Company Deep Dive: Chevron

Hello, Doomberg Pro subscribers, and welcome to the August 2026 Doom Zoom presentation called Company Deep Dive: Chevron.

As the title suggests, this is the first of what we are planning to be single-company and sector analyses with a bit more of a direct investor lens, albeit in keeping with the style of our prior work. For our inaugural in this regard, we have prepared a pretty extensive look into one of the most important energy companies on the planet, and we certainly hope that you find this, as our friend Grant Williams would say, both informative and entertaining.

Here is an outline for today's agenda. We will begin with an overview of the supermajors: what they are, what makes them unique, at least from an investor perspective, but also from a geopolitical lens. From there we will pivot to some Chevron-specific company highlights, and then the bulk of the presentation will be a deep dive on Chevron's formidable worldwide resource base. For this part of the presentation we are going to begin in the Western Hemisphere and make our way east. This is not in order of importance to Chevron, or even to energy analysts in general, but we will begin with a look at its US shale operations, its long-standing work in US offshore, its entry into Guyana, its long-standing efforts in Venezuela. Then we'll go to Argentina, West Africa, the Middle East, Kazakhstan, and we will wrap it up with Australia, and then of course close with some concluding thoughts.

Disclosures and a glossary

Before we go much further, given the nature of this presentation, we felt we ought to begin with some important disclosures. First and foremost, Doomberg is a widely circulated periodical. We are not a research firm. We offer a mix of opinion, information, and entertainment. Independently, no member of the company has an interest in the companies in this presentation, or frankly in any of our articles. In the rare instances where we do have a financial conflict, of course we disclose that. And then finally, nothing published by Doomberg is investment advice. Quite obviously we hold no relevant licenses and we are not financial advisors, and in this presentation we will not be making investment recommendations — although to the extent that our work is an interesting input into your own mosaic of research, that's great and hopefully useful. But we won't be making buy-sell recommendations on any security, whether it be Chevron's common stock or any of its debt instruments and so on.

With that out of the way, let's turn to an important glossary of terms. These are a set of words or phrases that we will be using in this presentation that will be very familiar to those who study the energy industry closely, but perhaps less so for those among you with a more casual interest.

Upstream refers to exploration and development. Essentially, drillers. Downstream refers to marketing and retail and refining: all the things that need to happen to those molecules before consumers like you and me actually get to take advantage of that energy. And then in between are the midstream players. You can think of these companies as building and operating pipelines and associated logistics to get these hydrocarbons to market. Of course there are no hard lines between these three, and as we'll see the supermajors tend to have a significant footprint across the entire hydrocarbon supply chain.

In the oil and gas sector, an independent is generally meant to convey a company that is focused on exploration and development and is not owned by one of the supermajors or one of the state-owned oil enterprise giants. The word comes with a bit of a connotation of potential long-term M&A candidate if they are successful enough — in other words, an acquisition candidate. We'll talk a bit more about that as we cover an overview of the supermajors and how they came to be formed.

Operating and non-operating interests, as the terms might imply, refer to business ownership in various resources. An operating interest is typically, but not always, a majority owner of the resource. A non-operating interest is typically a minority owner in the same resource who has capital obligations, funding obligations, and also a role in the execution of the operations, but is not in charge of them. As you will see, it is extraordinarily common in the oil and gas industry for complex joint-venture structures around resources currently under development or being considered for such development.

And then finally, barrels of oil equivalent per day. This is harmonizing the production of crude oil, natural gas liquids, and natural gas itself in one term that analysts can understand. This is correcting either those barrels or that volume of gas for energy content, and the rule of thumb for such analysis is that you sum up the barrels of crude and barrels of NGLs on a one-to-one basis, and then you divide the natural gas produced by a company — if it's measured in billion cubic feet — by six, and that gets you the oil equivalent. And so when a company says they produce two or three or four or ten million barrels of oil equivalent, that is a harmonized measure of the totality of their hydrocarbon output, excluding coal, of course.

What a supermajor is

Having dealt with some important disclosures and definitions, let's now jump into the meat of the presentation with a quick overview of what supermajors are and what makes them unique.

A supermajor has the following characteristics. They are extremely large and globally diversified. They are publicly traded and not state-controlled. So for example, even though Saudi Aramco is the largest and arguably the most important oil and gas company in the world, it is not a supermajor because it is owned and operated by the state of Saudi Arabia, even though it is publicly traded. As the name implies, these units are highly integrated across both oil and gas, and highly intertwined with geopolitics as well. So even though they might not be state-owned, they regularly interface with global governments, and often they are drivers of home-country diplomacy. Don't think for a second that Exxon and Chevron don't have a direct tie to the US State Department, or that Shell and BP don't have ties to their British counterparts as well.

Assembled here on this chart are the six companies that are widely considered to be the existing supermajors. The aforementioned Exxon and Chevron are the big American ones; Shell and BP, the British ones; TotalEnergies, France, is certainly a supermajor as well, as is Eni from Italy. You see here on this chart that this is a mostly Western phenomenon. The giant oil and gas companies of the developing world tend to be majority state-owned and certainly operated. But these are the big six, and these companies are pretty unique in the way in which they operate, in the way in which investors can participate in their operation, and most importantly, we believe, in the manner in which they share risk amongst each other and with other large oil and gas companies as well.

