Woodside Brand Guidelines: The 1954 Victorian Explorer That Became Australia’s LNG Name

A small-town name for a Gippsland explorer.

Woodside was incorporated on 26 July 1954 as Woodside (Lakes Entrance) Oil Co NL, a no-liability company named after the small town of Woodside in Victoria, English Wikipedia says. It was floated by the accountant Rees Withers, whose firm served small explorers in Gippsland, the region where Australia’s first oil field had been found. The young company struggled to raise money after its early exploration came up short; the stockbroker Geoff Donaldson, who had underwritten the first share offer, became chairman in 1956 and helped keep it afloat.

The turn came in 1962. The company recruited Nicholas Boutakoff as chief geologist, and he steered it from Victoria’s Gippsland Basin to Western Australia, reasoning that the North West Shelf held petroleum. That year Woodside applied for exploration licences over a large offshore area there, and it went on to form the original North West Shelf Venture with Shell and Burmah Oil; BHP later took Burmah’s place.

Its big partners became its big shareholders. By 1985 Shell and BHP each held 40% of Woodside. BHP cut its holding to 10% in July 1990 and sold the rest in October 1994, while Shell sold down to 34%. In 1995 Woodside moved its head office from Melbourne to Perth. In 2001 Shell tried to buy the part of the company it did not already own, but the Treasurer of Australia blocked the bid on national-interest grounds; Shell reduced its stake to 24% in November 2010 and sold its remaining shares in November 2017.

Gas from the Pilbara coast.

Woodside’s name is bound up with gas from Western Australia’s Pilbara coast. The North West Shelf project includes the Karratha Gas Plant on the Burrup Peninsula, known as Murujuga, and Woodside also runs the Pluto gas plant in the same industrial area. In 1998 the North West Shelf joint venturers signed a retrospective Indigenous Land Use Agreement with the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation, and Woodside is a party to the Burrup and Maitland Industrial Estates Agreement, whose Traditional Owner parties are represented by the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, English Wikipedia says.

Those sites have drawn long-running disputes, which Wikipedia records. In 2006 and 2007 Woodside faced opposition to building the onshore Pluto LNG plant on the Burrup, home to petroglyphs up to 30,000 years old. Further north, in the Kimberley, a proposed gas complex at James Price Point met a protest campaign under the name “Save The Kimberley,” community blockades and court actions; the proposal was abandoned in April 2013.

Oil is a smaller part of the story. Woodside operates the Enfield, Vincent and Pyrenees oil fields off Exmouth in Western Australia, and Wikipedia lists the Ngujima-Yin, Pyrenees and Okha floating production, storage and offloading vessels among its oil developments. In the Timor Sea it operates the Sunrise joint venture, whose Sunrise and Troubadour gas fields were discovered in 1974, with ConocoPhillips, Shell and Osaka Gas as partners. Beyond Australia, Wikipedia lists exploration, development or operating activity in countries including Canada, the United States, Senegal and South Korea.

How oil and gas 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.

One company from two.

The company’s present form dates from 2022. In August 2021 Woodside agreed with BHP to merge BHP’s oil and gas assets into Woodside, and in May 2022 about 98% of Woodside shareholders approved the deal, English Wikipedia says. The merger was completed on 1 June 2022: Woodside acquired the entire share capital of BHP Petroleum International and issued new shares to BHP, which distributed them to its own shareholders, OE Digital and Cyprus Shipping News reported that day. The combined company, formerly Woodside Petroleum Ltd and now Woodside Energy Group Ltd, is listed in Sydney, New York and London. Woodside said the merger made it a top-ten global independent energy company by hydrocarbon production and the largest energy company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Its newest Australian project is Scarborough, a gas field off the Pilbara coast linked by a subsea pipeline to the Pluto LNG plant near Karratha, where a second processing train has been built for it. In January 2026 Pipeline & Gas Journal reported the project as 94% complete and targeting its first LNG cargo in the fourth quarter of 2026. On 17 August 2026 Daily Cargo News reported first gas flowing from the field and the floating production unit declared ready for start-up, with the company saying the first cargo remained on schedule for later in the year.

Woodside has also moved into the United States. In July 2024 it agreed to buy the American gas company Tellurian, and in August 2024 it announced it would acquire an ammonia project in Texas from OCI Global, Wikipedia says. In January 2026 Pipeline & Gas Journal reported that its three-train Louisiana LNG project was 22% complete and targeting first LNG in 2029, and that its Beaumont New Ammonia plant in Texas had achieved first production in late December 2025.

For a design guide, Woodside shows how a company can keep a small-town founding name through more than seventy years, a move of head office across the continent and a merger with BHP’s petroleum business. Compare Shell, its partner on the North West Shelf and a shareholder until 2017, and INPEX, the Japanese oil and gas explorer. For this guide we use a shelf blue, a Pilbara ochre and a sandstone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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