100 companies, 885 moves

The Massachusetts battery start-up that took a lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cathode out of an MIT laboratory, sold it first in DeWalt power tools, then in hybrid buses, grid storage and the Fisker Karma, raised a celebrated IPO in September 2009 and a ~$249m federal stimulus grant to build North America's largest lithium-ion cell plant in Livonia, Michigan — and went bankrupt three years later. A1

A Riyadh-based developer, investor and operator of power plants, desalination plants and, increasingly, green hydrogen, founded in 2004 by Saudi family business groups and now ~44% owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF, reported, verify current stake), which built a business on winning state tenders at record-low tariffs and then financing the plants with long, cheap project debt. It has no mat

The Ahmedabad renewables developer, controlled by Gautam Adani's family, that grew from a 2015 subsidiary of Adani Enterprises into India's largest renewable generator by operating capacity — ~20.8 GW (20,763 MW) at 30 Sep 2026 across 12 states, 70% solar, 16% wind and 14% hybrid (company, 21 Oct 2026) — and is building the ~30 GW Khavda park on the salt desert of Kutch in Gujarat, the largest sin

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, founded by decree in November 1971 to take over the emirate's share of oil concessions run by BP, Shell, Total, ExxonMobil and Japanese partners, which under Sultan Al Jaber (CEO since 2016) changed from a quiet concession holder into the most aggressive deal-maker among national oil companies. It has listed minority stakes in eight or so subsidiaries since 2017

The Allentown, Pennsylvania industrial-gas company that invented the business of building an oxygen or hydrogen plant on a customer's site and selling the gas under a 15–20-year take-or-pay contract. Founded in 1940 by Leonard Pool, Air Products became the world's largest merchant hydrogen supplier (company claim) and one of the three Western industrial-gas majors with Linde and Air Liquide. From

The Palo Alto–founded, Israel-run electric-car network start-up that Shai Agassi launched in 2007 to end range anxiety by separating the car from its battery: drivers would buy an electric car without a battery, Better Place would own the battery and a network of robotic swap stations and charge spots, and customers would pay for distance like a mobile-phone plan. It raised ~$850m (reported) from

The Silicon Valley maker of solid-oxide fuel cells that spent two decades selling an expensive, subsidy-dependent box to corporations who liked its clean-air story — and then, in 2024–26, found the customer it had been built for: a data centre that cannot wait five years for a grid connection. Founded in 2001 as Ion America by KR Sridhar, a former NASA-funded Mars researcher, Bloom launched the "B

The British major that began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company after oil was found in Iran in 1908, became the UK government's oil company in 1914, lost its Iranian concession to nationalisation in 1951, and rebuilt itself on Alaska and the North Sea. It grew into a "supermajor" through the Amoco (1998) and Arco (2000) mergers, rebranded as "Beyond Petroleum" in 2000, and then lost much of the valu

The listed renewable-power arm of Brookfield, the Toronto-based alternative-asset group, which grew from Canadian and US hydro dams into one of the world's largest owners of contracted clean power by buying distressed or out-of-favour assets cheaply and selling the output under long contracts. The United States is now its biggest market: it bought control of SunEdison's yieldco TerraForm Power in

The Shenzhen company that began in 1995 as a maker of rechargeable phone batteries and became the world's largest seller of electric cars. Founded by the chemist Wang Chuanfu, BYD ("Build Your Dreams") bought a small state carmaker in 2003, took a ~10% investment from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in 2008, launched its own lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) "Blade" cell in 2020, stopped making com

The Saskatoon uranium company formed in 1988 by merging two Canadian government miners, which owns the world's highest-grade uranium mines in northern Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin (McArthur River/Key Lake and Cigar Lake), a conversion plant at Port Hope, Ontario, 40% of the Inkai in-situ leach mine in Kazakhstan with Kazatomprom and, since November 2023, 49% of the reactor vendor Westinghouse al

The battery maker from Ningde, Fujian, that grew out of a consumer-battery company (ATL) in 2011 and in about a decade became the largest lithium-ion cell supplier in the world, with roughly a third or more of global EV battery installations (SNE Research, 2024–25, verify exact share) and the largest share of stationary-storage cells (~30.4% of storage shipments in 2025, SNE Research via company).

