Usual Oil of Contemporary Jersey (Esso), Anglo Iranian Oil Firm (AIOC), Usual Oil of Contemporary York (Socony), Gulf Oil, Usual Oil of California (Socal), Texaco and Royal Dutch Shell.
Today, only the last two names on the above list are familiar. This, despite the fact that during much of the 20th century, all of these companies influenced the lives of millions of people due to the predominant role they played in the world economy by controlling a large part of the planet’s oil production and reserves.
Even in countries where they operated for decades, such as Venezuela, many of their inhabitants would find it difficult to associate them with the origins of the once all-powerful national hydrocarbon industry, since each one operated under a different name.
“The subsidiary in the country of Contemporary Jersey’s Usual Oil was called Creole Petroleum Corporation, and Gulf Oil’s was called Mene Grande,” recalls Venezuelan oil expert José Toro Hardy.
However, the name by which all of them were known collectively — “The Seven Sisters” — remains in the memory of Venezuelans, especially those over 50 years of age.
From classical Greece, but with derogatory purposes
“The name of the ‘Seven Sisters’ was given to these enormous transnational companies by Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state oil company ENI,” Giuliano Garavini, professor of History at Tre University in Rome (Italy), told BBC Mundo.
“The name was chosen by Mattei to describe these large oil companies, which monopolized oil production outside the United States and the Soviet Union and operated as an oligopoly,” added the author of the book. The Upward thrust and Tumble of OPEC in the 20th Century (The rise and fall of OPEC in the 20th century).
But why call them sisters if two of them weren’t even born on the same continent?
“It could have been a nod to the classic,” Venezuelan historian Rafael Arráiz Lucca told BBC Mundo, who made it clear that Mattei could have been inspired by the Greek myth of the Pleiades, the seven nymph sisters who ended up becoming stars.
“It is also important to remember that three of those seven companies were a consequence of the antitrust ban in force in the United States, which forced (John D.) Rockefeller to accept that his Usual Oil was divided into several smaller companies,” added the author of the book “Petroleum in Venezuela: a worldwide history.”
In 1911, the US Supreme Court declared that Usual Oil was a monopoly and declared it illegal, so the emporium that the then richest man on the planet formed since the end of the 19th century was dismembered into 39 companies, many of which, over the years, merged to form larger conglomerates.
The other two sisters were European: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Firm, which today is British Petroleum or BP, from the United Kingdom; and Shell, which was Anglo-Dutch.
To the above we must add the fact that the firms at a certain point stopped being competitors and became allies, which would explain why they have gone down in history as a cartel.
“These companies had concessions in Venezuela, in the Gulf countries (Persian/Arabian), Libya and Indonesia and these concessions allowed them to decide everything, such as the technology used, the amount of oil that was going to be produced and the price at which it was going to be sold,” Garavini said.
“The only thing they left to the countries where the oil deposits were were taxes, although sometimes the tax regime was not something sovereign either,” he admitted.
By 1970, the “Seven Sisters” produced around 80% of the oil sold in the world, not counting the US and the former USSR; and they controlled 85% of the reserves, said the American historian David Yergin in his book The prize (The prize).
The birth of the poster
The behavior that would lead to the end of the “Seven Sisters” began at the end of August 1928 at a meeting held at Achnacarry Castle (United Kingdom).
Henri Deterding, then director of Shell; Walter Teagle, president of Contemporary Jersey’s Usual Oil; and John Cadman, of Anglo-Persian.
The official objective of the meeting was to participate in a hunt. “It is no mystery that I am here as a guest of Sir Henri Deterding for the hunt, as I have had the pleasure of being his guest on numerous previous games in Europe,” Teagle told the press, according to the newspaper at the time. The Contemporary York Cases.
“Naturally, the ramifications of the world’s largest industry, oil, in which the three of us are interested, offer and always will offer a wide field of conversation,” added the American businessman.
And certainly, in addition to hunting birds, the three oilmen talked about the hydrocarbon business and reached an agreement that would not only modify the way they had been operating, but would have global repercussions.
The businessmen agreed to stop the atrocious competition that until then they had maintained for deposits and markets, a struggle that was bleeding them dry, and they agreed on a system of production quotas to keep prices stable or rising in order to always make profits.
They also agreed to share facilities and restrict new development to reduce costs.
And finally, Iran’s newly discovered crude oil deposits were distributed, according to the website of the Office of Historians of the US Department of State.
The so-called Achnacarry Agreement remained secret until 1952, when it was exposed to the US Federal Trade Commission.
Years later, the meeting was recreated in a film about Deterding’s life made in Germany.
The experts consulted admitted that the power of the oil companies in the first decades of the 20th century was such that they could influence governments and even confront them.
“In 1951, Iran nationalized its oil industry because the government considered that the oil company (BP) was not investing enough and was not paying the corresponding taxes. What happened? The ‘Seven Sisters’ decided to block the sale of Iranian oil; no one would touch it,” Garavini recalled.
