Vår Energi Brand Guidelines: Eni Norge Meets Point Resources, Listed in Oslo in 2022

An Eni subsidiary and a private-equity group.

Vår Energi is a young company with an old licence behind it. The company says its heritage includes more than 60 years of operations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, including the very first production licence issued there, PL001, in 1965, and it dates the founding of Eni Norge, the Norwegian arm of the Italian energy group Eni, to the same year.

The second half of the merger was much newer. The company says Point Resources was created in 2016 by merging companies owned by the Norwegian private-equity firm HitecVision, and that in 2017 it bought ExxonMobil’s operated business in Norway. English Wikipedia confirms that Point Resources was owned by HitecVision, a private-equity firm specialising in energy.

The two were brought together in December 2018, English Wikipedia says, and the merged company took the name Vår Energi. Wikipedia describes the result as one of Norway’s largest independent oil and gas companies, producing around 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. Eni remained the larger shareholder, with HitecVision as the minority owner. Norwegian Wikipedia names Balder, Ringhorne and Goliat among the fields in its portfolio, and the company today lists offices at Forus outside Stavanger, in Oslo, at Florø and at Hammerfest in the far north.

ExxonMobil’s assets, an IPO and Neptune.

Growth came by purchase. In 2019, the company says, it bought substantially all of ExxonMobil’s partner-operated assets on the Norwegian shelf; English Wikipedia dates the deal to August 2019, lists the Grane, Snorre and Fram fields among them, and says it made Vår Energi the second-largest operator on the shelf after Equinor.

On 16 February 2022 the company’s shares began trading on the Oslo stock exchange. A Reuters report published by Offshore Engineer that day called Vår Energi a spin-off from Eni and the largest pure-play exploration and production company to list anywhere in almost a decade, and noted that the shares fell on their first day. Eni and HitecVision sold a stake of about 11 per cent in the offering, the report said, with Eni remaining the majority owner; Euronext described the company as Norway’s third-largest stock market entrant of all time. Bookrunners said it was the most valuable exploration and production company to float since 2013. The company said the offering had been substantially oversubscribed and had brought in some 19,000 new shareholders, including institutional investors from Europe, the United States and Asia and Nordic private buyers, the report added.

The next deal was for Neptune Energy’s Norwegian business. Vår Energi announced the agreement on 23 June 2023 and completed it on 31 January 2024, according to its stock exchange announcements. The company says that with Neptune it now holds equity interests in about half of all producing assets on the Norwegian shelf and is one of the largest exporters of gas from Norway to Europe; it gives its workforce as around 1,500 people.

How producers present themselves.

Oil and gas producers sell crude, gas and liquids to refiners, traders and utilities rather than to shoppers, so most of their visual identity lives in places investors, partners, regulators and job seekers look. The pictures are familiar across the sector: drilling pads on open plains photographed from the air, with straight gravel roads running between them; offshore platforms and floating production, storage and offloading vessels, the FPSOs, standing in grey water; and geologists holding core samples cut from the rock they hope to produce.

The second register is the investor presentation. Producers set out their story in investor-day slides and quarterly decks built around acreage maps, with basins shaded in company colours, wells marked as dots and figures for inventory and reserves given in the units the industry uses. Names of basins and plays, such as the Permian, the Eagle Ford or the North Sea, often carry as much weight on these pages as the company’s own mark.

The third is reporting. Annual reports and sustainability reports sit beside each other on company websites, and the sustainability documents return to the same subjects year after year: methane, flaring, water and land use. Community-investment pages show schools, clinics and local programmes in the areas where a company drills, usually with photographs of the people involved rather than of the equipment.

Behind those formats, upstream companies often carry long histories of mergers, spin-offs and renamings, and their names can outlast the businesses that first used them. The guides in this group follow that record company by company, from the origins of each name to its current owner, and treat the colours and type shown here as our own interpretation rather than any company’s official system.

Fields in the north and in the North Sea.

Vår Energi’s fields stretch from the North Sea to the Arctic. In the Barents Sea it operates Goliat, which English Wikipedia describes as the first oil field to start production in that sea, and it holds an interest in Johan Castberg, which started production on 31 March 2025, according to the company’s announcements, and which the company said was producing at its plateau rate by June 2025; later that month it reported an oil discovery close to the field. In the North Sea, the Balder area has been its main development: the Jotun floating production vessel sailed for Balder in March 2025, the company announced the start-up of Balder Phase V later that year, and in June 2026 it took a final investment decision on the Balder Next New Wells project.

Not every update has been smooth. In December 2025 the company said its production for the year would come in at the lower end of its guidance because of operational problems at Johan Castberg and Balder. The same month it and its partners approved the first tie-in development intended to keep Johan Castberg at plateau towards 2030, the company says.

In July 2026 the company proposed another step. On 21 July it announced a combination with BlueNord, a producer with assets on the Danish Continental Shelf, which it said would make Vår Energi the largest independent producer of oil and gas in Europe. The deal was announced on 21 July 2026 and had not been completed at the time of writing; English Wikipedia says Eni would remain the majority shareholder after it.

The company now trades as Vår Energi ASA, with its stock exchange releases dated from Sandnes, where its Forus offices lie. Its chief executive, Nick Walker, sets out its aim as being “a reliable and secure provider of affordable energy to Europe,” the company’s website says.

For a design guide, Vår Energi shows how a company made from mergers can tie itself to one place — the Norwegian shelf — rather than to any one parent. Compare Eni, its majority owner, and Equinor, the largest operator on the same shelf. For this guide we use a fjord blue, a spruce green and a sea-fog grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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