Transocean Brand Guidelines: Rig 51, Sedco Forex, GlobalSantaFe & a Pending Valaris Deal

A gas pipeline company goes to sea.

Transocean is the product of many drilling companies, and its own account of its history begins on land. The company says its roots go back to the Danciger Oil & Refining Company of Fort Worth, Texas, which Southern Production, a subsidiary of the Birmingham, Alabama gas pipeline group Southern Natural Gas, bought in 1950. In 1953 that group created The Offshore Company, which Wikipedia says was formed after it acquired the DeLong-McDermott drilling venture. The Offshore Company was set up to design and build Rig 51, launched in the Gulf of Mexico in 1954, which Transocean and Wikipedia both describe as the first mobile jackup rig: a platform whose legs could be raised, towed to a new site and lowered to the seabed.

The Offshore Company went public in 1967 and, Wikipedia says, became a wholly owned subsidiary of its parent again in 1978. In 1982, after the parent renamed itself Sonat, the drilling arm became Sonat Offshore Drilling. Sonat spun it off in May 1993, when it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker RIG, the company says; Wikipedia adds that Sonat sold its last stake in 1995.

The Transocean name arrived from Norway. In September 1996 the company acquired Transocean ASA, a Norwegian drilling group that Wikipedia says began in the 1970s as a whaling company. The enlarged business took the name Transocean Offshore, and the company’s own history notes that “the logo was changed” at the same time. Wikipedia names Discoverer Enterprise as the first ship of its new deepwater programme, built to run two drilling operations at once; the company says that in 1999 it became the first ultra-deepwater, dual-activity drillship.

Sedco Forex, R&B Falcon and GlobalSantaFe.

The modern company was built by three large mergers. In 1999 Schlumberger spun off Sedco Forex, its offshore drilling division, which merged with Transocean to form Transocean Sedco Forex. Sedco, the Southeastern Drilling Company, began in 1947 with two land rigs under Bill Clements, who later served as governor of Texas; Schlumberger bought it in the mid-1980s and combined it with Forex Neptune. Forex itself was established in France in 1942; Wikipedia describes it as founded in German-occupied France to drill in North Africa, and Schlumberger took a majority interest in it in the 1960s. The sources used for this guide do not describe Forex’s work during the occupation years.

In 2001 Transocean Sedco Forex combined with R&B Falcon, itself formed in 1997 from Reading & Bates and Falcon Drilling. Wikipedia records that R&B Falcon owned 115 rigs, among them the semi-submersible Deepwater Horizon. In 2007 Transocean merged with GlobalSantaFe, formed in 2001 from Global Marine and Santa Fe International. Global Marine brought the CUSS I, which Transocean calls the first drillship, and the Glomar Explorer, built in the early 1970s for a secret CIA mission and later converted into the drillship GSF Explorer.

Later purchases were smaller. Transocean acquired Aker Drilling of Norway in 2011, and in 2018 it acquired Songa Offshore and then Ocean Rig. In 2012 it sold 38 shallow-water rigs to Shelf Drilling, the company says, to focus on high-specification floating rigs. Its principal executive offices are in Steinhausen, in the Swiss canton of Zug, and Wikipedia notes that it delisted from the SIX Swiss Exchange in March 2016.

On 20 April 2010 an explosion and fire on Deepwater Horizon, a Transocean-owned rig drilling the Macondo well for BP in the Gulf of Mexico, destroyed the rig; it sank, and oil flowed from the well for about three months. On 3 January 2013, The Maritime Executive reported, the US Department of Justice announced that Transocean Deepwater Inc. had agreed to plead guilty to violating the Clean Water Act and that Transocean entities had agreed to a civil settlement of the government’s Clean Water Act claims, including court-enforceable measures at their rigs in US waters. Transocean’s own history names the date and says it will never forget the crew members lost.

How drilling contractors present themselves.

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 rig name, a hull and a pending merger.

Transocean’s fleet names carry its history: the Discoverer drillships, the Deepwater rigs and units such as Sedco 706 and Transocean Leader. The company lists drilling records on its history page, including the 35,050-foot well drilled by Deepwater Horizon in 2009, and Wikipedia says that in February 2025 its rig Mighty Barents began drilling gas wells for the Neptun Deep project. Keelan Adamson, previously chief operating officer, became chief executive in April 2025.

The next chapter is not yet complete. On 9 February 2026, World Oil reported, Transocean agreed to acquire Valaris in an all-stock transaction; the companies said the combined fleet would number 73 rigs, including 33 ultra-deepwater drillships, nine semi-submersibles and 31 jackups. Baird Maritime reported on 5 November 2026 that the deal had received all required regulatory approvals, that shareholder votes were scheduled for 24 November and that closing was expected on or about 1 December 2026. At the time of writing the acquisition was agreed but not completed.

The Transocean name is shared with unrelated businesses, including a German news agency of that name, a former US airline and a former German cruise operator; the drilling company’s full name is Transocean Ltd. For a design guide, Transocean shows how a merger-built company keeps one short name on many inherited hulls; compare Valaris, the driller it agreed to acquire, and SLB, which spun off Sedco Forex in 1999. For this guide we use deepwater navy, hull grey and flare orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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