Helmerich & Payne Brand Guidelines: A 1920 Partnership, Tulsa and the FlexRig

Two men who met on a rig.

Helmerich & Payne began in 1920 as a partnership between Walt Helmerich and Bill Payne. English Wikipedia says the two met on an oil rig in South Bend, Texas, and formed the company as a joint venture. The company says they started with two rigs.

Oklahoma became home six years later. In its account of the centenary of its move, published on its website in 2026, the company says that in 1926 Helmerich and Payne took their two rigs to Oklahoma to drill the Osage County field and made Tulsa their headquarters at the height of the city’s oil boom. Tulsa has remained the headquarters since, the company says, and in 2024 it moved its offices to a building in downtown Tulsa.

The family name runs through the city’s history as well as the company’s. The company says the Helmerich family developed Utica Square in Tulsa and supported the city’s parks, schools and arts. It marked the hundred years in Tulsa with a luncheon for employees, retirees and community partners, opened by its president and chief executive, Trey Adams, at which it showed material from its own archive.

The company now often shortens its name to H&P, and its website uses the address hpinc.com and the name “H&P, Inc.”; it has no connection with HP Inc., the computer maker. The pronunciation of the founder’s name, given by Wikipedia, is “HELM-rik.”

The rig that carried the name.

H&P’s reputation rests on one rig design. English Wikipedia says the company introduced its FlexRig in 1998, and that FlexRigs have been used widely to drill unconventional shale formations such as the Bakken in North Dakota and the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford in Texas.

The company describes the FlexRig fleet as built around AC-drive rigs designed for unconventional drilling, and lists models including the Flex3, the Flex5, the Flex3W and an Arabia configuration. It says its walking versions can move between wells on a pad without being taken apart, and that some are designed for single-row pads and others for multi-row pads. The rigs carry their own automation, and the company names software and systems such as FlexFusion, AutoSlide and StallAssist.

Its position in the American market is large. Wikipedia describes H&P as the largest onshore driller in the United States, with more than a fifth of the American land drilling market and more than two-fifths of the market for what it calls super-spec land rigs. It also notes that after the shale boom the company lost market share as lower oil prices led customers to cut back on rigs in 2015.

Technology became a business of its own. In November 2018, Wikipedia says, H&P formed H&P Technologies to develop automation for directional drilling that could be used on any rig, “regardless of the drilling or service provider,” and bought Angus Jamieson Consulting of Inverness, Scotland, a software, training and consultancy firm.

The company also drills at sea. It says it has close to fifty years of offshore experience and operates on 32 offshore platforms in five countries, including two harsh-environment jackup rigs owned by Equinor on the Norwegian Continental Shelf. For those rigs, the company says, it provides management across the whole life of the rig, from construction support and commissioning through drilling, maintenance and marine operations, and its offshore services run from rig design and supply to end-of-field-life work.

Drilling contractors and their image.

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.

From an American land driller to a global one.

The biggest change in the company’s recent history came from outside the United States. In July 2024 H&P announced that it would acquire KCA Deutag, a UK-based oil and gas services company, according to English Wikipedia. The deal was completed in January 2025: on 17 January 2025 the industry news site energy-pedia reported that Helmerich & Payne had completed its acquisition of KCA Deutag International, and the Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce carried the same announcement.

H&P said the acquisition would accelerate its international growth by greatly increasing its presence in the Middle East and would give it a broader mix of operations across American and international oil and gas markets. It also said that H&P would remain headquartered in Tulsa, that its president and chief executive at the time, John Lindsay, would stay in post, and that KCA Deutag’s chief executive would not join H&P, energy-pedia reported. The company said that teams across its operations had spent several months planning the integration before the deal closed.

Through more than a century, the company has kept the same two surnames in its name and the same city as its base since 1926. On its website the company presents the FlexRig fleet, its automation software, its offshore work and its Tulsa history.

For a design guide, Helmerich & Payne shows how a contractor can turn a rig design into a name that carries the brand, and how a founding partnership can survive as an ampersand. Compare Nabors, whose PACE land rigs carry the SmartRig name, and Patterson-UTI, another American land driller. For this guide we use a brick red, a charcoal and a sand with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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