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Seven sisters oil companies
"Seven Sisters" was a term coined in the 1950s by businessman Enrico Mattei, then-head of the Italian state oil company Eni, to describe the seven oil companies which formed the "Consortium for Iran" cartel and dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. The group consisted of Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP), Gulf Oil (later part of Chevron), Standard Oil of California (SoCal, now Chevron), Texaco (later merged into Chevron), Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso, later Exxon), and Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony, later Mobil, now part of ExxonMobil).
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Prior to the oil crisis of 1973, the members of the Seven Sisters controlled around 85 percent of the world's petroleum reserves; but since then, industry dominance has shifted to the OPEC cartel and state-owned oil and gas companies in emerging-market economies, such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corporation, National Iranian Oil Company, PDVSA (Venezuela), Petrobras (Brazil), Petronas (Malaysia) and State Organization for Marketing of Oil (Iraq).
Composition and history
In 1951 Iran nationalized its oil industry then controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), and Iranian oil was subjected to an international embargo. In an effort to bring Iranian oil production back to international markets, the U.S. State Department suggested the creation of a "Consortium" of major oil companies, several of which were corporate offspring of John D. Rockefeller's original Standard Oil monopoly. The "Consortium for Iran" was subsequently formed by the following companies:
The head of the Italian state oil company (Eni), Enrico Mattei, sought membership for his company, but was rejected by what he dubbed the "Seven Sisters", the Anglo-Saxon companies that largely controlled the Middle East's oil production after World War II. British writer Anthony Sampson took over the term when he wrote the book The Seven Sisters in 1975, to describe the shadowy oil cartel that tried to eliminate competitors and control the world's oil resource.
Being well-organized and able to negotiate as a cartel, the Seven Sisters were initially able to exert considerable power over Third World oil producers. However, in recent decades the dominance of the Seven Sisters and their successor companies has been challenged by the following trends:
As of 2010, the surviving companies from the Seven Sisters are BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, which form four members of the "supermajors" group.