The story of petroleum is frequently told in terms of black and white, good and evil, are you with us or against us. I think that is an over-simplified fairy tale, and our current relationship with oil as insidious rather than evil. So lets start with the history of petroleum as told by those who make it. This is a true story of the victories of American ingenuity, and perhaps a cautionary tale of how fairy tales can take on a life of their own.
In the beginning, there was John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, founded in 1870 and quickly grown into a monompoly. Interestingly, the surpreme court broke up Standard Oil in 1911 and the model T was introduced in 1908, so the majority sales of the first petroleum giant was not today’s gasoline, but kerosene. Almost every major oil producer in the US today is descended from Standard Oil.
BP started as the Anglo-Persia Oil company with an English entrepreneur risking his fortune to find oil in Persia. BP now owns several of the U.S’s original oil companies, including pieces of Standard Oil of Ohio and ARCO. My Granddad and Grandma Wolfe worked for Standard Oil of Indiana, which eventually became Amoco before being acquired by BP. Chevron, formerly Standard Oil of California, had revenues of $1 billion for the first time in 1951 and now owns Texaco, a former Standard Oil competitor. ConocoPhillips merged in 2001 and is the third largest energy producer in the US. Conoco used to be part of DuPont. Phillips purchased ARCO Alaska before the merger. ExxonMobil, formerly Standard Oil of New York (Exxon) and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Mobil), is the largest remaining chunk of Standard Oil. The Hess Corporation grew up delivering residual fuel oil and took 30 years to get into petroleum drilling. Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held companies in the world, was born in 1927 with technology to make gasoline from heavy oil. Notice how they integrate fossil and natural products today. Marathon Petroleum, and it’s upstream cousin Marathon Oil used to be The Ohio Oil company, and also part of Standard Oil. Shell developed the first modern, continuous refinery in 1915, and was not part of Standard Oil.
The U.S petroleum industry was key to developing longer range aviation, which required fuels that do not freeze at the low temperatures present in the upper atmosphere, and a strategic advantage in WWII. Nazis developed the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert wood or coal to liquid transportation fuels to overcome their petroleum handicap.
Biofuels companies typically see history a bit differently, with emerging oil barons like the Rockefellers derailing renewable fuels to drive up demand for their own.