Chevron News

Chevron   traces its history back to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust; it has benefited from the Middle East's massive petroleum reserves; it capitalized on the mergers-and-acquisitions wave that swept the oil industry in the 1980s; and it has a dismal environmental record. 

 Known until 1984 as Standard Oil of California, Chevron has been one of the more conservative of the oil majors but has periodically made dramatic moves. The first of these came in the 1930s, when the company began exploration in Saudi Arabia - which had been shunned by some of the larger oil players - and ended up discovering the biggest petroleum reserve in the world. 

 In 1984, Gulf Oil brought in Chevron as a white knight to save it from a hostile takeover threatened by raider T. Boone Pickens, Jr. The subsequent $13.2 billion Chevron buyout of Gulf stands as the second largest merger in corporate history. Recently, the company has fought the bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union to move ahead with a plan - the largest Western project in the country - to explore for oil near the Caspian Sea.