ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil Corporation
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: XOM; Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 component
Industry	Oil and gas, petrochemicals
Founded	30 November 1999, by the merger of Exxon and Mobil; predecessor Standard Oil founded 1870
Headquarters	Spring, Texas, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Darren Woods (chairman and chief executive), Kathryn Mikells (chief financial officer)
Products	Crude oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, petroleum products, petrochemicals, lubricants
Revenue	Approximately US$340 billion (2024)
Employees	Approximately 61,000
Website	exxonmobil.com

ExxonMobil Corporation is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Spring, Texas, near Houston. It is the largest investor-owned oil and gas company in the world by revenue and production, and the direct corporate descendant of Standard Oil, the company founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870 and broken up by order of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1911.

The present company was formed on 30 November 1999 by the merger of Exxon, formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Mobil, formerly Standard Oil of New York, reuniting the two largest fragments of the 1911 dissolution. It operates across the industry, from exploration and production through refining, chemicals manufacture and the retail sale of fuel under the Exxon, Mobil and Esso brands, and holds proved reserves of approximately 19.3 billion oil-equivalent barrels.

ExxonMobil has been among the most controversial corporations in the world for four decades. Its own scientists produced accurate projections of the effect of fossil fuel combustion on global temperature between 1977 and 2003, a finding confirmed by independent analysis published in Science in 2023, while the company funded organisations that publicly disputed the same conclusions. It was responsible for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, for a substantial share of global carbon dioxide emissions, and has faced litigation and investigation on both. In 2024 it was responsible for approximately 610 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, about 1.58 per cent of the global total.

History

Standard Oil and the 1911 dissolution

Standard Oil was incorporated in Ohio in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller, his brother William, Henry Flagler and others. Through control of refining capacity, of the railroad rebates that determined transport costs and of the pipeline network, it came to control the greater part of American oil refining within a decade, and it was reorganised as a trust in 1882 and as Standard Oil of New Jersey, a holding company, in 1899.

In Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States in 1911 the Supreme Court held that the company had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered its dissolution into 34 separate companies. The two largest were Standard Oil of New Jersey, which took the Esso brand, and Standard Oil of New York, known as Socony, which took the Mobil brand. Others became Chevron, Amoco, Conoco, Sohio and Atlantic Richfield. The Rockefeller family's shareholdings in the successors made the break-up the most profitable event in the founder's financial history, since the parts proved worth considerably more than the whole.

Standard Oil of New Jersey adopted the Exxon name in 1972, having been constrained in the use of Esso in the United States by the trademarks of other Standard successors. Socony became Socony-Vacuum, then Socony Mobil in 1955 and Mobil Oil Corporation in 1966.

The merger, 1998 to 1999

The oil price collapse of 1998, when crude fell to around ten dollars a barrel, precipitated a wave of consolidation across the industry. Exxon and Mobil announced their merger in December 1998 in a transaction valued at approximately US$80 billion, the largest in corporate history at the time, and it completed on 30 November 1999 after divestitures required by the Federal Trade Commission, including 2,400 filling stations and a refinery.

The merger was one of four that reconstituted the industry within three years, alongside BP with Amoco and then Arco, Chevron with Texaco, and Total with Petrofina and Elf. The resulting companies, generally called the supermajors, held a smaller share of world reserves than Standard Oil had held of American refining, because the great majority of the world's oil is controlled by state companies, but they dominated the technology, the capital markets and the international projects of the industry.

Lee Raymond, chief executive from 1993 to 2005, directed the merger and established the management culture for which the company became known: highly disciplined on capital allocation, unsentimental about assets, sceptical of diversification into other forms of energy, and publicly and aggressively opposed to climate policy. His successor Rex Tillerson, chief executive from 2006 to 2016, moderated the public position without materially changing the strategy, and left to serve as United States Secretary of State. Darren Woods succeeded him in 2017.

Recent history

The company's most significant acquisition of the modern period was XTO Energy, bought in 2009 for about US$31 billion in stock, which gave it a very large position in American shale gas immediately before natural gas prices collapsed under the weight of the production the industry had unlocked, and which is generally regarded as among the worst-timed large acquisitions in the sector's history.

