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Reviewed by:
  • Exxon: Transforming Energy, 1973–2005 by Joseph A. Pratt
  • James E. Cousar
Exxon: Transforming Energy, 1973–2005. By Joseph A. Pratt with William E. Hale. (Austin: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, 2013. Pp. 662. Illustrations, maps, figures, appendices, notes, index.)

Exxon: Transforming Energy is the fifth volume of Exxon’s authorized corporate history. The principal author, Joseph A. Pratt, is a professor of business and history at the University of Houston. The co-author, William Hale, is a retired senior advisor to ExxonMobil’s Public Affairs Department. The book is based in part on the ExxonMobil historical archive at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Exxon, formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey or “Esso,” emerged from the breakup of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil Company following a 1911 Supreme Court anti-trust ruling. Esso, the largest and most successful of the Standard Oil offspring, changed its name to Exxon in 1973. When Exxon merged with Mobil Oil Corporation in 1999, it became ExxonMobil Corporation, the world’s largest non-state energy company. This volume covers an especially turbulent thirty-three years in Exxon’s history that encompassed two energy crises, repeated boom and bust cycles, and the formidable challenge of aggressive “resource nationalism.” The book also covers Exxon’s relocation from New York City to Irving, Texas.

Exxon reflects the advantages and drawbacks inherent in authorized histories. The advantages include access to extensive documentary resources and financial data, participation of key decision makers, and financial support for the book from ExxonMobil. Drawbacks include the authors’ personal engagement with the corporation they are chronicling and reliance on its financial support. Pratt’s preface candidly acknowledges that ExxonMobil exercised its right to review and comment on the manuscript, while ceding ultimate editorial control to the authors. The result is a comprehensive history, but one that subjects Exxon’s more controversial actions to only a modest degree of scrutiny.

The authors’ primary theme is the formidable challenge posed to Exxon and other “majors” in the 1970s when oil producing nations—including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and Libya—reclaimed oilfields from companies that had controlled them as private assets. The imperative of “reserve replacement” led Exxon and Mobil into increasingly challenging provinces, including Indonesia, former Soviet republics, and coastal and sub-Saharan Africa. Pratt and Hale do a credible job recounting ExxonMobil’s success in maintaining reserves and increasing its profitability in an era when many predicted that multi-nationals would become second string players to giant national oil companies like Saudi Aramco and Petrobras.

Because this is a thorough corporate history, it complements the company’s dramatic “upstream” story with accounts of the more mundane and lower revenue downstream divisions, including chemicals, refining, and retail. Pratt and Hale draw flattering portraits of corporate leadership over these three decades, balanced with a less admiring description of Exxon’s notoriously regimented corporate culture.

Two major misadventures draw different degrees of examination. Regarding the (then) largest oil spill in history, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the authors assess events and Exxon’s response evenhandedly. They acknowledge the stain left on the company’s reputation by the negligent spill and years of litigation and acrimony that followed. However, they largely gloss over Exxon’s controversial campaign to discredit widely accepted scientific research on global warming and its efforts to derail governmental initiatives intended to address that warming’s harmful effects. [End Page 238]

This thoroughly footnoted volume includes forty pages of indexes and data. Its detail and scope will make it a useful resource for researching a crucial era in “Big Oil’s” history, but like many authorized histories it should be balanced with more probing accounts of its subject’s complicated record. [End Page 239]

James E. Cousar
Austin, Texas
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