The Campbell, California, company that built North America's largest network of electric-vehicle chargers by count without owning most of them. Founded in 2007 as Coulomb Technologies, ChargePoint sells charging stations to the businesses that host them — employers, retailers, fleets, apartment owners, cities — and charges those hosts a recurring subscription for the cloud software that runs, pric

The Houston company that built a terminal at Sabine Pass, Louisiana to *import* liquefied natural gas, finished it in 2008 just as shale gas made the United States self-sufficient, and then reversed it. Cheniere signed 20-year sale-and-purchase agreements (SPAs) that paid a fixed liquefaction fee whether or not the buyer lifted a cargo, raised project debt against those fees, and shipped the first

The Oklahoma City shale-gas pioneer founded in 1989 by Aubrey McClendon and Tom Ward, which led the US land grab of the 2000s, became one of the two largest US gas producers, and showed better than any other company how shale could succeed technically and fail financially. Chesapeake leased millions of acres in the Barnett, Fayetteville, Haynesville and Marcellus with debt, joint-venture "carries"

The second-largest US oil company, descended from the Pacific Coast Oil Company (1879) and Standard Oil of California ("Socal"), which won the 1933 Saudi concession that became Saudi Aramco. Chevron has grown mainly by acquisition — Gulf Oil (1984), Texaco (2001), Unocal (2005), Noble (2020), PDC (2023) and Hess (closed 18 July 2025) — and its defining capability is M&A as strategy: knowing when t

The world's largest coal miner by output — ~768 Mt in FY2026 (April 2025–March 2026), more than the whole US coal industry — formed by India's nationalisation of coal mining in 1971–73 and organised as a holding company in November 1975. It supplies roughly three-quarters of India's coal (share falling as captive and commercial mines grow) and, through the power stations that burn it, most of Indi

A private fusion company spun out of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2018. It has raised ~$4bn of equity (company, July 2026), more than any other private fusion developer, on one engineering bet: that magnets made from high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape can make a tokamak far smaller and cheaper than the government machines that came before it. It proved the magnet at 20 tesla

The Houston-based company that is now the world's largest independent oil and gas producer — "independent" meaning it explores and produces but does not refine or sell fuel. It was formed by the 2002 merger of Conoco and Phillips Petroleum. It spent its first decade as an integrated major, and an expensive one: the Burlington Resources purchase (2006) and the Lukoil stake were largely written off

The largest owner of nuclear reactors in the United States, spun out of Exelon on 1 February 2022 as a merchant generator whose fleet had been closing plants for want of a price. Within three years the same reactors were treated as scarce assets. Constellation signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Microsoft to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 as the ~835 MW Crane Clean Energy Center

The off-grid solar company that grew out of a Stanford design class. Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun founded d.light in 2007 to replace kerosene lamps with cheap solar lanterns, sold first through shops and distributors in India and East Africa. It then moved up the product ladder to solar home systems with TVs, and from the mid-2010s into pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) credit over Kenya's M-PESA. Its distinctiv

The Lagos-based private conglomerate that Aliko Dangote built from a commodity-trading business started in the late 1970s into Africa's largest cement producer, a 3 million-tonne-a-year urea maker and, from 2024, the owner of the Dangote Petroleum Refinery at Lekki — a single-train plant with ~650,000 barrels a day (~650 kb/d) of nameplate crude capacity, the largest of its kind in the world, buil

The Richmond, Virginia utility holding company that grew from the Virginia Railway and Power Company (1909) into a sprawling gas-and-electric conglomerate — pipelines, storage, an LNG export plant at Cove Point, gas utilities from Ohio to Utah, merchant nuclear in New England — and then, in 2020–24, sold or cancelled most of it to become an electric utility in Virginia and the Carolinas. That util

The Charlotte, North Carolina utility that began in 1904 as a hydroelectric company on the Catawba River, financed by the tobacco fortune of James B. Duke, and grew by merger into one of the two or three largest US investor-owned utilities: ~8.6 million electric customers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky plus ~1.6–1.7 million gas customers (company, verify cur

France's state-owned national electricity company, owner and operator of the largest nuclear fleet run by a single company in the world (56–57 reactors, ~63 GW in France, plus 8–9 reactors in Britain through EDF Energy), builder of the EPR reactor, and since June 2023 once again 100% owned by the French state. EDF's story is the clearest test in the book of one claim: large nuclear is cheap to run