How they share and manage risk

It is to that tactic we now turn. A supermajor shares its risk through several well-understood and quite common tactics. First and foremost, they tend to form joint ventures. They do this once it becomes clear that an asset is going to be significant, or to share risks with an asset that could be wildly significant if exploration succeeds. You could think of this as spreading out both the work and the lottery tickets. The terms you will run into in the industry include the concept of farming in and farming out of joint ventures formed around certain resources. To farm down is to make smaller changes in your ownership position as risk management and financial discipline make prudent.

But it's not just through joint ventures that these supermajors share risks. They also do a lot of project finance and lender risk allocation. They also tend to sign long-term offtake agreements. These are received in a mixed way by investors sometimes. Long-term offtake agreements, for example: if you want to get an LNG export terminal financed, that might sound like a great idea and make the project more bankable, and of course it's very common. But at the same time, it tends to make taking advantage of wild fluctuations in spot-market prices less easy to do — unless of course you are Venture Global, in which case you just ignore your long-term offtake agreements. And then there are also production-sharing contracts and other nuances of the trade that come into play.

Given this relative risk aversion — they would say expertise in handling risk — this influences significantly the attributes of the resulting securities that investors can choose to acquire in order to participate in the operation of these supermajors. Of course, because these companies are in a highly cyclical business, this flows through to the nature of the investment possibilities. And in fact it is the cyclical nature of commodities that drives this risk-sharing mindset in the first place.

So when you look at a supermajor stock, it is best viewed not as a growth company, even though they might grow quite significantly above GDP. They should be viewed as income and cash-return equities. Their bonds can be an attractive yield pickup over sovereign offerings, and in fact in some cases these companies trade at spreads that are shockingly tight to the underlying sovereigns.

And then one of the downsides of all of this, of course, is that this risk-sharing mindset and the inherent diversification embedded in the structures of these companies necessitates that these are, by definition, not pure plays. There's no pure-play potential in these companies. If you wanted to make an isolated bet on, say, Guyana, turning to Exxon is not the way to do it. Even though, of course, Exxon's upside potential and its balance sheet and its future cash flows are all heavily tied to Guyana now, you still have to buy the rest of Exxon if you want exposure to Guyana. And that comes with its pluses and minuses.

All right, so we talked about risk-sharing. Let's talk about risk management down to the specifics. These companies have world-beating, highly sophisticated trading arms. They tend to do sophisticated commodity-price hedging. And this is the part of their operation that doesn't perhaps get as much attention as it might deserve. But how well a large commodity company hedges — or doesn't hedge — depending on the future direction of price moves can have just as big an impact on the numbers.

These companies also tend to keep fortress balance sheets. They are considered extremely conservative, sometimes criticized for being conservative, especially during the boom times. But any executive who distills up into these cultures has risk management beaten into them quite thoroughly. One of the consequences of this mindset is that equity tends to be the main acquisition currency, at least in large deals. For smaller transactions and for speed of closing, cash can often be used. But for the big transactions, as we'll see, these tend to be all-stock merger deals as opposed to cash transactions that require stressing of these fortress balance sheets.

This also helps to dampen the impact of the cycle. If you're buying with your stock another company, it doesn't really matter where you are in the cycle. If your stock is overvalued, you're using overvalued currency. And if your stock is undervalued, presumably the target you're buying is similarly undervalued. And so this tends to dampen that cyclicality.

And then these supermajors also are executing a version of what the pharmaceutical industry has evolved to, which is what we call prize theory of exploration and production. You allow smaller companies to do the more risky exploratory work that might put them out of business if it doesn't hit the jackpot. But when such companies do hit the jackpot, the supermajors come in and buy them at a premium. But that premium, when integrated across all of the risky E&P work being done in the industry, tends to save the owners of these supermajors significant time and money. For every successful E&P wildcatter that gets scooped up, there's an array of similar wildcatters who ended up with dry holes and bankruptcy, and that money spent proving those holes were dry is money saved by the supermajors. At least that's how we look at the industry.

And then as we mentioned, these aren't pure-play companies. They are basically in all aspects of every molecule in the hydrocarbon complex. So they execute molecular diversity: they make natural gas, they make NGLs, they make crude oil, they make heavy oil. They have regional diversity: they tend to operate, as Chevron does, in all four corners of the globe. And then they are integrated: they have business interests in upstream, midstream, and downstream to varying degrees.

Another attribute of the supermajors is in how they develop and manage technology and people. Corporate integration at these large companies is a defining cultural asset. And what do we mean by this? If your corporate history is littered with acquisitions and you do not distill the best of the best across the people and technologies that come into your company — if you allow local fiefdoms and serfdoms to decide which talent or favored technology is used, as opposed to a merit-driven system — you will eventually be acquired yourself by another supermajor. And so in these companies you will see executives from various origins, not always homegrown, and certainly technologies of various origin, not always homegrown. But at the same time, in these melting pots of people and technologies that the supermajors are, it is a pretty significant thing to flourish within said cultures. And so the ones who can tend to be extraordinarily talented people, or tech that are just real game-changers for the industry.

If you are an aspiring executive, these are also great companies to work at. You tend to be allocated huge spans of control: in other words, large budgets with ample headcount and billions of dollars of revenue. And compared to, say, CEOs or executives at smaller companies, your impact is significant and your pay also tends to be much, much higher than market at the supermajors as well. At the same time, you tend to have less autonomy. These cultures are not entrepreneurial as a default. Having said that, another feature of being an executive at a Chevron or an Exxon is that at any time in your career you can execute what we call a downshift maneuver, where you take on a bigger role at a smaller company. And so the Chevrons of the world tend to be feeders of CEOs of companies.

