The company is moving its corporate headquarters and reams of documents
Chevron $CVX released its second-quarter earnings Friday. Revenue was $51.2 billion, up 5% from the same time last year. Profits came in at $4.4 billion, down 26%. The oil giant celebrated 3.2 million barrels per day in crude production, a quarterly record, and confirmed that it had spent $6 billion on share buybacks.
“Despite recent operational downtime and softer margins, we remain poised to deliver significant longterm earnings and cash flow growth,” CEO Mike Wirth said in a statement accompanying the numbers.
But the quarter was really all about paperwork.
Besides its financials, Chevron said that it would be filing a change-of-address form. It’s moving its headquarters from San Ramon, California, to Houston, Texas, a relocation The New York Times reports as being connected to a lawsuit from the oil giant’s longtime home state alleging that it misled the public for decades about its connection to climate change. (Wirth has called the legal action “misguided.”)
Chevron also announced that it has received retirement papers from three executives in charge of human resources, its oil division, and its “midstream” crude transportation operations. The trio has a combined 75 years of experience at the company.
Though Hess shareholders approved Chevron’s $53 billion acquisition of their company, the deal is not all the way done. The Federal Trade Commission is still doing a review of the merger to make sure it passes on anti-trust grounds. Though one analyst did point out on the company’s earnings call that this leaves the company in a huge bit of legal limbo, Wirth suggested that everything looks like it will be fine.
“We remain confident that this is a straightforward matter,” he said.
Also connected to the Hess deal is a bit of a territorial showdown with Chevron rival ExxonMobil $XOM. The latter’s Stabroek Block $SQ, a giant oil discovery off the coast of Guyana, is tied up in arbitration proceedings because Exxon thinks it has a right to take back Hess’s 30% stake in the event the company sold itself. Chevron doesn’t think that’s the case. Wirth was asked whether there might a way to reach a compromise instead of wading into all the uncertainty of a contractual close-read. Wirth said that it has to be this way.
“We have indicated previously that there was a period of time where Hess and Chevron worked with the other partners in the Stabroek Block to find a resolution that accommodated everybody’s interests,” he said. “That time has now passed, and we’re in the arbitration process. So that’s the path that we’re on.”
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