Cseh Valentin szerk.: „70 éve alakult a MAORT” – tanulmányok egy bányavállalat történetéből (2009)

Philip J. Mulhall: Standard Oil in Europe

Philip]. Mulhall 1 ïxxonA lobi I International l imiteâ Standard Oil in Europe This paper was presented in June 2008 to mark the 70th anniversary of the Hungarian American Oil Company, MA( )RT. The man most responsible for creating the Standard Oil Company was John Davison Rockefeller. John D Rockefeller was born in N.Y. in 1839 and like many gifted entrepreneurs, Rockefeller's success came early. In 1863, at the age of 24, he was already a successful fruit and vegetable merchant in Cleveland. Rockefeller prided himself on bringing bright people into his organisations, challenging them and giving them more and more responsibility. This tradition is today very much alive in ExxonMobil; the largest successor company of Standard Oil. Rockefeller became interested in the oil industry at its very beginning. Oil fields in the early days were rough, sometimes violent and, above all, very dirty and unsafe places. At the time the law for ownership of oil resources was based on the old English law of capture. That meant that producers hastened to produce whatever they could as fast as they could, because they feared that if they did not, the man who owned the neighbouring well would. When Rockefeller first visited his first oil field, he was surprised to see hundreds of wooden derricks jammed together over wells that were flooding the market with unneeded oil and depressing the price. He was offended by the industry's lack of order and structure, and he resolved to change it. In 1863, Rockefeller invested in a small refinery in Cleveland, Ohio. He renamed it the Standard Oil Company Works. The name "Standard" was placed on each barrel to reflect the product's high, and uniform quality At first, the company's chances for success appeared marginal, since Cleveland already had many paraffin refineries and an oversupplied market. But through tight cost control and good marketing, the company prospered and became the dominant paraffin refiner and marketer in the Cleveland area. The standard barrel ultimately became standard in another sense, too. In the early days of the industry different refineries used barrels of varying sizes. It took some years, but eventually the Standard Oil Company's 42 gallon barrel became the industry standard which we still use today A few years after purchasing the Bayonne Refinery in New" Jersey, Rockefeller built a network of pipelines that carried oil from the fields of Pennsylvania to Bayonne. Building pipelines at that time required imagination and daring. Not only was the technology of transportation via pipeline in its infancy, but building pipelines meant clashing with the interests of the railroads and, in the oil fields, with the unions. Pipelines were a technical innovation of the time - and a huge money-saver. As a result of building his pipeline. Rockefeller's cost of moving a barrel to his refinery was 25 cents. The cost by horse-drawn cart was $2. ( )nce established on the East Coast, it was only logical to begin to export paraffin to other countries. In 1882, Standard Oil began exporting paraffin to Europe and Asia in cargo vessels that hauled products in barrels and cans which were lashed in cargo holds and on deck. However, this was an expensive way to ship paraffin. An early technical innovation in bulk transportation helped