THE UNDERGROUND NAZI INVASION OF AMERICA - Part 32
(Note: ATLANTIC RICHFIELD CO., also known as ARCO, is the 7th largest Petroleum/Chemical company in America, and part of the so- called "7-Sisters" Oil cartels -- in this case owned and run by the Rockefellers. On a hunch that there may be a connection between Atlantic Richfield [ARCO] and Standard Oil [EXXON], being that both of the companies are involved in the Oil Business, both have apparent connections to fascist political-economic agendas, and both have large facilities in New Jersey -- I began to "surf" the Internet in hopes of finding other possible connections. The following "history" was taken from the ARCO website, and may be very enlightening in tying certain loose ends together... - Wol.)
ARCO: A Time to Remember
1866 Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company is founded.
1874 Atlantic is sold to John D. ROCKEFELLER'S Standard Oil Trust. (Later to become EXXON. - Wol.)
1911 Standard Oil Trust is dissolved under Sherman Antitrust Act, and Atlantic is independent again.
1914-1918 Atlantic "fighting grade" gasoline powers Allied aviators in World War I.
1915 Atlantic opens first service station on Baum Boulevard in Pittsburgh.
1917 First Richfield station at Slauson and Central Avenues in Los Angeles sports new Eagle trademark.
1921 Sinclair opens first modern service station in Chicago, "Greasing Palace No. 1".
1922 Atlantic opens Dallas office in that city's first sky- scraper the Magnolia Building.
1929 Richfield builds new landmark 12-story office tower at 6th and Flower Streets in Los Angeles.
1931 Hit by the depression, Richfield slides into receivership.
Sinclair merges with Rio Grande Oil and Prairie Pipeline and Prairie Oil and Gas Companies, and now has largest U.S. pipeline network.
1932 Last horse is retired from Atlantic delivery fleet.
1942-1945 Atlantic produces 20 percent of Allies' World War II aviation fuel. Richfield emerges as a leading producer of high- octane fuels.
1942 February 23, Richfield's Elwood Field near Santa Barbara is shelled by Japanese submarine, making Richfield first victim of attack by foreign power on U.S. soil since War of 1812.
1945 Atlantic discovers Block 31 Field in Crane County, Texas, using highly accurate, company-developed seismic technology.
1948 Richfield discovers Cuyama and Russell Ranch Fields, completing 60 wells in 180 days.
1952 Atlantic begins offshore Gulf Coast production.
1963 Atlantic acquires Hondo Oil and Gas Company, with its newly discovered Empire Abo field in New Mexico.
1966 Atlantic merges with Richfield to form Atlantic Richfield. The company boasts a new symbol -- the ARCO Spark.
1968 March 13, Prudhoe Bay No. 1 discovers 10-billion-barrel field on Alaska's North Slope.
Corporate headquarters moves from Philadelphia to New York.
1969 Atlantic Richfield acquires Sinclair, adding 300,000 barrels a day to the company's crude oil production.
1972 Atlantic Richfield moves corporate headquarters into new building on site of earlier Richfield building in Los Angeles.
1973 ARCO's Cherry Point refinery on Puget Sound in Blaine, Washington, goes onstream -- one of the last major refineries in the United States to be built from the ground up.
1977 Atlantic Richfield merges with Anaconda to become broad-based "earth resources" company.
Trans Alaska Pipeline goes on stream. First tanker load of North Slope crude arrives at Cherry Point.
1979 The am/pm mini market franchise is introduced.
1982 ARCO ends credit card sales.
1983 ARCO International makes first commercial offshore discovery of gas in China near Hainan Island.
1984 ARCO becomes leading gasoline marketer in the West.
1985 ARCO restructures, reducing workforce and divesting most of Anaconda operations.
1987 ARCO Chemical stock is issued in a successful initial public offering in October.
1988 Tricentrol acquired; expands ARCO's North Sea prospects.
1989 ARCO introduces EC-1 Regular, the nation's first environ- mentally engineered fuel. The initial public offering of Lyondell Petro- chemical Company was completed in January.
1990 ARCO's net earnings top $2 BILLION for the first time. ARCO introduced another emission-control gasoline, EC-Premium, in Southern California.
1991 ARCO's emission-control gasolines are credited with having removed over 100 million pounds of pollutants from entering the Southern California air. Quarterly dividends are increased to $1.375 per share ($5.50 per share annual rate). A restructure of the company's Lower 48 oil and gas operations begins, including property sales.
1992 Sales agreement completed for the South China Sea gas to be piped to Hong Kong for electric power generation. Natural gas field developments also underway in Indonesia.
ARCO's West Elk underground coal mine in Colorado starts up a new long-wall mining system, one of the largest longwall units in the U.S.
1993 Natural gas from ARCO's facilities in the Java Sea began moving to power plants serving Jakarta in September. Production began from ARCO's Gordonstone coal mine in Australia.
Lower 48 oil and gas business is restructured and divided into four discrete business units -- ARCO Permian, ARCO Western Energy, ARCO Long Beach, Inc., and Vastar Resources, Inc. With the reorganization, ARCO eliminated 1,300 jobs and the downtown Dallas headquarters for Lower 48 operations.