The Calgary company that began in 1949 as Interprovincial Pipe Line, built by Imperial Oil to carry oil from the new Leduc field in Alberta to refineries in the US Midwest and Ontario, and grew into North America's largest pipeline operator by volume: its Mainline system carries ~3 million bbl/d of crude and liquids (company), roughly 30% of the crude produced in North America (company claim), and

Italy's former state electricity monopoly, created by the nationalisation law of December 1962, listed in November 1999 and still ~23.6% owned by the Italian Treasury (verify current %), which became one of the world's largest private electricity companies by customers (~70m end users, company claim) and the largest private owner of renewable capacity (company claim) by buying Spain's Endesa in 20

The California company that put a small inverter behind every solar panel instead of one big inverter on the wall, made that "microinverter" the premium standard for US rooftop solar, nearly ran out of money in 2016–17, was rescued by a new CEO (Badri Kothandaraman, from Sep 2017) who rebuilt its costs and margins, and rode the 2019–22 residential boom from ~$316m to ~$2.33bn of revenue and into t

The Houston company formed in 1985 when InterNorth of Omaha bought Houston Natural Gas. It turned a heavily indebted interstate pipeline group into the largest trader of natural gas and electricity in North America. Its "gas bank" (1990) solved a real problem that deregulation had created, and EnronOnline (Nov 1999) became the most-used electronic platform in US gas and power. But from 1992 Enron

The Houston-based shale producer that began life as Enron Oil & Gas, left Enron's orbit in August 1999, two years before its former parent collapsed, and became the US independent most associated with running drilling as a returns business rather than a growth business. It was a gas company that saw the US gas glut coming. Between 2007 and 2010 it moved early into shale *oil* (the Bakken's Parshal

Norway's state-majority energy company, founded in 1972 as Statoil to make sure that the oil found on the Norwegian Continental Shelf after 1969 enriched Norway and built Norwegian industry, which grew into Europe's largest gas supplier after Russia's 2022 cut-offs, produces ~2.1m boe/d (2025, company), and pays most of its profits to a state that saves them in the world's largest sovereign wealth

South Africa's state-owned, vertically integrated electricity utility. Eskom was founded as ESCOM in 1923 and owns most of the country's generating capacity (mainly coal, plus Africa's only nuclear plant, Koeberg) and the national transmission grid. It also distributes power directly to mines, large industry and about half of end customers; the rest is resold by municipalities. For two decades it

The Texas-based integrated oil and gas company descended from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey ("Jersey Standard", 1882), reunited with its Standard Oil sibling Mobil in 1999. It is the largest investor-owned oil company in the Western world, producing ~4.7–4.8m barrels of oil equivalent a day (boe/d) in 2025 (company) from two "advantaged" pillars, the Guyana Stabroek block (disco

The Houston start-up that took the shale industry's two signature techniques — horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing — and pointed them at hot, dry rock to make "enhanced geothermal" power that runs around the clock. Founded in 2017 by a former shale drilling engineer, Tim Latimer, and a Stanford reservoir modeller, Jack Norbeck, Fervo signed a development agreement with Google

The Tempe, Arizona company that makes solar modules from cadmium telluride (CdTe) deposited on glass instead of from crystalline silicon. Because it uses no polysilicon, no wafers and no Chinese inputs, it sits outside the chain China dominates. That made it a modest, often struggling business through a decade of falling Chinese module prices. Then US trade law (AD/CVD, Section 201, UFLPA) and tax

The Arlington, Virginia battery-storage integrator formed in 2018 by AES and Siemens to design, supply and service grid-scale battery systems built from other companies' cells. Fluence buys lithium-ion cells (mostly Chinese LFP until 2025), packages them into its Gridstack, Ultrastack and Smartstack products, wraps them in controls and software (Fluence Mosaic, Nispera), and sells the result to ut

The Somerville, Massachusetts start-up building an iron-air battery that stores electricity for ~100 hours by rusting and un-rusting iron pellets, made in a converted steel town in Weirton, West Virginia. It is the leading US bet on multi-day storage: a product whose cost per kWh of capacity is meant to be a small fraction of lithium-ion's, at the price of low power density and low round-trip effi

Russia's state-controlled gas monopoly, created in August 1989 from the Soviet Ministry of the Gas Industry, which for three decades sold pipeline gas to Europe under long-term, oil-indexed contracts and was the largest single supplier of Europe's gas — ~150 bcm of pipeline exports in 2021 and ~40% of EU gas imports (reported, figures vary by source). It used price and transit disputes as leverage

