ARCO

ARCO is a brand of gasoline stations owned by Marathon Petroleum. BP, which formerly owned the brand, uses it in California, Oregon and Washington, while Marathon has rights for the rest of the United States and Mexico.
ARCO was established in 1966 as the Atlantic Richfield Company, an independent oil and gas company formed from the merger of Atlantic Petroleum and the Richfield Oil Corporation.

History

From 1966 to 2000, the Atlantic Richfield Company, doing business as ARCO, was an independent American oil company with operations in the United States, Indonesia, the North Sea, the South China Sea and Mexico. After its acquisition of Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1977, ARCO had owned hard rock mines in several western states, which has created environmental clean-up liabilities to the company to this day even after the mines were closed in the early 1980s.
In 2000, BP Amoco acquired ARCO for $26.8 billion. ARCO's retail and marketing operations were kept separate while the rest of the company was integrated into BP.
In 2012, BP sold its Carson refinery, 800 ARCO stations in California, Arizona and Nevada, and the ownership of the ARCO brand to Tesoro for $2.5 billion while paying Tesoro for an exclusive license for use of the ARCO brand on its stations in northern California, Oregon and Washington which will be continued to be supplied from BP's Cherry Point Refinery in Washington state.
BP has retained the Atlantic Richfield Company as a subsidiary to handle environmental claims against BP for the clean-up of former Anaconda mine properties.

Early period

ARCO was formed by the merger of East Coast–based Atlantic Refining and California-based Richfield Oil Corporation in 1966; the company's name is an acronym of the two companies' names. A merger in 1969, brought in Sinclair Oil Corporation. In the 1970s and 80s, ARCO was one of the largest companies in the world, consistently a top 20 company of the Fortune 500. After its subsequent fracture in the late 1980s and early 90s, ARCO became a subsidiary of UK-based BP plc in 2000 through its BP West Coast Products LLC affiliate.

The Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company's heritage dates back to 1866. It became part of the Standard Oil trust in 1874, but achieved independence again when Standard Oil was broken up in 1911.
In 1915, Atlantic opens its first filling station on Baum Boulevard in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In 1917, First Richfield Oil Company of California gas station at Slauson and Central Avenues in Los Angeles, California. Richfield Oil Company of California logo is an Eagle trademark.
The Atlantic Refining Company was headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1966, Atlantic merged with the Richfield Oil Company of California. The first CEO was Robert Orville Anderson, who had previously led Atlantic. The trademark for the new company, a red diamond shape called the ARCO Spark, was designed by Bauhaus artist, designer, and architect Herbert Bayer.
Commercial oil exploration started in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in the 1960s, and the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, North America's largest oil field, was discovered on March 12, 1968, by Atlantic Richfield Company and Exxon with the well Prudhoe Bay State #1. Key employees with ARCO Alaska were Marvin Mangus, John M. Sweet, and William D. Leake, chief project engineer for the Alaska pipeline. The Richfield Oil Company of California had purchased the drilling rights to the land where the discovery well was located. BP had drilling rights near the discovery well.
ARCO acquired Sinclair Oil Corporation in 1969, but later divested certain Sinclair assets during the mid-1970s, resulting in Sinclair returning as a private company.
In 1978, ARCO opened the first of its ampm convenience stores in Southern California.
1980s

Due to the increasing cost in processing credit card sales, ARCO eliminated its own private credit card program and stopped accepting any bank credit cards, such as Visa and MasterCard, in 1982. In this way, the company was able to pass the resulting savings on to its dealers, which resulted in the company becoming the only major gasoline retailer to accept only cash at its stations.
In 1985, ARCO's East Coast stations were not doing very well so ARCO sold 400 service stations in eight states and the District of Columbia to Shell for an undisclosed price and also sold 576 service stations in Pennsylvania and New York plus a refinery in Pennsylvania for $420 million to Dutch trader John Deuss, who rebranded the stations to their former name Atlantic. Deuss later sold the stations plus refinery, pipelines and terminals in 1988 to Sunoco for $513 million.
In 1986, ARCO began to accept bank ATM cards at its stations by adding on a transaction fee of initially 10 cents for those sales while maintaining cash-only sales at the previous low price.

1990s

In the beginning of the 1990s, a subsidiary, ARCO Power Technologies, later Advanced Power Technologies, was the primary contractor for the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. ARCO having hired Bernard Eastlund led to conspiracy theories about weather control and warfare.
In March 1997, ARCO also leased almost all the gas stations of the Santa Fe Springs, California–based independent Thrifty Oil group of 250 stations found throughout California after a damaging price war which the independent Thrifty was unable to win.
On July 5, 1990, an explosion at an ARCO Chemical Co. facility in Channelview, Texas killed 17 people and injured five others.

