Oil and gas companies in Houston: who's here, how many, and how to reach them

This report is for job seekers and analysts mapping Houston's oil industry, companies looking for a partner or contractor, and B2B sellers whose customers are producers, drillers, oilfield service companies or refiners.

Houston's largest oil and gas companies

The Houston Chronicle ranked the city's ten largest public oil and gas companies by market value in December 2025, using S&P Global Market Intelligence figures:

Exxon moved its headquarters from Irving in 2023 and Chevron from San Ramon, California, in 2025. The Greater Houston Partnership's Houston Facts 2026 counts 21 Fortune 500 energy headquarters in the region and lists, from the Chronicle 100, Occidental Petroleum, Halliburton, APA, Coterra Energy, Murphy Oil and Magnolia Oil & Gas among Houston's other large public energy companies. Shell, BP and TotalEnergies run major US operations here without being Houston-headquartered.

Oil and gas establishments in metro Houston

County Business Patterns 2023 covers the Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX Metro Area (CBSA 26420) and four industry codes: NAICS 211 (Oil and Gas Extraction), 213111 (Drilling Oil and Gas Wells), 213112 (Support Activities for Oil and Gas Operations) and 324110 (Petroleum Refineries).

Size and location

In broader bands: 879 establishments have 1 to 19 employees, 188 have 20 to 99 and 99 have 100 or more. That adds up to 1,166. The other 9, five of them refineries, sit in cells the Census Bureau withholds because it publishes a cell only when it holds at least three establishments. So Houston may well have oil sites with 1,000 or more employees; some of the withheld nine could be that large.

"Withheld" means withheld by the Census Bureau to protect confidentiality. Harris County holds 71% of both the establishments and the employees.

Why the Census count understates Houston

County Business Patterns counts establishments with paid employees, not companies, and leaves out the self-employed, such as independent landmen and consultants. Three gaps matter most here:

• Head offices are filed elsewhere. Corporate, subsidiary and regional managing offices are published under NAICS 55, management of companies. A downtown or Spring headquarters campus doesn't appear in the table above.
• Midstream and trading aren't in these codes. Pipelines, LNG and petroleum wholesalers have their own codes outside the four counted here.
• Different sources, different numbers. The Greater Houston Partnership's Houston Facts 2026, using Texas Workforce Commission data for the fourth quarter of 2025, shows 374 oil and gas extraction firms employing 34,677 people. Census shows 363 establishments and 15,750 employees for 2023. Pick one source and use it consistently.

How much Texas production is run from Houston

The Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC) publishes each operator's annual production and a directory of organizations that file a P-5, the organization report that operators regulated by its Oil and Gas Division file every year. We joined the 2025 production ranks to the directory (data as of July 2026) and counted operators whose address is in Houston or a nearby city such as Spring, The Woodlands, Katy, Sugar Land or Conroe.

Those 308 operators also reported 37.4% of the state's gas. A directory address is a mailing address, not proof of a head office, but the pattern is clear: a few dozen Houston operators run most of the production managed from the city. The directory lists 703 organizations with an active P-5 status and a Houston address.

Finding and checking companies

To vet an operator before you sign a lease, a service contract or a job offer, check that its P-5 status is active, look at its production trend in the rank files, and for public companies read the latest annual report on SEC EDGAR. A delinquent P-5 is a reason to ask questions first.

Selling to Houston oil and gas companies

Big operators buy through supplier registration and safety prequalification, so expect a process measured in months. Mid-size independents move faster, and the RRC files tell you exactly who they are.

Illustrative example. The seller and rates are invented; the counts are from the RRC analysis above.

Saltgrass Sensors (saltgrass.example) sells corrosion monitoring for production equipment. Its best fit is the 52 Houston-area operators with 100 to 999 leases: big enough to have a production engineering team, small enough to decide locally. They reported 10.3% of Texas oil and condensate in 2025. With three contacts per operator (VP operations, production engineering manager, HSE manager) that's 156 people. At a 5% reply rate, about 8 conversations; if one in four leads to a field trial, 2 trials. A market this small rewards research per account over volume, which is where Bebop helps: describe the operators you want and it researches each one and drafts the outreach. The account research guide covers what to look for.

Subject: [operator]'s [field or county] wells

Hi [first name],

Railroad Commission records show [operator] running [number] leases in [county], with [a recent permit, acquisition or production change].

Operators that size often find corrosion problems when a line fails rather than before. We put sensors on [equipment] and flag wall loss early, without adding a field visit.

Would 15 minutes on [day] be worth it to see whether it fits your [field] program?

[Your name]

Next step: see the statewide picture, including Midland and the Permian operators, in the report on oil and gas companies in Texas.