The energy business of General Electric, spun off as a separate company on 2 April 2024 (NYSE: GEV), which makes the largest installed fleet of gas turbines in the world, onshore and offshore wind turbines, grid equipment and — through a joint venture with Hitachi — the BWRX-300 small modular reactor. For most of the decade before the spin-off the same businesses were GE's problem: the ~$10bn purc

A Swiss-headquartered, London-listed group (LSE: GLEN; Johannesburg secondary listing) that is both one of the world's largest commodity traders and one of its largest miners — of copper, cobalt, zinc, nickel and above all coal. It began as Marc Rich + Co AG in 1974, the trading house of a man indicted in New York in 1983 and pardoned by President Clinton in 2001; was bought out by its managers in

A Geneva-based independent energy trader founded in 2000 by the Swedish trader Torbjörn Törnqvist and the Russian-Finnish businessman Gennady Timchenko, which grew in its first decade into one of the largest exporters of Russian seaborne crude and then spent the next fifteen years trying to stop being defined by that origin. Timchenko sold his stake to Törnqvist on 19 March 2014, the day before th

The former ABB Power Grids — the world's largest maker of power transformers and the leading supplier of high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) links (company claims) — bought by Japan's Hitachi in two steps: 80.1% agreed in December 2018 and closed on 1 July 2020, and the remaining 19.9% for ~$1.68bn, completed in late December 2022. Renamed Hitachi Energy in October 2021 and run from Zurich, it foun

The Bilbao-registered, Madrid-run Spanish utility that became Europe's largest power company by market value (reported, verify current ranking) by betting early on wind (from 2001), buying regulated networks in Britain (ScottishPower, 2007) and the US northeast (Energy East, 2008; UIL, 2015, which together became Avangrid), and then, from 2023, turning most of its investment toward wires in the US

A privately funded reactor developer from Alameda, California, founded in 2016 by nuclear engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, that is trying to de-risk a new reactor type — a fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor using TRISO pebble fuel — the way a manufacturer would rather than the way a utility would: by building its own hardware, its own salt and its own test units,

Kazakhstan's state uranium company, created by presidential decree in 1997 from the wreck of the Soviet uranium industry, which turned the country's sandstone-hosted deposits and a cheap mining method — in-situ leaching (ISL), pumping acid solution through the ore body instead of digging it — into the world's largest and lowest-cost uranium supply. Kazakhstan overtook Canada as the largest produci

The Houston pipeline company that Richard Kinder and William Morgan founded in February 1997 by buying the general partner of Enron's small liquids-pipeline partnership for ~$40m (reported), and that grew — through master limited partnerships (MLPs), a 2007 management buyout, a 2011 IPO and the ~$38bn El Paso deal of 2012 — into the largest natural-gas pipeline operator in North America. Its story

The Seoul-based battery maker, spun out of LG Chem in December 2020, that supplied the cells for the first mass-market US plug-in (the Chevrolet Volt, 2010), co-owns General Motors' Ultium Cells plants in Ohio and Tennessee, and built the largest Korean manufacturing footprint in the United States on the strength of the IRA's Section 45X credit (which Korean companies call the "AMPC"). It is the c

The Xi'an company that bet in 2000 that solar would run on monocrystalline silicon rather than the cheaper multicrystalline wafers that dominated the industry, drove the cost of mono wafers down with diamond-wire sawing and sheer scale until multi all but disappeared (by ~2020), bought its way into modules with Lerri Solar (2014–15) and became, by 2020–22, the world's largest module shipper (indus

The Nairobi company that put solar home systems on credit over Safaricom's M-PESA mobile-money network. Founded in 2011 by Jesse Moore, Nick Hughes and Chad Larson, it launched its first kit commercially in Kenya in 2012 (reported): a small panel, a few LED lights, phone charging and a radio, paid for with a deposit and a daily mobile-money instalment. If the payments stopped, the kit switched its

Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, founded by the sovereign investor Mubadala in 2006 to build a zero-carbon city in the desert, which became instead one of the world's largest state-owned buyers and builders of renewable power — owned since a restructuring announced in December 2021 by TAQA (43%), Mubadala (33%) and ADNOC (24%). Its main US business is a 50% stake in Terra-Gen, the San Diego-based

