Company news & releases

Three films were added to the media library today. The marine reel steps through all twelve support vessels as outboard profiles on a common scale. The aviation reel does the same for the twelve Bell airframes, front and side elevation on a shared ground line. The capability reel is a single pass over what the company has and what it has delivered since incorporation.

All three are generated from the same dimensional tables that produce the animated drawings on the fleet page. That is deliberate: a film and a web page that are drawn from one source cannot quietly disagree with each other six months later.

Dimensions in the reels are indicative envelopes. The controlled drawing pack governs.

Ameristar Oil was incorporated on 14 March 2026. Six months later the company operates eighteen drilling rigs, twelve support vessels and twelve Bell airframes across six districts, with 1,480 people on the books against nineteen at incorporation.

The revised overview also says plainly what is not true yet. The safety record is 172 days, which is a short record and not a proven one. ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 are Stage 2 complete but not certified. API Spec Q2 is under assessment. Operating statistics in the document are internal management information and are unaudited.

A six-month-old contractor that presents itself as a mature one is telling its clients something it cannot support. We would rather publish the gaps.

Stage 2 assessments against ISO 14001 (environmental management) and ISO 45001 (occupational health and safety management) were completed across the onshore and offshore divisions. Both closed with minor findings only, each with an agreed corrective action and a closure date.

Certification decisions sit with the certification body and have not been issued. Until they are, neither standard appears on any Ameristar document as held. The certification maturity table in the quality statement is the authoritative list.

ISO 9001 was certified in July 2026. IADC accreditation and ISM Code certification were obtained in May 2026, and the FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate in June 2026.

XG-12, a Bell 525 Relentless, was accepted and entered the deepwater crew-change rotation this week. It is the twelfth airframe and completes the planned fleet.

The fleet now spans every Bell commercial type: two 505 Jet Ranger X, three 407GXi, two 429 and one 429WLG, three 412EPX and the 525. Running a single manufacturer keeps the training footprint, the parts pool and the maintenance organisation as one relationship rather than six.

All twelve are IFR equipped with HUMS monitoring and are flown two-pilot on offshore sectors. Aviation has operated under the company's own Part 135 certificate since June rather than by charter.

The engineering group released design imagery and a concept specification for the Ironmark XG-1: a fifth-generation semi-submersible sized for 10,000 ft of water and 35,000 ft of drilling depth, with robotic pipe handling on the drill floor, closed-loop managed pressure drilling, a 20,000 psi subsea stack and a 12 MWh hybrid battery giving an eighteen-minute blackout ride-through.

The design question that drives everything else is manning: 32 people in the core crew against 68 on a conventional unit of the same class. Every other choice follows from taking people off the floor.

The XG-1 is a concept. It has not been built, has not been sanctioned for construction, holds no yard slot, has no class approval and is not available for charter. Cost estimate maturity, class society engagement and the regulatory precedent for reduced manning are all open questions at gate G1.

MV Ameristar Cutline, a 58 m oil spill response vessel with 1,200 m3 of recovered-oil capacity, was accepted at Venice, Louisiana and entered service this week.

She is the twelfth and final vessel of the planned marine fleet. The fleet deliberately contains no two vessels of the same class: platform supply, deepwater supply, fast supply intervention, emergency response and rescue, anchor handling tug supply, multipurpose support, well intervention, dive support, self-elevating liftboat, survey and ROV support, crew transfer, and spill response.

Twelve classes cost more to crew and maintain than twelve of one class. The company took that cost so it does not have to charter in a capability at the moment it needs it most.

Rigs 17 and 18, both moored semi-submersibles rated to 7,400 ft of water and 35,000 ft of drilling depth, were accepted from the yard and are mobilising to the Gulf of Mexico deepwater district.

Both were crewed from inside the company rather than by hiring in a deepwater crew wholesale. That slowed the build-up and was the right call: the people running them already know how Ameristar writes a procedure.

The drilling fleet is now complete at eighteen units — thirteen onshore AC-electric pad rigs, three cantilever jackups and two moored semi-submersibles. Every one was specified by Ameristar engineers and ordered new from the manufacturer. The company has never taken over another contractor's fleet.

The company passed 150 days without a recordable incident this week, with a trailing TRIR of 0.00 since start-up. The quarterly safety bonus was paid to every crew.

This is worth stating carefully. A 150-day record on a fleet this young is a small sample. It says the systems have not failed yet; it does not say they will not. The company publishes the number because it intends to keep it, not because it thinks the number has been earned in the way a fifteen-year record would be.

