In 1980, Fritz Maslø Hansen and Harald Vormedal (the father of Semar’s marine design engineer William Vormedal) contributed to completing the delivery of Statfjord B project from Oslo and Stavanger. They found an opportunity at that time to start ‘on their own’. A few weeks later, they established a company called Structural Engineering A.S. (Structural and Architectural Consultants) in Oslo.

Initially Fritz and Harald worked as consultants in project teams for the design of offshore platforms and were subsequently joined by Petter Skrikerud in 1982. In addition to the consulting activities in large project teams, some smaller projects were performed directly for Mobil on the Statfjord field installations and transport and seafastening analyses for the Dyvi heavy lift vessels.

The company grew and another company was established with main adminstration office in Tønsberg. It was called Tønsberg Engineering A.S. (Marine and Engineering Consultants). All the employees, apart from Harald, Fritz and Petter were initially employed in Tønsberg Engineering until 1986 when some employees transferred to Structural Engineering.

One of the first projects for Tønsberg Engineering was the transport of the drill-rig Dyvi Stena on board Ferncarrier, a Dyvi heavy lift vessel (a converted tanker). Tønsberg Engineering managed at that time to show through modelling and structural assessments performed using Sacs software that Dyvi vessel could safely transport the 17000 T rig from Japan to Norway. Other major players who were consulted concluded that this was impossible. At that time, Tønsberg Engineering was one of two companies in Norway who had a data machine (manufactured by OSBORNE Computer Corporation). The calculations were performed on a server located in Paris with the communication being made between the server and the Osborne by modem over the telephone lines.

Through hard work and good working environment, both companies managed to deliver many projects (amongst them more than 100 transport assessments for Dyvi).

In 2005, Structural Engineering AS changed its name to SEMAR AS (Structural Engineers and Marine Consultants).