Chevron Corporation
Chevron Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation predominantly specializing in oil and gas. The second-largest direct descendant of Standard Oil, and originally known as the Standard Oil Company of California, it is active in more than 180 countries.
Chevron is one of the largest companies in the world and the second-largest oil company based in the United States by revenue, only behind fellow Standard Oil descendant ExxonMobil. Chevron ranked 10th on the Fortune 500 in 2023. The company is also the last-remaining oil-and-gas component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since the exit of ExxonMobil from the index in 2020.
Within oil and gas, Chevron is vertically integrated and is involved in hydrocarbon exploration, production, refining, marketing and transport, chemicals manufacturing and sales, and power generation. Chevron manufactures and sells fuels, lubricants, additives, and petrochemicals, primarily in Western North America, the US Gulf Coast, Southeast Asia, South Korea and Australia. In 2018, the company produced an average of of net oil-equivalent per day in United States.
Chevron traces its history back to small California-based oil companies which were acquired by Standard Oil and merged into Standard Oil of California. After the breakup of Standard Oil, Socal grew quickly on its own by continuing to acquire companies and partnering with others both inside and outside of California, eventually becoming one of the Big Oil companies that dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s.
In 1985, Socal merged with the Pittsburgh-based Gulf Oil and rebranded as Chevron; the newly merged company later merged with Texaco in 2001.
Chevron has been subject to numerous controversies.
History
Predecessors
Star Oil and Pacific Coast Oil Company
One of Chevron's early predecessors, "Star Oil", discovered oil at the Pico Canyon Oilfield in the Santa Susana Mountains north of Los Angeles in 1876. The 25 barrels of oil per day well marked the discovery of the Newhall Field, and is considered by geophysicist Marius Vassiliou as the beginning of the modern oil industry in California. Energy analyst Antonia Juhasz has said that while Star Oil's founders were influential in establishing an oil industry in California, Union Mattole Company discovered oil in the state eleven years prior.In September 1879, Charles N. Felton, Lloyd Tevis, George Loomis and others created the "Pacific Coast Oil Company", which acquired the assets of Star Oil with $1 million in funding. Pacific Coast Oil eventually became the largest oil interest in California, and in 1900, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil acquired Pacific Coast Oil for $761,000. In 1906, the Pacific Coast acquired the business operations and assets of the Standard Oil Company. At this time, Pacific renamed itself the Standard Oil Company.
Texaco
Since the acquisition of the Pacific Coast Oil Company by Standard Oil, the Standard descendant had traditionally worked closely with Texaco for 100 years, before acquiring Texaco outright in 2001. Originally known as the Texas Fuel Company, Texaco was founded in Beaumont, Texas, as an oil-equipment vendor by "Buckskin Joe". The founder's nickname came from being harsh and aggressive. Texas Fuel worked closely with Chevron. In 1936, it formed a joint venture with California Standard named Caltex, to drill and produce oil in Saudi Arabia. According to energy analyst and activist shareholder Antonia Juhasz, the Texas Fuel Company and California Standard were often referred to as the "terrible twins" for their cutthroat business practices.Formation of the Chevron name
In 1911, the federal government broke Standard Oil into several pieces under the Sherman Antitrust Act. One of those pieces, Standard Oil Co., went on to become Chevron. It became part of the "Seven Sisters", which dominated the world oil industry in the early 20th century. In 1926, the company changed its name to Standard Oil Co. of California. By the terms of the breakup of Standard Oil, at first Standard of California could use the Standard name only within its original geographic area of the Pacific coast states, plus Nevada and Arizona; outside that area, it had to use another name.Today, Chevron is the owner of the Standard Oil trademark in 16 states in the western and southeastern United States. Since American trademark law operates under a use-it-or-lose-it rule, the company owns and operates one Standard-branded Chevron station in each state of the area. However, though Chevron acquired Kyso in the 1960s, its status in Kentucky is unclear after Chevron withdrew its brand from retail sales from Kentucky in July 2010.
The 'Chevron' name came into use for some of its retail products in the 1930s. The name "Calso" was also used from 1946 to 1955, in states outside its native West Coast territory.
Standard Oil Company of California ranked 75th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.
In 1933, Saudi Arabia granted California Standard a concession to find oil, which led to the discovery of oil in 1938. In 1948, California Standard discovered the world's largest oil field in Saudi Arabia, Ghawar Field. California Standard's subsidiary, California-Arabian Standard Oil Company, grew over the years and became the Arabian American Oil Company in 1944. In 1973, the Saudi government began buying into ARAMCO. By 1980, the company was entirely owned by the Saudis, and in 1988, its name was changed to Saudi Arabian Oil Company—Saudi Aramco.
