Seven Sisters (oil companies)

"Seven Sisters" was a term coined in the 1950s by businessman Enrico Mattei, then-head of the Italian state oil company Eni, to describe the seven oil companies which formed the "Consortium for Iran" cartel and dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. The group comprised Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP), Gulf Oil (later part of Chevron), Standard Oil of California (SoCal, now Chevron), Texaco (later merged into Chevron), Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso, later Exxon), and Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony, later Mobil, now part of ExxonMobil).

Prior to the oil crisis of 1973, the members of the Seven Sisters controlled around 85 percent of the world's petroleum reserves; but since then, industry dominance has shifted to the OPEC cartel and state-owned oil and gas companies in emerging-market economies, such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corporation, National Iranian Oil Company, PDVSA (Venezuela), Petrobras (Brazil), and Petronas (Malaysia).