A Geneva-based energy and commodities trader founded in 2004 by Marco Dunand and Daniel Jaeggi — two former Goldman Sachs and Sempra traders — out of a merger with the trading arm of Poland's J&S Group, which grew within one generation into one of the five largest independent energy traders. Its defining move was buying JPMorgan's physical commodities business in 2014, when US regulators were push

The Juno Beach, Florida holding company that owns Florida Power & Light (FPL), the largest US electric utility by customers (~6m accounts, ~12m people, company), and NextEra Energy Resources, which grew from a 1990s independent-power side business into the world's largest generator of wind and solar power (company claim). Its strategy is one idea repeated for thirty years: use the steady, low-cost

The Fremont, California company that makes the single-axis trackers that turn rows of solar panels east to west through the day on most large US solar plants. It was founded in 2013, bought by Flextronics in 2015, listed in February 2023 and fully spun off on 2 January 2024. Through the late 2025 rename to Nextpower, it kept the Nasdaq ticker NXT (the folder keeps the old name). It is the solar in

The Phoenix truck start-up that promised hydrogen fuel-cell and battery-electric Class 8 trucks plus a national network of hydrogen stations, became worth more than Ford for a few days after its June 2020 SPAC listing, and then lost its credibility, its founder and finally its existence. Trevor Milton founded it in 2014; a short-seller report (10 Sep 2020) showed that a 2018 video of the Nikola On

The Shanghai-founded, Hefei-headquartered maker of premium electric cars that has spent more than a decade testing the idea Better Place could not prove: that a carmaker can own the battery, swap it in minutes and sell the car without it. William Li (Li Bin) founded the company in November 2014 (as NextEV), listed it on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2018, nearly ran out of cash in 2019,

Nigeria's national oil company, created in 1977 and converted under the Petroleum Industry Act (Aug 2021) into NNPC Limited, a commercial company owned by the federal government (launched 19 Jul 2022). It holds the state's share — usually 55–60% — of the joint ventures (JVs) through which Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies and Eni produced most of Nigeria's oil for half a century. It also h

The Swedish battery start-up that two former Tesla executives founded in 2016 to give Europe its own answer to CATL, LG and Panasonic, built on cheap hydro and wind power in Skellefteå, near the Arctic Circle. It raised more than $13bn of equity and debt (reported; verify the split), signed orders it put at more than $50bn (company claim, reported), counted Volkswagen (~21%), Goldman Sachs funds,

The Houston power company that has spent twenty years trying to decide whether it is a generator with a retail business or a retailer with power plants. NRG began as the independent-power arm of a Minnesota utility, went bankrupt with it in 2003, and emerged under David Crane as a merchant generator that bought Texas Genco (2006), the Reliant retail brand (2009) and GenOn (2012) to become the larg

The developer of the first small modular reactor (SMR) design certified by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, spun out of an Oregon State University research programme in 2007, rescued by the engineering contractor Fluor in 2011 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a SPAC in May 2022. NuScale holds the NRC's certification for a 50 MWe module (rule effective February 2023) and a sta

The Houston-based oil and gas producer ("Oxy") that Armand Hammer turned from a tiny California driller into an international company through the Libyan concessions of 1966. Its North Sea platform Piper Alpha exploded in 1988, killing 167 men, the deadliest offshore accident in history. Under Vicki Hollub it outbid Chevron for Anadarko in 2019 (~$38bn of equity, ~$55bn including debt), funded part

A London electricity and gas retailer founded in 2015 that treated the energy bill as a software problem. Octopus wrote its own customer, billing and device-control platform, Kraken, and used it to run customers at a lower cost per account than the incumbents. It survived the 2021–22 gas-price shock that bankrupted ~29 British suppliers, took over the collapsed Bulb (~1.7m customers at its peak, ~

A Santa Clara, California developer of small sodium-cooled fast reactors, founded in 2013 by two MIT-trained engineers, backed early by Sam Altman, listed on the New York Stock Exchange through Altman's SPAC (AltC Acquisition Corp) in May 2024, and in October 2025 valued at ~$25.7bn (14 Oct 2025, reported) without a licensed reactor or meaningful revenue. Oklo plans to build, own and operate its ~

The largest coal miner in the United States, founded in Chicago in 1883 as a retail coal merchant and grown into an owner of the Powder River Basin's giant surface mines in Wyoming. It passed through the hands of Kennecott, an industrial consortium, Hanson and Lehman Brothers before listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2001. It then made two of the classic top-of-cycle moves in mining: it spu