Standard Oil of California and Gulf Oil merged in 1984, which was the largest merger in history at that time. To comply with U.S. antitrust law, California Standard divested many of Gulf's operating subsidiaries, and sold some Gulf stations in the eastern United States and a Philadelphia refinery which has since closed. Among the assets sold off were Gulf's retail outlets in Gulf's home market of Pittsburgh, where Chevron lacks a retail presence but does retain a regional headquarters there as of 2013, partially for Marcellus Shale-related drilling. The same year, Standard Oil of California also took the opportunity to change its legal name to Chevron Corporation, since it had already been using the well-known "Chevron" retail brand name for decades. Chevron would sell the Gulf Oil trademarks for the entire U.S. to Cumberland Farms, the parent company of Gulf Oil LP, in 2010 after Cumberland Farms had a license to the Gulf trademark in the Northeastern United States since 1986.
In 1996, Chevron transferred its natural gas gathering, operating and marketing operation to NGC Corporation in exchange for a roughly 25% equity stake in NGC. In a merger completed February 1, 2000, Illinova Corp. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dynegy Inc. and Chevron's stake increased up to 28%. However, in May 2007, Chevron sold its stake in the company for approximately $985 million, resulting in a gain of $680 million.
Acquisitions and diversification
2000s
The early 2000s saw Chevron engage in many mergers, acquisitions, and sales, the first largest of which was the $45 billion acquisition of Texaco, announced on October 15, 2000. The acquisition created the second-largest oil company in the United States and the world's fourth-largest publicly traded oil company with a combined market value of approximately $95 billion. Completed on October 9, 2001, Chevron temporarily renamed itself to ChevronTexaco between 2001 and 2005; after the company reverted its name to Chevron, Texaco became used as a brand by the company for some of its fueling stations.2005 also saw Chevron purchase Unocal Corporation for $18.4 billion, increasing the company's petroleum and natural gas reserves by about 15%. Because of Unocal's large South East Asian geothermal operations, Chevron became a large producer of geothermal energy. The deal did not include Unocal's former retail operations including the Union 76 trademark, as it had sold that off to Tosco Corporation in 1997. The 76 brand is owned by Phillips 66, unaffiliated with Chevron.
Chevron and the Los Alamos National Laboratory started a cooperation in 2006, to improve the recovery of hydrocarbons from oil shale by developing a shale oil extraction process named Chevron CRUSH. In 2006, the United States Department of the Interior issued a research, development and demonstration lease for Chevron's demonstration oil shale project on public lands in Colorado's Piceance Basin. In February 2012, Chevron notified the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Reclamation, Mining and Safety that it intended to divest this lease.
In 2008, Chevron Limited, a subsidiary of Chevron, sold its equity distributor business in the UK to GB Oils Limited for £21.9 million.
2010s
Starting in 2010, Chevron began to reduce its retail footprint and expand in domestic natural gas. In July 2010, Chevron ended retail operations in the Mid-Atlantic United States by removing the Chevron and Texaco names from 1,100 stations. In 2011, Chevron acquired Pennsylvania-based Atlas Energy Inc. for $3.2 billion in cash and an additional $1.1 billion in existing debt owed by Atlas. Three months later, Chevron acquired drilling and development rights for another 228,000 acres in the Marcellus Shale from Chief Oil & Gas LLC and Tug Hill, Inc. In September 2013, Total S.A. and its joint-venture partner agreed to buy Chevron's retail distribution business in Pakistan for an undisclosed amount.In October 2014, Chevron announced that it would sell a 30 percent holding in its Canadian oil shale holdings to Kuwait's state-owned oil company Kuwait Oil Company for a fee of $1.5 billion. Despite these sales, Chevron continued to explore acquisitions, a trend which had reinvigorated in 2019 and extended throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2019, Chevron announced its intention to acquire Anadarko Petroleum in a deal valued at $33 billion, but decided to focus on other acquisitions shortly afterwards when a deal could not be reached. Despite the failed acquisition of Anadarko, Chevron did acquire Noble Energy for $5 billion in July 2020.
Chevron sold its North Sea operations in May 2019 to Ithaca Energy for $2 billion.
Chevron was not spared from the pandemic, however, as Chevron announced reductions of 10–15% of its workforce due to both the pandemic and a 2020 oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. During the pandemic, Chevron considered a merger with rival ExxonMobil in 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that drove oil demand sharply down. It would have been one of the largest corporate mergers in history, and a combined Chevron and ExxonMobil would have been the second-largest oil company in the world, trailing only Saudi Aramco.
Later in the pandemic, Chevron began requiring some employees, namely expatriate employees, those working overseas, and workers on U.S.-flagged ships, to receive COVID-19 vaccinations after having some key operations, the off-shore platforms off the Gulf of Mexico and Permian Basin for example. The requirement will begin for workers off the Gulf of Mexico on the first of November.