Here's a quote from Chevron's CEO, Mike Wirth, on the company's second-quarter 2026 earnings call. It was almost a bit of a throwaway comment by Wirth, but one that piqued our interest. And I'll read it: "Actually, the person who runs all of our shale and tight came from Hess and is very familiar with the Bakken. And I cited some of the things that we're doing in the Bakken differently already in terms of lateral length and drilling efficiencies — same production with one fewer rig." Embedded in this comment is all the things I just described on the prior page. You have what by all measures is a high-potential, super-talented person at Hess, and as we'll see the recent Hess transaction at Chevron is a defining one. And instead of prioritizing their homegrown talent, this clearly talented individual was elevated within Chevron's culture and has been given one of the most important leadership roles in the company.

History, the numbers, and the mergers

Okay, so with that overview of supermajors out of the way, let's turn now to some company-specific highlights with regard to Chevron, and this of course will lead us into the global look at its resource base.

Chevron traces its corporate history back to the infamous breakup of the Standard Oil Company, and its original name for decades was Standard Oil Company of California, so SoCal. It came of age in 1911. It became Chevron in 1984, and then after its merger with Texaco was briefly known as ChevronTexaco, and then back to Chevron again to the present day.

One of the interesting aspects of Chevron's history is the company is actually responsible for the key enabling discoveries of what is now Saudi Aramco. In the 1930s, today's Chevron earned a significant concession in Saudi Arabia and the California Arabian Standard Oil Company was formed. They farmed down to Texaco in '36 and modern-day Exxon in 1948, and 1948 is the year that the largest oil field ever known to humanity was discovered: the Ghawar oil field. This is not just any oil field. This oil field measures 150 miles in length and 25 miles in width, and for decades has produced at an incredible five million barrels per day just in this one oil field, and it is approaching 100 billion barrels of production with no signs of slowing. This is not a Doom Zoom about Saudi Aramco, but nonetheless an interesting tidbit that the world's most valuable oil and gas company owes its history back to Chevron's early days. And one wonders what could have been if geopolitics had evolved differently.

Here are some key facts and figures for Chevron. Its 2025 revenue was $184 billion. Its cash flow from operations was $34 billion, an impressive number by any measure. Its total assets checked in at over $300 billion, while its debt was just $41 billion. And this is an attribute of Chevron that is well known: they tend to be extraordinarily risk-averse, as we say, and they keep their balance sheet in pristine condition.

Underpinning these numbers is Chevron's production. It produced, its share net of all of its ownership interests across its various JVs, crude oil and condensate production of 1.8 million barrels, tossed in another half a million barrels per day of NGLs, and then 8.5 Bcf per day of natural gas. Actually, Chevron, a bit under the radar, is a pretty significant natural gas player. And when you add all these up, you end up with a barrel of oil equivalent per day of 3.7 million — a sizable number indeed, one of the obviously largest publicly traded oil and gas producers on the planet.

Chevron is the integral of its prior mergers, and here are the big ones going back past forty years or so. Gulf Oil, Texaco, and Unocal: these go back a little further than what is necessary to understand Chevron today. But the last five on this slide are relatively modern, and themes from these transactions will be woven into the rest of the presentation as we go through the resource analysis of Chevron.

Atlas Energy is a fascinating one. This essentially is a failed attempt for Chevron to break into Appalachian dry natural gas. Probably a full Doomberg article on this one ahead, but needless to say Chevron bought into the shale-gas boom and ultimately sold out its position at a significant loss to EQT in 2020. Fascinating history there.

The other four are either not fully written or happier stories. Noble Energy in 2020: this brought Chevron its current presence in the Middle East, essentially, but also significant assets in the DJ Basin in Colorado and associated midstream assets. PDC Energy in 2023 significantly augmented Chevron's DJ Basin presence even further, and also brought some Permian presence to supplement what Chevron already had. We will talk about the Hess merger in detail on the next slide. And then back up to Renewable Energy Group: we will talk about Chevron's renewable presence, but this was Chevron's play, still is Chevron's play, predominantly into renewable diesel, biodiesel, that side of the industry, and we'll have a few things to say about it soon.

But obviously the one that is of most relevance to modern Chevron, and the merger that dominates conference calls and investor summaries, is of course the Hess merger. For modern Chevron, a $53 billion all-stock deal, plus the assumption of about $8 billion in Hess debt. And it is just undeniable that the driving force behind this transaction was ultimately Hess's decision to farm into Exxon's Guyana concession, the Stabroek claim. But this wasn't just a Guyana transaction. Hess brought a major shale position, almost half a million acres in the Bakken, with some pretty handsome midstream assets, and a modest supplement to Chevron's already significant assets in the Gulf of America, and a few natural gas assets of consequence in Southeast Asia specifically. So the Hess merger is a really big deal, and something that will make an appearance throughout the balance of this presentation.

Power, refining, and the dividend

Another important aspect of modern-day Chevron: its push into the power business. This is driven by the deluge of associated gas that Chevron and the rest of the industry is producing. Here on this slide is an AI-generated rendering of Project Kilby. This is Chevron's significant play into the power business: to use that excess natural gas, to convert it into electricity, and ultimately into data, to power the same AI model that presumably generated this image.

This project, which we've written about in a piece called Blue Chips, is reaching a critical phase. FID is coming. The project just signed a 20-year power purchase agreement. It's in total around a $7 billion investment, with 2.7 gigawatts of local power, consuming one Bcf per day of natural gas. This is a critically important proof of concept. If the supermajors can make better use of their natural gas in places like the Permian, this is a real game-changer, and it's certainly worth keeping a close eye on.

