Amoco
Amoco is a brand of fuel stations operating in the United States and owned by British conglomerate BP since 1998. The Amoco Corporation was an American chemical and oil company, founded by Standard Oil Company in 1889 around a refinery in Whiting, Indiana, and was officially the Standard Oil Company of Indiana until 1985. In 1911, it became an independent corporation as part of the break-up of the Standard Oil trust. Incorporated in Indiana, it was headquartered in Chicago.
In 1925, Standard Oil of Indiana absorbed the American Oil Company, founded in Baltimore in 1910, and incorporated in 1922, by Louis Blaustein and his son Jacob. The combined corporation operated or licensed gas stations under both the Standard name and the American or Amoco name and its logo using these names became a red, white and blue oval with a torch in the center. By the mid-twentieth century it was ranked the largest oil company in the United States. In 1985, it changed its corporate name to Amoco.
The firm's innovations included two essential parts of the modern industry, the gasoline tanker truck and the drive-through filling station. Its "Amoco Super-Premium" lead-free gasoline was marketed decades before environmental concerns led to the eventual phasing out of leaded gasoline throughout the United States. Amoco's headquarters were located in the Amoco Building in Chicago, Illinois.
Amoco merged with BP in December 1998 to form BP Amoco, which was renamed BP in 2001. The Amoco name was branded at the gas pump for the highest 93 octane blends. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 tarnished the BP brand in the US, resulting in the re-consideration of US branding. In October 2017, BP announced re-introduction of the Amoco branded stations to selected US markets. As of 2023, there were over 600 new Amoco stations in the eastern and midwestern United States.
History
Standard Oil of Indiana
Standard Oil of Indiana was formed in 1889 by John D. Rockefeller as part of the Standard Oil Trust. The company's operations centered around the Whiting Refinery situated on Lake Michigan, and first operational in 1890. In 1910, with the increased usage of the automobile, Indiana Standard decided to specialize in providing gasoline to consumers. In 1911, the year it became independent from the Standard Oil trust, the company sold 88% of the gasoline and kerosene sold in the Midwest. In 1912, it opened its first gas service station in Minneapolis, Minnesota.When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, Indiana Standard was assigned marketing territory covering most of the Midwestern United States, including Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. It had the exclusive rights to use the Standard name in the region. Soon after, Indiana Standard scientist William Burton pioneered a new way to process crude oil, called thermal cracking, which allowed the industry to produce more oil. The company licensed the process to 14 companies between 1914 and 1919, including former parent company Standard Oil of New Jersey. The company opened its Casper refinery in 1914.
In 1918, Indiana Standard named Colonel Robert W. Stewart as its first chairman. Under Stewart, it began investing in other oil companies outside its Standard marketing territory, beginning with the purchase of the Dixie Oil Company of Louisiana in 1919 and a one-third interest in Midwest Refining in 1920. By June 1921, Standard Oil owned 85% of Midwest's stock.
By 1922, the company also had facilities in Sugar Creek, Missouri; Wood River, Illinois; and Greybull, and Laramie in Wyoming. The Casper facility was the largest volume gasoline refinery in the world by this time, turning 1.35 million barrels of crude oil per month into 615,000 barrels of gasoline. In the 1920s and 1930s, Indiana Standard opened up dozens more refining and oil-drilling facilities. Combined with a new oil-refining process, Indiana Standard created its exploration and production business, Stanolind, in 1931. In the following years, a period of intense exploration and search for oil-rich fields ensued; the company drilled over 1,000 wells in 1937 alone.
Purchase of American Oil Company
After working for Standard Oil, Blaustein eventually saved enough capital to found his own oil company with his son in 1910. They called it the American Oil Company. Blaustein incorporated his business in 1922.In 1923, the Blausteins sold a half interest in American Oil to the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company in exchange for a guaranteed supply of oil. Before this deal, Amoco was forced to depend on Standard Oil of New Jersey, a competitor, for its supplies. Standard Oil of Indiana acquired Pan American in 1925, beginning John D. Rockefeller's association with the Amoco name.
