History of Chevron Corporation

History

Entrance to Chevron's headquarters complex in San Ramon, California

The oldest predecessor of Chevron Corporation is Pacific Coast Oil Company (also known as "Coast Oil"), which was founded after oil was discovered at the Pico Canyon Oilfield) north of Los Angeles in 1879. Coast Oil was acquired in 1900 by the Standard Oil Co. (Iowa), a subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil company. In 1906, Coast Oil was reincorporated as Standard Oil Co. (California).

Another side of the genealogical chart points to the founding of The Texas Fuel Company in 1901, which was started out in three rooms of a corrugated iron building in Beaumont, Texas, United States. This company was known as the Texas Company and later Texaco.

In 1911, Standard Oil Co. (California) was severed from its parent corporation, Standard Oil, as a result of the federal government's successful lawsuit against Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act. It went on to become part of the "Seven Sisters", which dominated the world oil industry in the early 20th century. In 1926, the company shed its parenthetical name by changing to Standard Oil Co. of California, or SoCal. As a former subsidiary of Standard Oil, SoCal had traditionally used the brand name "Standard", but in the 1930s, it began using "Chevron" on some of its retail products, which would eventually become its dominant brand name, although the brand name Calso was 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 SoCal a concession to find oil, which led to the discovery of oil in 1938. In 1948, SoCal discovered the world's largest oil field (Ghawar) in Saudi Arabia. SoCal's subsidiary, California-Arabian Standard Oil Company, grew over the years and became the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) 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, SoCal divested many of Gulf's operating subsidiaries, and sold some Gulf stations and a refinery in the eastern United States. (The refinery is currently owned by Sunoco.) 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, SoCal 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 (later Dynegy) 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.

On October 15, 2000, Chevron announced acquisition of Texaco in a deal valued at $45 billion, creating 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. The merged company was named ChevronTexaco. On May 9, 2005, ChevronTexaco announced it would drop the Texaco moniker and return to the Chevron name. Texaco remained as a brand under the Chevron Corporation.

On October 10, 2001, Texaco purchased General Motors' share in GM Ovonics, which in 2003, was restructured into Cobasys, a 50/50 joint venture between Chevron and Energy Conversion Devices Ovonics. In 2009, both Chevron and Energy Conservation Devices sold their stakes in Cobasys to SB LiMotive Co.

In 2005, Chevron purchased 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 the world's largest producer of geothermal energy.

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 intends to divest this lease.

In July 2010, Chevron ended retail operations in the Mid-Atlantic United States, 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.