Magseis Fairfield Brand Guidelines: Oslo & Houston Seabed Nodes, Part of TGS Since 2022

A Norwegian start-up and a Houston veteran.

Magseis Fairfield was a seismic company built from two businesses that recorded data on the seabed rather than with cables towed behind ships. Its method is the ocean bottom node: a self-contained recorder placed on the sea floor, often by rope or by remotely operated vehicle, which listens for sound reflected from the rock beneath.

The Norwegian half was Magseis ASA. Its company profile on the Nordic news service MFN dates its founding to 2009. In its 2018 stock exchange notices Magseis described itself as a Norwegian geophysical company providing ocean bottom seismic acquisition, headquartered in Oslo, with offices in Norway, Sweden, the United States and Singapore, and built around its own Marine Autonomous Seismic System, or MASS. Its shares were listed on Oslo Børs under the ticker MSEIS.

The American half came from Fairfield Geotechnologies of Houston, which English Wikipedia says was founded in 1976 and began with a transition-zone survey in Louisiana; it introduced its first non-exclusive 3D survey in 1989 and, in April 2018, bought Geokinetics’ United States multi-client data library. Fairfield’s owner, Fairfield-Maxwell, had owned and invested in it for more than 40 years, its chairman said in October 2018. Fairfield’s Seismic Technologies business ran its node surveys: according to the Magseis press release reported by GEO ExPro in November 2018, it had carried out 45 ocean bottom node surveys around the world since 2005, and it held patents covering seabed, land and permanent reservoir monitoring work.

The 2018 combination.

The two came together in 2018. On 30 October 2018 Magseis agreed to buy Fairfield’s Seismic Technologies business — data acquisition, node systems and their sale and rental, and the shares of Fairfield’s British subsidiary WGP Group — Offshore Energy reported the next day. Fairfield’s data licensing and data processing business was not part of the deal; it was carved out and stayed with Fairfield Geotechnologies, which continues as a separate Houston company.

The deal was completed on 18 December 2018, according to the company’s notice to Oslo Børs, and on the same day the listed company took the name Magseis Fairfield ASA. Fairfield received shares and warrants, giving it about 18 percent of the shares and votes, and Fairfield’s chief executive became chairman of the board. At the time of the agreement Fairfield Seismic Technologies was headquartered in Houston with about 230 full-time employees and 250 contracted personnel, Offshore Energy reported, and the combined company was planned around about 430 full-time employees in three areas: Eastern Hemisphere operations from Oslo, Western Hemisphere operations from Houston, and technology.

Magseis said in 2018 that the combined business would have the industry’s largest nodal inventory, a claim it made in announcing the deal. A month earlier its chief executive had described a business model that combined full-scale node surveys with the lease and sale of nodes, GEO ExPro reported. The two-city name kept both halves visible.

The company’s later projects reached beyond oil and gas. In October 2022 it signed a global co-operation agreement with Fugro to pursue wide-area 3D ultra-high-resolution surveys for offshore renewables and carbon capture and storage, pairing Fugro’s geo-data work with Magseis Fairfield’s Extended High Resolution, or XHR, seismic system. In November 2022 its subsidiary Magseis Renewables AS announced a contract to monitor a carbon storage project in the North Sea using MASS III ocean bottom nodes and its modular source technology.

Design and documentation.

Seismic and geophysical survey companies sell something most people never see: an image of rock layers far below the ground or the seabed. Their websites therefore lean on pictures of the work itself. Survey vessels towing long streamer cables, land crews laying out sensors across desert or farmland, and vibrator trucks lined up on a survey line are the photographs these companies publish again and again, usually next to a coloured cross-section of the subsurface.

Those seismic-image samples do much of the visual work. A processed section, with its bands of colour and folded layers, shows what the company delivers far more quickly than a paragraph of text could. Multi-client data libraries, where a company surveys an area once and licenses the data to several clients, are usually presented through interactive maps and region pages, described in the terms each company chooses for its own library.

Equipment makers and node operators follow a slightly different pattern. Ocean-bottom node pages, land nodal systems and streamer products tend to appear as clean product shots against white or dark backgrounds, with named product lines and launch dates. Land-crew and field-service pages add maps, location lists and training or support offers. Many of these firms also present newer work in mining, geothermal, carbon storage and infrastructure monitoring alongside oil and gas.

Because several of the companies are listed, investor pages are a large part of the picture: results, governance documents and regulated information, laid out in the plain, orderly style that stock exchanges expect. Names change often in this sector, through mergers, renames and asset sales, so a company’s history page and its newsroom are usually the clearest record of who it is today and what it used to be called.

Absorbed into TGS.

Magseis Fairfield’s independence lasted four years. On 29 June 2022 TGS, the Norwegian seismic data company, agreed a voluntary exchange offer for all its shares; Magseis Fairfield’s board recommended it, and shareholders holding about a third of the company, including its largest shareholder, Fairfield MS, pre-accepted, Offshore Energy reported. TGS’s chief executive said the deal would combine Magseis Fairfield’s position in the ocean bottom node market with TGS’s multi-client and data processing capabilities.

The closing conditions were met on 29 September 2022, and settlement was completed on 11 October 2022, leaving TGS with about three-quarters of the shares, according to the stock exchange notice, which described TGS as a provider of scientific data and intelligence to companies in the energy sector. A mandatory offer for the rest followed. On 5 January 2023 TGS, holding about 97.5 percent, carried out a compulsory acquisition of the remaining shares and so took ownership of the whole company. Oslo Børs delisted Magseis Fairfield’s shares on 12 January 2023, the last trading day being 11 January.

Today the old web addresses forward to TGS, which describes ocean bottom node acquisition as part of its marine acquisition work. TGS says its proprietary MASS and ZNodal technologies are modular, can be deployed by rope, cable or remotely operated vehicle, and work in water depths from 0 to 4,000 metres, and it says it has led the industry in ocean bottom node acquisition for more than 20 years. The Magseis Fairfield name no longer trades as a listed company; the node systems carry on inside TGS. A different company, Fairfield Geotechnologies, keeps the Fairfield name in Houston for data licensing.

For a design guide, Magseis Fairfield shows how a merged company can carry both founders’ names until a larger owner absorbs it. Compare TGS, its owner since 2022, and Fugro, its renewables partner. For this guide we use a teal and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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