In Alaska, the Point McIntyre field started up as did West Beach and North Prudhoe Bay State. All three fields use the Lisburne Production Center and together they are called the Point McIntyre Area fields. The first phase of a major gas handling expansion (GHX-2) is completed at Prudhoe Bay.
1994 Pagerungan natural gas field begins sales to customers on East Java, including the power plant that serves Surabaya, Indonesia's second largest city.
Vastar Resources, Inc. completed a public offering of 17 million shares of its common stock. The second phase of GHX-2 was completed at Prudhoe Bay.
ARCO's Los Angeles refinery completed modifications to meet federal Clean Air Act requirements for gasoline and stationary emissions. ARCO's Southern California stations introduce mid-grade unleaded gasolines, along with meeting the federal standards.
ARCO cost reduction program announced with $400 million in annual savings (compared to 1993) by 1996. Workforce reductions extended to Alaska, coal, refining and marketing, corporate and transportation units.
1995 Yacheng 13-1 natural gas field development completed. Testing of 480-mile subsea pipeline from the South China Sea to Hong Kong started in October. The ARCO-discovered and developed field is China's largest offshore energy development and the pipeline to Hong Kong is the second longest in the world.
1996 Official startup of the Yacheng 13-1 gas field takes place in January with celebratory events in Beijing, Hainan Island and Hong Kong.
ARCO signs Production Sharing Contract with Sonatrach, the Algerian state oil company, to undertake a major Enhanced Oil Recovery project in Algeria's second largest oil field, Rhourde El Baguel.
Charles Lockhart and his partners founded the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company in Philadelphia in 1865. At the time, Atlantic's business was simply to store and ship crude and refined oils. In 1870 the company built a refinery that could process a record 3,000 barrels a day. Only four years later it was sold to John D. Rockefeller's vast Standard Oil Trust, where it remained until 1911 when the Trust was dissolved by a federal court, leaving Atlantic on its own with no crude oil, pipelines or tankers. This prompted Atlantic's concerned president John Wesley Van Dyke to tell his people: "Go find the company some crude," which they did, making significant discoveries in the American Southwest. During the next few decades, Atlantic acquired a fleet of oil tankers, built a network of pipelines, and established a system of service stations throughout the eastern part of the nation.
In 1963 Atlantic purchased the Hondo Oil & Gas Company .... a small oil producer in the Western states .... from Robert O. Anderson, who took a seat on Atlantic's Board of Directors. Two years later, Anderson was elected chairman. A visionary business- man, Anderson, along with President Thornton F. Bradshaw, guided the company through two significant mergers.
The first was with Richfield Oil Corporation. Founded in 1905, Richfield grew quickly into one of the West Coast's leading gasoline marketers, with its own refineries and production properties. Gas wars and financial setbacks pushed Richfield into receivership in the early 1930s. The firm was reorganized in 1936 and once again captured an important share of the gasoline market. In its merger with Atlantic Refining Company on January 3, 1966, Richfield brought along its Alaskan leases and Prudhoe Bay exploration program, providing the new Atlantic Richfield Company with a promising blend of exploration and producing properties.
In 1968, Atlantic Richfield (along with its partner, EXXON) discovered Alaska's Prudhoe Bay field, the biggest oil strike ever in the Western Hemisphere. Now company management realized that the organiza- tion needed expanded marketing capabilities and strategically located refineries in order to smoothly handle the huge volume of crude expected from Alaska. Soon, plans were in the works for a new 100,000-barrel-a- day refinery at Cherry Point, Washington.
Merger talks heated up again in the late '60s, this time with the SINCLAIR Oil Corporation, founded by Harry F. Sinclair in 1916. ARCO was attracted by Sin- clair's chemical and refining operations as well as its network of crude and product pipelines. The merger was completed in 1969. Although federal intervention eventually required the company to sell off certain Sinclair assets, ARCO had acquired its largest refinery (Lyondell in Houston), taken its first step into petrochemicals, and added valuable acreage on the North Slope.
In 1968, ARCO and its partner EXXON struck oil at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope of Alaska, the biggest oil strike ever in the Western Hemisphere. At the time, recoverable reserves were estimated at 9.6 billion barrels, a figure that has since increased to almost 13 billion barrels. To prepare for the huge volume of oil that would move through the proposed Trans Alaska Pipeline, ARCO began expansion of refining and marketing capability on the West Coast, including construction of a new refinery at Ferndale, Washington, and the retrofitting of the Los Angeles Refinery in the city of Carson. In 1972, acknowledging its new Western focus, the company moved its headquarters from New York City to Los Angeles.
The company grew through a number of major acquisitions. In 1977, ARCO acquired the Anaconda Company, a large copper and aluminum operator with interests in metals manufacturing. ARCO Coal Company's domestic assets were acquired beginning in the mid-1960's and there have been several important additions since then. ARCO now has coal holdings in Wyoming, Colorado and Australia. In 1995, worldwide coal shipments totaled a record 57.6 million tons. The Black Thunder mine in Wyoming's Powder River Basin is the largest surface mine in the Western Hemisphere, while the new Gordonstone longwall mine became Australia's most productive coal mine in 1994.
The Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 marked another turning point for the company because it led Congress to approve construction of the 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), the largest privately financed construction project ever undertaken. ARCO is a 21.3 percent owner of TAPS, which in 1995 carried an average of 1.52 million barrels of crude oil and liquids per day...almost a quarter of all U.S. production...to the port of Valdez for loading aboard tankers and delivery to the Lower 48 states. ARCO owns 21.7 percent of the Prudhoe Bay field and operates the field's eastern half. The company also owns 55 percent of the Kuparuk River field, America's second largest oil field 30 miles west of Prudhoe Bay, and has a 30.1 percent working interest in the Point McIntyre field which began production in 1993. Point McIntyre has approximately 340 million barrels of gross reserves.
Over the years, ARCO has made giant strides in a number of areas. Domestically, ARCO's gasoline marketing operation is the envy of the industry. During the 1980s, ARCO Products Company, ARCO's refining and marketing division, inaugurated a high-volume, low-price marketing strategy that increased the company's gasoline market share in California from about 10 percent to 20 percent in 1992, an unprecedented gain in the retail gasoline market.
ARCO is now the number ONE gasoline retailer in its five-state marketing area (California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Arizona). The centerpiece of ARCO's strategy was the 1982 decision to eliminate the ARCO credit card and pass along the savings to customers.
ARCO's am/pm mini market franchise, begun in 1980, has also proved highly successful with its combination of quality food and convenience store items. Am/pm's can now be found in nine countries around the globe. In 1986, the company introduced the PayPoint Network, allowing customers to buy gasoline and food store items with ATM debit cards.
In 1989 ARCO took a bold step into the future, becoming the first oil company to market a clean-burning reformulated gasoline, EC-1 Regular, aimed at reducing pollution from older cars and trucks in the Southern California area. The following year ARCO enhanced its clean-fuel leader- ship by introducing a reformulated premium gasoline. An even cleaner- burning gasoline will be marketed in California in 1996.
When oil prices plummeted in 1986, the company was prepared for the worst, thanks to far-sighted decisions made a year earlier. With much of its metals and minerals holdings from the Anaconda acquisition already divested, ARCO underwent a massive restructur- ing in 1985 that included a $4 billion stock buy-back program, a $700 million reduction in operating costs, and the sale of more than $3.2 billion in assets, including ARCO's entire petroleum refining and marketing operation east of the Rockies and hundreds of domestic oil and gas producing properties that were not contributing adequately to profits.
Leading the company through this transformation was Lodwrick M. Cook who succeeded William F. Kieschnick, who had assumed the presidency in 1981 following the retirement of Thornton F. Bradshaw. In January 1986 Cook became chairman and CEO upon the retirement of Robert O. Anderson. In June 1993, Mike R. Bowlin became president and COO, then CEO on July 1, 1994, and chairman on July 1, 1995, following Cook's retirement.
Today, ARCO stands poised for major expansion overseas through an aggressive exploration program underway in several countries. ARCO is a major gas producer in China, the United Kingdom North Sea and a major oil and gas producer in Indonesia. In 1992, the company signed an agreement with the People's Republic of China to develop a South China Sea natural gas field with an estimated 3 trillion gross cubic feet of gas reserves discovered by ARCO nine years earlier. ARCO is operator and 34.3 percent partner in the China project. A 480-mile pipeline to Hong Kong was completed in late 1995, and start-up of the field took place in January 1996.
In another milestone development (February 1996), ARCO signed a production sharing contract with Sonatrach, the Algerian state oil company, to undertake a major Enhanced Oil Recovery project at Rhourde El Baguel, Algeria's second largest oil field. In addition to a $225 million bonus payment to Sonatrach, ARCO will invest over $1.3 billion in the project. EOR efforts should yield over 500 million total barrels of crude oil equivalent. ARCO will receive up to 49% of the project's annual production.
ARCO has clearly identified itself as a hydrocarbon-based company, focusing on crude oil, natural gas, chemicals and coal. ARCO's corporate philosophy is one that demands quality performance with an emphasis on a strong bottom line.
ARCO's resources operations include ARCO Alaska, Inc., ARCO International Oil and Gas Company, Vastar Resources, Inc. (in which ARCO has an 82.3 percent interest), ARCO Permian, ARCO Western Energy, ARCO Long Beach, Inc., ARCO Coal Company, and ARCO Exploration and Production Technology.
Downstream operations include ARCO Products Company and ARCO Transporta- tion Company. ARCO also has a 49.9 percent ownership interest in Lyondell Petrochemical Company, an 82.9 percent ownership interest in ARCO Chemical Company, a world leader in the manufacture of propylene oxide and MTBE, an octane- enhancing oxygenate widely used in cleaner burning gasolines, a 9.9 percent ownership interest in Zhenhai Refining and Chemical Company in the People's Republic of China, and a 6 percent interest in LUKoil, Russia's largest petroleum company.
ARCO is the seventh largest oil company in the United States (Fortune 500) with total revenues in 1995 of $18.2 billion and assets of $24 billion. In 1995, the company reported earnings of $1.376 billion and earnings per share of $8.42.
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