In the wake of the infamous Teapot Dome scandal, it was discovered that Harry Sinclair, Robert Stewart, Albert Fall, and others, had been laundering money through a shell company called Continental Trading Company and using the funds to buy more than $3 million in liberty bonds during World War I. Though Stewart was never charged with a crime, John D. Rockefeller Jr. demanded his resignation. After a lengthy proxy fight between the two, Stewart was eventually ousted in March 1929.
Pipelines and oil transport
In 1921–22, Indiana Standard bought a half interest in the Sinclair Pipe Line Company, a subsidiary of Sinclair Oil Corporation for $16,390,000, which owned a network of crude oil pipelines in the midwestern United States from Ranger, Texas passing by Tulsa, Oklahoma and Kansas City, Missouri to East Chicago, Indiana. In 1925 Indiana Standard made a $36.7 million stake in the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company gave the company interest in the American Oil Company, which marketed half of PAT's oil in the United States. Indiana Standard raised its stake in PAT to 81 percent by 1929. The two companies officially merged in 1954.In 1930, Standard completed its acquisition of Sinclair Pipeline and also acquired the remaining half of Sinclair Crude Oil Purchasing Company. The two companies were renamed to Stanolind Pipeline Company and Stanolind Crude Oil Purchasing Company. The pipeline company headquarters were located in the Philcade building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1950, all of the corporation's pipeline activities were merged into a single entity, which was named Service Pipeline Company. By 1964, the company operated 14,500 miles of pipelines located in the central part of the country. It gathered crude oil from 34,300 wells and carried it to 59 refineries, delivering 900,000 to 950,000 barrels a day.
Lead-free gasoline
While most oil companies were switching to leaded gasolines en masse during the mid-to-late 1920s, American Oil chose to continue marketing its premium-grade "Amoco-Gas" as a lead-free gasoline by using aromatics rather than tetraethyllead to increase octane levels. This was decades before the environmental movement of the early 1970s that led to more stringent auto-emission controls, which ultimately mandated the universal phase out of leaded gasoline.The "Amoco" lead-free gasoline was sold at American's stations in the eastern and southern U.S. alongside American Regular gasoline, which was a leaded fuel. By 1970, lead-free Amoco was introduced in the Indiana Standard marketing area in 1970. The Red Crown Regular and White Crown Premium gasolines marketed by parent company Standard Oil in its prime marketing area in the Midwest before 1961, also contained lead. By 1978, Amoco had phased out premium lead gas.
In November 1986, amid pressures from the EPA to cut down on the usage of lead in gasoline, Amoco became the first major oil company to say it would quit all retail sales of leaded gasoline. In its place, Amoco began selling a mid-grade 89 octane unleaded gasoline, along with its unleaded regular and unleaded premium offerings.
World War II
followed this period of exploration; Indiana Standard participated in the war effort, discovering new means of refinement and even a way of producing TNT more quickly and easily. In addition, Indiana Standard significantly contributed to the aviation and land gasoline needed for the Allied armies. Also, during the war Indiana Standard created its chemical division, formed from the merger of the Pan American Chemicals Company and the Indoil Chemical Company.Post-war
In the late 1940s, after World War II, Indiana Standard returned to focusing on domestic oil refinement and advancement. In 1947, Indiana Standard was the first company to drill off-shore, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in 1948, Stanolind Oil invented Hydrafrac, a hydraulic well fracturing process that increased oil production worldwide. Initially the Hydrafrac process was licensed exclusively to Halliburton.By the early 1950s, Standard Oil of Indiana was ranked as the second-largest American oil company with annual gross sales of $1.5 billion. It had 12 refineries in the United States, marketed its products in 41 states, owned of crude oil pipelines, of trunk lines, and of product pipelines.
In October 1954, Standard Indiana opened its Mandan refinery in North Dakota under its American Oil Company subsidiary.
Business expansion
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Indiana Standard began to diversify its assets. It again led the way with scientific and technological discoveries. Indiana Standard discovered PTA, a chemical for polyester fiber production. In 1968, following that discovery, Indiana Standard acquired the Avisun Corporation and Patchogue-Plymouth, forming the Amoco Fabrics and Fibers Company. By 1992, the company was trying to sell off its yarn factories in Alabama and Georgia.The company's Amoco Foam Products subsidiary made polystyrene cups, plates, carrying trays and other products. The division was sold to Tenneco in June 1996.