Conoco

History

The "Continental Oil and Transportation Company" was founded by Isaac Elder Blake in November 1875 in Ogden, Utah. The company distributed the recently harnessed mineral resource of petroleum, which had first been identified in a commercially extractable concentration in August 1859 by Edwin Drake (1819–1880), in a well drilled at Oil Creek, near Titusville, (Crawford County), in the far northwestern corner of Pennsylvania). Continental distributed in the Western United States, and included the petroleum by-products of kerosene, benzene, and others. Continental Oil Company was acquired by Standard Oil Company in 1884, and was spun off during the Standard Oil divestiture in 1911.

Marland Oil Company, which had been founded by exploration pioneer E. W. Marland, acquired the Continental Oil Company in 1929, and the main office was moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma. Marland Oil acquired the assets (subject to liabilities) of Continental Oil Company for a consideration of 2,317,266 shares of stock. The merged company took the more recognizable Continental name along with the Conoco brand. However, it adopted Marland's red triangle logo, which it retained until 1970, when the capsule logo was adopted.

Dan Moran (1888–1948) succeeded Marland Oil Company founder E. W. Marland as president of Marland Oil in 1928, and became the first president of the merged Conoco. Moran then ran Conoco for twenty years, seeing the company through economic hardships and challenges of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and retiring in 1947, the year before he died. The company ran into trouble when, shortly after acquisition, it was hit by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Conoco became a key supplier to the United States federal government and its world-wide deployment of the United States Armed Forces, along with several other Allied powers and their militaries during the World War II.

Under the leadership of successor Leonard F. McCollum, Conoco grew from a regional petroleum company to a global corporation in the post-war years of the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Another upheaval for the company came two decades later during the 1970s energy crisis, which began with the 1973–1974 Arab oil embargo following the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. The company did not fully recover until 1981, when Conoco became a subsidiary of former corporate rival but then white knight DuPont company of Wilmington, Delaware.

In 1981, Dome Petroleum made a tender offer for 20% of Conoco. More than 50% of Conoco shares were tendered, evidence that shareholders were unhappy, and several companies made their own tender offers to take over Conoco. Cash-rich and wanting to diversify, Seagram Company Ltd. engineered a takeover of Conoco. Although Seagram acquired a 32.2% stake in Conoco, DuPont was brought in as a white knight by the oil company and entered the bidding war. Mobil Corporation, the nation's second-largest oil company at the time, also joined the bid, and borrowed $5 billion to bid for Cocono. In the end, Seagram and Mobil lost out in the Conoco bidding war. In exchange for its stake in Conoco Inc, Seagram became a 24.3% owner (almost one-quarter of stock/interest) of the DuPont company. By 1995, Seagram was DuPont's largest single shareholder with four seats on the board of directors.