Texaco Inc.

Texaco Inc., former U.S.-based petroleum corporation that was, during the late 20th century, one of the world’s largest oil companies in terms of sales. The name Texaco was officially adopted in 1959. Although the company originally conducted its business ventures wholly within Texas, it expanded to all states of the United States and eventually established operations in many other parts of the world, including Latin America, Indonesia, and the Middle East. It was primarily engaged in the production, refining, marketing, and shipping of crude oil and natural gas. Texaco was acquired by Chevron Corporation in 2001.

In 1901 the Texas Fuel Company was founded in Beaumont, Texas, by Joseph S. Cullinan (1860–1937), a former Standard Oil field worker, and Arnold Schlaet (1859–1946), a New York investment manager. Their original design was to buy and refine oil in Texas and sell it to Standard Oil Company interests in the north at a profit, but very soon they expanded into oil production in the giant Spindletop field. The company was reorganized in 1902 as the Texas Company, and by 1910 it was operating tankers out of New York. By 1911 it had established its first refinery outside Texas, in Illinois. In 1928 it became the first company to market in the conterminous 48 states, and in the 1930s it began operations in Canada, Colombia, and Venezuela. It joined with Standard Oil of California (Socal) in half ownership of ventures in the Middle East and Indonesia—such as the Caltex group of companies in Bahrain, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in Saudi Arabia, and holding companies in Sumatra and Java.

In 1984 Texaco purchased the Getty Oil Company but was sued for contract interference by the Pennzoil Company, whose own imminent acquisition of Getty had been derailed by Texaco’s successful bid. Texaco retained control of Getty, but Pennzoil won punitive damages after a five-year court battle, being awarded the sum of $10.5 billion (of which Texaco eventually paid $3 billion). Getty Oil, headquartered in Los Angeles, had been incorporated in 1928 as the Pacific Western Oil Corporation, holding properties owned by Edward L. Doherty and family. It came under the control of J. Paul Getty, and the name Getty Oil Company was adopted in 1956. The protracted legal and financial complications over the Getty acquisition were a drain on Texaco, and it went through more than a decade of reorganization and strategic refocusing before it was finally acquired by Chevron.