Gulf Oil

From Freepedia

Gulf Oil was a major global oil company from the 1900s to the 1980s. The eighth largest manufacturing company in the country in 1941 and the ninth largest manufacturing company in the country in 1979, Gulf Oil was considered a member of the so-called Seven Sisters oil magnates. Gulf, headquarted in Pittsburgh was one of the chief instruments of the legendary Mellon fortune.


Gulf Oil was born in 1901 with an oil discovery in Spindletop, Texas. It was founded by William Larimer Mellon of the Pennsylvania Mellons. Gulf Oil grew over time, and its innovations include the first drive-in service station, complimentary road maps and drilling over-water at Ferry Lake. It had extensive exploration operations in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere.

Its undoing as an independent company began in 1982 when T. Boone Pickens, a Texas oilman and corporate raider (or greenmailer), and owner of Mesa Petroleum made an offer for the much larger Cities Service Company from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Gulf offered to be a white knight and take over Cities Service (more generally known by the name Citgo) to keep them out of the clutches of Mesa. Cities Service was ultimately sold to Occidental Petroleum, and the retail operations were resold to Southland Corporation, the operators of 7-Eleven stores.

Mesa later turned on Gulf, and acquired 11% of the company. Gulf turned to Standard Oil of California (better known as Chevron) to act as their white knight in 1984. The forced buyout of Gulf Oil was a controversy that reached all the way to the U.S. Congress and business talk shows. Never before had a "small operator" successfully taken apart a Fortune 500 company. The merger with Chevron would become the largest coporate merger in world history up to that time. Chevron, to settle with the government antitrust requirements, sold some Gulf stations and a refinery in the eastern United States to British Petroleum (BP) and Cumberland Farms in 1985. Confusion arose as both BP and Chevron continued to use the Gulf name through the early 1990s, but would not accept each others' credit cards. All Gulf stations franchised by BP and Chevron have since been converted to those names. Stations operating under the Gulf name are now limited to those run by Cumberland Farms of Canton, Massachusetts, a convenience store operator in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states. The Canadian exploration and production arm of Gulf Oil continued as an independant oil compnay (Gulf Canada Resources) until its acquisition by Conoco in 2002.

Their gasoline line "Goodgulf" became the name of a character in Bored of the Rings, a parody of The Lord of the Rings.

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