ARCO

ARCO is a brand of gasoline stations owned by Marathon Petroleum. BP, which formerly owned the brand, uses it in Northern California, Oregon and Washington, while Marathon has rights for the rest of the United States and Mexico. ARCO was established in 1966 as the Atlantic Richfield Company, an independent oil and gas company formed from the merger of Atlantic Petroleum and the Richfield Oil Corporation. History From 1966 to 2000, the Atlantic Richfield Company, doing business as ARCO, was an independent American oil company with operations in the United States, Indonesia, the North Sea, the South China Sea and Mexico. After its acquisition of Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1977, ARCO had owned hard rock mines in several western states, which has created environmental clean-up liabilities to the company to this day even after the mines were closed in the early 1980s. In 2000, BP Amoco (now BP) acquired ARCO for $26.8 billion. ARCO's retail and marketing operations were kept separate while the rest of the company was integrated into BP.