Conoco

Conoco ( KON-ə-koh), formerly known as Continental Oil, is an American petroleum brand that has been operating under the ownership of the Phillips 66 Company since 2012. It is headquartered in the Westchase neighborhood of Houston, Texas. The brand is one of the several successors of the original Standard Oil Company ("oil trust" founded 1870 by John D. Rockefeller). Continental Oil was a subsidiary of Standard Oil from 1884 until 1911 when the Supreme Court of the United States, in an anti-trust legal case, ruled to decouple and break up the monopolized entity of Standard Oil. Alongside Phillips 66 and 76, it operates as one of the major fuel brands of the Phillips 66 Company. Of those two brands, Conoco has a more dominant presence of gas refueling stations in Colorado, Texas, Montana, Missouri, and Oklahoma in the Midwestern United States, as well as a growing presence in Eastern Pennsylvania following taking over the retail contracts of several Gulf Oil locations there, while having a complete absence in states such as California to the west and Florida to the far southeast. Continental Oil was founded in Ogden, Utah, by Isaac Elder Blake in November 1875 as the Continental Oil and Transportation Company. It was acquired in 1884 by the increasingly dominant Standard Oil Company. Marland Oil Company was founded in 1921 by E. W. Marland (1874–1941), oilman, businessman and later politician of Pennsylvania and later Oklahoma. Eighteen years after Standard Oil's federal court-ordered dissolution of 1911, Marland Oil acquired Continental Oil, and moved its headquarters to Marland's home town of Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1929. As the Continental-Marland acquisition took effect, Marland Oil favorably phased out its own name and rebranded itself into the more nationally known Continental and Conoco nameplates. It eventually became one of the largest oil companies...