Talk:Unocal Corporation

Afghan Pipeline
No mention of Unocol's role in the discussions with Turkmenistan, about building the pipeline through Afghanistan, before the talks between Washington and the Taleban over the pipeline broke down and the US subsequently invaded Afghanistan instead?

Isn't it important, as a key role in oil politics which (arguably) helped lead to two countries collapsing?


 * Oooh, another 9/11 conspiracy! Just what we needed! 216.37.253.152 (talk) 03:52, 4 May 2008 (UTC)


 * If you have information to add to the article, I encourage you to help write it. Kingturtle 20:41, 20 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, I tried, but, my addition is probably poorly structured. Also, I'm sure Unocal has been involved in many other dealings, and the paucity of other history makes its role in the tawdry US/Afghanistan dispute seem overemphasized by comparison, I think.

That paragraph on Unocal and Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is oversimplified at best, and arguably misleading, but I've not time to try to fix it. I'm also not sure if wikipedia has an article on CentGas somewhere -- searching on CentGas doesn't find it. Slitim 19:12, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

I think we should add in that there was a documentary made on this topic called Total Denial which won a Vaclav Havel Special Award for Human Rights in 2006. Agreement? (Radokapi 16:56, 15 December 2006 (UTC))

Fair use rationale for Image:Unocal Logo.svg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 02:39, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Paul Calonico
The Paul Calonico article claims this person founded (or at least funded) one of the companies that became Union Oil; and indeed asserts that his son and grandson ran it.

As an employee of Unocal for the last 45 years I can assert that the Calonico Family, while strange, does have a very large influence in the company, but haven't been involved for year. In the Unocal archives there is documentation of their role. I am retired, but will contact the person who took over my role as Document and Records manger and see if he can track it down. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.80.182.130 (talk) 15:52, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Remove "needs additional citations..."?
I believe we now have enough references from reliable sources. Can we remove the "article needs additional citations for verification" box at the top?--CurtisSwain (talk) 23:41, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Neutrality
There seems to be some disagreement re: the article's purpose and factual quality, which is fine. It should be neither unduly weighted toward controversies, nor whitewashed. However, I don't believe that these edits aim for a neutral presentation, , , and given that a WP:SPA is involved, suggest a possible WP:COI. 2601:188:0:ABE6:65F5:930C:B0B2:CD63 (talk) 21:22, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

CityOfMirrors (talk) 21:24, 31 December 2015 (UTC)CityOfMirrors

I don't appreciate your allegations. The tone of the article (admittedly a work-in-progress) was vastly improved by my changes and began to add verifiable facts surrounding Unocal's global operations. The sources were much more factual. As a purely factual matter: Unocal was a sizable oil & gas producer in Louisiana via the offshore US Gulf of Mexico, yet the existing page does not even list this. Similarly: adding its Fortune 500 ranking begins to help an uninformed reader understand how large Unocal was and how that changed from 1985 to 2005. I was trying to improve the article and removed information that I could not immediately verify. Perhaps I was over-cautious in removing information while conducting further research, but the article as is demonstrates a clear and unequivocal bias towards controversy, factual non-events, and incidents where unlisted sources are the currency of facts. It looks unlikely that prior authors conducted the work necessary to verify their information. It is very well possible that these individuals had and/or have a conflict-of-interest.

Wikipedia should be a repository of demonstrable facts for individuals seeking to research companies, not a political message board. For example: compare the quality of the following page to the Unocal one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BG_Group

BG is very similar to Unocal, yet its article is much clearer and factual.

As a factual matter with respect to "conflict-of-interest" allegations, there are numerous entities and sources here that have clear and demonstrable conflicts-of-interest. The article does not explore them in any detail deserved. I think that all the opinions in this article should be clearly identified as such and placed in a separate heading entitled "Opinions Surrounding Unocal". For example: "The Nation" should never be used as an unbiased source. It is a partisan magazine and is well-known for its biases. No link is provided to an accurate description of its agenda. Similarly: the article does not even try to explain who EarthRights International is and whether it has a conflict of interest. As a purely financial matter, my preliminary research would suggest that it is an organization that could not exist without legal settlements and the finding of corporate guilt. As such, it has a clear financial bias towards the finding of corporate guilt in a very vague area of the law.

With respect to "whitewashing", the existing article lists allegations and disputed facts as if they are facts. For example: who is Julie Sirrs (there is no link to her bio and conflicts-of-interest) and does she have a conflict of interest? Similarly: who is Richard Labeviere (again no bio and listing of conflicts-of-interest)? For example: how does one even begin to verify a source where the individual is legally defined as "Doe"? Logic would suggest that someone known as Doe might have an undisclosed conflict of interest. Similarly: how does one even begin to verify highly secretive meetings in rural Afghanistan?

Unocal is a company that existed from 1890 to 2005, yet the summary description lists two sentences where an uninformed reader might conclude upon reading this article that Unocal was a company with principal operations in Afghanistan. As a purely factual matter, this is very inaccurate. As an example stated in the edit prior to this reversion: Unocal actually owned a pipeline in Argentina in 1996, whereas no pipeline ever existed in Afghanistan. As a parallel example: Apple and/or Google no doubt have countless secretive projects that never come to fruition, yet its Wikipedia article would never list these projects as if they were the company's main purpose.

Again, to an uneducated reader trying to learn about Unocal, the existing article is highly biased towards non-events. The CentGas/Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is (a "pipeline" that as a factual matter never even existed) Doe v. Unocal (a case that as a legal matter was vacated and no legal facts were ever formally proven to the public and ended in a "confidential settlement") As a factual matter: the links are broken for the following sources, which suggested to me serious issues with the claims and the overall thrust of the article. Gail Sheehy, "Ex-Spook Sirrs: Early Osama Call Got Her Ejected", The New York Observer, March 14, 2004. Eviatar, Daphne (May 9, 2005). A Big Win for Human Rights. The Nation. Howard, John E. (Oct. 2002). The Alien Tort Claims Act: Is Our Litigation-Run-Amok Going Global?. Retrieved Oct. 6, 2005. Unocal. The story you haven't heard about. . . The Yadana Project in Myanmar Retrieved Oct. 6, 2005. Brief Oil and Gas History of Santa Barbara County: Santa Barbara County Energy Division Le, Phuong (August 10, 1999). "Beach town forced to scrape away oil leak -- and a chunk of its past". Seattle PI. Retrieved 09/12/09.

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