"Wait, what?? Is that... It can't be. No, it has to be, how many fire-breathing dogs with 6 legs do you know?"

The uncapitalised name "eni" is a common sight back in the homeland. If you need to find a service station / petrol station / gas station (for American visitors) on the autostrade of Italia, you'll often be looking for an eni sign because you sure as hell won't find an Ampol.

Founded in 1953 out of a company called Agip (Azienda generale italiana petroli,), its name came from "Ente nazionale idrocarburi"; "national institute of hydrocarbons", roughly. (Wikipedia mistranslates "ente" as "board" but as far as I can determine eni was never a government board or authority. However the government is never far away in Italia and certainly wasn't in the 50s to 80s, which is how a plane carrying the first chairman of eni, Enrico Mattei, was blown up to conceal certain political interests in the company. Ah, Italia in the 60s; if you weren't blown up or shot you could be kidnapped.)

The symbol of the 6 legged dog supposedly comes from a car's 4 wheels plus the driver's two legs.

Most Australians have probably never heard of eni, nor have a lot of Americans, I suspect. Unlike BP or Chevron or Gulf or Mobil or Shell, eni doesn't have a huge retail presence outside of Italia and to a much lesser extent Spain. Consequently it doesn't have masses of brand recognition. So what is it doing in Australia?

Well, not selling petrol. It's doing what the bulk of the company was designed to do, exploration and development:
"Activities in Australia focus on the exploration, development and production of hydrocarbons and natural gas, and the renewable energy market."

(Because everybody has to be involved in renewables...)

So there we have it. Apparently it has been operating in Australia since the year 2000. (That's AD, not BC. Hey, it's headquartered in Roma, I need to be clear on that point.)

Eni, the multi-billion Euro per year company that many of you didn't know existed.