Occidental Petroleum Corporation

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Occidental Petroleum Corporation headquarters, Los Angeles.

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Occidental Petroleum Corporation, major American petroleum-producing company. Headquarters are in Los Angeles.

Founded in 1920 in Los Angeles, Occidental Petroleum was for many years a small, largely unprofitable driller. It was precisely its bleak prospects that first attracted the attention of Armand Hammer, a successful international businessman who hoped to use the ailing company as a tax shelter. In 1957 Hammer bought a controlling interest in Occidental but quickly abandoned his tax shelter plan when its rigs struck a rich crude oil deposit in southern California. Hammer thereupon acquired another drilling company, and in 1961 Occidental struck a huge natural gas deposit near Stockton in northern California. The success of these and other finds spurred Hammer to expand the company’s reach beyond oil and gas and beyond the United States. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the company acquired interests in coal mining, in the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, and fertilizers, and in the processing and marketing of meat.

In 1967 Hammer personally won an oil concession from Libya following a major oil discovery in that country, a deal that propelled the growth of “Oxy,” as the firm came to be called, into a major international oil company. However, in order to dissuade the revolutionary Libyan government from nationalizing its oil production in the 1970s, Occidental offered concessions that severely limited its income from that country, and in 1986 the company ceased operations there altogether as relations between Libya and the United States deteriorated.

To help replenish its oil and natural gas reserves, Occidental expanded into the North Sea, where it made a major oil discovery in 1973; acquired Cities Service Company in 1982 (though it sold off all of that company’s refining and marketing operations the next year); and acquired in 1986 the Midcon Corporation, which had one of the largest natural gas pipelines in the United States. In 1987 the company gathered its chemical activities into Occidental Chemical Corporation, or OxyChem, with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The growth of the company’s chemical interests marked Hammer’s decisive efforts to shift Occidental away from an exclusive reliance on energy ventures.

Following Hammer’s death in 1990, Ray R. Irani became president and chief executive officer. During his 20-year tenure, Irani reduced the company’s debt burden and refocused its operations on profitable oil and gas production. Occidental’s interests in meatpacking, agricultural products, coal mining, the North Sea, and gas pipelines acquired from Midcon were sold off. In 1998 the company bought huge natural gas deposits in the Elk Hills Field of southern California (formerly part of the U.S. government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve), and in 2000 it bought Altura Energy, Ltd., a company with reserves in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. The company pursued lucrative production and pipeline projects in the Persian Gulf, particularly in Oman and Qatar, and in 2005 it renewed operations in Libya. Through OxyChem and other subsidiaries and joint ventures, chemicals remained important, generating as much as one-third of Occidental’s revenue. Irani was succeeded by Stephen I. Chazen in 2011.