And managed to keep producing. Where do things stand now and how does it look to you?
Well, we've been able to increase production here early this year. Over the last two and a half to three years, we've gone up about 5x as we've had the ability to bring oil to the US, use some of those funds to invest in the fields and grow production. And so we're seeing signs of progress. I think Secretary Wright was correct when he said the reforms in the hydrocarbon law have moved in the right direction. There's still things that I think need to happen to encourage investment to scale that people would like to see. So work to be done, but progress.
Right. What would you like to see done? What are the things out there that need to be addressed?
Well, the secretary mentioned a couple of things in particular. Dispute resolution that is durable and predictable. So access to international arbitration if needed. And then as he said, there are ranges on some of the fiscal terms that are relatively broad. At one end of the range you'd have investments that look attractive, and another end of the range you'd have investments that probably wouldn't. And so there's discretion and some ambiguity or uncertainty that still exists in the law that I think can be tightened up.
Right. And your production is all in the Orinoco.
We've got a little bit of Lake Maracaibo, but primarily up in the Orinoco, heavy oil up in the Faja.
Sure. I mean, I think people in this room would know that Venezuela's got enormous oil resources, in particular the largest on the planet by most accounts, and that's primarily in the Orinoco. So there are many decades worth of opportunity.
Right. Engineering challenges to bring that oil on.
Certainly to bring it on. In the short term, some incremental production can flow through existing infrastructure. To get to levels that the country was at 20 years ago will require significant investment, tens of billions of dollars, and time to get there.
So next door to Venezuela is Guyana, and you completed the merger with Hess. How is that going?
Very well. We had plenty of time to plan for it, so integration's gone quickly.
Not necessarily intentional.
No, but it's just a fact. So we were well prepared to move forward on integration. Integration has moved very quickly. We have found upside on synergies. We moved the synergy number from a billion to a billion and a half dollars. We've actually captured a lot of that already. We got former Hess employees in key positions within our company now and contributing in a big way. We're seeing good progress in certainly Guyana. The projects have been coming along very, very well. And in Gulf of America, we had an integration opportunity as well. So everything with the Hess transaction once we closed has been as good or better than we had expected.
Great cultural fit. The companies spent a lot of time on that in the negotiation, and the cultures inherently had a lot of commonality. And we've come together very, very quickly. And so I think there are shared attributes that have made that not as difficult as in some cases where you get cultures that are further apart from one another.
Right. And of course it's not only Guyana, but you also have the Bakken as part of that.
Correct, correct. And we're already seeing efficiencies. You know, we now have very large positions in the Permian, the DJ Basin, and Bakken. In Argentina, we've restructured to bring all of our shale assets into one operating organization, allowing us to move technology, best practices, people, and experience more quickly across these different basins. We're doing things with advanced chemicals, for instance, to improve recovery that we've proven out in the Permian Basin. We're moving that now into some of these other basins and seeing good early progress. Out of the Bakken, we're doing some field pilots on that right now, but everything suggests we're going to continue to see costs improve, efficiency improve, productivity of assets improve across that entire portfolio.
And you mentioned Argentina and the Vaca Muerta. How is that?
The geology is great. And the progress in the country, you know, the challenge in Argentina has really been more above ground. It's been in the investment environment, whether it's rigidities in labor laws, import restrictions on equipment, export restrictions on production. Those things under President Milei have been systematically addressed, and we're seeing real progress. And so the investability, if you want to call it that, of Argentina is improving. We're very pleased with the geology, and I would expect over time, if we continue to see these improvements in the environment down there, that Argentina's production will grow.
Yeah. So the theme of this conference, obviously what's happened the last three weeks has become a very important part of the dialogue, but the theme of this conference is about convergence. Convergence of the energy industry, the tech industry, obviously pinpointed on AI, and two very different definitions of what an engineer is and the time framework of an engineer. How are you seeing these two industries coming together?
Well, it's very interesting, and the secretary mentioned this. I think you've got Ruth coming up here on stage shortly. The real constraint, first of all, you step back, there truly is competition between the US and China for AI leadership. It's very evident. The second thing that I think is becoming more evident with the situation in the Middle East is these systems are being integrated into systems of national defense and the military. So they have strategic importance as well. Which means you want to be sure your data centers are secure, your data is secure, your technology is secure. And I think that's even more evident today than it was not long ago. We are coming out of the last couple of decades of very low demand growth for power in this country, and now we see that moving up in part driven by data centers, driven by other electrification of other parts of our economy as well. And China has been on a much more steady increase in their ability to generate power for quite some time. So we've got to bend that curve and begin to produce a lot more power in this country. There are issues with permitting, there's issues with the grid. Our approach has been to look to develop power resources that are not grid-connected in the first instance, ultimately to tie into the grid but not let that be a time-limiting factor. We currently operate 5 gigawatts of off-the-grid power around the world at a very high degree of reliability in your own LNG facilities, oil production facilities around the world where we don't have access.
And so I think what you're seeing is these two worlds come together, and power really is becoming, I think, the rate-limiting element for growth. GPUs at one point looked to be a concern. The GPU supply now is viewed as adequate, but what's really concerning people is access to power. And so you see a lot of creative deals being done, and we're working hard with some of the biggest companies in the world to try to help them grow their business and be a part of that solution.
So what about the dialogue with the tech industry? Is it a process of discovery or...
Well, it is interesting because as you say, in the tech world, an engineer historically has been a software engineer. They write code. You can improve it very quickly. There's not a lot of supply chain complexity that sits behind that.
In the world that we work in, we have complex mechanical, chemical, electrical engineering work that needs to be done. We have permits, you have equipment and supply chains, and then physical construction of assets, often times with supply chains that span many countries and years, not seven years.