The COVID-19 pandemic produced the worst year in the company's history. Demand for transport fuel collapsed, oil prices briefly traded below zero in April 2020, and ExxonMobil reported a loss of US$22.4 billion for the year, borrowed heavily to maintain its dividend and was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in August 2020 after 92 years, having been the largest company in the world by market value as recently as 2013.

In May 2021 the activist investment fund Engine No. 1, holding approximately 0.02 per cent of the shares, succeeded in electing three directors to the board against the company's opposition, with the support of BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and the California and New York state pension funds. The campaign argued that the company had failed to prepare for a transition away from fossil fuels and that its capital discipline had deteriorated. It was among the most consequential shareholder actions ever conducted at a company of that size.

The subsequent recovery in energy prices, accelerated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, produced record results: ExxonMobil reported net income of US$55.7 billion in 2022, the largest annual profit recorded by any Western oil company.

In October 2023 the company agreed to acquire Pioneer Natural Resources in an all-stock transaction worth approximately US$60 billion, completing in May 2024 after antitrust review. The purchase more than doubled its position in the Permian Basin and created one of the largest unconventional development portfolios in the world. The New York Times described the transaction as a bet that American energy policy would not move decisively against fossil fuels.

The company exited the West Qurna 1 field in Iraq in January 2024, ending its operations in that country, and completed the US$1.28 billion sale of its Nigerian onshore assets to Seplat Energy in October 2024, part of a general withdrawal by international oil companies from onshore West African production.

Operations

Upstream

The upstream division, comprising exploration and production, generates approximately 70 per cent of the company's earnings. Proved reserves stood at 19.3 billion oil-equivalent barrels at the end of 2025.

American activity is concentrated in the Permian Basin of west Texas and New Mexico, greatly expanded by the Pioneer acquisition; the Bakken Formation; the Woodford and Caney shales; and the Gulf of Mexico. Natural gas operations, conducted through XTO Energy, cover the Marcellus, Utica, Haynesville, Barnett and Fayetteville shales. The company has held around 14.6 million acres in the United States, of which 1.7 million are offshore. In California it operated the Aera Energy joint venture with Shell, since sold. In Canada it holds 5.4 million acres through Imperial Oil, including the Kearl oil sands project.

The most significant international development of the period is the Stabroek block offshore Guyana, where ExxonMobil operates with Hess and CNOOC as partners. Discoveries beginning in 2015 established one of the largest new oil provinces found this century, with recoverable resources exceeding eleven billion barrels, and production has been brought on through a series of floating production, storage and offloading vessels, with six planned by the end of 2027. The development has transformed Guyana's economy, producing among the fastest growth rates ever recorded by any country, and has raised corresponding questions about resource governance, environmental oversight and the terms of the production sharing agreement. Further discoveries followed in March 2024.

Other international operations include liquefied natural gas in Qatar, Papua New Guinea and Mozambique; deepwater production offshore Angola, where a discovery was made in the Kizomba B area in 2024, Nigeria and Brazil; and gas developments in Australia through the Gippsland Basin joint venture with Woodside.

Russia

ExxonMobil held a 30 per cent operating interest in Sakhalin-1, a major oil and gas development in the Russian Far East, and had agreed a wide-ranging Arctic exploration partnership with Rosneft in 2011 which was suspended after sanctions were imposed following the annexation of Crimea in 2014. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the company announced its withdrawal from Sakhalin-1, and Russia subsequently expropriated the interest by decree, for which ExxonMobil wrote off approximately US$4.6 billion.

Product Solutions

The downstream and chemicals businesses were combined into a single Product Solutions division in a 2022 reorganisation.

ExxonMobil operates 21 refineries worldwide and states that 80 per cent of its refining capacity is integrated with chemical or lubricant base stock production, which allows streams to be directed to whichever product carries the better margin. Its largest refinery is at Beaumont, Texas, where a 250,000 barrel per day expansion was completed in early 2023, making it among the largest in the United States; Baytown, also in Texas, is the second largest. It was among the few American refiners to add capacity after the pandemic downturn, during which a number of refineries closed permanently.

Retail fuel is sold under the Exxon and Mobil brands in the United States and Esso in most other markets, with Mobil 1 the leading synthetic motor oil brand worldwide. The chemicals business produces olefins, polyethylene, polypropylene, aromatics and specialty products, and is among the largest petrochemical producers in the world, with major complexes on the United States Gulf Coast, in Singapore, in Belgium and in China, where a large project at Huizhou began production in the mid-2020s.

