Take that, Walmart! Irving-based ExxonMobil has returned to the top of the Fortune 500.

“It’s tough to beat the kind of year Exxon Mobil had in 2011,” the magazine wrote in its 2012 feature. “Shares rose by 20% and profits surged by 35% to $41.1 billion. Revenues jumped 28% to $452.9 billion.” 

ExxonMobil topped the Fortune 500 in 2006 and 2009, with Walmart edging it out in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011. 

Fortune credits rising oil prices for Exxon’s return to number one, but also notes, straightfaced, that:

[T]he company has also positioned itself well to capitalize on the latest controversial trend in domestic energy production: Fracking.But  Exxon now produces just about as much gas as it does oil, thanks to its $35 billion purchase of XTO Energy in 2010. As CEO Rex Tillerson told Fortune recently, with world demand for energy expected to rise considerably during the coming decades, the shale gas party has just begun.

Party!

Texas has 52 companies on the rest of the list, which is one fewer than California. However, Texas has four in the top twelve, to California’s two (Cupertino-based Apple is number seventeen). Taken together, Texas, California, Nevada, New York, and Georgia are home to more than 50 percent of all the country’s corporate headquarters.

The top ten Texas companies to make the list:

1. Exxon Mobil

4. ConocoPhillips

11. AT&T

12. Valero Energy

44. Dell 44

62. Enterprise Products Partners

69. Sysco

87. Plains All American Pipeline

101 Tesoro

118 Halliburton

Other notables from Texas: American Airlines parent company AMR, (123), Kimberly-Clark (137), J.C. Penney (153), and Southwest Airlines (167).

It’s obviously a big media month for ExxonMobil, as the company is also the subject of a new book by New Yorker writer Steve Coll.