Exxon Mobil Corp. history, profile and corporate video
Exxon Mobil Corp. explores, develops and distributes crude oil and natural gas. The company through its divisions and affiliated companies, engages in its principal business, is energy, involving exploration for, and production of, crude oil and natural gas, manufacture of petroleum products and transportation and sale of crude oil, natural gas and petroleum products. It manufactures and markets commodity petrochemicals, including olefins, aromatics, polyethylene and polypropylene plastics and a variety of specialty products. The company also has interests in electric power generation facilities. It operates business under three segments: Upstream, Downstream and Chemical. The Upstream segment is organized and operates to explore for and produce crude oil and natural gas. The Downstream segment manufactures and sells petroleum products. The refining and supply operations encompasses global network of manufacturing plants, transportation systems, and distribution centers provides fuels, lubricants, and other high-value products and feedstocks to customers. The Chemical segment operates to manufacture and sell petrochemicals. It supplies olefins, polyolefin’s, aromatics, and a wide variety of other petrochemicals. The company operates and markets products in the U.S. and most other countries of the world. Exxon Mobil was founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1882 and is headquartered in Irving, TX.“
“ExxonMobil History
Exxon Mobil Corp. was formed in 1999 by the merger of two major oil companies, Exxon and Mobil. Both Exxon and Mobil were descendants of the John D. Rockefeller corporation, Standard Oil which was established in 1870. The reputation of Standard Oil in the public eye suffered badly after publication of Ida M. Tarbell’s classic exposé The History of the Standard Oil Co. in 1904, leading to a growing outcry for the government to take action against the company.
By 1911, with public outcry at a climax, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Standard Oil must be dissolved and split into 34 companies. Two of these companies were Jersey Standard (“Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey”), which eventually became Exxon, andSocony (“Standard Oil Co. of New York”), which eventually became Mobil.
In the same year, the nation’s kerosene output was eclipsed for the first time by gasoline. The growing automotive market inspired the product trademark Mobiloil, registered by Socony in 1920.
Over the next few decades, both companies grew significantly. Jersey Standard, led by Walter C. Teagle, became the largest oil producer in the world. It acquired a 50 percent share in Humble Oil & Refining Co., a Texas oil producer. Socony purchased a 45 percent interest inMagnolia Petroleum Co., a major refiner, marketer and pipeline transporter. In 1931, Socony merged with Vacuum Oil Co., an industry pioneer dating back to 1866 and a growing Standard Oil spin-off in its own right.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Jersey Standard had oil production and refineries in Indonesia but no marketing network. Socony-Vacuum had Asian marketing outlets supplied remotely from California. In 1933, Jersey Standard and Socony-Vacuum merged their interests in the region into a 50–50 joint venture. Standard-Vacuum Oil Co., or “Stanvac,” operated in 50 countries, from East Africa to New Zealand, before it was dissolved in 1962.
Mobil Chemical Co. was established in 1950. As of 1999, its principal products included basic olefins and aromatics, ethylene glycol andpolyethylene. The company produced synthetic lubricant base stocks as well as lubricant additives, propylene packaging films and catalysts. Exxon Chemical Co. (first named Enjay Chemicals) became a worldwide organization in 1965 and in 1999 was a major producer and marketer of olefins, aromatics, polyethylene and polypropylene along with speciality lines such as elastomers, plasticizers, solvents, process fluids, oxo alcohols and adhesive resins. The company was an industry leader in metallocene catalysttechnology to make unique polymers with improved performance.
In 1955, Socony-Vacuum became Socony Mobil Oil Co. and, in 1966, simply Mobil Oil Corp. A decade later, the newly incorporated Mobil Corp. absorbed Mobil Oil as a wholly owned subsidiary. Jersey Standard changed its name to Exxon Corp. in 1972 and established Exxon as a trademark throughout the United States. In other parts of the world, Exxon and its affiliated companies continued to use its Esso trademark.
On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska and spilled more than 11 million US gallons (42,000 m3) of crude oil. The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the second largest in U.S. history, and in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez incident, the U.S. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. An initial award of $5 billion USD punitive was reduced to $507.5 million by the US Supreme Court in June 2008, and distributions of this award have commenced.
In 1998, Exxon and Mobil signed a US$73.7 billion definitive agreement to merge and form a new company called Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest company on the planet. Aftershareholder and regulatory approvals, the merger was completed on November 30, 1999. The merger of Exxon and Mobil was unique in American history because it reunited the two largest companies of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust, Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey/Exxon and Standard Oil Co. of New York/Mobil, which had been forcibly separated by government order nearly a century earlier. This reunion resulted in the largest merger in US corporate history.
In 2000, ExxonMobil sold a refinery in Benicia, California and 340 Exxon-branded stations to Valero Energy Corp., as part of an FTC-mandated divestiture of California assets. ExxonMobil continues to supply petroleum products to over 700 Mobil-branded retail outlets in California.
In 2005, ExxonMobil’s stock price surged in parallel with rising oil prices, surpassing General Electric as the largest corporation in the world in terms of market capitalization. At the end of 2005, it reported record profits of US $36 billion in annual income, up 42 percent from the previous year (the overall annual income was an all-time record for annual income by any business, and included $10 billion in the third quarter alone, also an all-time record income for a single quarter by any business). The company and the American Petroleum Institute (the oil and chemical industry’s lobbying organization) put these profits in context by comparing oil industry profits to those of other large industries such as pharmaceuticals and banking.
On June 12, 2008, ExxonMobil announced that it was transitioning out of the direct-served retail market, citing the increasing difficulty of running gas stations under rising crude oilcosts. The multi-year process will gradually phase the corporation out of the direct-served retail market, and will affect 820 company-owned stations and approximately 1,400 other stations operated by dealers distributing across the United States. The sale has not resulted in the disappearance of Exxon and Mobil branded stations; the new owners will continue to sell Exxon and Mobil-branded gasoline and license the appropriate names from ExxonMobil, who will in turn be compensated for use of the brands.
In 2010, ExxonMobil bought XTO Energy, the company focused on development and production of unconventional resources.
In terms of potential future developments, many gas and oil companies are considering the economic and environmental benefits of Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG). This is an innovative technology designed to enable the development of offshore gas resources that would otherwise remain untapped, because environmental or economic factors make it unviable to develop them via a land-based LNG operation. ExxonMobil is waiting for an appropriate project to launch its FLNG development, and the only FLNG facility currently in development is being built by Shell, due for completion in around 2017.
In 2012, ExxonMobil confirmed a deal for production and exploration activities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
In 2013, Exxon’s CEO Rex Tillerson was quoted “Exxon is starting work with Russia’s OAO Rosneft in assessing what could be massive reserves of shale oil in Western Siberia”, “There is huge shale potential in shale rocks in West Siberia…we just don’t know what the quality is”.
In November 2013, Exxon agreed to sell its majority stakes in a Hong Kong-based utility and power storage firm, Castle Peak Co Ltd, for a total of $3.4 billion, to CLP Holdings.”
*Information from Forbes and Wikipedia.org
**Video published on YouTube by “ExxonMobil“