Unocal chief goes on the offensive to put his imprint on the oil giant.

His voice rising, Richard Stegemeier, chairman, chief executive and president of Unocal Corp., fidgets in his chair and rubs his face as he launches into a tirade against roadblocks to offshore drilling in California.

Sounding at times more like a radical thinker than the conservative head of a multibillion-dollar oil company, Stegemeier vowed to champion a legal challenge against the drilling ban, which he sees as a violation of a U.S. citizen's basic property rights.

"Citizens of this country are coming to a crisis point with their government. The government is riding roughshod over property rights," he fumed. "Without property rights, there can be no human rights. It's a basic tenet of life."

This is tough talk coming from an executive characterized in a recent Forbes magazine article as mild, cautious and still in the shadow of his outspoken predecessor, the late Fred Hartley. But Stegemeier seems to be emerging from that shadow at last.

During a February interview in his office overlooking the downtown Los Angeles skyline, the 63-year-old Anaheim Hills resident blasted regulators and assorted government officials, took a few shots at the competition, and laid out his strategy for leaving his own imprint on the company he has run for four years.

His message: Unocal's image as well as its bottom line are being recast, and Stegemeier intends for both to reflect a new vitality.

"We are not a me-too company. We lead, we don't follow," he said, countering a characterization of Unocal he has heard far too often. "We are one of the most innovative and creative of oil companies. We can lead the pack."

Perhaps part of the reason Stegemeier has been perceived as somewhat stodgy since he took over for Hartley as CEO in 1988 is that he's had a lot of reclamation work to do. Hartley left Unocal with a huge debt load and an unfocused business plan. Now that Stegemeier has addressed some of the more pressing problems, he seems ready to toot his own horn a bit.

In the last 18 months, Stegemeier has:

* Announced plans to close 300 of the company's 1,500 service stations.

* Sold Unocal's Southeast marketing operations.

* Closed the company's shale oil project in Colorado.

* Put its molybdenum minerals division on the block.

* Sold its polymers division to Philadelphia-based Rohm & Haas Co.

* Placed its truck stop division on the selling block.

With a reputation for higher-priced and higher-quality gasolines, Unocal has been losing customers to cut-rate competitors. These include archrival Atlantic Richfield Co., whose gleaming high-rise towers are clearly visible from Stegemeier's office. These moves, he said, are part of a companywide return to its root strengths: oil and gas exploration, production and marketing.

In the late 1970s, Unocal, along with several other oil companies, began to diversify out of these markets and into "earth resources," like mining and alternative forms of energy. But in the mid-1980s, the diversification came to be seen as more of a burden than the way to achieve future profits. Now Stegemeier is putting the finishing touches on undoing the work of the 1980s.

"The effort to move into earth resources got us into all sorts of mining operations. Mining is highly cyclical and is really not our expertise," Stegemeier said. "Return to oil and gas and geothermal is more the activity we are used to. They have been our most profitable areas over the years and are the areas of most of our technological expertise."

One exception to the policy of refocusing on oil and gas is Unocal's geothermal operations, which are the largest in the world. Stegemeier intends to maintain Unocal's work in this area. His new focus on oil and gas has meant he has had to confront another problem: Unocal's ability to find new domestic supplies.

For the first time in its history, Unocal spent more on capital projects outside the U.S. in 1991 than within the country. Over the long term, though, Stegemeier sees no vast new oil or gas reserves coming on line outside the U.S., which means the company may have to rely increasingly on domestic supplies.

"America still has abundant supplies. The problem is that most of our prime areas for oil and gas are in moratorium today," Stegemeier said, referring to the vast tracts of coastal ocean areas that Unocal and other oil companies are waiting to bring to market. Congress has placed many of these tracts, including several off the California coast, in moratorium after recent oil spills left lawmakers fearful of more environmental damage.

"When we prevent the development of oil resources under the guise of environmental protection, we have to import the same quantity of oil by tanker, which is even less safe," said Stegemeier. "People's eyes glaze over" when the subject comes up, he said. They are more apt to think of massive oil spills like the Exxon-Valdez spill in Prince William Sound off Alaska three years ago.

Stegemeier said oil spill fears have obscured the real issue: the government's taking of property, which he said is illegal under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Unocal and other oil companies like Chevron and Arco have paid nearly $1 billion in bonuses and fees to the government for the right to drill for oil and gas on the offshore tracts.

"We are denied the right to develop these contracts after we have paid the bonuses," he argued, "with exploration costs as well as opportunity costs."

Fine is a staff reporter for the Orange County Business Journal.