1909 to 1954
In May 1908 a group of British geologists discovered a large amount of oil at Masjid-i-Suleiman in Iran. It was the first commercially significant find of oil in the Middle East. The Shah of Iran granted a concession to William Knox D'Arcy to enable the British to drill for Iran's oil. On 14 April 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated as a subsidiary of Burmah Oil Company. Some of the shares were sold to the public. The first chairman and minority shareholder of the company became Lord Strathcona.
Immediately after establishing the company, construction of the Abadan Refinery and the pipeline from Masjid to Abadan started. The refinery was commissioned in 1912. In 1913, the British Government acquired a controlling interest (50.0025%) in the company and at the suggestion of Winston Churchill, the British navy switched from coal to oil.The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, came to be run 100% on oil from Iran. In 1915, APOC established its shipping subsidiary the British Tanker Company and in 1916 it acquired the British Petroleum Company which was a marketing arm of the German Europäische Petroleum Union in Britain. In 1919, the company became a shale-oil producer by establishing a subsidiary named Scottish Oils which merged remaining Scottish oil-shale industries.
After World War I, APOC started marketing its products in Continental Europe and acquired stakes in the local marketing companies in several European countries. Refineries were built in Llandarcy in Wales (the first refinery in the United Kingdom) and Grangemouth in Scotland. It also acquired the controlling stake in the Courchelettes refinery in France and formed with the Government of Australia a partnership named Commonwealth Oil Refineries, which built the Australian's first refinery in Laverton, Victoria.[31] In 1923, Burmah employed Winston Churchill as a paid consultant to lobby the British government to allow APOC have exclusive rights to Persian oil resources, which were subsequently granted by the Iranian monarchy.[40]