Harbour Energy Brand Guidelines: EIG’s 2014 Start-Up, Premier Oil & the Wintershall Dea Assets

Private equity, Chrysaor and two North Sea packages.

Harbour Energy began as an investment vehicle rather than an oil producer. The company dates its creation to 2014, when, it says, the private-equity firm EIG Global Energy Partners founded it “with a goal to build a new global, independent oil and gas company by acquisition.” English Wikipedia gives the start as July 2014 and names a second backer, the commodity trader Noble Group, alongside EIG.

The first purchase came in 2017. Harbour acquired Chrysaor Holdings and, through it, a package of UK North Sea oil and gas assets from Shell, according to the company’s history page. Wikipedia describes the same step from the other side, saying Harbour’s backing of Chrysaor for the Shell deal made it Chrysaor’s largest shareholder. A second package followed in 2019, when Harbour bought the UK North Sea business of ConocoPhillips; the company says that deal made it the UK’s largest oil and gas producer.

In 2021 Chrysaor combined with a listed company with a much longer history, and the enlarged group took the Harbour name on the stock market.

A 1934 Trinidad company and a reverse takeover.

That listed company was Premier Oil. English Wikipedia says it started trading in 1934 as the Caribbean Oil Company, to explore for and produce oil in Trinidad, and was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1936 as Premier (Trinidad) Oilfields. It took its first North Sea interest in 1971, a stake in the Wytch Farm onshore field in Dorset in 1984, and later worked in Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam and Mexico; Wikipedia credits it with discovering the Qadirpur gas field in Pakistan in 1990 and the Yetagun gas field in Myanmar in 1992, and says it bought Pict Petroleum in 1995 and agreed in 2016 to buy E.ON’s UK North Sea assets. In 2014 the UK government approved its development of the Catcher area in the North Sea, in which Premier held half and the operatorship, Wikipedia says.

Premier announced the proposed merger with Chrysaor on 6 October 2020, according to the documents Harbour still keeps on its investor pages. The deal combined an all-share merger with a reorganisation of Premier’s debt. On 31 March 2021 it was completed, and Premier changed its name to Harbour Energy, Drilling Contractor, the magazine of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, reported that day. At completion, the magazine said, EIG held about 36 per cent of the shares, former EIG shareholders about a third, former Premier creditors 18 per cent, Chrysaor’s legacy investors 8 per cent and former Premier shareholders 5 per cent.

Harbour describes the transaction as a reverse takeover that gave it a UK public listing. The company says Premier brought complementary UK assets and a starting point for international growth, with interests in Southeast Asia and Mexico. Wikipedia describes the result as a London-headquartered company listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the FTSE 250 index; the company’s own website gives its registered office as Edinburgh, where Harbour Energy plc is registered in Scotland.

How producers present themselves.

Oil and gas producers sell crude, gas and liquids to refiners, traders and utilities rather than to shoppers, so most of their visual identity lives in places investors, partners, regulators and job seekers look. The pictures are familiar across the sector: drilling pads on open plains photographed from the air, with straight gravel roads running between them; offshore platforms and floating production, storage and offloading vessels, the FPSOs, standing in grey water; and geologists holding core samples cut from the rock they hope to produce.

The second register is the investor presentation. Producers set out their story in investor-day slides and quarterly decks built around acreage maps, with basins shaded in company colours, wells marked as dots and figures for inventory and reserves given in the units the industry uses. Names of basins and plays, such as the Permian, the Eagle Ford or the North Sea, often carry as much weight on these pages as the company’s own mark.

The third is reporting. Annual reports and sustainability reports sit beside each other on company websites, and the sustainability documents return to the same subjects year after year: methane, flaring, water and land use. Community-investment pages show schools, clinics and local programmes in the areas where a company drills, usually with photographs of the people involved rather than of the equipment.

Behind those formats, upstream companies often carry long histories of mergers, spin-offs and renamings, and their names can outlast the businesses that first used them. The guides in this group follow that record company by company, from the origins of each name to its current owner, and treat the colours and type shown here as our own interpretation rather than any company’s official system.

From a UK producer to a global one.

The largest step came next. Harbour agreed in December 2023 to take on the upstream business of Wintershall Dea, the German oil and gas producer then owned by the chemical group BASF and the investment firm LetterOne; English Wikipedia says the two owners were paid partly in new Harbour shares. Harbour announced completion on 3 September 2024, describing what it bought as “substantially all of Wintershall Dea AG’s upstream assets.” The company says the deal gave it significant operations in Norway, Germany, Argentina and North Africa and enlarged its position in Mexico, where in 2025 it was appointed operator of the Zama oil field.

Since then Harbour has kept reshaping the map. It completed the sale of its Vietnam business, including the Chim Sao and Dua fields, to EnQuest in July 2025. It completed the purchase of LLOG Exploration Company on 11 February 2026, giving it an operated deepwater business in the US Gulf around the Who Dat and Buckskin hubs. In May 2026 it completed the sale of its operated Natuna Sea Block A field and Tuna project in Indonesia to Prime Group, keeping its interests in Andaman Sea discoveries, and in July 2026 it completed the purchase of the Waldorf companies, raising its share of the Catcher field from half to 90 per cent, the company says.

Carbon storage is part of the story the company tells about itself. Wikipedia describes Harbour as leading the Viking carbon capture and storage project in the North Sea with BP as partner, and in September 2026 Harbour reported first injection of carbon dioxide at Greensand, an Ineos-operated storage project in the Danish North Sea in which it holds an interest. New Norwegian fields — Dvalin North, Alve Nord and Idun Nord — started up during 2026, the company says.

For a design guide, Harbour Energy shows how a company assembled from purchases can present one plain, steady name across very different places, from the North Sea to Argentina and Mexico. Compare Shell, whose North Sea package started Harbour’s production, and ConocoPhillips, whose UK business followed. For this guide we use a navy, a sea teal and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Harbour Energy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.