Brazil's state-controlled oil company, created by law in October 1953 on the slogan "o petróleo é nosso" ("the oil is ours"), which spent its first two decades failing to find much oil onshore, moved offshore in the 1970s, became the world's leading deepwater operator, and in 2006–07 found the giant pre-salt fields beneath ~2 km of salt off Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Those fields are among the

The listed arm of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), created in November 1999 to take CNPC's best oil fields, refineries, pipelines and filling stations to the New York and Hong Kong stock markets — the first time a Chinese state oil company sold shares to American investors. It is China's largest oil and gas producer (~1.84bn boe in 2025, ~5.0m boe/d, company), its largest gas supplier

The San Francisco Bay Area utility, now based in Oakland, that supplies electricity and natural gas to ~16 million people across ~70,000 square miles of northern and central California, and has gone bankrupt twice in two decades for opposite reasons. In April 2001 it filed for Chapter 11 because a badly designed wholesale market made it buy power at soaring prices and sell it at frozen retail rate

The Irving, Texas, oil producer formed in August 1997 from Parker & Parsley Petroleum and T. Boone Pickens's Mesa Inc., which spent two decades shedding everything except one asset, the Midland Basin of West Texas, and became the largest pure-play Permian producer (~700 kboe/d in 2023, company). Under Scott Sheffield it moved from shale's "growth at any cost" era, with a 2017 goal of ~1 million bo

The Latham, New York company that has been trying to make a hydrogen fuel-cell business pay since 1997, and that did build one genuine market: fuel cells for warehouse forklifts, with Walmart and Amazon as anchor customers and tens of thousands of units in the field. To win that market Plug sold fuel cells, service and hydrogen below cost, gave its two biggest customers warrants over its own share

Qatar's state energy company (Qatar Petroleum until October 2021), owner of the Qatari side of the world's largest single natural-gas field, the North Field, which it shares under the sea with Iran's South Pars. From one gas discovery in 1971 it built, with foreign partners, the largest LNG export system in the world: ~77 million tonnes a year (Mtpa) of liquefaction capacity at Ras Laffan by 2011,

The largest specialty contractor building the North American power grid, formed in Houston in 1997 as a roll-up of four family-owned line contractors and listed in February 1998 (NYSE: PWR). Quanta does not make equipment or own power plants; it owns the scarcest input in the power build-out — skilled craft labour, above all linemen — and rents it to utilities under multi-year agreements, adding t

The Carson City, Nevada company founded in 2017 by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel to recycle lithium-ion batteries and turn the recovered nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper back into battery materials — first copper foil and cathode, then, from 2025, whole storage systems built from used EV packs. Redwood is the US's largest battery recycler by its own account and one of its best-funded climate-hard

The Mumbai conglomerate that Dhirubhai Ambani built from a yarn-trading business founded in 1958 into India's largest private company, and that his son Mukesh turned into the owner of the world's largest single refining site — Jamnagar in Gujarat, ~1.4 million barrels a day (b/d) of crude capacity across two refineries by the company's current figure (~1.24 mb/d at original design; see the basis n

The Irvine, California, electric-vehicle maker founded by RJ Scaringe in 2009 that raised more capital before selling a car than almost any industrial start-up in US history — private rounds from Amazon, Ford, Cox and T. Rowe Price, then a ~$11.9bn IPO in November 2021 that briefly valued it above Ford and GM — and has spent the years since trying to reach the scale that capital implied. It builds

Russia's largest oil company and the clearest case of state capture of an oil sector: a minor state producer in the 1990s that took Yukos's main asset, Yuganskneftegaz, at a forced auction in December 2004, listed in London in July 2006 (~$10.7bn raised, reported), and bought TNK-BP for ~$55bn in March 2013, giving BP 19.75% of Rosneft and making Rosneft the world's largest listed oil producer by

The Essen-based former coal-and-nuclear giant of German electricity (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk, founded 1898) that turned itself into one of the world's largest renewable generators not mainly by building but by swapping: in 2016 it floated its networks, retail and renewables as Innogy; in 2018–20 it traded Innogy to E.ON for E.ON's and Innogy's renewables plus a 16.67% stake in E.

