Henry L. Doherty

Henry L. Doherty was an American engineer and businessman who founded the Cities Service Company in 1910, a holding company that grew into one of the largest public utility and oil enterprises in the United States, later the parent of what became Citgo Petroleum. Trained as an engineer in the natural gas industry, Doherty was an early advocate of unitization, the practice of pooling adjoining oil leases into a single unit operated for the field as a whole rather than drilled competitively well by well, arguing that unregulated competitive drilling wasted oil and depleted reservoir pressure prematurely. He also pioneered the holding company structure for combining scattered local gas and electric utilities under single centralized management and financing.