THE HISTORY OF THE SEVEN SISTERS
You must have heard about oil, the black gold that makes countries rich and is used to make different by products that are useful to man.
But what you might not have know is that crude oil was formed as a result of small plants and animals that died and fell to the bottom of the sea floor, buried under layers of rock.
In 1858, Edwin Drake discovered oil and in 1870 Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil of ohio, His company had a habit of buying their strongest competitor, he always researched and developed new products that would be produced from oil like Vaseline, varnish, toothpaste and paraffin wax.
He also diversified into Iron, rail roads, shipping etc until his company was broken into 33 other companies after a court case, some of the companies that were birth from his company included Mobil, Exxon, Chevron etc
The mid 1940s, seven oil companies grew to control about 75% of the oil reserves and 85% in the 1950s, then Enrico Mattei popularised them by referring them to what we would later know as the ‘Seven sisters’ it was a term used for the seven daughters of Pleione and Titan Atlas (Pleiades sisters)
The seven sisters included
✓Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now known as Exxon)
✓ Standard Oil Company of New York (Mobil)
✓ Standard Oil Company of California (Chevron)
✓ Gulf oil
✓ Texaco
✓ British Petroleum (BP)
✓ Royal Dutch (Shell)
Most of them have merged, like Exxon Mobil, Texaco merged with Chevron as well.
The seven sisters used ownership of oil fields to maintain collusion and restrict oil supply so that they could reap greater profits, they sometimes minimised the taxes and regulations they were meant to pay to the government of the countries that owned the oil fields and when the government wanted to nationalise their oil, they could slow production of oil to retaliate.
In 1951, Mohammed Mossadegh nationalised the nation’s oil asset, this angered BP, and in 1953 he was overthrown out of government and the new government gave back the oil fields back to the seven sisters until OPEC was born in 1960.
OPEC, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting countries is a cartel that aims to manage the supply of oil in an effort to coordinate the price of oil in the world unfortunately Russia, UK and United States aren’t members
They coordinate their members oil production to keep price stable, their influence grew when they announced oil embargo in 1973 aimed at countries that supported Isreal during the Yom Kippur war, members include
1. Iran
2. Iraq
3. Kuwait
4. Saudi Arabia
5. Venezuela
6. Baghdad
7. Nigeria
8. Libya
9. United Arab Emirates
10. Algeria
11. Angola
12. Congo
13. Equatorial Guinea
And four countries left which include Ecuador, Indonesia, Gabon, Qatar
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