Union Oil Company encyclopedia topics

History

The company was founded on October 17, 1890, when it was incorporated in Santa Paula, California, as the Union Oil Company of California. The company was formed by the merger of co-founders Lyman Stewart, Paul Calonico, Thomas Bard, and Wallace Hardison's holdings. Union Oil moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1901. The original headquarters in Santa Paula is a California Historical Landmark.

The company expanded to national status in 1965, when Union Oil merged with the Pure Oil Company, headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. Over the next two decades, Union became the major oil producer in southern Alaska and a major natural gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico. The company was reorganized in 1983, and Union Oil Company of California became an operating subsidiary of a new Delaware-based holding company, Unocal Corporation. Virtually all operations are conducted by Union Oil Company of California (Union Oil).

In 1989, Unocal placed its midwest refining and marketing assets, including Union's refinery in Lemont, Illinois into a 50-50 joint venture with Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (P.D.V.S.A.). The joint venture, known as the Uno-Ven Company, was headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois and primarily comprising employees from Union Oil's then Schaumburg, Illinois division headquarters and Lemont, Illinois refinery. The joint venture was dissolved in 1997, with P.D.V.S.A. receiving full ownership. During the life of the joint venture, the familiar Union 76 brand name continued in full force. At the termination of the joint venture, most stations were converted to Citgo, which is controlled by P.D.V.S.A.

In 1997, Unocal sold its western United States refining and marketing operations to Tosco Corporation, including the rights to the Union 76 brand for refining and marketing (except in states where Uno-Ven operated). Tosco was later acquired by Phillips Petroleum who later merged with Conoco to form ConocoPhillips.

In March 2005, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation CNOOC) tried to acquire Unocal with a bid that valued Unocal at between $16 billion and $18 billion. Following a vote in the United States House of Representatives, the bid was referred to President George W. Bush, on the grounds that its implications for national security needed to be reviewed . CNOOC withdrew its bid. Soon after, Unocal merged with Chevron.

Operations

Central Asia

Unocal was one of the key players in the CentGas consortium, an attempt to build the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline to run from the Caspian area, through Afghanistan and probably Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. One of the consultants to Unocal at that time was Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Afghanistan then to Iraq and currently to the UN.

In the 1980s CIA chief Bill Casey had revived the agency's practise of gaining intelligence from traveling businessmen. Marty Miller, one of Unocal's top executives, conducted negotiations in several Central Asian countries from 1995, and voluntarily provided information gained on these trips to the CIA's Houston station.

In 1996 Unocal opened an office in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while the Taliban were in the process of taking control of the country.

Unocal rented a house in central Kandahar directly across the street from one of [Osama] bin Laden's new compounds. They did not choose this location deliberately. Most of the decent houses in town straddled the Herat Bazaar Road. Also near was the Pakistani consulate, which housed officers from [the Pakistani military Inter-Services Intelligence, the] ISI. Charlie Santos ...

In 1997,

Robert Oakley [ex-US ambassador to Pakistan, now Unocal's ad hoc advisory board] advised Miller to reach the Taliban by working through Pakistan's government [then led by Benazir Bhutto]. He also suggested that Unocal hire Thomas Gouttiere, an Afghan specialist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, to develop a job training program in Kandahar that would teach Pashtuns the technical skills needed to build a pipeline. ... Unocal agreed to pay $900,000 via the University of Nebraska to set up a Unocal training facility on a fifty-six acre site in Kandahar, not far from bin Laden's compounds. ... Gouttiere traveled in and out of Afghanistan and met with Taliban leaders. ... In December 1997 Gouttiere worked with Miller to arrange for another Taliban delegation to visit the United States. ...

Unocal seems to have had a deeper role. Intelligence "whistleblower" Julie Sirrs claimed that anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud told her he had "proof that Unocal had provided money that helped the Taliban take Kabul [in 1996]". And French journalist Richard Labeviere said, referring to the later 1990s, "The CIA and Unocal's security forces ... provided military weapons and instructors to several Taleban militia[s] ...

The Taleban and Unocal were in negotiations in Texas to discuss arrangements for the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan in 1997 and a deal was struck but later failed .

The failure was believed to be because the deal was going to be struck with Bridas, an Argentinian company .

The CentGas pipeline was not built, due to inability of CentGas and the Taliban to come to a mutually acceptable economic understanding although rumours about a deal with Argentinian company Bridas were widespread .

The Argentinian economy collapsed soon after this deal had been struck

Unocal is also the third largest member of the recently completed and opened Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

Sponsorships

Unocal 76 was the official fuel and motor oil of NASCAR from the sports inaugural season in 1948 until the end of the 2003 season when Sunoco became the official fuel and Mobil 1 became the official motor oil. The 76 logo is often seen in Major League Baseball and National League Football stadiums on the west coast.

Criticism

In 1969, it was discovered that one of their drilling platforms off the coast of California had leaked a large quantity of oil into the water. Although Union Oil claimed that it had quickly dealt with the problem, the event reflected poorly on both Unocal and the offshore oil drilling industry.