The downstream business of Chevron, compared to the other supermajors, it must be said, is relatively small. The company has just five refineries in the US and has non-operating joint-venture interests in three other significant refineries. Shown here is the Richmond refinery in California. One of the reasons why Chevron has a comparatively limited refining foundation is because of its California origins. It's not exactly the world's friendliest place to own and operate refineries. Chevron has been systematically closing down those facilities and actually recently moved its headquarters from California to Texas. And so this slide is really meant to convey the importance of interfacing with local and regional and national governments when it comes to these supermajors. They will leave jurisdictions that don't treat them well, as Chevron has been slowly doing in California.

We mentioned Chevron's Renewable Energy Group, and that this is, to a gross approximation, essentially a biofuel, renewable-diesel play. The company operates nine biorefineries. To say it, for example: you're not going to see much more in this presentation about Chevron's Renewable Energy Group. I suppose the best thing we can say about it is the company invested about as much as it needed to to not stick out for not doing enough, but they haven't wasted an enormous amount of money going down this path either, which from an investor perspective we suppose is a good thing. The executives will wax poetically about how this is the future of the business. We wouldn't believe them. And the importance of this line of Chevron's assets, at least in our view, is made apparent by its relatively short appearance in this presentation.

And then finally, on Chevron at the holistic level, here is a history of Chevron's stock performance over the years. As we record this presentation, the company sports [unclear] of the industry. And you could see after recovering from the COVID lows, the stock really doesn't do much — although the war in Iran has certainly been bullish for Chevron. And you could see once the war broke out, the company's stock has spiked by about 50 percent or so, plus or minus.

This is not our preferred way to look at a company like Chevron and the value of its equity. Our preferred way is to consider the dividend yield of Chevron. And of course you can even look at dividend yield compared to your favorite benchmarks like the 10-year. And you can see that Chevron's dividend yield tends to fluctuate inversely with its stock performance, because these companies target a steady dividend, one that doesn't vary across the cycle.

The typical narrative arc of these companies is: during low commodity prices, or periods of excess supply, the market begins to wonder whether their dividend is sustainable, and it spikes up to prices like the 8 percent yield that we see here during the peak of COVID — a couple of hundred basis points higher for Exxon during this period. The narrative in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal is whether Chevron or Exxon will cut their dividend. And then cycling down to periods of high energy prices like we see today, where dividend yields are much lower, and then the narrative arc shifts to: can't you expand your dividend more aggressively, and bring that yield up?

As a general rule, if you treat as an axiom that these companies are extremely well managed — then, superficially easier to say than to do, you want to buy the equities of these companies when their dividend yield is high, and you want not to add when it isn't. And so, as you can see, based on that rule of thumb — again, which is not investment advice — the time to have bought Chevron, to capture both the appreciation in its stock and the healthy growth in its dividend, would have been during the frenzy of COVID, when oil couldn't be given away and traded negative and people wondered whether there was even a future for oil and gas. You had giant intellectuals like Cathie Wood on CNBC proclaiming the end of the oil and gas industry is near. Who wants to own this stuff? These are stranded assets.

It is of course difficult to pull the trigger on getting long such assets in a contrarian way. But time and time again, given the fact that energy is life and hydrocarbons are still 82 percent of global primary energy consumption, stocks like Chevron and Exxon get far more interesting when their dividend yields are high on a relative basis, or high when compared to the US 10-year Treasuries.

Now the investable universe for companies like Chevron is not limited to their equity. And this is a pretty interesting chart that we made on our Bloomberg terminal. This is effectively Chevron's bond yield curve. Plotted on this chart are the yields to maturity associated with all 45 of Chevron's existing debt instruments that are traded, that at least we could find data for. And so you can see, if you're interested in Chevron's paper, you can buy 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30-year maturity bonds, and you get more and more yield the further out you go. There is a spread. You get some pickup. And there's a couple of outliers on here which are just interesting. Chevron does have a floating bond, which is SOFR minus 45 out here, and there's a long-term bond that matures in 2097 that was inherited by the Noble transaction. These bonds tend not to have a huge amount of principal and aren't all that liquid. If you're interested in, I don't know, 70-year Chevron paper, you can get it yielding just over 7 percent today, if that's something that you might be interested in.

US shale

All right, let's turn now to a resource summary of Chevron. We should say up front, there's only so comprehensive one can be in a short presentation like this. Each of these resources will get a relatively high-level summary as opposed to a deep dive that individually they might merit. And as we said, we will start in the US and work our way to the east, down the Western Hemisphere and then across the oceans. And of course we begin with Chevron's significant presence in the all-important US shale industry.

If we were to summarize Chevron's participation in US shale, first thing to say: it is considered a top-three US shale player, alongside Exxon and Occidental, and its barrels of oil equivalent per day levels of production as of the second quarter of this year are roughly a million barrels a day in the Permian, 400,000 barrels a day in the DJ, and a couple hundred thousand barrels per day in the Bakken.

As you might expect, Chevron's operational excellence is a differentiator in these basins. It has focused on improved well and completion design, reduced cycle times, and huge technology deployment. And it does operate a cross-basin model, as we alluded to earlier. It manages basically a significant majority of its entire shale operations under one management team for development and cross-pollination of key technology learnings.