Low Carbon Solutions

The company has announced investment of approximately US$15 billion in what it describes as a lower carbon future and states that its own Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, meaning those from its operations and from the energy it buys, will be net zero by 2050. It has not set targets for Scope 3 emissions, which arise when customers burn the products it sells and which constitute the overwhelming majority of the emissions associated with its business, a position that distinguishes it from the European majors and which it defends on the ground that those emissions are attributable to consumers.

Its low-carbon activity concentrates on carbon capture and storage, in which it claims world leadership, on hydrogen and on lithium. It acquired Denbury Resources in July 2023 for US$4.9 billion, principally for that company's network of carbon dioxide pipelines along the Gulf Coast, the largest in the United States. In July 2024 it agreed with CF Industries to transport and store 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from 2028. A large low-carbon hydrogen plant was designed for the Baytown complex, intended to be the largest of its kind.

In November 2023 the company began drilling for lithium in Arkansas, extracting it from brine in the Smackover Formation using direct lithium extraction, and in June 2024 signed a preliminary agreement to supply SK On for electric vehicle batteries. The move applies subsurface expertise to a mineral required by the technology displacing its principal product, and the company has said it intends to become a significant lithium producer by 2030.

Critics observe that the sums involved, while large in absolute terms, are small relative to the company's capital expenditure on oil and gas, which has continued to rise, and that carbon capture applied to industrial facilities does not address emissions from the combustion of transport fuels.

Brands and marketing

The company operates three retail brands. Exxon is used in the United States, adopted in 1972 after a lengthy search for a name that was pronounceable in most languages, meaningless in all of them and not already registered anywhere; the double X was chosen partly because it appears in no English word. Mobil, with its flying red horse Pegasus, dates from the Vacuum Oil Company and is used in the United States and in a number of Asian markets. Esso, a phonetic rendering of the initials of Standard Oil, is used across Europe and much of the rest of the world but is restricted in the United States by the trademarks of other Standard successors.

The Esso tiger, introduced in the 1930s and revived in 1959 with the slogan "Put a tiger in your tank", is among the most durable advertising devices in commercial history and was adapted into dozens of languages. Mobil 1, introduced in 1974, was the first widely marketed fully synthetic motor oil and remains the leading brand in its category.

Sponsorships

ExxonMobil has been a long-standing sponsor of motorsport, supplying fuel and lubricants to Formula One teams, most prominently a partnership with Red Bull Racing and previously with McLaren and with Scuderia Ferrari through the Mobil 1 brand, and to NASCAR. Mobil 1 sponsorship of engine and lubricant development serves a technical purpose as well as a promotional one, since racing conditions test formulations at extremes that road use does not reach.

Exxon was for many years a significant corporate patron of American public television, underwriting Masterpiece Theatre, and the company has funded science education programmes, mathematics teaching initiatives and the National Math and Science Initiative.

Technology and research

The company operates one of the largest corporate research organisations in the energy industry, with laboratories in Clinton, New Jersey, and Annandale, and research agreements with a considerable number of universities. Its historic contributions include the development of fluid catalytic cracking in the 1940s, which greatly increased the yield of petrol from a barrel of crude and was of substantial strategic importance during the Second World War, and metallocene catalysts for polyolefins.

Current research concentrates on subsurface imaging and reservoir modelling, on catalysts for chemical processes, on carbon capture materials, on advanced recycling of plastics, and on algae-based biofuels, a programme pursued in partnership with Synthetic Genomics from 2009 and substantially wound down in 2022 after two decades without commercial result. The algae programme featured prominently in the company's advertising during its existence and its quiet abandonment was cited by critics as characteristic of the industry's presentation of long-dated research as evidence of transition.

Taxation and political activity

ExxonMobil is among the largest corporate taxpayers in the world in absolute terms, principally through the production taxes, royalties and profit-sharing arrangements levied by the countries in which it extracts hydrocarbons, which in many jurisdictions take the majority of the value of production. Its effective rate on American earnings has at times been low relative to its reported profits, because of the treatment of foreign taxes, of depletion allowances and of intangible drilling costs, and the company has been a consistent opponent of proposals to remove those provisions.

