Conoco

CONOCO, or ConocoPhillips since the merger with Phillips Petroleum in 2002, is a major U.S. based oil and petrochemical company with operations in 29 countries. As of 2002, the bulk of ConocoPhillips' production operations were in the United States, Norway, and the United Kingdom with smaller operations in Canada, China, Dubai, Ecuador, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

The company also operates 18 refineries in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Germany, and Malaysia. The company's 12 U.S. refineries make ConocoPhillips the largest oil refiner in America. The Conoco side of ConocoPhillips can trace its origins back to the Continental Oil and Transportation Company formed in 1875 to distribute petroleum products across the American West. In 1884–85, Standard Oil acquired Continental Oil to distribute Standard Oil products.

In 1913, the company became independent after the break-up of the Standard Oil Trust. Short of oil supplies, Continental Oil merged with Marland Oil in 1928, forming the Continental Oil Company or Conoco. After a fierce takeover battle between Seagram, Mobil, Texaco, Marathon Oil and Unocal, DuPont bought Conoco in 1981 to secure access to cheap feedstock for DuPont's chemical plants. DuPont divested Conoco in 1999 as part of a move away from the highly cyclical petrochemical business toward the life sciences. In 2002, Conoco and Phillips Petroleum merged in order to compete with super-majors like BP Amoco, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

Conoco has a mixed environmental record. In 1990, the company undertook to replace its fleet of single-hulled oil tankers with doubled-hulled tankers in response to the Exxon Valdez accident. That same year, Conoco paid $23 million to settle a lawsuit brought by residents of Ponca City, Oklahoma who claimed that the Ponca City Refinery had polluted their groundwater.

During the past 10 years, Conoco has regularly fallen afoul of U.S. environmental protection regulations. The company accumulated the largest number of fines from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality during the period of 1993–2001, paying $250,000 for a series of self-reported violations between 1998 and 2001. For eight years until 1989, Conoco and Pioneer Nuclear Corporation ran a de facto low-level radioactive waste dump without a permit at the Conquista Uranium Mine in Texas.

Conoco has also been involved in a series of oil royalty disputes with federal and state authorities. In 1999, Conoco paid the state of California $1.15 million to settle an oil royalty dispute. The company paid the federal government $26 million to settle another oil royalty dispute in 2000. Conoco and several other vertically integrated oil companies evaded royalty payments, calculated as a percentage of the post price, by undervaluing the oil produced on state and federal land, making correspondingly lower royalty payments to the government.