Where is the closest Murphy USA?

One of the smallest among integrated oil companies located in the United States is Murphy Oil Company. The company performs onshore and offshore exploration in the U.S. (especially in the Gulf of Mexico), in the west part of Canada, the North Sea of the United Kingdom, and Ecuador.

It operates two U.S. oil refineries based in Superior, Wisconsin and Meraux, Louisiana, and has 30% interest in one of the United Kingdom refineries, namely Milford Haven, located in Wales. As for the marketing, the company is present in 17 states of the U.S. (Upper Midwest and Southeast region) in Ontario's Canadian Thunder Bay area.

Murphy offers refined fuels via more than 560 SPUR and Murphy USA petrol stations. Approximately 45 of them are placed in the Wal-Mart Shops discount supermarkets' parking lots. Murphy's products are present at nearly 400 fuel stations in the United Kingdom. It is also involved in four pipelines for crude oil located in Western Canada and pipelines for refined oils located in the U.S.

Murphy Oil made a deal with Chevron Corporation and Elf Aquitaine S.A. in France to merge their interests in the U.K., considering refining and marketing in November 1996. But at the beginning of 1997, it changed the strategy and decided to go alone through the competitive U.K. market. So Murphy entered an alliance with the United Kingdom Costcutter chain stores and was finally able to turn the losses into profits.

In the United States, Murphy Oil pursued a similar plan of combining fuel stations with markets agreeing with Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. The attempt was so successful that by the end of 1999, Murphy had 145 Wal-Mart stations, with plans to double the number by the end of 2000. In the meantime the oil surplus crisis pushed the price of a barrel of crude oil down to around $11 by the end of 1998.

The lowest price in history was driven by inflation. For comparison, it was about $23 just a year before that. The glut of oil was caused by several factors, primarily the Asian financial crisis and its sharp decrease in consumption of oil products and the OPEC's virtual failure that could not restrain its production.

Because of the low prices, in 1998, Murphy Oil's profit decreased by 20%, from $2.13 billion in 1997 to $1.69 billion. Furthermore, the company took charge of 57.6 million dollars to report the value of part of its possessions, which caused a net loss of 14.4 million dollars for the year.

This proved to be just a temporary decrease, as oil prices bounced back. In late 1999, the company reported overall capital expenses of $457 million for 2000, showing an 18% rise compared to the previous year. At the same time, lots of funds were spent on developing a retailing program in Wal-Mart as well as exploring the Gulf of Mexico and developing Terra Nova, which was anticipated to be used for oil production at the beginning of 2001.

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