Nabors Brand Guidelines: A 1952 Calgary Driller, a Guggenheim Holding Company and Robotic Rigs

A Canadian subsidiary, a new name and a Guggenheim holding company.

Nabors began in Canada. English Wikipedia says the business was founded as an Alberta corporation in Calgary in May 1952 under the name Parker Drilling Company of Canada Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Parker Drilling Company, which had been founded in Tulsa in 1934. By 1966, Wikipedia says, Clair Nabors, originally from Texas, had taken control of the Canadian company and renamed it Nabors Drilling Limited. The company’s own history puts it more simply: it dates its founding to 1952 “by Clair Nabors.”

The company says that in 1963 it drilled the discovery well for ARCO in what became the Prudhoe Bay field on Alaska’s North Slope, and that its work in Alaska led it to develop modular rigs and moving systems that are still in use.

The holding company that carries the name today came from a different direction. Wikipedia traces it to the Guggenheim family’s nitrate businesses in Chile, merged in 1950 as the Anglo-Lautaro Nitrate Corporation and sold after Chile nationalised its nitrate industry under Salvador Allende. The remnants were reorganised as the Anglo Company, incorporated in the Bahamas, which in 1974 bought 52.4 percent of Nabors Drilling and by 1978 held 99 percent, according to Wikipedia. In 1981 the group became Anglo Energy.

The 1980s oil glut hit Anglo hard. Wikipedia says it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 1983, was restructured in 1986, filed again in February 1988 and emerged that May. The Nabors name then moved to the top: Wikipedia dates the renaming of Anglo Energy as Nabors Industries to 9 March 1989, while the company’s own history places the change from Anglo to Nabors in 1986, when the investors Gene Isenberg and Marty Whitman took control.

Buying fleets, then automating them.

Growth came through acquisitions. In November 1988 Nabors bought the Westburne Group, a Canadian drilling and supply company, which the company calls its first international acquisition, with operations in the Middle East. In 1990 it bought Loffland Brothers Drilling and opened its corporate headquarters in Houston. In 1993 it bought Grace Drilling, adding 167 rigs, according to both Wikipedia and the company. In 1997 it bought Canrig, which took it into making drilling equipment, Sundowner, which expanded its offshore work, and Epoch Well Services, which took it into rig instrumentation.

The 2010s brought a change of direction. Anthony Petrello, who had joined in 1991, succeeded Gene Isenberg as chief executive in late 2011, and the company says it then set out to make technology its point of difference. In 2013 it introduced the PACE-X800, a “SmartRig” able to walk between wells on multi-well pads. In 2015 it left the completion and production services business it had entered in 2010 and set up Nabors Drilling Solutions to run services such as managed pressure drilling, casing running and directional drilling from the rig itself.

Joint ventures widened its reach. Wikipedia says Nabors signed an agreement with Saudi Aramco in October 2016 to form SANAD, the Saudi Aramco Nabors Drilling Company, which began operating on 1 December 2017, and that it bought Tesco Corporation in December 2017 and Robotic Drilling Systems from the Norwegian contractor Odfjell Drilling the same year. In 2021, the company says, it sent the PACE-R801, which it describes as the world’s first fully robotic land rig, to the Permian Basin, and in 2022 it fitted a robotic rig floor module to an existing land rig.

Through its subsidiaries, the company says, Nabors makes and sells top drives, catwalks, wrenches and drawworks for onshore and offshore rigs, and sells drilling software alongside its rigs. Its offshore range includes platform rigs under the MASE, MODS and Sundowner names.

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.

A Bermuda company with a Houston headquarters.

Today the company is Nabors Industries Ltd., which dates its press releases from Hamilton, Bermuda, while English Wikipedia describes it as based in Houston. The two sources describe the fleet differently: Wikipedia calls it the world’s second-largest land drilling rig fleet, with more than 250 rigs in 20 countries, while the company says it owns and operates the world’s largest land-based fleet and works in more than 15 countries.

The Parker name returned in 2025. The company announced on 12 March 2025 that it had closed its acquisition of Parker Wellbore, which brought tubular running services, land and barge rigs and the rental business Quail Tools. Nabors did not keep all of it: in August 2025 the Journal of Petroleum Technology reported that Nabors had sold Quail Tools to Superior Energy Services, while keeping the rest of the Parker portfolio.

The company now frames its strategy around three themes it calls talent, technology and transition. Its software carries names such as ROCKit, REVit and SmartROS, and Wikipedia says that since 2021 it has invested in start-ups in geothermal energy and energy storage.

For a design guide, Nabors shows how a drilling contractor can present itself as much through its rig names and software as through its corporate history, which runs from a Calgary subsidiary through a nitrate fortune to a Bermuda holding company. Compare Helmerich & Payne, another American land driller, and Precision Drilling, a land driller based in Calgary. For this guide we use a navy, a steel grey and a rig orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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