US shale is a cash cow for Chevron. This is an aspect of how the supermajors operate in the shale patch that can be missed by outsiders. A lot of energy perma-bears tend to point to fast decline rates of newly drilled wells, and that's certainly true. But these same wells have extraordinarily long tails. And what happens over time is these mature wells stack on top of each other, and the foundation of your operations — the run-for-cash aspect of your shale business — grows over time. So each new well might give a burst of production and then quickly dissipate, but the tails of these wells stack up in a way that with very minimal incremental investment you can have really an outstanding run-for-cash business. So the capex per barrel of production shrinks substantially. These long-tail assets have huge upside price-gearing ratios to the commodity itself. And while it becomes more difficult to grow production, the accumulation of value to shareholders of existing production, as you stack on more and more new and newly depleted, quote-unquote, wells, becomes more attractive over time.

And so just in the Permian, the company is estimating about $5 billion per year in free cash flow from the Permian, and $2 billion in free cash flow per year from the DJ and the Bakken. And these numbers, I should say, and unless stated otherwise during the rest of this presentation, come from Chevron's long-term guidance articulated in its November 2025 investor day. In order to make these projections the company has to make certain assumptions about the price of oil. Depending on which presentation you look at and which estimate they're providing, Brent is somewhere in the $60–$65 per barrel range. And so in years like 2026, where Brent has actually averaged much higher than those long-term modeling inputs, you see a huge accumulation of cash flow above and beyond these estimates by Chevron, which is of course one of the reasons why Chevron's stock price has performed so well in the past six months as well.

The Permian

And then a bit of a deeper dive on the Permian, which is of course a crown jewel. This is a homegrown franchise by Chevron, augmented by a couple of acquisitions, Noble and PDC, and the company has line of sight to steady production of about a million barrels of oil equivalent per day. This is renowned by energy pessimists as: it's getting harder for Chevron to grow in the Permian. But for the reasons we articulated, the company can produce a million barrels a day in the Permian for the next fifteen years with decreasing amounts of capital. That is an attractive proposition, and far from these basins being exhausted. Chevron gets to stay there, wait for new technologies to develop, while planning on keeping production steady and having cash just accumulate into its coffers. Any conservative management team is going to select that option.

The company has an ample low-breakeven inventory to maintain this production. The company claimed that more than half of its inventory has breakevens below $50 a barrel, and the bulk of its remaining inventory is somewhere between $50 and $70. We don't like this metric, especially in associated-gas-producing regions like the Permian, because if natural gas becomes more valuable, then what does the breakeven price of oil even matter over time? And in fact we did some calculations in preparation for this presentation. If natural gas were to get to $12 per million BTU in the Permian — like an unfathomable number, but if AI-driven demand for gas materializes at $12 per million BTU natural gas — the Permian actually makes more money from the associated gas it is producing today than it does, say, from its crude oil production. And natural gas is trading for twice that value, landed LNG in Europe today. So it's not wholly implausible that the Permian could become a cash cow from a natural gas perspective. But we still use crude-oil breakevens. It's sort of the way things have always been done. And directly, this is an important indicator of Chevron's ability to comfortably maintain a million barrels of oil equivalent production per day in the decades ahead, again with the really positive attribute of decreasing reinvestment rates over time.

US offshore

We turn next to Chevron's formidable US offshore business. To summarize this resource: Chevron is widely recognized to be the top US offshore oil producer. It has nearly a nine-decade operating history. It is considered to be the deepwater long-life technology leader. 300,000 barrels of oil equivalent production in 2026 is the company target. The company claims that it has over a billion barrels of oil equivalent in recoverable reserves. This is an estimate. And they anticipate $3 billion in annual free cash flow through the end of the decade, using those price-assumption numbers that we described earlier.

The thing we would say about offshore is: unless you have visited an offshore drilling rig like Big Foot, shown here, one of Chevron's large rigs, it is difficult to internalize just what technology powerhouses the supermajors are. The ability to operate in these harsh conditions, drilling through thousands of feet of water and then thousands of feet of the earth, and landing with pinpoint accuracy at a resource in a way that allows for its economic extraction and preliminary gathering, and then via various midstream assets transporting it to refineries where it is then chemically converted to the fuels that run society — it really is a marvel. And these companies deserve far more credit than they get for the work they do to power modern society. Get on a helicopter and go visit one of these oil drilling rigs and you will come back with a wholly different appreciation for what a real technology company actually is.

Chevron is pushing the limits of offshore. Occasionally there's a significant project that is worth watching not just for the execution of the project itself but for the precedent that project sets. And Anchor is one of those projects, which is designed to prove that Chevron can operate at pressures of 20,000 psi or higher. And so while the production of oil and natural gas from this project itself is impressive, the real impressiveness of a project like Anchor is that it unlocks an entirely new resource class: namely, the bounty of oil and gas that sits underwater and below the surface at pressures that were not that long ago considered to be permanently inaccessible.

And it's projects like Anchor that drive us to conclude that the best way to model oil and gas resources is that they are effectively infinite, and that betting on higher long-term real commodity prices is effectively a short bet on human ingenuity — a sucker's bet if there ever was one. And as these more difficult resources are unlocked, there tends to be an enormously high amount of volume. In other words, the more difficult resources that exist underground tend to have the highest volumes. The analogy is mining lower and lower grades of copper. Well, sure, it gets harder to do, but as you get lower and lower in the grade of copper that you can economically mine, the amount of such low-grade copper underground increases dramatically. And so as these companies unlock shale, unlock super-high-pressure assets under the sea, the amount of those resources is on a whole different scale, which then of course significantly increases that which is ultimately recoverable.

