Mergers with Houston-based firms drive exits of two Fortune 500 oil-and-gas companies
OKLAHOMA CITY — Devon Energy and Expand Energy have moved their corporate headquarters to Houston, ending Oklahoma City’s run as the home of two of its three Fortune 500 oil-and-gas companies and concentrating the U.S. energy industry further in Texas.
The relocations, announced in back-to-back statements this year, stem directly from a pair of mergers that have reshaped the U.S. shale sector. Devon is merging with Houston-based Coterra Energy, and Expand was created two years ago from the combination of Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy, which was based in north Houston. Devon has a market value of about $52 billion; Expand’s is around $20 billion, according to the Journal’s reporting.
Coterra made Houston a condition of its merger with Devon, according to people familiar with the matter, effectively foreclosing Oklahoma City as a headquarters for the combined company. Expand’s move carried its own internal drama: Then-CEO Domenic Dell’Osso opposed the relocation, and his opposition contributed to his decision to step down. He has since become CEO of Gulfport Energy, a roughly $3 billion company that remains based in Oklahoma City. “We are proud to call Oklahoma City our home and are confident that it will remain a vital part of the American energy landscape for years to come,” Dell’Osso said in a statement.
Both companies have said they will preserve large operations centers in Oklahoma City, but some officials fear that will dwindle over time. A Devon spokeswoman said the company’s “commitment to and presence in Oklahoma City hadn’t changed” and that the city remains a major operations hub. Expand said its operations team remains in Oklahoma City and that the size of its local workforce is “largely unchanged.” Devon has about 1,000 employees in the city; Expand has about 500.
The relocations have nonetheless drawn pointed reactions from Oklahoma officials. Mayor David Holt, who has watched two of his city’s marquee corporate citizens depart, said “people don’t understand that locating in Houston is like moving a film company to Hollywood.” State Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Republican, said the pattern demands a policy response: “We should be asking why Oklahoma keeps building energy companies only to watch so many of them eventually move south.” Deevers has introduced legislation to eliminate Oklahoma’s individual and corporate income taxes, pointing to Texas, which levies neither. Senate Democratic leader Julia Kirt countered that Oklahoma had already offered oil-and-gas companies ample incentives and that the state should instead focus on improving its public-education system.
The departures follow a longer-term decline in the sector’s footprint. Oil-and-gas industry employment in the Oklahoma City region has fallen to about 10,000 jobs, down more than half from 2018, partly reflecting pandemic-era layoffs. The sector still accounts for roughly 13% of the region’s gross product, according to the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber, but aerospace and healthcare have grown into larger employers — Boeing alone employs thousands in the area. With Devon and Expand gone, Oklahoma retains three Fortune 500 energy companies: pipeline operators Oneok and Williams, both based in Tulsa, and Continental Resources, headquartered in Oklahoma City.
Continental’s founder, Harold Hamm, has pledged to stay. “I made up my mind that I was born and raised in Oklahoma, I am an Oklahoman, and I’m going to continue to be an Oklahoman,” Hamm told a local newspaper in February. Hamm also weighed in on Devon’s CEO, Clay Gaspar, saying, “He’s a Texas A&M grad, a Texan, so I guess he felt like they needed to be in Houston.”
The Houston draw is part of a broader consolidation. ExxonMobil and Chevron, both based in the Houston region, have acquired rivals once headquartered in New York, Denver and Irving, Texas, and have centralized corporate functions there.
The exits carry emotional weight because Devon and Chesapeake were by far the largest corporate patrons of Oklahoma City. Devon was founded in 1971 by John Nichols, a former accountant, and his son Larry Nichols, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 2012, the company cut the ribbon on a $750 million, 50-story skyscraper to house its employees; for the six-story glass rotunda at its entrance, architects used wood from the Republic of Congo and white granite from India’s Kashmir. Devon lent the city $95 million to revamp downtown streets, parks and sidewalks, repaid with the company’s own tax dollars.
Larry Nichols stepped down as Devon’s CEO in 2010 after 30 years in the role but has remained active in the city’s planning organizations. He used to tell people, according to Mayor Holt, that “if you ever see that Devon Energy is moving to Houston in the paper, turn the pages to the obituaries, and there you will find me.” People close to Nichols have said Devon’s departure has saddened and disappointed him.
Chesapeake, founded in 1989 by Aubrey McClendon and Tom Ward, grew into a natural-gas fracking powerhouse. At its 2011 peak, the company employed more than 11,000 people, with roughly a third in Oklahoma City, and McClendon said the company received about 500 résumés a day. It built a 50-acre, Georgian-style corporate complex modeled after a college campus, complete with four gourmet restaurants, a 72,000-square-foot gym and a vegetable garden. McClendon, a flamboyant billionaire, persuaded Whole Foods to set up shop, developed an upscale shopping center across from the campus, and helped fund several restaurants, among them Pops, a soda-and-burger joint on Route 66 that today sells more than 700 flavors of soda.
Earnings calls became an opportunity to promote the flashy amenities to prospective talent. “We pay very well, have excellent benefits, have a beautiful campus,” McClendon said in a 2008 call.
That year, he and other owners of the Seattle SuperSonics moved the NBA franchise to Oklahoma City and rebranded it as the Thunder. Rambunctious fans soon earned the team’s arena the nickname “Loud City.” In 2025, the team defeated the Indiana Pacers to win its first NBA championship since relocating.
Chesapeake was the primary funder of the first boathouse on a seven-mile stretch of river on the outskirts of downtown, and it supported developing a sports program to foster a rowing-and-paddling community. Today, the so-called Boathouse District is an Olympic training site that attracts Ivy League rowers. The canoe and kayak slalom events for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics will take place at a white-water venue at the river complex. Mike Knopp, founder of the nonprofit Riversport Foundation, which operates the site, credited McClendon — who died in a car crash a decade ago — with planting the seeds of the Olympic project: “He went along with that ride. He believed in the big idea.”
Oklahoma City has long treated McClendon and Larry Nichols as patron saints of its modern skyline. Most agree that Devon and Expand won’t be easily replaced. “We won’t have the CEOs sitting at the table,” Kirt said.