Petroleum Products: “Oil for Aladdin’s Lamp” revised circa 1949 Shell Oil Company 21min
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“The romance of the petroleum industry, showing how dependent our society is on oil and petrochemical products. Remake and update of the original (1933) version.”
NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Shell Oil Company is the United States-based subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, a multinational oil company (“oil major”) of Anglo Dutch origins, which is amongst the largest oil companies in the world. Approximately 22,000 Shell employees are based in the U.S. The U.S. head office is in Houston, Texas. Shell Oil Company, including its consolidated companies and its share in equity companies, is one of America’s largest oil and natural gas producers, natural gas marketers, gasoline marketers and petrochemical manufacturers.
Shell is the market leader through approximately 25,000 Shell-branded gas stations in the US which also serve as Shell’s most visible public presence. Shell Oil Company is a 50/50 partner with the Saudi Arabian government-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in Motiva Enterprises, a refining and marketing joint venture which owns and operates three oil refineries on the Gulf Coast of the United States. It also holds 80% of an exploration firm called Pecten that explores and drills in various offshore locations including the oil basin near Douala, Cameroon in cooperation with the French government-owned Elf Aquitaine (now Total).
Shell products include oils, fuels, and card services as well as exploration, production, and refining of petroleum products. The Shell Oil Refinery in Martinez, California, the first Shell refinery in the United States, supplies Shell and Texaco stations in the West and Midwest.
Shell gasolines previously included the RU2000 and SU2000 lines (later there was a SU2000E) but they have been superseded by the V-Power line.
In 1997, Shell and Texaco entered into two refining/marketing joint ventures. One combined their midwestern and western operations and was known as Equilon. The other, known as Motiva, combined the eastern and gulf coast operations of Shell Oil and Star Enterprise, itself a joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Texaco. After Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001, Shell purchased Texaco’s shares in the joint ventures. In 2002, Shell began converting these Texaco stations to the Shell brand, a process that was to be completed by June 2004 and was called “the largest retail re-branding initiative in American business history…”
The Royal Dutch Shell Group was created in February 1907 through the merger of two rival companies – Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (Dutch legal name : N.V. Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij) and the “Shell” Transport and Trading Company Ltd of the United Kingdom, founded by Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted. It was a move largely driven by the need to compete globally with the then dominant American petroleum company, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and as a strategy to face the challenges brought by the crisis of 1907. The terms of the merger gave 60% ownership of the new Group to the Dutch arm and 40% to the British.
Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was a Dutch company founded in 1890 by Jean Baptiste August Kessler, along with Henri Deterding, when a Royal charter was granted by King William III of the Netherlands to a small oil exploration and production company known as “Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch East Indies”.
The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel and his brother Samuel Samuel. Their father had owned a company, importing and selling sea-shells, after which the company “Shell” took its name. Initially the Company commissioned eight oil tankers for the purposes of transporting oil. In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company and in 1921 formed Shell-Mex Limited which marketed products under the “Shell” and “Eagle” brands in the United Kingdom. In 1932, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, Shell-Mex merged its UK marketing operations with those of British Petroleum to create Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, a company that traded until the brands separated in 1975…