It is among the largest corporate spenders on lobbying in the United States and has been a significant funder of trade associations including the American Petroleum Institute, which has conducted advocacy the company has at times declined to conduct in its own name. In 2021 an undercover recording of a senior ExxonMobil lobbyist, published by Greenpeace's Unearthed, described the use of shadow groups to argue against climate measures and the support of a carbon tax as a position taken because it was unlikely to be enacted; the company disavowed the remarks and the lobbyist left.

Competition and industry position

ExxonMobil's direct competitors among investor-owned companies are Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies and BP. The far larger holders of reserves are the state companies: Saudi Aramco, which exceeds ExxonMobil in production and profit, together with the national companies of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Russia, Venezuela, Brazil and China.

The strategic divergence between the American and European majors has been the defining feature of the industry since about 2015. BP, Shell and TotalEnergies announced substantial investment in renewable electricity and reductions in hydrocarbon output, and each has since moderated or reversed those commitments under pressure from investors comparing their returns with ExxonMobil's and Chevron's. ExxonMobil's position throughout has been that demand for oil and gas will persist for decades, that it has no comparative advantage in generating electricity, and that its shareholders can invest in renewables directly if they wish.

Whether that judgement is vindicated depends on facts not yet determined: the rate at which electric vehicles displace liquid fuels, the trajectory of petrochemical demand, which the company expects to grow and which is its principal argument for the durability of oil consumption, and the stringency of climate policy in the largest economies. The Pioneer acquisition, committing sixty billion dollars to American shale production with decades of inventory, is the clearest possible expression of the company's view.

Employees and safety

The company employs approximately 61,000 people directly and a far larger number through contractors. Its operating safety record, measured by recordable injuries, is among the better in heavy industry, a consequence of the Operations Integrity Management System introduced after the Valdez spill, which imposed standardised procedures across every facility worldwide and which has been adopted as a model by other companies.

The record is not unblemished. Refinery and chemical plant incidents have caused deaths and serious injuries, including explosions at Baytown and at Baton Rouge, and the company has been cited by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on numerous occasions. The offshore and drilling contractors on which it relies operate under conditions where the consequences of failure are severe, as the Deepwater Horizon disaster at a BP-operated well demonstrated for the industry as a whole.

Employment practice has attracted attention on other grounds. The company did not extend equal benefits to employees in same-sex relationships after acquiring Mobil, which had provided them, and shareholders proposed resolutions on the subject annually for more than a decade before the policy changed in 2015 following a federal executive order applying to contractors.

Controversies

Climate change

ExxonMobil's conduct in relation to climate science is the most extensively documented case of its kind. Internal research conducted by Exxon scientists from the late 1970s, including work by the physicist James Black and by a group modelling atmospheric carbon dioxide, established that combustion of fossil fuels would raise global temperatures, estimated the sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide within the range later confirmed, and identified the timescale over which effects would become apparent.

A study published in Science in January 2023 by Geoffrey Supran, Naomi Oreskes and Stefan Rahmstorf analysed the projections produced by the company's own scientists between 1977 and 2003 and found that they had accurately projected and skilfully modelled the warming that subsequently occurred, and had reasonably estimated the concentration at which dangerous warming would begin. The authors concluded that while academic and government scientists worked to communicate what they knew, ExxonMobil worked to deny it.

From the late 1980s the company funded organisations that disputed the scientific consensus, including the Global Climate Coalition, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute and a large number of smaller bodies, and placed advertorials in The New York Times emphasising uncertainty. Lee Raymond argued publicly against the Kyoto Protocol and questioned whether warming was occurring. The company announced in 2007 that it had ceased funding several such groups, though subsequent reporting identified continued payments to others.

Investigations followed. The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts opened inquiries in 2015 and 2016 into whether the company had misled investors and consumers. New York brought suit in 2018 alleging that ExxonMobil had used two different internal carbon prices, one for public disclosure and a lower one for internal planning, thereby understating the risk to its assets; the case was dismissed in 2019 after the court found the state had not proved material misstatement. A large number of cities, counties and states have since brought claims seeking to recover the costs of adaptation, on nuisance and consumer protection theories, and those proceedings continue.

The company has also been criticised for suing or subpoenaing its critics, including a 2016 action against the Massachusetts attorney general and subpoenas directed at researchers and advocacy organisations, conduct characterised by opponents as intended to deter scrutiny.