The Johannesburg-based integrated energy and chemicals company that turns coal and gas into fuels and chemicals with the Fischer-Tropsch process. It runs the world's largest coal-to-liquids complex at Secunda, which is also reported to be the world's largest single-site emitter of CO2. Sasol was founded by the South African state in 1950 to make the country less dependent on imported oil. It grew

The Saudi Arabian state oil company that grew out of a 1933 concession to Standard Oil of California, was bought step by step by the kingdom between 1973 and 1980, and now produces about one barrel in eight of the world's crude oil from the lowest-cost large reserves on earth. It is the instrument of Saudi oil policy: the ministry of energy, not the board, decides how much it may produce and how m

A French company that began as an ironworks and arms maker at Le Creusot in 1836 and spent the 1980s and 1990s selling steel, shipbuilding and heavy engineering to become a pure electrical-equipment business — then bought its way into the United States (Square D, 1991; APC, 2007) and into industrial software (Invensys, 2014; AVEVA, 2018–23). In 2025 it passed €40bn of revenue for the first time (~

The Anglo-Dutch major formed when Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading pooled their businesses in 1907. It is now a single London-headquartered company (Shell plc, since January 2022) whose core is the world's largest portfolio of liquefied natural gas among the international oil companies, alongside deepwater oil (Brazil, the US Gulf, Nigeria offshore), a large trading arm, chemi

The Munich-based maker of gas turbines, grid equipment and (through Siemens Gamesa) wind turbines that Siemens AG spun off onto the Frankfurt exchange in September 2020. It bought out Siemens Gamesa's minority shareholders in 2022–23, only for the wind unit's onshore quality defects to trigger a profit warning on 22 June 2023, a share-price fall of roughly a third in a day and, in November 2023, a

The world's largest oilfield-services company, founded in France in 1926 by the brothers Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger to measure what lies underground with electricity, which ran the first electrical well log at Pechelbronn in Alsace in September 1927 and turned that measurement into a global business. It sells the technology and labour that oil and gas producers use to find, drill, complete and

The Fremont, California solar start-up that made panels from copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) thin film deposited on glass tubes, won the first loan guarantee of the 2009 stimulus programme — $535m — to build a highly automated factory, and filed for bankruptcy on 6 Sep 2011 after the price of the silicon it was designed to avoid fell by roughly nine-tenths. Its engineering worked; its cost p

Algeria's state oil and gas company — Africa's largest company by revenue in most years and the country's fiscal backbone: hydrocarbons have provided over ~90% of Algeria's export earnings and a large share of budget revenue for decades (reported, verify current shares). It was founded on 31 Dec 1963, eighteen months after independence. The world's first commercial LNG exports had already left Arz

The Atlanta holding company for Georgia Power, Alabama Power and Mississippi Power, a wholesale generator (Southern Power), four gas utilities (Southern Company Gas) and the operator of the only new US nuclear reactors finished in a generation. Southern serves ~9 million electric and gas customers (company, verify) and is the case study in this knowledge base for the full cost of first-of-a-kind b

The Beijing-based, central-government-owned company that owns and runs the electricity grid across ~88% of China's territory (26 provinces, more than 1.1 billion people, company claim) — by revenue the largest utility in the world and among the three largest companies of any kind on the Fortune Global 500 in the 2020s (reported, verify rank and year). Created in December 2002 when Beijing broke up

The off-grid solar company that began in 2008 as Greenlight Planet, a start-up founded by students from the University of Illinois selling a durable solar lantern called the "Sun King", and that by the mid-2020s had become the largest pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) solar business in Africa and Asia by most counts. It designs lanterns and solar home systems, has them made under contract (mostly in China), s

The St Louis-area company that began in 1959 as Monsanto's silicon-wafer maker (MEMC), bought the pioneering US solar developer SunEdison in 2009, took its name in 2013 and, in three years, used two listed "yieldcos" — TerraForm Power (Jul 2014) and TerraForm Global (Jul 2015) — to become one of the world's largest renewable-energy developers. The yieldcos were meant to give it a permanent low cos

The Silicon Valley company that made the world's most efficient mass-produced solar cells and still went bankrupt as a residential installer. Founded in 1985 by Stanford professor Richard Swanson to commercialise back-contact silicon cells, SunPower was rescued in 2002 by Cypress Semiconductor and its CEO T.J. Rodgers, listed on Nasdaq in November 2005, became a utility-scale developer through Pow

