The fuel company Tesoro is now known as Andeavor.
And it's quite a bit bigger than it was just a few years ago. The name change comes as part of an overall marketing effort that really began almost twenty years ago, when Tesoro began purchasing refineries in the Lower 48.
The company’s Vice President at the Kenai refinery, Cameron Hunt, made a presentation at a joint meeting of the Kenai and Soldotna Chambers of Commerce Wednesday and explained the new name.
“What does Andeavor mean? It’s a custom word. Sounds like ‘endeavor’, which (means) ‘to strive for’. That’s something that we’re constantly trying to do as a company. We had an opportunity, as we’re acquiring western refining (operations), we wanted to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace and we wanted to build a different identity for ourselves as a company.”
That new identity includes picking up more than half a dozen oil refineries in the western United States and branching out into logistics and marketing operations. It has also meant the purchase of hundreds of gas stations all over the U.S.
The effort isn’t just that of Tesoro. Hunt says it’s more of a partnership with a number of energy companies, big and small, and it got off the ground with the purchase earlier this year of a company called Western Refining.
“We had an opportunity here, rather than rebranding Western as Tesoro, we had an opportunity to say ‘hey, we’re building this company together.’ Along with Western, along with the other refineries that come from BP, Shell, Amoco, etc. and from Tesoro," Hunt said.
What all those mergers and acquisitions amount to is a company with more than 3,000 retail gas stations nation-wide, a refining capacity of 1.2 million barrels per day and more than 13,000 employees. Despite all of those changes, though, gas stations branded under the Tesoro name in Alaska will stay unchanged.