Today, AGR provides software solutions and multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy to the energy industry on a global scale. It may therefore be somewhat surprising to learn that the origins of the company are more humble.
AGR was created in 1987 near Bergen, Norway. What does “AGR” stand for actually?
It is a reference to the founders’ forenames: Arve (Nordahl-Pedersen), Geir (Nordahl-Pedersen, his brother) and Reidar (Sillelid).
The company started out specialising in industrial cleaning, jet washing everything from buildings to toll booths. After two years, the company started to diversify – this was an important step in the journey to becoming the global organisation we are today.
Members of the AGR crew on Heidrun platform (NCS) during the cleaning and maintenance process, 2006
In 1989, AGR invested in offshore high-pressure cleaning technology and began to repair drill equipment – we displayed something of our innovative spirit already back then.
In the early 90’s, first prototypes of petroleum software were developed. The tools were built in-house as a result of necessity to fill the gap of available solutions as no adequate products for risk performance evaluation, cost calculation, materials management and skills transfer were available.
The story of petroleum consultancy as part of AGR’s portfolio began in 2002 with the VARG field project which was assigned to two Norwegian consultancies, Drilling Production Technology (DPT) and Reservoir Evaluation Services. The project served as a first example of AGR’s integrated services’ delivery covering drilling expertise and subsurface excellence.
After strategically acquiring businesses which were leaders in their field, AGR has been growing to become the leading energy services and software company for the oil and gas industry.
From right: AGR-founder Geir Nordahl-Pedersen, DPT founder Per-Inge Remmen and AGR CEO 2005-2012, Sverre Skogen, on a business trip to Jordan
Since 2014, AGR focusses on helping our clients achieve their targets throughout exploration and well delivery, field development and production to increased oil recovery and decommissioning.
We aim to be at the forefront of providing the best solutions for our clients. AGR’s Well Management division was the first outsourced drilling engineering consultancy to create and manage multi-well multi-client rig campaigns on the Norwegian and British continental shelves, South Atlantic and the APAC region. In 2007, AGR was contracted on behalf of seven operators to manage drilling of wells with Bredford Dolphin rig. In 2009, the largest logistics and drilling operations in the remote South Atlantic began managed out of our Aberdeen office. As a result, 22 wells were drilled and over 25,000 tonnes of equipment shipped.
Things have certainly changed during the 30 years’ history of our company but the recipe for success has not – the people working for AGR are its greatest asset. As founder Geir Nordahl-Pedersen once said, “It is all about the people.”
The company has a tradition of fostering and promoting good ideas. Many improvements in the activity processes or portfolio, not least internal campaigns, come from personnel initiatives.
AGR’s staff celebrates 30 years of excellence in all aspects of upstream this year. We have many firsts to be proud of:
- first oil services company to manage over 530 well projects
- first to complete over 1,500 reservoir studies in 10 years
- first to develop an oilfield version of a Risk Mitigation tool (P1).
We could not have done it without our people.