'RECORD $27 BILLION': Chevron CEO spotlights MASSIVE shareholder payout

Well, it's good to be with you, Maria. 2025 was a record year of growth, execution, and shareholder returns for us. As you said, we saw higher free cash flow by 35% even though oil prices were down about 15%. We set production records in the United States and globally. We had our highest US refinery throughput since the 1990s. We returned a record 27 billion in cash to our shareholders. Earlier this week we announced a dividend increase of 4%, our 39th year in a row increasing the dividend, and a yield of about 4%, which is about three times that of the S&P 500. So our company is bigger, stronger, and better than ever, and that goes on to deliver cash flow and earnings growth well to the end of this decade and into the next.

Sure. So, Venezuela is a place where we stayed. We're getting paid and we've got a significant head start in capturing some of the longer-term potential I think that exists in the country. We've been there for most of the last 100 years. We've been an important partner in the development and growth of Venezuela. We're being repaid debt that we're owed and others that have left have had more difficulty with that. And we've grown our production over the last couple of years from 50,000 barrels a day to 250,000. So 5x. And over the next 18 to 24 months we see the potential to grow by another 50%. It'll require some additional authorizations from the US government. And we're looking at other opportunities in the country. And so it's a valuable resource option for the future in our portfolio. We stay focused on safe and reliable operations and we're optimistic that things are moving in a better direction.

Well, as I said earlier, on a 100% basis, the ventures that we participate in there produce about 250,000 barrels a day of oil. That's about 100,000 per day to us. So, we produce 4 million barrels globally. So you can see it's relatively small within the scheme of our company, 1 to 2% of our cash from operations, but it has tremendous potential. It's a country with the largest petroleum resource in the world, including all the big Middle Eastern countries, the United States, Canada, Venezuela has more oil and gas than any of those countries. And so there are many decades of opportunity that lie ahead of us. The type of oil is one that is highly sought after by US refiners along the Gulf Coast. And so the potential to grow, Venezuela was producing over three million barrels a day a couple of decades ago. The opportunity for it to begin to move back up to higher levels is very real. And so we see it as a long-term play. As all things in our industry, as with all other parts of our business, we look at security, we look at contract terms, the rule of law, and as we make investment decisions, things will need to compete versus our alternatives. But we believe that the US government and the Venezuela government are taking steps to ensure that happens.

Yeah. And so I like to tell people that the price we see looking out the window today doesn't really influence our investment decisions. It's the price we see when we look down the road. And so we tend not to move our investment up and down with today's oil price. We take a long-term view on supply, demand, technology, competition, regulation, and develop a range of price forecasts, and that's what we use to test our investments. Most of our portfolio are large projects that have lifespans measured in decades, sometimes even centuries. And so today's oil price is not particularly relevant to that. Some of our shorter cycle things like shale in the US, you'll see from time to time when we go through an event like COVID, we can slow things down there, but we tend not to do that across most of our business.

Yeah, you know, it's really hard to predict these things, Maria. We don't talk about commercial matters including M&A or asset acquisitions. So I can't really speculate on that. But in a resource business where every year we produce now close to a billion and a half barrels you need to continue to replenish your portfolio. We do that through exploration and finding new reserves in the world. We do it through using technology to unlock resource that we have today but isn't economic to produce and we develop new technologies to do that. And then of course we do use acquisitions to bring resource into the portfolio. So over time all of those have contributed and I expect in the future will continue to do so. But when and how transactions like that occur is really difficult to forecast.

Well it certainly took us a while to get there. We're very pleased with the outcome. We've increased the synergy commitment from a billion dollars a year to a billion and a half dollars a year. We've already captured the first billion and expect to capture the next half a billion very quickly. We're seeing good performance in all the assets that we acquired. The thing that I'm most excited about are the great people of Hess that have joined our company. We've got leaders in key senior positions and a lot of people throughout the organization that bring different experience, different perspectives, and talent to our company which is making us stronger and I'm seeing that every single day. So, we're very, very pleased with the transaction.

Well, I think the things that can be done administratively have been addressed. Secretary Burgum and the Department of Interior, for instance, who we deal with a lot, have simplified the process, streamlined some of the red tape out of it. We see actions by other agencies to do the same kinds of things. Now, a subsequent administration could reverse some of those practices. And so, the real solution here, and it's not just for our industry, it's for the renewables industry, it's more broadly to build infrastructure in this country which I think there's general agreement that that would be beneficial to our economy. We need to have durable permitting reform that allows people to develop projects, have appropriate review and oversight and then get on with construction and investing in our economy. There has been some progress made on bills that are beginning to move through Congress. It's been difficult. Congress is polarized and it's been difficult to find things that can bring both parties together. This is one that I remain hopeful can bring both parties together and we've seen some progress. But we don't have a bill that's actually moving through the House and the Senate yet. So I think that remains an important thing for businesses across our economy to weigh in on and support.

Well, the Permian is a tremendous asset for our company and for our country. As you saw when you were out there, it's a vast expanse. It's an area that has over geological history a lot of hydrocarbon resource to be developed and we now have the technology in order to do it. If you go back a decade or so we were barely producing 100,000 barrels a day there. Today we're over a million barrels a day. We're still only recovering about 10% of the molecules that are actually trapped in the rock beneath the ground. So 90% of them are still there waiting for us to develop the technologies as I mentioned earlier to unlock that resource. We're working hard on that right now with different ways to break up the rocks so those molecules can flow, different chemicals we can use that reduce some of the tendency for the molecules to stick to the rock so they'll flow more easily. And I think that the Permian basin is going to be an underpinning of the US economy for many decades to come.