From the investor perspective, this is our thoughts on how Chevron's offshore business should be viewed. First thing to say is shale made US offshore better. The deluge of new supply represented significant competition for capital and resources and talent, and it made the operation of these platforms all the better for it. That which does not kill you makes you better. Also, offshore should be considered sort of long-cycle, lower-decline barrels. These have a different production profile than a typical shale well. Additionally, the ebbs and flows of US government support for the industry: with the 47th US president and his return to the Oval Office, there has been a significant uptick in US government support for offshore licensing. And then once these major projects are on stream, of course they tend to be high-margin, infrastructure-led growth for these companies. Yes, the upfront cost is high, but once that money is spent, the marginal cost to keep that production going drops significantly.

Guyana

Having completed our look at Chevron's US assets, we now turn to Guyana, the all-important participation that it has. This, as we mentioned, was a key driver of the Hess deal. And by any measure Stabroek is a crown-jewel asset: 6.6 million acres in the concession. The operating company that manages this has an extremely favorable deal with Guyana, and currently estimated that there's 11 billion barrels of resource there. We think it is much, much higher. And the current ownership mix after the Hess deal is: Exxon is the operator with 45 percent interest; Chevron is one of two non-operating interests in the JV, with 30 percent; and then the Chinese state-owned company, CNOOC, comes in with 25 percent.

We did an entire Doom Zoom presentation in May of this year on Guyana called Bonanza Republic. We will of course cover just briefly the highlights here, but if you're interested in Guyana and in its own sort of baseline deep-dive presentation, including the history and potential future prospects, you can go into the Pro-tier archives on our homepage under the Doomberg Pro tab and pull that up.

Of interest to us is why Chevron is a better owner of this asset than Hess was. Obviously as a non-operating partner there's little incrementally in the way Chevron could help, although it certainly does, injecting some talent and its own management expertise into the joint venture. But the real leg of value for Chevron is what is known as equity barrels. In other words, the production share from Stabroek can be taken in either physical barrels or in cash, and this gives expansive strategic optionality due to Chevron's status as a supermajor. It could sell the cargo properly. It could time or redirect those sales. It could feed Chevron's refining system directly. It could blend it. It could trade it. In other words, Chevron can make more use of the junior position in this joint venture than Hess could. Obviously the most important thing is being in the deal, but we wouldn't downplay the synergistic optimization potential of having that ownership interest be in more sophisticated hands like those of Chevron.

And then finally from the investor perspective: look, this is a longer high-margin cash-flow machine for Chevron. The runway is huge. It is one of the best undepleted oil-growth assets in the world. And this project has experienced elite well execution thus far. As we described in that May Doom Zoom, the sequential deployment of floating production, storage, and offloading vessels, and Exxon's excellent management discipline — these are things Chevron now gets to draft behind, help make better at the margins, and then to enjoy the spoils from over the decades as well. And so as Guyana grows, so too does Guyana's importance in Chevron's financial statements. And even though they paid sort of full price for Hess, we still think that deal will be wildly accretive to Chevron investors over time.

Venezuela

We head south now to Venezuela, which is of course a fascinating story, one made all the more interesting with the events of early January and the snatching of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Chevron's position in Venezuela can be characterized as a century of persistence. Venezuela is a country that for only brief periods of time has operated at its full potential. But Chevron's been there for over a hundred years. They began exploration work in the 1920s, some significant discoveries in the 1940s. The current embodiment of Chevron's participation was supplemented by the Gulf Oil and Texaco transactions.

The allure of Venezuela is well known. Depending on how you measure it, Venezuela is home to one of, if not the, largest hydrocarbon resources on the planet. Some doubts about the realities of these numbers, but however you measure it, it's just undeniable that there is an enormous amount of oil and gas in Venezuela, much of which remains to be exploited. But at the same time this is a bit of a cautionary tale, sort of on the complete opposite end of what Guyana has chosen to do with its resources. And famously the relationship between the Venezuelan government and external supermajors has been less than glorious over time. The 2007 expropriation in particular still resonates in the industry, is still echoing throughout courtrooms around the world.

The big companies took different approaches to this. Exxon and ConocoPhillips left and sued, and Chevron stayed and worked with Chávez and ultimately Maduro to the extent that they could. Actually this caused some friction with various US administrations. And when Maduro was snatched in early January, Chevron was the only remaining US major in the country, which put the company in a very interesting position, to say the least. And by the way, to sort of steal the headline: relative to Chevron's other interests, Venezuela is not all that significant, say, in terms of production. It's modest, interesting in terms of potential. But it is really significant politically, because suddenly the glaring focus of the current US administration is on parlaying their sort of audacious move into Venezuela into a success. And that's where Chevron's existing footprint is politically quite interesting, and some would say also [unclear] the company.

It is through that lens that we observed with great interest this rather bizarre meeting of oil and gas majors at the White House on January 9th of this year, barely a week after Maduro was awakened in the night and hurriedly relocated to the US. Famously this is the meeting where, pictured on the left side of this, sitting close to Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Susie Wiles, chief of staff — and right next to that group of apex leaders in the Trump administration is Darren Woods from Exxon, who then told the president that Venezuela is effectively uninvestable. Noticeably absent from this meeting was Mike Wirth, the CEO of Chevron. Now the company says that he was undergoing knee surgery, and the company sent Mark Nelson in Mike Wirth's place. He is of course a formidable executive, the vice chair of Chevron, and what many consider to be the number two at the company. But we couldn't help [noting] the well-timed nature of this knee surgery of Mike's. This is sort of classic Chevron. It likes to say the minimum it has to in the political world, and it navigates US administrations with a keen understanding that the political cycle is even shorter than the commodity cycle, and that one shouldn't draw tangent lines to sine curves in these political cycles. And Chevron's objective in this meeting undoubtedly was to get through it without making any binding commitments or any headlines, and it must have smirked internally at Darren Woods and his comments grabbing all those headlines in the aftermath of this meeting. So just an interesting note. Maybe we're reading too much into it, but Mike Wirth's absence from this meeting was not all that shocking to us, at least.

