plans, that a US court had recognised the Dutch and UK rulings under Chapter 15 on 22 March, that liabilities linked to the Reficar arbitration award were resolved, and that its letter-of-credit and term-loan facilities ran to mid-2027. On 21 September 2026 it said it had completed a further refinancing, combining a rights offering to shareholders, a bond in the Nordic market due in 2031 and a new long-term letter-of-credit and guarantee facility.

Today McDermott describes itself as an engineering and construction company for the energy industry, with more than 30,000 employees in over 30 countries, specialised marine vessels and fabrication yards. Its website groups the work into subsea and floating facilities, shallow-water offshore projects, high-voltage direct-current links, LNG and what it calls low-carbon pathways; Wikipedia names an EPC contract for TenneT’s BorWin6 grid connection among its work after 2020. Michael McKelvy, chief executive since February 2022, is also chair of the board, the company said in 2026. Its stated values are Go Beyond, Commitment, Integrity, Well-being and One Team.

For a design guide, McDermott shows how a contractor can tell its story through a century of named barges, yards and projects. Compare Saipem and TechnipFMC, two other offshore engineering contractors. For this guide we use a deep navy, steel grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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