Amerada Petroleum Corporation

Hess Corporation (formerly Amerada Hess Corporation) is an American global independent energy company involved in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas. It was formed by the merger of Hess Oil and Chemical and Amerada Petroleum in 1968. Leon Hess served as CEO from the early 1960s through 1995, after which his son John B Hess succeeded him as chairman and CEO.

Headquartered in New York City, the company ranked 394th in the 2016 annual ranking of Fortune 500 corporations. In 2020, Forbes Global 2000 ranked Hess as the 1,253rd largest public company in the world.

The company has exploration and production operations on-shore in the United States (North Dakota) and Libya, and off-shore in the United States (Gulf of Mexico), Canada, South America (Guyana and Suriname), and Southeast Asia (Malaysia and the Joint Development Area of Malaysia and Thailand).

History

In 1919, British oil entrepreneur Lord Cowdray formed the Amerada Corporation to explore oil production in North America. The firm was incorporated on February 7, 1920, in Delaware as a holding company for its principal subsidiary, the Amerada Petroleum Corporation. The oil producer experienced growth during most of the 1920s, hitting a peak in 1926 with a net income of US$4.9 million. However, in the years leading to the Great Depression, weakness in the oil markets contributed to sluggish profits. The aftermath of the market crash aggravated an already unsteady oil industry. In the first quarter of 1930, the company experienced a minor loss. The early years of the Depression were a struggle against wavering demand and overproduction in some regions. Later into the 1930s, financial forecasts for Amerada became more positive.

In December 1941, the company reorganized by merging the holding company and the principal operating subsidiary, Amerada Petroleum Corporation, into a simplified operating company. The new entity also adopted the former subsidiary's name.

In 1955, robust post-war growth grew the company to over US$100 million in annual sales.

Hess Oil and Chemical, an oil refiner and marketer, founded by Leon Hess, acquired 10% of the company for US$100 million in 1966 from the British government. Albert Levinson became the senior vice president and designed the modern-day Hess logo. In December 1968, Hess and Amerada would announce plans for a merger. Some Amerada stockholders led by Morton Adler criticized the arrangement as being too favorable for Hess. Adler argued that Amerada's oil reserves would contribute the lion's share of assets for the proposed company, and that Amerada stockholders should retain greater control of the new company. Before the stockholder vote on the matter, Phillips Petroleum, an integrated oil firm, approached Amerada with its merger proposal, but the offer was declined in March 1969. Still interested, Phillips nonetheless stated it would not carry out a lawsuit against the proposed Hess deal. Hess, fearing such a strategy, made a cash tender offer of US$140 million for an additional 1.1 million shares of Amerada, which would double its holding in the company. The new claims would be employed in a May stockholder vote deciding the merger's fate. The voting took place amidst shareholder rancor that, in addition to echoing Adler's arguments, objected to Amerada's financing of the recently completed tender offer. Hess planned to cancel the shares, and the newly formed company would absorb the cost of the acquisition. One shareholder at the meeting quipped, "It looks to me as if Hess is buying Amerada with Amerada's money." Proponents of the deal won and the US$2.4 billion mergers combining a pure production company with a refinery and marketer operation was completed. However, the controversy was not yet extinguished by the stockholder confirmation. A federal class-action lawsuit was filed in 1972, which claimed that the proxy vote information was misleading. In 1976, a court agreed that the company falsely claimed to have considered each company's assets as a reason for the merger.

In February 2000, Hess acquired the Meadville Corporation and rebranded all 178 Merit gas stations as Hess. The Merit gas station chain was primarily located in the Boston, New York, and Philadelphia markets.

In 2001, Amerada Hess purchased Triton Energy Limited in a cash tender deal valued at approximately US$3.2 billion. Triton, one of the largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies in the United States, had earned a reputation as a maverick oil company due to its highly successful yet potentially risky overseas exploration. According to contemporary Amerada Hess press releases, Triton's major oil and gas assets in West Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia would strengthen its exploration and production business and provide access to long life international reserves. Hess also stated that the purchase was expected to immediately increase the company's per-day barrel output by more than 25 percent.

Similarly in 2001, Amerada Hess entered into a joint venture with A.T. Williams Oil Co. of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The company and the gas stations were changed and called WilcoHess. After the joint merger, there existed some 1200 WilcoHess stations.

Following on the heels of the Triton purchase, energy prices fell and global economies weakened. Amerada Hess struggled through the following years, and in 2002 posted a US$218 million loss due primarily to a US$530 million charge relating to its write-down of the Ceiba oil field. In March 2002, TXU Europe bought the UK retail gas and electricity business of Amerada Hess. However, from 2003 through 2006, Amerada Hess posted steadily increasing profits as the company reported US$1.920 billion in net income.

In May 2006, Amerada Hess Corp. changed its name to Hess Corp.

On January 18, 2012, the company announced that it would close the Hovensa refinery in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands by mid-February 2012. The refinery would continue to serve as a storage terminal.

By the end of February 2013, Hess permanently closed its Port Reading, New Jersey