Last thing we'll say about Venezuela is Chevron is making a not-so-subtle shift towards heavy oil. The Venezuelan story is the Orinoco Belt. This is a huge resource, difficult to extract, difficult to ship, sort of an analogy to the oil sands of Canada but harder for a variety of reasons. Chevron has recently done a bit of an asset swap with the state-owned oil company in Venezuela, and it is making this strategic shift, and the overall target output growth in the next couple of years is to double Chevron's production. But these are from relatively small totals. The company doesn't really separate Chevron's interest in a specific way for us here, but our best guess is that the ventures that Chevron has ownership interest in produce about 200,000 barrels a day, of which maybe 75,000 represents Chevron's share of those assets. So not insignificant, but certainly not on the scale of the Permian or Guyana, but still interesting politically nonetheless.

Argentina

Continuing across the spectrum of interesting politically, we turn further south to Argentina, again another place where Chevron has participated for many decades, often to some criticism because of the relatively challenging local environment which Argentina represents — and that's to say it as politely as we can.

Obviously the story of the day is whether [Milei] can turn things around in a manner that is sustainable. We have our doubts. Many people do. But it is clear that Milei understands that the long-term success of Argentina and the country's ability to exploit its world-leading hydrocarbon resources are intimately intertwined. Why the world is very interested in Argentina of course comes down to Vaca Muerta, which is an absolutely astonishing hydrocarbon resource on the scale of the Permian. It has been long known by industry to be an enormous resource of superior quality. It was discovered after the shale boom that Vaca Muerta itself was a shale formation. The formal discovery of this is commonly marked as 2011. And again we've done a [Doom Zoom] on Argentina as well, so you can get into the interesting and winding history of this resource, but it is a world-beater for sure. And if Milei can orient Argentina to the point where it becomes as attractive as, say, Guyana or the US shale patch, you could see huge development of this resource.

Milei's effort to get this done is through what the country calls a large investment incentive regime, or RIGI. Here investments over $200 million are granted accelerated relief from currency repatriation. The ever-declining value of the Argentinian peso, and the country's insistence that oil and gas operators keep their profits in that currency for years at a time, basically makes the country uninvestable, to borrow a term that was used by Mr. Woods earlier. This is marketed as a 30-year stability regime for foreign investment. Of course the big challenge is these regimes tend not to survive changes in government, and changes in government happen often in Argentina. So it remains to be seen whether this is the time that Argentina finally breaks through, or whether this is another example of Lucy's football.

Chevron is putting forward a critically important test case of this new regime. Back in June they announced a nearly $14 billion investment plan in Argentina and applied for this tax break and currency break — really more than the tax break. And this complements other investment initiatives in the country that Chevron is doing. The thesis is export-led. And ultimately it is our view that the fate of Milei, and by extension that of Argentina, is tied at the hip with this particular project, actually. And if this one succeeds, a new day for Argentina will arrive. And if it goes the other way and falls apart, then this will be, we think, the end of the modern era's excitement with Argentina, and the country will be relegated back to uninvestable status for at least a couple of decades. And so this is a really important one for the country, for the energy industry, to keep an eye on.

West Africa

All right, we cross the ocean and head over to West Africa, where Chevron does have significant regional presence and some interesting exploration work going on.

Angola is Chevron's regional centerpiece. It has between 30 and 40 percent operating interest direct in some pretty important concessions: Cabinda, Block 0. It is also a participant in the liquefied natural gas business of Angola, and it does have some midstream participation as well. And Chevron's strategy here is to extend production through brownfield infrastructure that already exists.

Nearby in Nigeria, another core regional operating position. Difficult country to operate in. A lot of stability issues — social, cultural, political stability issues to deal with. But they do have pretty significant onshore and shallow-water Niger Delta concessions. A similar strategy of extending production through brownfield. Brownfield is one of Chevron's main drivers for exploration growth in West Africa as well. You never know when a headline is going to cross of the discovery of something significant or world-scale, and you have to have many bets like these in a portfolio as large and complicated as Chevron's.

And then another one in the area of these types of bets is in the Equatorial Guinea or the Cameroon gas plays, largely inherited by the Noble transaction. And you could see there's lots of gas in place. Two and a half trillion cubic feet is not small. Nobody would confuse it with the Marcellus, but still of interest and worth keeping an eye on.

The Middle East

And then from there we will spend a few slides in the Middle East, again another interesting play for Chevron, one with important political dimensions as well. Perhaps most significantly, given the war in the Middle East, Chevron operates Israel's two principal producing offshore gas fields, again acquired through the Noble transaction. The Leviathan field: Chevron owns 40 percent, operates it, and they just recently announced a $2.4 billion expansion to that project. As well as Tamar, they have a 25 percent interest there.

Interestingly, these assets serve not just Israel's domestic market but also that of Egypt. And when you observe geopolitics, sometimes it's important to read past the headlines. Of course geopolitics is nothing if not complex, and energy ties often trump rhetoric, domestic politics, and propaganda. So for example, when you see Egyptian commentary about Israel or the Palestinian issue or pick your favorite flashpoint, the subject of the day, it's important to keep in mind that through Chevron, and there are pipelines that connect Israel to Egypt, these countries are closer and more mutually dependent than might be superficially obvious just by reading the headlines. And we are always interested to study and learn about these types of ties, because they are an important input into geopolitical analysis as well.

