In 1889, Mellon agreed to loan $25,000 to the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, a fledgling operation seeking to become the first successful industrial producer of aluminum. Mellon became a director of the company in 1891, and he and Richard played a major role in the establishment of aluminum factories in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and Niagara Falls, New York. The company would emerge as one of the most profitable ventures invested in by the Mellons, and in 1907 it was renamed Alcoa. Moving into the petroleum industry, the Mellon family also established the Crescent Oil Company, the Crescent Pipeline Company, and the Bear Creek refinery. By 1894, the Mellon family's vertically integrated companies produced ten percent of the oil exported by the United States. Partly due to the difficult economic conditions caused by the onset of the Panic of 1893, in 1895 the Mellons sold their oil interests to Standard Oil. At roughly the same time they were selling their oil concerns, Andrew and Richard invested in the Carborundum Company, a producer of silicon carbide. The brothers gained majority ownership of the Carborundum Company in 1898 and replaced the company's founder and president, Edward Goodrich Acheson, with a Carnegie protege, Frank W. Haskell. Mellon also invested in mining concerns, becoming vice president of the Trade Dollar Consolidated Mining Company.