Former Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub and Vertien's Manyard Holt at the 2026 KBH Energy Center Symposium

Well, as I was contemplating my resignation or retirement, I was wondering how it was going to feel and I didn't really know. But I knew that for 10 years I had spent way too many weekends and way too many nights away from my family. And every year my brother and his wife and my husband, we would sit down and we would do our bucket list and update our bucket list. And it's like our bucket list wasn't changing. [laughter] We just weren't going anywhere and doing anything. And then you know, and then you look at we've had several people from Oxy pass away actually right before they retired and I started kind of watching the health of some of my family members and realized that the time is now. But I thought I would be incredibly sad and miss it. It's like the most sad part for me, but also helpful to me from a personal standpoint was somebody had put out an email that I was about to leave the building on my last day there because I had to go to a speaking engagement. So, they knew exactly what time I was going to leave. And as I got to the bottom of the elevators, there was I think a couple of thousand people there gathered to say goodbye. That was incredibly emotional for me. But after that, I miss our employees because I loved our employees, loved being around them. I got my energy from them. But I found that day two I realized it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do not just for me and my family, but for Oxy. It was the right time for a transition. And so I've never looked back. It's been from that period on it's been the most amazing thing for me. It's my family and I we're going places. We've in the last six weeks we've gone to Chicago, Aspen, Nova Scotia, and New York. And all of those were incredibly enjoyable. And now though, I'm looking for that opportunity that I had envisioned, which is sitting around long enough at my house to one day say, "Well, what am I going to do now? I can't think of anything to do, so I'll just go fish." That I'm looking forward to next. But it's been good.

And it was mutual because especially when you go through hard times and you go through hard times and you see people stepping up and going above and beyond what you ever imagined they could do. That's what our employees did. And they did it when we did the big acquisition. They came through and delivered more synergies than I ever thought we would get. They did it during COVID. We didn't have to tell them exactly what to do. We just told them where we needed to be. They went and did it. And it's just it was an amazing experience for me. I never imagined I'd be CEO, but to be CEO of an organization that was like Oxy was really amazing, really incredible.

Yeah. Well, what really drove our big strategic moves was the fact that we, thanks to our former CEO, we owned significant CO2 enhanced oil recovery projects in the Permian Basin. And I remember I was working in the Rockies trying to grow a business in the Rockies when I was asked by the company to go work in the Permian. And I thought Permian man that's kind of been around for a while. What more is there to do there? And then when I got there and started realizing the potential of CO2 enhanced oil recovery and it was about the time that Shell was starting and we started wondering can it be done in Shell too and can we have two sorts of businesses here and what we realized is that to do all we wanted to do there was not enough CO2 and so we started going out and building a strategy around two things. One, trying to strengthen the company, get more cash flow coming in, because we couldn't pay our dividend anymore. And at the time I took over, we were not able to without selling assets cover our dividend and our sustainable capital or anything beyond our sustainable capital. Then the next thing that we needed to do is we decided we wanted to be more of a US company with a great foundation in the Permian and I discovered this multi-layered phenomenon in the Permian and this just amazing set of assets better than any basin anywhere I'd ever seen. I realized and my team helped me to realize the tremendous potential of the Permian, the best area in all of the United States and one of the best in the world. It's, you know, we almost have as much as is Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. It's just that we can't get as much out as they can. But I realized that we had a great base. We had a unique set of assets with a portfolio that would not only be useful advancing EOR in the Permian but in other places where we operated as well but we needed more CO2, we needed more cash flow hence the big acquisition of Anadarko to get us to a point where we could exit things that were money consumers, cash consumers and focus on the best set of assets that we ever had. So we sold off those things that were users of cash instead of contributors and that had no growth potential in the future. We went through a huge transition to make that happen and to then build a bigger position in the Midland Basin with the CrownRock acquisition. So with those two acquisitions, it positioned us to what we believed is to be a company that could sustain through any macro. And that was the vision because when you had this low decline conventional business, low decline EOR business combined with a higher decline but fast growth and high return shale business. So they're very complimentary. And so we were trying to build for resilience so that we could even as low as $40 continue growing a dividend over time by continuing to reduce our cost and to get better efficiencies. And the way we viewed the macro is that we had looked at basically how exploration had played out in the world over the last years going all the way back to 1956 and looking at the exploration curve over that time. If you look at it from 1956 to 1979, the oil and gas industry discovered more new resource by five times, five and a half times than what our production was. So phenomenal new discoveries of resources. But then from 1980 to 2012, we discovered 1.6 times what we produced. But then from 2012 to 2020, we only discovered 50% of what we had produced on average in those years. And then the last these years since 2020, we've only discovered 23% of what we've produced on the average in those years. So our ability to find and replace what we produce on an annual basis in our industry is dropping dramatically. The 20 largest reservoirs in the world were discovered before 2000. So we're headed toward a scenario where it's getting harder to find new great reservoirs and you look at Guyana and it's a great discovery by Exxon. They've done a great job with it, but if you look at the plot, it's not even a blip on the radar. It will deliver maybe 12 to 13 billion barrels but we need every year the world needs 30 billion. So while it's a big discovery and great for Exxon it's not a needle mover discovery for the industry in the world. So we saw all that happen and we thought that provides us a unique opportunity because we're one of those companies that we don't have to go chase. We don't feel like we need to go chase the big elephants internationally. We want to be more domestic and right now we're most of our production more than 82% of our production is domestic and almost and more than that of our future development is domestic. And so we're very much centered here in the United States. And we're a company that's always been one that worked really hard to try to get the most barrels out of every reservoir we have. And we've gone around the world doing that and following majors to do that because the majors are going for the bigger stuff. And we just go in afterward and we sweep up what they left behind. And that's our expertise, our core competence. And we've done it with steam floods, we've done it with CO2 flooding, water floods. We're doing it now with other things, surfactants and other things and we're focused on that. That's what we want to do because with the macro and looking at the United States, we put together this forecast of what it's going to look like in the United States over the next few years. And what we're seeing is that we expect that we could hit peak production in the United States between 2027 and 2030. And that peak production then and what we'll end up doing with that is probably becoming a net importer in the 2035 to 2040 range and net significant importer. And what that means for us is we feel like for the energy independence of the United States, we now have to play our role and we have to play our role stronger and that is to help get more barrels out of these reservoirs. Our conventional reservoirs in the United States, we expect they will produce they've already produced about 230 well ultimately they'll produce about 230 billion barrels. So they've already produced 90% of that. We've got about 20 billion barrels in our conventional reservoirs yet to produce. We believe that the shale development will produce about 100 billion barrels. We've already produced 40 billion. So, we've got 60 billion more to produce. But we believe what goes beyond that, what could be almost as impactful as the shale, but not as dramatic in terms of how quickly you could grow it, but impactful from a volume standpoint. We believe we could get 70 billion more barrels out of the conventional and unconventional reservoirs in the United States with CO2. And so our big push has been to go back to that core competence that we started building the company with and making sure that we have set ourselves up to be able to do that. And from an economic standpoint, doing that and bringing on more CO2 for our company would enable us to then lower our decline from 25% to 20%. So, it lowers our sustainability cost and it puts us in a position where we've got more dollars to spend in additional projects and reservoirs.

