Koch Industries, Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas, and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill. Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, cloud computing, finance, raw materials trading, and investments. Koch owns Flint Hills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Infor, Invista, KBX, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch Investments Group, Koch Minerals & Trading, and Molex. The firm employs 122,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States.
Chevron Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation predominantly specializing in oil and gas. The second-largest direct descendant of Standard Oil, and originally known as the Standard Oil Company of California, it is headquartered in San Ramon, California, and active in more than 180 countries. Within oil and gas, Chevron is vertically integrated and is involved in hydrocarbon exploration, production, refining, marketing and transport, chemicals manufacturing and sales, and power generation.
Ovintiv Inc. is an American independent petroleum company. The company was formed in 2020 through a restructuring of its Canadian predecessor, Encana. Ovintiv is incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Occidental Petroleum Corporation is an American company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration in the United States, and the Middle East as well as petrochemical manufacturing in the United States, Canada, and Chile. It is organized in Delaware and headquartered in Houston. The company ranked 183rd on the 2021 Fortune 500 based on its 2020 revenues and 670th on the 2021 Forbes Global 2000.
Chesapeake Energy Corporation is an American exploration and production company, headquartered in Oklahoma City.
Anadarko Petroleum Corporation was a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration. It was organized in Delaware and headquartered in two skyscrapers in The Woodlands, Texas: the Allison Tower and the Hackett Tower, both named after former CEOs of the company. In 2019, the company was acquired by Occidental Petroleum.
APA Corporation is the holding company for Apache Corporation, an American company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration. It is organized in Delaware and headquartered in Houston. The company is ranked 431st on the Fortune 500.
John Henry Kirby was an American businessman whose ventures made him the largest lumber manufacturer in Texas and the Southern United States. In addition to serving two terms in the Texas Legislature, he also established the Kirby Petroleum Company. With his successful reputation, he was known by his business peers as "The Prince of the Pines" and "The Father of Industrial Texas". He was also active in anti-union and subversive political activities, cofounding the Southern Committee to uphold the Constitution which supported racism, fascism, and sought to block the reelection of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kirbyville, Texas, in Jasper County is named after him, as is Kirby Drive and Upper Kirby in Houston.
Weatherford International plc, an American–Irish public limited company, together with its subsidiaries, is a multinational oilfield service company and one of the largest companies in the world in oil services. Weatherford is a company providing equipment and services used in the drilling, evaluation, completion, production, and intervention of oil and natural gas wells. Many of the company's businesses, including those of predecessor companies, have been operating for more than 50 years.
Fracking in the United States began in 1949. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), by 2013 at least two million oil and gas wells in the US had been hydraulically fractured, and that of new wells being drilled, up to 95% are hydraulically fractured. The output from these wells makes up 43% of the oil production and 67% of the natural gas production in the United States. Environmental safety and health concerns about hydraulic fracturing emerged in the 1980s, and are still being debated at the state and federal levels.
XTO Energy Inc. is an American energy company and subsidiary of ExxonMobil principally operating in North America. Acquired by ExxonMobil in 2010 and based out of Spring, Texas, it is involved with the production, processing, transportation, and development of oil and natural gas resources. The company specializes in developing shale gas via unconventional means like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.
Noble Energy, Inc. was a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration headquartered in Houston, Texas. In October 2020, the company was acquired by Chevron Corporation.
The Bakken Formation is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The formation was initially described by geologist J. W. Nordquist in 1953. The formation is entirely in the subsurface, and has no surface outcrop. It is named after Henry O. Bakken (1901–1982), a farmer in Tioga, North Dakota, who owned the land where the formation was initially discovered while drilling for oil.
Shale gas in the United States is an available source of unconventional natural gas. Led by new applications of hydraulic fracturing technology and horizontal drilling, development of new sources of shale gas has offset declines in production from conventional gas reservoirs, and has led to major increases in reserves of U.S. natural gas. Largely due to shale gas discoveries, estimated reserves of natural gas in the United States in 2008 were 35% higher than in 2006.
The forests in the U.S. state of Texas have been an important resource since its earliest days and have played a major role in the state's history. The vast woodlands of the region, home to many varieties of wildlife before Europeans first showed up, provided economic opportunities for early settlers. They continue to play an important role economically and environmentally in the state.
Venoco, Inc. was a company engaged in hydrocarbon exploration. It primarily operated in the Monterey Formation in California. In 2017, the company filed bankruptcy and was liquidated.
Kirby Corporation, headquartered in Houston, Texas is the largest tank barge operator in the United States, transporting bulk liquid products throughout the Mississippi River System, on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, along all three U.S. Coasts, and in Alaska and Hawaii. Products transported by Kirby include petrochemicals, black oil, refined petroleum products and agricultural chemical products by tank barge. Kirby also owns and operates eight ocean-going barge and tug units transporting dry-bulk commodities in United States coastwise trade.
American Energy Partners, LP, also known as AELP, was an American natural gas and oil company founded in April 2013 by Aubrey K. McClendon. The company managed affiliates responsible for natural shale gas and oil production and exploration in the United States, as well as management of assets, minerals, royalties and non-operated properties. It was headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and employed over 450 people as of August 2015. AELP announced on May 18, 2016, two months after McClendon's death, that it would end operations and close by the end of summer 2016.
In the economics of petroleum extraction, the term shale band refers to the range of global oil prices that can support current levels of United States shale oil extraction via hydraulic fracturing techniques.
ExxonMobil, an American multinational oil and gas corporation presently based out of Texas, has had one of the longest histories of any company in its industry. A direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, the company traces its roots as far back as 1886 to the founding of the Vacuum Oil Company, which would become part of ExxonMobil through its own merger with Mobil during the 1930s. The present name of the company comes from a 1999 merger of Standard Oil's New Jersey and New York successors, which adopted the names Exxon and Mobil respectively throughout the middle of the 20th century. Because of Standard Oil of New Jersey's ownership over all Standard Oil assets at the time of the 1911 breakup, ExxonMobil is seen by some as the definitive continuation of Standard Oil today.
US$ 260.83 million [2] (2016)
US$ 27.50 million [2] (2016)