ARCO


Atlantic Richfield Company is an American oil company with operations in the United States, Indonesia, the North Sea, the South China Sea, and Mexico. It has more than 1,300 gas stations in the western part of the United States, and recently five gas stations in northwestern Mexico. ARCO was formed by the merger of East Coast–based Atlantic Refining and California-based Richfield Oil Corporation in 1966; the company's name is an initialism of the two companies. A merger in 1969 brought in Sinclair Oil Corporation. In the 1970s and 80s, ARCO was one of the largest companies in the world, consistently a top 20 company of the Fortune 500. After its subsequent fracture in the late 1980s and early 90s, ARCO became a subsidiary of UK-based BP plc in 2000 through its BP West Coast Products LLC affiliate. On August 13, 2012, it was announced that Tesoro would purchase ARCO and its refinery for $2.5 billion. The deal came under fire because of increasing fuel prices. Many activists urged state and federal regulators to block the sale because of concerns that it would reduce competition and could lead to higher fuel prices at ARCO stations. On June 3, 2013, BP sold ARCO and the Carson Refinery to Tesoro for $2.5 billion. BP sold its Southern California terminals to Tesoro Logistics LP, including the Carson Storage Facility. BP sold the ampm brand to Tesoro for Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. BP exclusively licensed the ARCO rights from Tesoro for Northern California, Oregon, and Washington.
ARCO is known for its low-priced gasoline compared to other national brands, mainly because of an early 1980s business decision to emphasize cost cutting and alternative sources of income. ARCO is headquartered in La Palma, California.
Tesoro was renamed Andeavor in 2017, and was acquired by Marathon Petroleum in 2018. Following the acquisition, Marathon hinted at keeping the ARCO brand name in Mexico as well as select US markets while rebranding the rest either as standard Marathon stations or Speedway locations ; stations still owned by BP may either remain as ARCO or rebranded as Amoco, as BP doesn't own the rights to the name due to licensing-based reasons in the Western United States.

History

complex in Downtown Los Angeles

Presence in Southwest U.S.

ARCO has a presence in the Southwestern U.S. It once had a property fronting Texas Highway 225 east of Loop 610 in Houston, Texas, with an oil tank farm once painted with the ARCO logo. Lyondell-Citgo purchased the property and rebranded the oil tanks in the 1980s. ARCO's global corporate headquarters were in the ARCO Plaza in Los Angeles at the corner of 5th and Flower Streets, the site of Richfield's former headquarters. ARCO's Oil & Gas division headquarters were in downtown Dallas, Texas. The headquarters' building was a 46-story office building designed by architect I.M. Pei, the ARCO Tower. ARCO closed the Dallas office and sold the building in the mid-1980s., ARCO operated about 1,100 stations in six Western states: Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Utah.

Merger

ARCO merged with Anaconda Copper Mining Company of Montana in 1977. Anaconda's holdings included the Berkeley Pit and the Anaconda, Montana Smelter. ARCO founder Robert Orville Anderson stated "he hoped Anaconda's resources and expertise would help him launch a major shale-oil venture, but that the world oil glut and the declining price of petroleum made shale oil moot". The purchase turned out to be a regrettable decision for ARCO. A lack of experience with hard-rock mining and a sudden drop in the price of copper to below seventy cents a pound, the lowest in years, caused ARCO to suspend all operations in Butte, Montana. By 1983, only six years after acquiring rights to the "Richest Hill on Earth", the Berkeley Pit was completely idle. By 1986, some ARCO properties were sold to billionaire industrialist Dennis Washington, whose company, Montana Resources, operates a much smaller open-pit mine east of the defunct Berkeley Pit.

Acquisition

In 1985, the Atlantic brand was spun off for ARCO's East Coast stations as Atlantic Petroleum. Atlantic was acquired by Dutch trader :nl:John Deuss|John Deuss, who later sold it in 1988 to Sunoco. The ARCO brand is now used on the West Coast. ARCO specializes in discount gas by removing many frills, among them forcing prepayment for fuel, not accepting credit cards at most locations, and charging 35 cents for the use of debit cards. In most locations, it is co-branded with ampm convenience stores, also a division of BP West Coast.