2000s

On April 18, 2000, ARCO was purchased by BP and completely merged into BP operations. There were two exceptions due to FTC requirements: ARCO Alaska was sold by BP to Phillips Petroleum, and ARCO Pipe Line Company was acquired by TEPPCO, a subsidiary of Enterprise Products.

Headquarters buildings

From 1972 to 2000, ARCO's global corporate headquarters were in the ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles at the corner of 5th and Flower Streets, the site of Richfield's former headquarters. Upon completion in 1972, the ARCO Plaza towers were the tallest buildings in the city for one year before being overtaken by Aon Center, and were the tallest twin towers in the world until the completion of the World Trade Center in New York City. In 1986, joint owners ARCO and Bank of America sold the buildings to Shuwa Investments Corp., the American subsidiary of Shuwa Co. of Tokyo, for $650 million while both remained tenants in their respective named towers. ARCO moved out of the building in 1999. The building was renamed City National Plaza in 2005.
ARCO's Oil & Gas division headquarters were in downtown Dallas, Texas. ARCO Tower, the company's headquarters, was a 46-story office building designed by architect I.M. Pei. The building is now called Energy Plaza.

Research Laboratory

From the 1960s, until the end of the twentieth century, ARCO operated a highly significant research and development center in Plano, Texas, on land purchased in 1964 by the Atlantic Refinery Company. Its golden age was arguably in the early to mid 1980s, when it was led by Robert L. Hirsch. A standout example of ARCO's research at that time was the pioneering study on 4D seismic surveying by Robert Greaves and Terry Fulp. This consisted of repeated 3D seismic surveys which successfully mapped the effects of enhanced oil recovery processes as a function of time. This work was recognized for its seminal importance over 20 years later by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Besides Greaves and Fulp, the laboratory produced a number of other distinguished alumni during this golden age, including scientists John Castagna, Michael Batzle, Geoffrey Dorn, and Marius Vassiliou. In later years the laboratory experienced significant contraction. It finally closed shortly after the 2000 acquisition of ARCO by BP.

ARCO Solar

During the 1970s, the United States government and states such as California sought to encourage companies to invest in the development of low-pollution renewable energy sources. Oil companies such as BP, Shell, and ARCO began to look into photovoltaics. In 1977, ARCO purchased Chatsworth-based Solar Technology International, renamed it ARCO Solar, and moved it to Camarillo. In 1982, ARCO constructed the world's first photovoltaic central utility power plant, a 1-megawatt facility near Hesperia. Unfortunately for ARCO, the solar panel industry was costly and not very profitable, so it was looking for a buyer by 1989. It finally sold the company to the German company Siemens for $36 million in 1990.

ARCO Chemical

In 1987, ARCO Chemical Co. was spun off and taken public, with ARCO selling 19.9% to the public. Lyondell Chemical Company, bought ARCO Chemical in 1998 for $5.6 billion including ARCO's entire 82.2% ownership stake.

Anaconda Copper

ARCO merged with Anaconda Copper Mining Company of Montana in 1977. Anaconda's holdings included the Berkeley Pit and the Anaconda, Montana Smelter. ARCO founder Robert Orville Anderson stated "he hoped Anaconda's resources and expertise would help him launch a major shale-oil venture, but that the world oil glut and the declining price of petroleum made shale oil moot". The purchase turned out to be a regrettable decision for ARCO. A lack of experience with hard-rock mining and a sudden drop in the price of copper to below seventy cents a pound, the lowest in years, caused ARCO to suspend all operations in Butte, Montana. By 1983, only six years after acquiring rights to the "Richest Hill on Earth", the Berkeley Pit was completely idle. By 1986, some ARCO properties were sold to billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington, whose company, Montana Resources, operates a much smaller open-pit mine east of the defunct Berkeley Pit.

Superfund site

ARCO was the responsible party for the largest U.S. Superfund site—a site that takes in the towns of Butte and Anaconda, and of the Clark Fork River including Milltown Dam. The region's water and soil were polluted by a century of mining and smelting. Chemicals of concern include many heavy metals and arsenic. On 7 February 2008, the United States Environmental Protection Agency announced that prolonged litigation with ARCO ended when ARCO agreed to pay $187 million to finance natural resource restoration activities. Anaconda Copper still nominally exists, but only as a massive environmental liability for BP.
Atlantic Richfield Co and its then parent BP America agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by about 700 current and former residents of Yerington, Nevada, who lived near the Anaconda mine built in 1941. The company paid in Nevada up to $19.5M for settlement. EPA tested in 2009 wells and found that 79% of the wells north of mine had dangerous levels of uranium and/or arsenic.