Chevron's Middle East story is not just an Israeli one. It is also potentially an Iraqi one. And shown here is the aforementioned Mark Nelson, the vice chair of Chevron who attended the Venezuela meeting at the White House, signing a deal with the leaders of Iraq. Historically Chevron's exposure in Iraq was in the Kurdistan region. It has since exited that area, or its concessions have expired, and its current strategy is more prospective: a move into federal Iraq. And of course how the war in Iran unfolds is a material risk to these potential ambitions. Not a huge amount in the way of existing production or assets to be imperiled, but long-term potential for growth is certainly there. Iraq is one of the most attractive oil plays and gas plays in the world from a geology perspective, but of course geology is just one input into whether those resources ultimately find their way to market. So there is some strategic optionality for Chevron in Iraq, depending on how things go in the war in Iran.

Kazakhstan

We turn now to Kazakhstan, which was the subject of a recent Doomberg article. Really fascinating play. This is another of Chevron's crown jewels. This is a flagship international asset. They recently achieved first oil from the Future Growth Project last year. This was the culmination of some $48 billion in investment, and the history of Chevron's participation, as we covered in that article, goes all the way back to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Chevron got into Kazakhstan in 1993. It farmed down its participation to Exxon over the years. And with Brent at $60, the company forecasted $5 billion in free cash flow.

And Chevron's insertion into Kazakhstan has helped Kazakhstan become really one of the most important and under-the-radar oil producers in the world. So when Chevron got in there the country was producing about half a million barrels a day, and for all of 2025, according to the Statistical Review, it averaged more than two million barrels a day.

The big challenge with Kazakhstan, and the subject of that article that we wrote, is that Kazakhstan is a landlocked country and relies on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium to get its oil all the way to the Black Sea, from Kazakhstan through Russia to the Black Sea, which unfortunately for Chevron and for Kazakhstan happens to be close to the Sea of Azov and Ukraine's access to the Black Sea. And the war itself is jeopardizing production in Kazakhstan and its distribution of that blend, the CPC blend, which is all-important really for Europe. And so much in the way of geopolitical intrigue going on. And as we mentioned in that article that we wrote recently, attacks on Chevron-aligned tankers, on the export facility, mooring facilities in Novorossiysk, the significant Russian port on the Black Sea, are best viewed as attacks really on American interests by Ukraine, which we find to be fascinating and interesting for a variety of reasons. Something worth keeping a very close eye on as the war in Ukraine winds down, and hopefully quite quickly.

Australia

Last but certainly not least, we turn to Chevron's long-standing participation in Australia, which is both significant to the company and we believe potentially even more significant over time. We are working on a Doomberg article on this very subject as we are coming to press with this Doom Zoom.

Chevron is a very significant player in Australia's natural gas. Australia, after the US and Qatar at least in normal times, is considered to be the third-largest LNG exporter, and within that sector Chevron is one of the country's largest LNG operators. It has operator interests in the Gorgon operation and in Wheatstone, and together these trains generate about three Bcf per day of production. We pulled this slide from Chevron's investor-day presentation. The gross resource that Chevron points to is about 40 trillion cubic feet total. These are sort of low-cost projects with backfill economics: in other words, the existing infrastructure, you just need to keep the gas going. And they project somewhere between $4 to $5 billion in annual free cash flows. Of course, with JKM natural gas prices being where they are, one would assume that those numbers are going to be far more handsome than that, at least while the Strait of Hormuz is closed and Qatar is knocked offline. And so all that would make Chevron's participation in Australia significant enough and material enough for the investor.

But we believe there's a potential game-changer in the works in Australia. This is a slide of global shale-gas potential, and you could see in the bottom right that Australia has a relatively large blue circle, and huge potential there. And the pieces are emerging. They're triggering our pattern recognition.

Last slide that we want to leave you with, both for Australia and this presentation. A bit of a speculative one, but we're beginning to see significant shale-gas activity in Australia. The Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory in particular is catching our eye. This has some early echoes of US shale-gas development. Tamboran is the sort of lead name there. But Liberty Energy, a company that is very forward-looking and was founded by current Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — Liberty Energy has moved into this basin and is helping with the early development of it. And in our view, classic lateral thinking: with Chevron being there, Chevron knowing shale, and Chevron knowing the players, Chevron makes a big move by acquisition, for example. This will be a powerful signal that a potentially promising age of shale-gas development will envelop Australia. Too early to say that we have another Marcellus or Utica Shale on our hands. But this does give us echoes to those days in the late 2000s when there was a lot of skepticism about the potential development of the Appalachian shale basins, and suddenly we see this deluge of new gas being brought online. And so that as the subject of future articles and presentations.

Closing

But that wraps up both Australia and our worldwide tour of Chevron's significant resources. Look, as far as supermajors go, hard to do better than Chevron. Extremely well run. They pay their dividend. Their bonds are typically money-good. They know how to manage the cycles. They're deft geopolitical operators. So you could do a lot worse than allocating some of your resources to Chevron — again, not investment advice. But to the extent that you found this deep dive on a single company to be interesting — hopefully you did — you can look forward to more of these in the future. Always a great pleasure to put these Doom Zoom presentations together. We certainly hope that you enjoy them. And with that, this wraps up the August 2026 Doom Zoom. We have another exciting one in the hopper for September. Talk to you then.