Exxon Valdez

On 24 March 1989 the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, releasing approximately 11 million gallons of crude oil and contaminating about 1,300 miles of coastline. It was the largest oil spill in American waters until Deepwater Horizon in 2010 and remains among the most environmentally damaging, because of the sensitivity and remoteness of the location.

The immediate response was slow and inadequately equipped, and the company's public handling of the incident, including the chief executive's delay in visiting the site, became a standard case study in crisis management failure. Exxon spent approximately US$3.8 billion on cleanup, settlements and fines. A jury awarded US$5 billion in punitive damages in 1994; after fourteen years of appeals the Supreme Court reduced the award to US$507.5 million in 2008, holding that punitive damages in maritime cases should not exceed compensatory damages, by which time a substantial number of the plaintiffs had died. Oil remains in the sediments of parts of the Sound.

The spill led directly to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which imposed double-hull requirements on tankers in American waters, established liability rules and created a trust fund for spill response.

Environmental and safety enforcement

The company committed thousands of violations of federal air pollution law at its Baytown complex between 2005 and 2013, for which it was ordered to pay US$19.95 million, later reduced to US$14.25 million, in a decision affirmed by the Fifth Circuit in 2024. It has been the subject of numerous other enforcement actions in the United States and elsewhere concerning emissions, flaring, wastewater and pipeline releases.

As a major producer of the polymers from which plastic is made, it has been identified in brand audits and academic studies as among the largest contributors to global plastic waste, and has been sued by the state of California in 2024 for allegedly misleading the public about the recyclability of plastic, a case testing whether promotion of recycling as a solution constitutes deception where the industry knew it would not operate at scale.

Human rights and geopolitics

In Doe v. ExxonMobil, villagers from Aceh in Indonesia alleged that Indonesian military units hired by the company to guard the Arun gas field had committed murder, torture and sexual violence, and that the company was liable for having engaged and paid them. The litigation continued for approximately two decades before settling.

The company's operations in countries including Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Angola and Nigeria have drawn criticism on transparency and governance grounds, and it opposed the rule made under the Dodd-Frank Act requiring extractive companies to disclose payments to foreign governments, which was ultimately vacated. During Rex Tillerson's tenure the company negotiated agreements with Russia and with Kurdistan that placed it at odds with American foreign policy objectives, and its relationship with the State Department has periodically been the subject of comment.

Allegations of war profiteering have been raised in relation to periods of high prices during conflict, most recently after the invasion of Ukraine, when the company's record 2022 profits prompted proposals for windfall taxation in the United States and the imposition of such taxes in the European Union and United Kingdom.

Benzene exposure

The company has faced litigation from workers and from residents near its facilities alleging that exposure to benzene, a constituent of crude oil and petrochemical streams and an established human carcinogen, caused leukaemia and other cancers, and that the risks were known and inadequately disclosed. Comparable claims have been brought against most companies in the industry.

Corporate affairs

Headquarters and offices

ExxonMobil moved its headquarters from Irving, Texas, where it had occupied a low, heavily secured building widely described as fortress-like, to a large campus at Spring, north of Houston, completed in 2014 and consolidating operations previously spread across several states. Imperial Oil in Canada and Esso entities in Europe operate as subsidiaries.

Management and governance

Darren Woods has been chairman and chief executive since 2017. The board was expanded in 2021 following the Engine No. 1 campaign, and the company has since made commitments on emissions disclosure that it had previously resisted.

The corporate culture is distinctive within the industry. Managers are recruited largely from engineering disciplines, promoted internally over long careers, and the company's operating and capital allocation systems are unusually centralised and quantitative. Its financial discipline, in particular its insistence on measuring projects against a consistent return threshold rather than against production volume, produced returns superior to its peers for decades and has been criticised as having made it slow to respond to changes it could not model.

Business trends

Revenue was approximately US$340 billion in 2024. Earnings are dominated by the upstream division and are therefore driven by the oil price, which the company does not control and which has ranged from negative values in April 2020 to above US$120 a barrel in 2022 within a two-year period. The company maintains one of the strongest balance sheets in the industry and has increased its dividend annually for more than four decades, a record it protected through the 2020 losses by borrowing, a decision criticised at the time and vindicated by the recovery.