Select locations Conoco (/ˈkɒnəkoʊ/ KON-ə-koh),[2] formerly known as Continental Oil, is an American petroleum brand that is operating under the current ownership of the Phillips 66 Company since 2012 and is headquartered in the Westchase neighborhood of Houston, (Harris County), Texas.

Conoco was a subsidiary of that dominant petroleum company from 1884 until its 1911 divestiture when the Supreme Court of the United States in the federal national capital city of Washington, D.C. in a major significant anti-trust legal case ruled to decouple and break up the monopolized entity of Standard Oil.

As the Continental-Marland acquisition took effect, Marland Oil favorably phased out its own personal name and rebranded itself into the more nationally known titles of Continental and Conoco nameplates.

[9][10] Based in Ogden, Utah, the company distributed the recently discovered mineral resources of petroleum / oil (first found in August 1859 by Edwin Drake (1819–1880), in a well drilled at Oil Creek, near Titusville, (Crawford County), in the far northwestern corner of Pennsylvania) and its refined by-products of kerosene, benzene, and other products in the Western United States.

[15] The company ran into early trouble when, shortly after acquisition, it was hit by the Great New York Stock Market Crash of October 1929.

[16] Under the leadership of successor Leonard F. McCollum, Conoco grew from a regional petroleum company to a global corporation in the post-war years after World War II of the late 1940s and into the 1950s.

Another rough patch for the company came two decades later during the 1970s energy crisis, beginning with the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo (resulting from the fourth Arab-Israeli conflict of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973), from which it did not fully recover until 1981, when Conoco became a subsidiary of former corporate rival DuPont company of Wilmington, Delaware.

Although Seagram acquired a 32.2% stake in Conoco, DuPont was brought in as a "white knight" by the oil company and entered the bidding war.

[34] In 1995, Conoco Inc. was awarded a contract by the Islamic Republic of Iran to develop a huge offshore oilfield in the adjacent Persian Gulf to the south.

It was the first energy agreement involving Iran and the United States since Washington severed diplomatic relations 15 years before with Tehran in 1979–1980, during the American Embassy invasion, seizure and occupation there by mobs of student activists and taking U.S. diplomats hostage for a year in the Iran hostage crisis.

[36] However, the company dropped the plan after the White House announced that after further consideration and consultation, that 42nd President Bill Clinton (born 1946, served 1993–2001), would issue a directive blocking all such transactions on grounds of national security.