It can also be used—less commonly—as a nickname for:

• Compost: “A household produces about a tonne of organic waste annually, she explains; wigglers eat half their weight daily, and in one year, a half kilo of them, numbering 800 to 1,000, and their offspring, can convert that tonne of material into ‘black gold.’”—Ellen Moorhouse, “Learning to love the magic of worms; Red wigglers can turn your garbage into ‘black gold’ so meet vermicomposting advocate Cathy Nesbitt,” The Toronto Star, September 19, 2009
• Bluefin Tuna: “Fishermen here call it ‘black gold,’ referring to the dark red flesh of the Pacific bluefin tuna that is so prized in this sashimi-loving nation that just one of these sleek fish, which can weigh a half-ton, can earn tens of thousands of dollars.”—Martin Fackler, “Tuna Town In Japan Sees Falloff Of Its Fish,” The New York Times, September 20, 2009
• Black Peppercorns: “If those vital downpours have not washed away what passes for the road, a few days travel into Kerala’s rolling Western Ghats, where waterfalls roar and herds of wild elephants loom from soft mist, brings you to the ancestral home of Piper nigrum.  High up in the middle of nowhere, Iddicki produces the finest pepper in the world, its peppercorns always dark and heavy, bursting with flavour.  Its vines wind their way around almost every tree in sight, climbing ten metres or more into the sky. After such a journey you might expect Iddicki to be a sleepy backwater.  In its own idyllic way, though, it is a boomtown worthy of the Wild West.  Fancy jeeps clog the narrow streets; shops overflow with the latest necessities of rural life, like washing machines and stereos.  Giant satellite dishes shove their expensive snouts at the heavens from every other house.  One of the world’s largest stashes of gold is in rural India, and to judge by its glittering jewellery shops this town has considerably more than its fair share.  ‘Black gold,’ explains one pepper farmer with a broad grin, is fetching top prices on the world market.”—No author, “The Spice Trade:  A taste of adventure; The history of spices is the history of trade,” The Economist, December 19, 1998, p. 51

During World War II, Mr. Gulbenkian settled Lisbon, Portugal where he died in 1955.  A large portion of his wealth was used to establish the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, which today has assets of around €2.5 billion and an annual budget of around €100 million.  In addition, his extensive collection of art, which included paintings by Rubens, Degas, and Monet, as well as ancient Egyptian sculptures and jewelery created by René Lalique, who was a personal friend, was used to create the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

Company Name

Situation as of 2009

The term “The Seven Sisters” in reference to oil companies was coined by Enrico Mattei, the chairman of ENI, Italy’s state oil company. He used the term to refer to the group of oil companies, which, through joint ventures, virtually controlled the industry. As Daniel Yergen writes in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Prize:  The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991), “Mattei’s overriding objective [as head of ENI] was to ensure that ENI—and Italy—had its own international petroleum supply, independent of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ companies. He wanted to share in the rents of Middle Eastern crude. He loudly and continually attacked the ‘cartel,’ as he called the major companies, and he was credited with coining the term ‘Sette Sorrelle,’ the Seven Sisters, in derisive reference to their close association and multiple joint ventures…Actually there was an eighth sister, the French national champion, CFP, which was in both Iranian consortium, with the Seven Sisters, and the Iraq Petroleum Company, along with Jersey, Socony, British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch/Shell.  But since CFP did not fit under the rubric of ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ Mattei conveniently dropped it. His real complaint against this exclusive club of major companies was not its existence, but rather that he was not in it” p. 503.

The term “The Seven Sisters” originated in Greek Mythology to refer to the daughters of Atlas and Pleione in Greek Mythology. It is also used to refer to a star cluster in Astronomy, a group of women’s colleges in the United States, as well as a group of women’s magazines published in the United States.