DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG was an international oil and gas company headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. It was a subsidiary of L1 Energy. In 2018, DEA owned stakes in oil and gas licenses in various countries and operated natural gas underground storage facilities in Germany. DEA is a derivation from Deutsche Erdöl-Aktiengesellschaft, the original name of the company. On 1 May 2019, DEA merged with Wintershall to form Wintershall Dea.
History
The early years
Deutsche Tiefbohr-Actiengesellschaft was founded in Berlin on 10 January 1899. In 1900 the headquarter was relocated to Nordhausen. The new company specialised in all types of mineral oil product and, among other things, raw lignite, briquettes for domestic heating and industry, lignite tar and paraffin. Its managing director was the Krefeld businessman Rudolf Nöllenburg.
It first struck oil with a well of its own in 1901, in 1906 crude oil is officially declared the new main business. Since 1907 the companies headquarters were again moved to Berlin. In 1911, DTA and its subsidiary Vereinigte Norddeutsche Mineralölwerke AG were merged with Deutsche Mineralölindustrie AG to create Deutsche Erdoel-Actiengesellschaft (DEA), based in Berlin.
DEA had stakes in oil fields in Alsace, Austria-Hungary and Romania from 1905/1906, but lost most of its foreign production when the World War I broke out. However, DEA drilled the world's first oil shaft – in Pechelbronn in Alsace – in 1917. Unlike extraction close to the surface or by means of wells, this involved the first-ever application of the complex shaft construction method, in which oil is “mined”. However, domestic oil production was not able to secure the company's survival and so DEA focused on coal mining until the early 1930s.
The Third Reich
DEA benefited from the seizure of power by the National Socialists, such as in the form of loans under the Reich Drilling Programme from 1934 onwards. Greater self-sufficiency in German's supply of raw materials had been an official goal of the National Socialist state since Adolf Hitler's Four-Year Plan Memorandum in 1936. The company began production operations in Czechoslovakia and in Alsace by participating in consortia such as Kontinentale Öl AG, which was founded in 1941. In 1937/1938, Jewish members were excluded from the management board and supervisory board. DEA also employed forced labourers on a large scale. The precise ties between company management and the NS regime have not yet been investigated.
At the time, the company's business activities covered a large part of the production and supply chain: extraction, processing and utilisation of mineral oil products and their resale, acquisition of and trading in mining rights, and the manufacture of mining machinery and equipment.
In 1943, its subsidiaries and equity interests included Deutscher Mineralöl-Verkaufsverein GmbH in Berlin, Deutsche Viscobil Oel GmbH in Berlin and Braunkohle-Benzin AG (BRABAG) in Berlin.
Its hard coal operations in 1938 comprised the Graf Bismarck Colliery in Gelsenkirchen and the Königsgrube Colliery in Wanne-Eickel. Lignite operations were grouped at the Borna branch in the administrative district of Leipzig and consisted of various lignite works, briquette factories, an earthenware factory and a brick factory in the region.
Post-war era
The company was relocated to Hamburg in 1948. NITAG's headquarters at Mittelweg in the Hamburg district of Rotherbaum were closed as a result of the merger between Gasolin and Wintershall's subsidiary NITAG. DEA then moved into them. Its headquarters were then moved to Hamburg City Nord around 1970.
DEA developed various new fields in Germany as part of expansion of domestic oil production in the 1950s. In 1956, Wintershall and DEA contributed Deutsche Gasolin to Aral. However, DEA left the Aral Group in 1960 in order to build its own service station network.
In 1963 an employee of DEA, Rudolf Dittrich, and his team in Wieze were instrumental in rescuing 14 miners who were trapped for many days in a collapsed coal mine in Lengede, Lower Saxony. They did so, together with others, by applying very innovative drilling techniques. The successful effort is commonly known in German history as the “Miracle of Lengede” (Wunder von Lengede). By 1965, the DEA Group was generating revenue of DM 2.01 billion and had 26,400 employees. Texaco took over more than 90% of the shares in DEA in 1966. DEA became Deutsche Texaco AG in 1970. The mines it owned were contributed to Ruhrkohle AG (RAG) around 1970.