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Unocal Corporation is the parent company of Union Oil Company of California which was incorporated in California in 1890. Virtually all operations are conducted by Union Oil Company of California (Union Oil), which does business as Unocal and its subsidiaries. On August 10, 2005, Unocal merged with Chevron Corporation and became a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Unocal was founded in 1890 as the Union Oil Company of California. Unocal is also known as Unocal 76. Union 76 gasoline is no longer sold by the company, which sold its retail operations to a predecessor company of ConocoPhillips. In April 2005, the company agreed to a merger with ChevronTexaco (now Chevron); however, in June 2005, the Chinese oil company Cnooc made a rival $18.5 billion bid. On July 19, 2005, Unocal agreed to merge with Chevron. Unocal and Chevron completed their merger on August 10, 2005.

History

Unocal was founded on October 17, 1890, when it was incorporated in Santa Paula, California, as the Union Oil Company of California. The company was formed by the merger of co-founders Lyman Stewart, Thomas Bard, and Wallace Hardison's holdings. Union Oil moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1901. The original headquarters in Santa Paula is a California Historical Landmark. The company expanded to national status in 1965, when Union Oil merged with the Pure Oil Company, headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois. Over the next two decades, Union became the major oil producer in southern Alaska and a major natural gas producer in the Gulf of Mexico. The company was reorganized in 1983 and Union Oil Company of California became an operating subsidiary of a new Delaware-based holding company, Unocal Corporation. However, virtually all operations are conducted by Union Oil Company of California (Union Oil).

Central Asia

Unocal was one of the key players in the CentGas consortium, an attempt to build a pipeline to run from the Caspian area, through Afghanistan and probably Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. One of the consultants to Unocal at that time was Zalmay Khalilzad, now US ambassador to Iraq. The CentGas pipeline was not built, due to inability of CentGas and the Taliban to come to a mutually acceptable economic understanding. Shortly thereafter, the US invaded Afghanistan, removing Taliban control from Afghanistan and making moot the question of their remuneration.

Unocal is also the third largest member of the recently completed and opened Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.

Myanmar

Unocal was charged with numerous human rights violations in the construction of the Yadana Pipeline in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Since 1988, Myanmar has been governed by a particularly unstable and militaristic regime. The pipeline consortium (which included Unocal) hired the Burmese military, according to the company to protect the pipeline from insurgents and terrorists. The soldiers have been accused by villagers in the vicinity of the pipeline of torture, rape and forced labor. Unocal has condemned these actions and points out that the company does not control the Burmese military and did not hire them to police residents. Unocal is the defendant in legal action brought in the United States under the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, a law originally designed to aid victims of pirates. The United States Department of Justice has taken measures to oppose use of the law in human rights cases, and business groups have lobbied the U.S. Congress to repeal the law. It is said to interfere with US foreign relations. This would nullify all pending lawsuits filed under the act. Plaintiffs and Unocal settled the lawsuits against Unocal for an unspecified amount in April 2005.

References

External links

Fortune 1000 | 1890 establishments | Companies based in Los Angeles | Oil companies of the United States

Unocal | Unocal Corporation

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Unocal Corporation".

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