Chevron Corporation

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 (shortened to Socal or CalSo), it is active in more than 180 countries.

Founded originally in Southern California during the 1870s, After the breakup of Standard Oil, Socal grew quickly on its own by continuing to acquire companies and partnering with others both inside and outside of California, eventually becoming one of the Big Oil companies that dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. In 1985, Socal merged with the Pittsburgh-based Gulf Oil and rebranded as Chevron; the newly merged company later merged with Texaco in 2001.

Chevron is one of the largest companies in the world and the second-largest oil company based in the United States by revenue, only behind fellow Standard Oil descendant ExxonMobil. 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. Chevron manufactures and sells fuels, lubricants, additives, and petrochemicals, primarily in Western North America, the US Gulf Coast, Southeast Asia, South Korea and Australia. In 2018, the company produced an average of 791,000 barrels (125,800 m³) of net oil-equivalent per day in United States. Chevron ranked 10th on the Fortune 500 in 2023. The company is also the last-remaining oil-and-gas component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since the exit of ExxonMobil from the index in 2020.

Chevron has been subject to numerous controversies relating to its activities involving climate change. In particular, one of its most widely covered incidents on social media was its continued denial of ecological damage near the Lago Agrio oil field and its involvements against Steven Donziger, a controversy rooted and inherited from Texaco when Chevron acquired it in 2001. Chevron has also received negative attention for numerous other oil extraction projects, especially within the Los Angeles metropolitan area and in the Eastern Mediterranean.