Stop-work authority is written into every contract Ameristar signs, and 100 per cent of crews hold it without qualification. Nobody has ever been questioned for using it.

The Ironmark twin desk was added to the Operations Control workspace this month. It models the XG-1's drilling, power and marine systems so the 32-person manning assumption can be stress-tested against realistic operations before the design goes anywhere near a yard.

The desk carries a simulation banner on every view and cannot be mistaken for a live feed, because there is nothing to feed it: the unit does not exist.

Early runs have been useful mainly for finding where the manning model breaks. Those findings are carried in the gate G1 open-questions list rather than smoothed out of it.

Two cantilever-capable pad rigs were awarded a three-year daywork contract covering a 92-well development across Martin and Howard counties. Operations begin in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The award follows performance on the operator's first four wells rather than a public tender. Ameristar does not tender publicly, and work reaches the company through operators it already drills for.

The contract forms part of the USD 412 million firm backlog reported at the six-month mark. Backlog is stated firm; priced options are disclosed separately and are not counted.

Rigs 14 and 15, cantilever jackups rated to 400 ft of water and 30,000 ft of drilling depth, were accepted and mobilised to the shelf. The offshore division was formed around them.

Going offshore in month five was faster than the original plan and is the single decision in the build-out that carried the most risk. It was taken because the marine and aviation divisions were already standing, so the logistics chain the jackups needed existed before the rigs did.

Both units run 15,000 psi subsea BOP stacks and 1,500 kip hookloads.

Rig 6 delivered a 20,400 ft lateral in the Delaware Basin, the longest the company has drilled, landed in a single string and reaching TD without a sidetrack.

Cost per foot on the well was USD 171 against a fleet average of USD 182. Most of the difference came from hole cleaning rather than rate of penetration — the well was drilled slightly slower and had almost no reaming time.

The bit and BHA programme from this well has been carried into the standard Delaware long-lateral template.

The FAA issued Ameristar's Part 135 air carrier certificate in June, three months after incorporation. The division flies crew change, freight and medevac cover across the onshore districts and the Gulf.

Flying in-house rather than chartering means the aviation risk sits with the company that carries the drilling risk. The same stop-work authority applies: any pilot or passenger can refuse a sector without explanation.

A gap assessment against the IOGP aviation management standard has been completed. Closure actions are in progress and the standard is not claimed as met.

The Eagle Ford district opened at Kenedy, Texas with three AC-electric pad rigs and a district yard carrying tubulars, bits and a maintenance crew.

District yards are stood up before the rigs arrive rather than after. It is slower at the start and it is the reason non-productive time across the fleet has stayed under two per cent while the company was growing fastest.

Ameristar Marine was formed in May 2026 and obtained ISM Code certification in the same month. The division operates from Port Fourchon, Galveston and Venice.

As with the rigs, no vessel was bought used and none came from another operator's fleet. Each was specified by the company's own marine engineers and ordered new.

The policy costs more at the point of purchase. It removes an inherited maintenance history from the operating decision, which on a support vessel is the thing most likely to strand a rig.

Battery peak-shaving is now fitted to the majority of the onshore fleet, taking engines off line during low-load periods rather than idling them.

Scope 1 intensity is down 31 per cent against the first-quarter baseline. The baseline is three months old, so the percentage is a real reduction measured against a very short history and should be read that way.

Emissions figures are internal management information and are unaudited. ISO 14001 certification is pending and is not claimed.

From April 2026 every contract Ameristar signs carries stop-work authority as a term: any person on the location may stop the job, and no rate consequence attaches to the stoppage.

Making it contractual rather than procedural was the point. A policy that only binds the contractor is a policy the contractor pays for. A term that binds both parties is one the operator has agreed to before the rig moves.

Every crew in the company holds the authority without qualification.

The company's first well was a vertical test in Glasscock County, drilled by Rig 1 and released after twenty-six days against a twenty-day plan.

It lost money. The overrun was almost entirely rig-up and surface-handling time on a crew that had not worked together before, not downhole trouble.

The well is worth reporting because the fixes that came out of it — a written rig-up sequence and a rehearsed handover between tours — are the reason non-productive time across the fleet now sits at 1.9 per cent.

Ameristar Oil, LLC was incorporated in the State of Texas on 14 March 2026, with its principal place of business in Midland.

The company started with nineteen people, no rigs and one signed term contract. The first four rigs were ordered new rather than bought in, which is the decision the rest of the fleet policy followed from.

The company is privately held. It has taken no outside equity, carries no debt against the fleet, has never been listed and has never acquired another drilling contractor.