Polarcus Brand Guidelines: Dubai’s 2008 X-Bow Seismic Fleet, Wound Up in 2021

Seismic ships from a Dubai yard.

Polarcus was a marine seismic company set up in Dubai in 2008, English Wikipedia says. Its work was towed-streamer surveying: ships pulling long cables of sensors behind them to record sound reflected from the rock beneath the seabed, the data oil and gas companies use to decide where to explore.

The company described itself, in a September 2008 report by Offshore & Shipping on the Riviera Maritime Media site, as “a pure play marine geophysical company with a pioneering environmental agenda, specialising in high-end towed streamer data acquisition from pole to pole.” The same report said it was established by some of the people involved in forming Eastern Echo, an earlier seismic start-up that had ordered its own new ships before it was bought by Schlumberger, and that its management came mainly from Eastern Echo, PGS and Schlumberger’s WesternGeco. Its chief executive was Rolf Ronningen, and its principal office was in Dubai.

The shareholders named in that 2008 report were the Dubai shipyard Drydocks World, Zickerman family holding companies, Ulstein Shipping, senior management and a number of smaller investors. Two Drydocks World executives sat on the first board alongside two members of the Zickerman family.

The company’s shares were listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange’s over-the-counter list in 2008 and moved to the main Oslo list in 2009 under the ticker PLCS, English Wikipedia says.

X-Bow hulls and a green agenda.

Polarcus’s plan was to build a fleet from scratch. The 2008 report described six new ships to be built at Drydocks World – Dubai to designs by Ulstein Design of Norway, all with the Ulstein X-Bow hull form, which the company said reduced fuel use in transit. Four were to be high-end 3D vessels towing 12 streamers each — two of the SX124 design and two of the SX134 — and two were to be multi-purpose SX133 ships for 2D and source work. Plate cutting for the first hull, NB66, took place on 18 May 2008, the report said, with the second, NB67, following in early June. The first 12-streamer 3D ships were intended to be working in the third quarter of 2009, with all six in service in 2010. The report noted that the ships would carry DP2 dynamic positioning, which it called a first for towed-streamer vessels, and that the company planned to offer 3D and 4D contract surveys as well as multi-client projects for the oil and gas industry.

The equipment list read like a directory of the trade. Sercel was to supply its Seal data acquisition systems, G Gun II sources and Sentinel solid streamer sections for all six vessels; Odim was to supply back-deck handling systems, Wärtsilä the engines and Berg the propellers.

The environmental agenda was central to how the company presented itself. Its stated vision was “to be a pioneer in an industry where the frontiers of seismic exploration are responsibly expanded without harm to our world,” and it said its ships would be built to DNV’s Clean Design notation and run on low-sulphur marine gas oil. It also said it would use solid streamers with a seismic source that needed no lubrication, and follow “soft start” and monitoring procedures for its sound source under the guidelines of the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee. It also said it aimed to become what it called the “supplier of choice” for marine seismic work in polar regions.

The fleet grew beyond the first plan. In November 2012 the satellite provider Marlink announced that Polarcus had extended its contract to a total of eight vessels, adding two new X-Bow ships, Amani and Adira, launched earlier that year, to the five it already served. The release called Polarcus a Dubai-based marine geophysical seismic operator and stressed its environmental focus, in the company’s own terms.

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.

A fleet that passed to Shearwater.

Polarcus did not survive the downturn in seismic spending. On 26 January 2021, Reuters reported, lenders took control of its ships after the company defaulted on its bank loans and bonds, taking over the shares of the subsidiaries that owned the vessels and replacing their directors. Polarcus said at the time that the lenders did not intend to destabilise its organisation and were open to a standstill period so that awarded projects could continue. On 14 April 2021, Offshore Energy reported, Polarcus agreed standstill and settlement terms with those lenders.

The fleet then changed hands. On 29 April 2021 Shearwater GeoServices announced two transactions with Tiger Moth, a company affiliated with Woodstreet, for marine seismic assets previously owned by Polarcus and controlled by the lenders since January: six seismic acquisition vessels, and streamers with related seismic equipment, Offshore Energy reported. The ships did not pass directly from Polarcus to Shearwater, but through the lenders’ company.

The listed company itself was wound up. Joint provisional liquidators were appointed by a court order on 8 February 2021, and on 21 June 2021 the court placed Polarcus Limited into official liquidation, Offshore Engineer reported, with the liquidators to seek its delisting from the Oslo exchange; the company said there would be no return to shareholders. English Wikipedia records the delisting in 2021. Polarcus no longer trades.

For a design guide, Polarcus shows how a young company can build an identity around a single idea — a polar, environmental agenda carried by a distinctive hull shape. Compare Shearwater GeoServices, which bought its vessels, and PGS, another Oslo-listed streamer contractor. For this guide we use a deep blue and an ice blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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