Because it's really about more about just pumping CO2 into the ground. It takes a lot of modeling. We actually have the guy that built the model years ago. He was a big part of that. It's really more complicated than it sounds. Although I can describe it very simply and that is CO2. It's like putting CO2 in a Coke bottle. If you shake it up and then you open the bottle, it's going to go everywhere. Well, you're energizing the reservoir with CO2 when you're pumping the CO2 in there. But what you got to know is you got to model the temperature and the pressure and make sure that you have visibility to be able to get the most that you can out of those reservoirs. So, we've seen others try hydrocarbon EOR and we've noticed some mistakes they've made. They eventually gave up on it because it wasn't working. We have the model. We understand why it wasn't working for them. And CO2 is the same way. You have to know it well because it is an expensive process if you don't do it right. And then there's the fact that we have the tremendous footprint from a facility standpoint and infrastructure standpoint. It would be incredibly hard for anybody to duplicate the CO2 infrastructure we have in the Permian.

Its full potential really is the 70 billion barrels. It's that prize to get that prize and extend our energy independence. But what comes with that is about 140 TCF of natural gas, the associated gas production and you know as I think probably most of you know 30% of the gas produced in the US today comes from its associated gas coming from oil production. So getting that 70 billion barrels also gives us that 140 TCF of additional natural gas. So that's important. It's going to take though 21 billion tons of CO2 to make that happen. And that's why we're building a direct air capture facility because we tried to work with some of you power generators if you're out there. We probably knocked on your door to try to put CO2 capture on your facilities. We've tried to do it with ethanol plants, steel plants. But the problem is that because every one of those would be a unique design, it's what we've figured out and done some modeling around. It's really better to build a direct air capture facility than to have a scenario where for every plant you go to, you've got to build in something that's unique. At least if we can with our direct air capture facility get it to the point where we're mass manufacturing the pieces and parts and that's our goal then that's a better option and so with all of that comes for the United States not just the energy security but jobs and the assurance that we're going to have a lot more incremental natural gas than we would have otherwise had.

Yeah, I would say that the conventional and CO2 EOR is more like the I formation or the wishbone with all