The San Francisco company that made rooftop solar a subscription. Founded in 2007 by Lynn Jurich and Ed Fenster, Sunrun owns the panels and, increasingly, the battery on a customer's house, charges a monthly lease payment or a price per kWh for 20–25 years, and pays for the hardware with tax equity, project debt and asset-backed securities sold against those payments. It listed in August 2015, bou

A Pennsylvania merchant generator, built in 2015 from PPL's unregulated power plants and Riverstone's Mid-Atlantic fleet, that was taken private, went bankrupt in 2022, and emerged in May 2023 owning one asset the market suddenly wanted: the ~2.5 GW Susquehanna nuclear plant on the PJM grid. Within ten months of emerging it sold Amazon the data-centre campus next to the plant (~$650m, March 2024),

The Bill Gates–founded reactor developer from Bellevue, Washington that spent its first decade on a travelling-wave reactor it never built, lost its planned first plant in China to US export policy (2019), and then rebuilt itself around Natrium — a 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten-salt heat store that can lift output to ~500 MW for several hours — designed with GE Hitachi and half-

The Austin-based carmaker that is also, by 2026, one of the world's largest makers of grid batteries. Tesla's energy story has three parts. First, its cars are a demand for electricity and batteries: ~1.64m vehicles delivered in 2025 (company), each with a ~50–100 kWh pack, built on cells from Panasonic's lines in its Nevada Gigafactory, from CATL and LG Energy Solution, and increasingly from its

The Paris-based integrated major that began in 1924 as France's state-sponsored vehicle for a share of Iraqi oil (Compagnie Française des Pétroles), absorbed Belgium's Petrofina and France's other champion, Elf Aquitaine, in 1999–2000, and has since tried to run two businesses at once: a growing oil and LNG company (~2.53m boe/d of hydrocarbon output and ~43.9 Mt of LNG sold in 2025, company) and

A private, employee-owned commodity trader — Trafigura Group Pte Ltd, registered in Singapore with its main trading offices in Geneva, Houston and Singapore — that moves crude oil, refined products, LNG, power, and metals and minerals, and is the second-largest independent oil trader after Vitol. Founded in 1993 by Claude Dauphin and a group of former Marc Rich traders, it became the largest expor

The Arlington, Virginia LNG developer founded in 2013 by two lawyer-financiers, Michael Sabel and Robert Pender, that built US export plants faster and (on its own claims) cheaper than anyone else by stringing together dozens of small, factory-built liquefaction trains. Its first plant, Calcasieu Pass in Louisiana, made its first LNG in January 2022 — weeks before Russia's invasion of Ukraine — an

The largest Western maker of wind turbines (Copenhagen: VWS), headquartered in Aarhus, Denmark, with a large US business: blade and nacelle factories in Windsor and Brighton, Colorado, US sales and service run from Portland, Oregon, and the United States as one of its largest single markets for onshore orders and service. Vestas began as a village smithy in 1898, sold its first wind turbines in 19

The Irving, Texas power company that is what was left of TXU after the largest leveraged buyout in history went bankrupt. The generating and retail arm of TXU was bought in October 2007 for ~$45bn including debt on the bet that Texas gas would stay near ~$7–8/MMBtu; shale gas pushed Henry Hub below ~$4/MMBtu and the holding company, Energy Future Holdings, filed for Chapter 11 in April 2014 with ~

The largest independent oil trader in the world: a private partnership, owned by several hundred of its own senior employees, run from Geneva, London, Singapore and Houston, that reports trading ~7 million barrels a day (mb/d) of crude oil and refined products (company figures, reported) and also trades LNG, natural gas, power, coal, metals and carbon. It owns almost no oil in the ground for most

The Pittsburgh company George Westinghouse founded in 1886 to sell alternating-current power, which built the US Navy's first submarine reactor and the first full-scale US civilian nuclear plant (Shippingport, 1957), designed the pressurised-water reactor that became the world's most common type, and then — under Toshiba's ownership — signed fixed-price contracts to build four first-of-a-kind AP10

The Danish state-controlled company that turned itself from a North Sea oil, gas and coal utility (DONG Energy) into the world's largest offshore wind developer outside China in about a decade, and then found that the United States — the market it bet on for its next stage of growth — could break its balance sheet. Ørsted entered US offshore wind by buying Deepwater Wind in 2018 for ~$510m (report