Texaco
From The Matrix
Texaco was the name of an American oil company that has merged into ChevronTexaco. It began as the Texas Fuel Company, founded in 1901 Beaumont, Texas. For many years, Texaco was the only company selling gasoline in all 50 states, but this is no longer true. Its logo features a white star in a red circle, leading to the long-running advertising jingles "You can trust your car to the man who wears the star." and "Star of the American Road."
Texaco is associated with the Havoline brand of motor oil and other automotive products. It is one of the sponsors of NASCAR.
Texaco's patented gasoline additive is called CleanSystem3.
Major events:
- 1984 bought Getty Oil (including Tidewater Petroleum), the Getty name and stations in the Northeastern United States was sold to Power Test and is still today.
- 1985 - On November 19 Pennzoil won a US$10.53 billion verdict from Texaco in the largest civil verdict in US history (Texaco established a signed contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil entered into an unsigned, yet still binding, buyout contract with Getty).
- 1998 formed joint venture Equilon with Royal Dutch Shell, combining their Western and Midwestern U.S. refining and marketing.
- 1998 formed joint venture Motiva with Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco, a joint venture combining their Eastern and Gulf Coast U.S. refining and marketing businesses.
- 2001, Shell purchased Texaco's share of the joint ventures to permit Texaco to merge with Chevron. Shell may exclusively use the Texaco brand in the U.S. through 2004, and non-exclusively through 2006.
- 2001, Chevron merged with Texaco to became ChevronTexaco.
ALSO: [copied from http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200109/hattam1.asp]
In November 1993, indigenous residents of Ecuador and Peru filed a $1.5- billion class-action lawsuit against Texaco, charging that the company's extraction operations in the Ecuadorian Amazon dumped 16 million gallons of crude oil into local rivers between 1964 and 1990. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in May, saying the matter belongs in an Ecuadorian court; Texaco has agreed to contribute to a cleanup fund for the area, but denies any illegal environmental wrongdoing.
Refining record: Of the seven Texaco and Star (a joint venture of Texaco and Saudi Aramco) refineries Environmental Defense evaluated, one ranked in the bottom 20 percent.
Stance on global warming: In February 2000, Texaco became the first U.S. oil giant to drop out of the Global Climate Coalition, which led the GCC to reconfigure its membership.
Green initiatives: Texaco is a participant in the California Fuel Cell Partnership (see BP entry). In May 2000, Texaco spent $67.4 million on a 20 percent share in Energy Conversion Devices Incorporated, an alternative-energy firm working on fuel cells and other new technologies.
