By Quentin Langley
When the American oil giant, Standard Oil, was broken up, one part of it, mostly based in the Mid West, became known as the American Oil Company, usually shortened to Amoco. Decades later it was one of the ‘seven sisters’ the big private sector oil companies that dominated the refining and marketing of oil and petroleum products. Along with Shell and BP from Europe and Exxon (Esso), Mobil, Texaco and Chevron from the US, Amoco was among the most well-known companies in the world. The very biggest oil companies, of course, are much more anonymous. The big exploration and production companies, like Saudi Aramco, the Kuwait National Oil Corporation and Nigerian National Petroleum Company remain government owned and avoid developing a consumer profile.
In the 1990s, the oil industry began to concentrate again. Exxon merged with Mobil, Texaco with Chevron and BP with Amoco. Only the very largest, already an Anglo-Dutch joint venture, avoided this and remained as Royal Dutch Shell. When BP merged with Amoco and absorbed the much smaller ARCO, the original plan was to brand all the American gas stations as Amoco with the BP name being used elsewhere. However, the BP name soon came to dominate. The name British Petroleum was dropped and the company name was officially changed to BP. The company began to use the slogan ‘beyond petroleum’.
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