“And then the intervention of the CIA (US) and MI6 (UK) led to the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddeq’s government two years later and its replacement by the Shah (Reza Pahlavi),” explained the Italian historian.
“It was not the oil companies that overthrew the government, but they did participate,” he added.
The Caribbean refuge
At the beginning of the 20th century, the discovery of oil fields in Venezuela attracted the “Seven Sisters” to the Caribbean country, although three (Usual Oil of Contemporary Jersey, Shell and Gulf Oil) had the greatest presence and for the longest time.
“Shell is the pioneer of the Venezuelan oil industry, the first to arrive and the one that exploited the Zumaque 1 well in 1914,” explained Arráiz Lucca, who added that it was later followed by Usual Oil of Contemporary Jersey.
Although it arrived late, the American company soon took over half of the country’s wells. As? “It was buying small companies and concessions granted to other people,” explained the Venezuelan historian.
The nationalization of oil in Mexico in 1938 ended up attracting transnational companies to Venezuela.
“Shortly after, World War II broke out and Venezuelan oil was essential for the Allied victory,” Toro Hardy recalled.
“We Venezuelans and the world no longer remember, but more than 60% of the oil used by the allies came from Venezuela,” said the former director of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state firm born from the nationalization of the Venezuelan subsidiaries of the “Seven Sisters” five decades ago.
“And although important discoveries were later made in the Middle East, constant crises also began to occur that interrupted supply. And, for this reason, the world saw Venezuela as a reliable producer,” added the oil expert.
Between the 1940s and 1950s, transnational companies built large refining complexes in the country, most of which are still operational and form one of the pillars of the now battered Venezuelan oil industry.
“Most of the refineries in Venezuela were built by concessionaires. After nationalization (1976) modernization or expansion work was done, but the essential infrastructure was built by foreign concessionaires,” said historian Arráiz Lucca.
The deadly blows
But since nothing lasts forever, the power of the “Seven Sisters” began to decline in the 1960s due to two factors: the founding of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the nationalizations in Venezuela and the countries of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, explained the experts consulted.
“OPEC began to control the markets, taking away the influence of these companies,” said Toro Hardy.
Garavini spoke in similar terms, explaining: “The exporting countries wanted to have a voice, not only in matters of taxes, but also in production and to do so they needed to coordinate.”
“If Iraq raised taxes, what companies did was change their investments and increase production in Saudi Arabia or other countries, or veto the sale of Iraqi crude oil. OPEC’s idea was to dispute that power with the sisters,” he added.
OPEC members have 80% of global crude oil reserves and produce 40% of the barrels consumed in the world, according to organization data.
Of the “Seven Sisters”, only four survive today: ExxonMobil, which resulted from the mergers between Contemporary Jersey’s Usual Oil (Esso) and New York’s (Mobil); Chevron, which is the result of mergers between Gulf Oil and Texaco; BP, which became Anglo-Iranian; and Shell, which is the only one that has not changed its name.
And although they continue to play an important role, currently the world oil market is dominated by national companies from some of the countries where they operated for decades, such as Aramco of Saudi Arabia, NIOC of Iran or INOC of Iraq. PDVSA was also part of this group until its collapse at the end of the last decade.
To the rescue of his heir?
With the nationalization of oil in 1976, the “Seven Sisters” officially lost the bulk of their market in Venezuela. However, some managed to maintain some type of presence through service or maintenance contracts with the nascent and then promising PDVSA; one of them was Shell.
In the late 1990s, when the country undertook the so-called Oil Opening—an initiative aimed at incorporating private capital in the development of the vast fields of heavy and extra-heavy crude oil in the Orinoco Belt—several of these companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, returned to the country.
“In the Opening, investments of US$65,000 million were committed that, if fulfilled, would have taken Venezuela’s oil production to five million barrels per day by 2005,” said Toro Hardy, one of the promoters of the initiative.
However, those plans were cut short in May 2007, when the late Hugo Chávez launched a second oil nationalization and ExxonMobil and other transnational companies withdrew from the country.
The expert believes that the turn taken by the Venezuelan authorities after the unprecedented military operation that the US launched in the country on January 3, which ended with the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, could serve to resume some of the discarded plans and take advantage of the vast oil wealth.
Days after the events, US President Donald Trump asked international oil companies to invest US$100 billion to rescue the Venezuelan industry, and almost simultaneously the Venezuelan Parliament hastily approved a reform to the Hydrocarbons Law to allow the participation of private companies in the energy sector.
“Venezuela was always considered the safest and most reliable oil supplier in the oil markets and by offering legal security that allows the return of private investors, it will be so again,” added the former director of PDVSA.
At the beginning of 2026, Chevron, one of the sisters, produced 250,000 barrels of crude oil per day in the country, around a quarter of current Venezuelan production; and hoped to increase that number to 300,000 by March.
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