Research Paper on Valero

 I.Introduction

Valero Energy Corporation is a Fortune 500 international manufacturer and a marketer of transportation fuels, other petrochemical products, and power (n, d. Valero Energy to Purchase Chevron's Pembroke Refinery, Marketing and Logisitics Assets in the U.K. and Ireland, 2011). It is based in San Antonio, Texas, United States. The company owns and operates 16 refineries throughout the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and the Caribbean with a combined throughput capacity of approximately 3 million barrels per day, 10 ethanol plants with a combined production capacity of 1.2 billion US gallons per year, and a 50 megawatt wind farm. Valero is also one of the United States' largest retail operators with approximately 6,800 retail and branded wholesale outlets in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and the Caribbean under the Valero, Diamond Shamrock, Shamrock, Ultramar, Beacon, and Texaco brands. (n, d. Valero Energy to Purchase Chevron's Pembroke Refinery, Marketing and Logisitics Assets in the U.K. and Ireland, 2011).

Named for the mission San Antonio de Valero – the original name of the Alamo – Valero Energy Corporation was created on Jan. 1, 1980, as the corporate successor to LoVaca Gathering Company, a subsidiary of the Coastal States Gas Corporation. Valero is the direct result of a $1.6 billion settlement approved unanimously in 1978 by the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s natural gas regulatory agency, which ended more than six years of litigation brought against Coastal by its municipal gas customers who claimed they had been overcharged for natural gas.

Valero’s natural-gas transportation business diversified in the mid-1980s when the company purchased a 50 percent interest in a Corpus Christi, Texas, refinery owned by Saber Energy. The operation began as nothing more than a vacuum unit and crude unit on a humble plot of land near the Corpus Christi Ship Channel. But in the years that followed, Valero assembled its...