Occidental Petroleum history

In 1956 Hammer and his wife Frances each invested $50,000 in two oil wells that Occidental planned to drill in California.

At the time Hammer became involved with Occidental, the company was listed on very small stock exchanges on the West Coast; within several years, however, Oxy was on the American Stock Exchange, boosted by the 1959 Hammer-led acquisition of Gene Reid Drilling Company of Bakersfield, California.

By the end of 1961, Occidental was reporting a $1 million profit on revenues of over $4 million.

Occidental has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 1964.

In 1966 Oxy's potential skyrocketed, with a billion-barrel oilfield find in Libya.

In 1967 Hammer personally won an oil concession from Libya following a major oil discovery in that country, a deal that propelled the growth of “Oxy,” as the firm came to be called, into a major international oil company.

Hammer's skills as a negotiator were put to the test when the Libyan king was overthrown in a bloodless coup in 1969 and replaced by the Revolutionary Command Council, soon to be headed by Muammar Qaddafi.

However, Hammer negotiated in late 1970 an agreement by which Libya received an immediate increase of 30 cents per barrel of oil, with another ten-cent increase spread over five years.

Hammer, in fact, considered his dealings as détente through trade, and he continued this notion through trade with the Chinese, with whom he began negotiating in 1979.

1982: Occidental becomes the eighth largest petroleum company in the country after paying $4 billion for an Oklahoma-based oil company, Cities Service Company.

In 1983 Hammer had convinced Irani, the president of Olin Corporation, to run Oxychem.

In late 1985 Hammer made another multibillion-dollar transaction, acquiring Midcon, the huge domestic natural gas pipeline company, for $3 billion.

IBP cost Oxy $750 million in stock and proved a sound investment; in 1987 Oxy sold 49.5 percent of IBP to the public for $960 million.

In February 1988 Oxy was found liable for cleaning up the toxic wastes at the country's most infamous landfill, Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York.

Weinberg, Steve, Armand Hammer: The Untold Story, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989.

In June 1990, for example, Oxy was the only United States company in a four-country agreement to build a $7 billion petrochemical plant in the Soviet Union, the largest-ever joint Soviet-Western project.

Perhaps most importantly, Irani outlined a strategy to reduce the company's debt load by 40 percent by 1992.

In 1995, Oxy announced it was simplifying the management of its oil and gas operations in an attempt to grow that business and get away from its dependence on chemicals.

After a near-fatal car crash in 1996, she began to reassess her life’s purpose.

By mid-1998, Occidental had transformed itself into a much more focused company than it had been during Hammer's reign.

Hill cofounded the Circle of Life Foundation (CILF), committed to transforming human interactions with nature, in 1999.

The acquisition also added substantially to Occidental's debt, which exceeded $6 billion by the end of 2000.

Occidental has been a participant in the Dolphin Gas Project since 2002.

Hill joined the war tax resistance movement in 2003 to protest the use of her federal taxes in the Iraq War.

When United States sanctions against Libya were lifted in the spring of 2004, Irani sent a negotiating team back to the country that had delivered one of Hammer's greatest successes.

2006: Occidental acquired production assets from Vintage Petroleum in Argentina, Bolivia, California and the Middle East.

2007: The Dolphin Gas Project, one of the largest energy projects ever undertaken in the Middle East, became fully operational.

2008: Occidental signed agreements for various projects in the Middle East region, including an agreement to develop gas fields and to explore for potential new discoveries in the Sultanate of Oman.

2009: Occidental and Mubadala Development Company (Mubadala) with the National Oil and Gas Authority of Bahrain (NOGA) started operations for the further development of the Bahrain Field.

Irani was succeeded by Stephen I. Chazen in 2011.

2012: Occidental’s cryogenic gas plant at Elk Hills came online in July, improving operational efficiency and production, and enhancing liquids yields.

In 2013, Occidental achieved average worldwide oil and gas production of 763,000 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day.