1990s

In the beginning of the 1990s, a subsidiary, ARCO Power Technologies, later Advanced Power Technologies, was the primary contractor for the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. ARCO having hired Bernard Eastlund led to conspiracy theories about weather control and warfare.
In March 1997, ARCO also leased almost all the gas stations of the Santa Fe Springs, California based independent Thrifty Oil group of 250 stations found throughout California after a damaging price war which the independent Thrifty was unable to win.

2000s

On April 18, 2000, ARCO was purchased by BP America and completely merged into BP operations. There were two exceptions due to FTC requirements: ARCO Alaska was sold by BP to Phillips Petroleum, and ARCO Pipe Line Company was acquired by TEPPCO, a subsidiary of Enterprise Products. ARCO as a subsidiary no longer exists.
Over the course of 2004 and 2005, ARCO signs were replaced with signs that still had the ARCO spark, but BP's Helios is also located on the sign. A new tagline "ARCO—part of BP" also appeared on some signs and advertisements. ARCO was known for sponsoring the ARCO Arena in Sacramento, California, with a license fee of $750,000/year through 2007.

Research Laboratory

From the 1960s until the turn of the century, ARCO operated a highly significant research and development center in Plano, Texas, on land purchased in 1964 by the Atlantic Refinery Company. Its golden age was arguably in the early to mid 1980s, when it was led by Robert L. Hirsch. A standout example of ARCO's research at that time was the pioneering study on 4D seismic surveying by Robert Greaves and Terry Fulp. This consisted of repeated 3D seismic surveys which successfully mapped the effects of enhanced oil recovery processes as a function of time. This work was recognized for its seminal importance over 20 years later by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Besides Greaves and Fulp, the laboratory produced a number of other distinguished alumni during this golden age, including scientists John Castagna, Michael Batzle, Geoffrey Dorn, and Marius Vassiliou. In later years the laboratory experienced significant contraction. It finally closed shortly after the 2000 acquisition of ARCO by BP.

Superfund site

ARCO is the responsible party for the largest U.S. Superfund site—a site that takes in the towns of Butte and Anaconda, and of the Clark Fork River including Milltown Dam. The region's water and soil were polluted by a century of mining and smelting. Chemicals of concern include many heavy metals and arsenic. On 7 February 2008, the United States Environmental Protection Agency announced that prolonged litigation with ARCO ended when ARCO agreed to pay $187 million to finance natural resource restoration activities. Anaconda still nominally exists, but only as a massive environmental liability for ARCO.

In the media

's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead features a zombie wearing a red baseball jersey that read "Bach's Arco Pitcairn".
The song "Storm", in Godspeed You Black Emperor's 2000 album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven uses a field recording done at the Los Angeles Airport ARCO gas station.
Sacramento band CAKE recorded the song "Arco Arena", which was about the stadium in Sacramento to which Arco had purchased naming rights.
One of ARCO's former diesel-hydraulic switcher engines, numbered 6920, was briefly shown in There Goes A Train, and one of their tanker ships, the ARCO Sag River, was featured in There Goes A Boat.

Legal issues

Atlantic Richfield Co and its parent BP America agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by about 700 current and former residents of Yerington, Nevada, who lived near the Anaconda mine built in 1941. The company paid in Nevada up to $19.5M for settlement. EPA tested in 2009 wells and found that 79% of the wells north of mine had dangerous levels of uranium and/or arsenic.
In September 2010, the staff of KCST-FM in Florence, Oregon noticed that the station's Emergency Alert System equipment would repeatedly unmute as if receiving an incoming EAS message several times a week. During each event, which was relayed from KKNU in Springfield, the same commercial advertisement for ARCO/BP gasoline could be heard, along with the words "This test has been brought to you by ARCO". Further investigation by the primary station transmitting the commercial revealed that the spot had been produced using an audio clip of an actual EAS header which had been modified to lower the header's volume and presumably prevent it from triggering false positive alert reactions in EAS equipment. The spot was distributed nationally, and after it had once been identified as the source of the false EAS equipment trips, various stations around the country reported having had similar experiences. After a widespread notification by the Society of Broadcast Engineers was issued, ARCO's ad agency withdrew the commercial from airplay.