Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
From the
Seven Sisters
to the NOCs
Where the big energy companies
came from
The original “seven sisters” were the biggest companies in their
countries, and they dominated the world oil scene of their day. The
phrase was coined around 1950 by Enrico Mattei, founder of ENI,
Italy's oil major, in irritation at the seven predominantly Anglo-
American companies, which seemed to have all the international oil
concessions locked up. Over time, of course, the composition of the
septet has changed.
The seven sisters Mattei had in mind were Standard Oil of New Jersey
(still with us as Exxon), Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Iranian Oil com-
pany (now BP), Texaco, Socony-Mobil, Gulf and Socal. Since then Mobil
has merged with Exxon, while Gulf, Socal and Texaco have merged to
create Chevron. Chevron would be in any updated list of the top seven
international oil companies, as would Total of France, Mattei's own ENI,
and ConocoPhillips of the US.
These are still enormous companies. Exxon has the biggest stock-mar-
ket capitalization in the US, and it's often referred to, alongside most of the
other top six, as a “super-major”. The super-majors grew even bigger in
the late 1990s in a wave of mergers. But these were partly defensive merg-
ers by companies which had come to realize that, however big they might
seem within their own Western industrialized economies, they were
