Kerr-McGee

Kerr-McGee Center 123 Robert S. Kerr Avenue Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73102 U.S.A. Company enters the industrial chemical industry, buying a pigment plant in Mississippi. From its beginning as a small drilling company during the Great Depression, Kerr-McGee Corporation has grown to become one of the country's more successful medium-sized energy and chemical companies. Kerr-McGee's operations focus on three areas: oil and natural gas production, production and marketing of inorganic industrial chemicals, and coal mining and marketing. The Great Depression was just around the corner when Anderson & Kerr Drilling Company was founded near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in July 1929. The company's assets amounted to three boilers and two steam rigs, and the company was one of many small oil-related firms vying for drilling contracts in a city that was booming. The local newspaper, the Daily Oklahoman, in October 1929, mentioned the October stock market crash briefly under the headline, "Business Men are Unnecessarily Troubled by Crash of Stocks." This town wasn't feeling the depression--there was oil here and plenty of it. The year 1937 was a critical time. The economy was in recession, oil prices were decreasing, and there was no money to finance drilling. The company's directors recognized a need for leadership at the executive level to move the company's exploration and production into the black. They were willing to bank a large part of their holdings on two men from Phillips Petroleum, offering them salaries that dwarfed their own by comparison. Robert Lynn became executive vice-president of the company which, in these formative years, restructured and renamed its operations several times. He played a prominent role in the company, then called Kerlyn Oil Company, for five years. Dean A. McGee, the second man from Phillips, was to direct the company on a new course almost immediately. His presence was felt until his death in 1989. McGee, who had been Phillips's chief geologist, relied heavily on credit, faith, and hard labor. Within a year the company made its first major oil discovery--the Magnolia field in Columbia County, Arkansas. The revenues from the Magnolia discovery fueled further expansion. In 1942, confident that the company was in capable hands and certain that his primary role was to be played out in public office, Bob Kerr made a long-desired move into politics. That year he was elected governor of Oklahoma, and throughout successive political roles, including U.S. senator, Kerr remained an active member of the company's board until his death in 1963. When Kerr made his move into politics Robert Lynn decided to leave the company. From the time he joined the firm, McGee had acted as a key figure in the company. He was the logical choice to move into Lynn's leadership role, and in 1946 the company changed its name to Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, Inc. McGee became executive vice-president in 1942 and was made president of Kerr-McGee in 1957. Exploration activities continued to increase as Kerr-McGee expanded its drilling operations to the Gulf of Mexico. Seeking to capitalize on the increased need for refined oil products, the company also moved into "downstream" operations with the purchase of its first refinery in 1945. Downstream activities generally include transportation, refining, storage, marketing, distribution, and slop disposal--in short, all activities that follow the upstream activities of exploration and production. In the postwar 1940s the energy needs of the United States were rising dramatically. The country was using as much oil in one year as did the entire world in 1938. Kerr-McGee responded to this trend with many firsts in oil exploration and production, including in 1947, the completion of the world's first commercial oil well that was out of sight and safety of land, 11 miles off Louisiana's shore. This marked the beginning of the nation's offshore drilling industry. The company added natural ga