Major energy-producing companies based in the United States annually report their worldwide financial and operating data to the EIA on a uniform and standardized basis on the Financial Reporting System (FRS) Form EIA-28. These companies (the FRS companies) occupy a major position in the U.S. economy. For the 2008 reporting year, 27 companies filed this information. In aggregate, their sales equaled about 17 percent of the $10.7 trillion in sales of the Fortune 500 corporations. The 2008 reporting companies are:

Under the legislation establishing the FRS (P.L. 95-91), the EIA is to "identify and designate the major energy-producing companies" that are required to file the FRS Form EIA-28.

Twenty-seven companies were initially notified of a requirement to file Form EIA-28. This group comprised the top 50 publicly-owned U.S. crude oil producers, who, in 1976, had at least 1 percent of either production or reserves of oil, gas, coal, or uranium in the United States or 1 percent of either refining capacity or petroleum product sales in the United States.

In recent years, the U.S. refining industry has been undergoing a process of restructuring, cost-cutting and consolidation, and the trend in industry acquisitions, divestitures, and alliances has sharply increased. These rapid industry changes were reducing the ability of EIA's Financial Reporting System to meet its legislative requirement to provide "... a statistically accurate profile ..." of the U.S. refining line of commerce. Therefore, in 1998 EIA changed the selection criteria for the EIA-28 survey in order to maintain a more representative coverage of the industry. Accordingly, the EIA eliminated the Form EIA-28 Top-50 Requirement. Additionally, the 1 percent threshold on both coal and uranium production was eliminated. EIA also specified that the U.S.-based companies selected for the FRS survey group, or their parent companies, must be publicly-traded companies. With these changes, the simplified FRS respondent selection criteria allows for the inclusion of large, publicly-traded, non-integrated independent refiners.

In summary, the revised respondent company selection criteria for the FRS Form EIA-28 includes in the FRS survey group, any U.S.-based company (or its parent company) that is publicly-traded, and accounts for 1 percent or more of U.S. production or reserves of crude oil (including natural gas liquids) or natural gas, or 1 percent or more of U.S. refining capacity or refined product sales volume.

The names of the individual companies reporting to the FRS each year from 1974 to 2008 may be found in the Company List.