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‘A Tough Place To Do Business’: Chevron Exec Details Company’s Decision To Move HQ Out Of California

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

 

A top Chevron executive detailed his company’s decision to move its headquarters out of California in a Thursday roundtable with reporters.

Andy Walz, president of Chevron Americas products, said that California’s crusade against conventional energy producers played a role in the company’s decision to move its headquarters to Texas. Measures like California’s 2035 ban on internal combustion engine vehicles and its emissions cap-and-trade rules were specific headwinds that played a role in the company’s decision to move its headquarters to Houston, Walz said.

“It is a difficult place to do business. It’s a difficult place to be headquartered. And we finally said, ‘Hey, that’s enough. We’ve got critical mass, we’re gonna move.’ We’re also going to improve our performance by getting everybody in the same location,” Walz explained.

Walz made clear that part of the reason for Chevron’s headquarters relocation is that parts of its operations and senior leadership have already been stationed in Texas, and that the company believes its performance can improve if employees and executives are in the same place. The company is not walking away from its assets in California, andChevron plans to continue operating them into the future, Walz said.

“California is a tough place to do business. It’s a tough place to recruit people. It’s a tough place to move employees. A lot of our employees move up through the company, they gain experiences in different geographies, different locations, and we have a lot of people that will not move to California. That makes it difficult,” Walz said. “California is a tough place to have a big employee base. It’s tough, its cost of living is expensive, and we were not able to get employees that didn’t live there to move there. And that’s not sustainable for us, to be honest.”

California has the third-highest cost of living of all states, trailing only Hawaii and Massachusetts, Forbes Magazine assessed in July. Overall, California has seen net outflows of population in recent years, with more than 800,000 people moving out of the state in 2022 alone, according to Forbes.

Additionally, more than 350 companies moved their headquarters out of the state between 2018 and 2022, according to Forbes.

“California has said, ‘Hey, you cannot buy a new car that has an internal combustion engine in it after 2035.’ So, that’s a headwind against investing in a refinery. On the books, they have a windfall profits tax or penalty, they’re evaluating how to deal with that, they want to cap the amount of profits you can make in your refinery. That is a headwind for anybody that would want to put money into it to try to get a return on their investment,” Walz said. “And the third thing that maybe is even a bit more crippling is this: they have a program called cap and trade, where they tax your CO2 emissions in the state of California. And that tax continues to go up every year, and it gets more burdensome every single year. So those three regulations, those three policies, really make it hard for me to want to put more capital into the state of California. Therefore, I think the business case there is really challenging.”

“Our competitors are looking at the exact same equation I’m looking at, and our money is going other places, and California can’t get supplied from Houston,” Walz said. “It doesn’t work.”

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized tailpipe emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles — which have been characterized by critics as an “EV mandate” — are another policy that Walz believes will have “consequences” if implemented.

Walz’s comments on the business environment in California echo Chevron CEO Mike Wirth’s recent remarks to The Wall Street Journal, in which he said that “California has a number of policies that raise costs, that hurt consumers.”

As news of Chevron’s headquarters relocation broke earlier in August, the office of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the company’s decision was the “logical culmination of a long process that has repeatedly been foreshadowed by Chevron.”

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Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Resets The Energy Policy Playing Field

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Make no mistake about it, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) signed into law on Friday by President Donald Trump falls neatly in line with the Trump energy and climate agenda. Despite complaints by critics of the deal that Majority Leader John Thune struck with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to soften the bill’s effort to end wind and solar subsidies from the Orwellian 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the OBBBA continues – indeed, accelerates – the Trumpian energy revolution.

Leaders in the oil and gas industry, hamstrung at every opportunity by the Biden presidency, hailed the bill as a chance to move back into some semblance of boom times. Tim Stewart, President of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told his members in a memo that, “For the oil and gas industry, the bill…signals a transformative opportunity to enhance domestic production.”

API CEO Mike Sommers also praised the OBBBA as a positive step for his members: “This historic legislation will help usher in a new era of energy dominance by unlocking opportunities for investment, opening lease sales and expanding access to oil and natural gas development.

While leaders of organizations like those must curb their enthusiasm to some extent in their public statements, they and their peers must be somewhat amazed at how much real substantive change the thin GOP majorities shepherded by Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to stuff into this bill. This industry, historically an easily demonized bogeyman for Democrats and too often ignored by previous Republican presidents, does not experience days as encouraging as July 3 was in the nation’s capital.

Even so, many Republicans, especially in the House, remained unsatisfied by amendments the Senate made to the bill related to IRA subsidy rollbacks. To help Speaker Johnson hold the party’s narrow House majority together, President Trump committed the executive branch to strict enforcement of the new limitations, and promised the White House will work with congressional allies to move a major deregulation package ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

But the OBBBA as passed is chock full of energy and environment-related provisions. FTI Consulting, a business consultancy with a major presence in Washington, DC, published a quick analysis Thursday that projects natural gas and nuclear as the biggest winners as the OBBBA’s impacts begin to take hold across the United States. Interestingly, the analysis also projects battery storage to expand more rapidly over the next five years even as wind and solar suffer from the phasing-out of their IRA subsidies.

The side deal struck by Thune and Murkowski is likely to result in significant new investment into wind and solar facilities as developers strive to get as many projects on the books as possible to meet the “commenced construction” requirement by the July 4, 2026 deadline. The bill’s previous language would have required projects to be placed into service by that time. But even that softer requirement will almost certainly cause a flow of capital investment out of wind and solar once that deadline passes, given the reality that many of their projects are not sustainable without constant flows of government subsidies.

What it all means is that the OBBBA, combined with all the administration’s prior moves to radically shift the direction of federal energy and climate policy away from intermittent energy and electric vehicles back to traditional forms of power generation and internal combustion cars, effectively reset the policy playing field back to 2019, prior to the COVID pandemic. That was a time when America had become as energy independent as it had been in well over half a century and was approaching the “Energy Dominance” position so dear to President Trump’s heart.

Trump’s signing of the OBBBA gives the oil and gas, nuclear, and even the coal industry a chance at a do over. It is an opportunity that comes with great pressure, both from government and the public, to perform. That means rapid expansion in gas power generation unseen in 20 years, rapid development of next generation nuclear, and even a probable chance to permit and build new coal capacity in the near future.

Second chances like this do not come around often. If these great industries fail to grab this brass ring and run with it, it may never come around again. Let’s go, folks.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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‘They Don’t Know What The F*ck They’re Doing’: Trump Unloads On Iran, Israel

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Harold Hutchison

President Donald Trump expressed frustration Tuesday after Iran broke a ceasefire, prompting retaliation from Israel during a gaggle with reporters on the White House lawn.

Trump announced the ceasefire Monday, saying it was supposed to take effect at 1 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, but Iran fired missiles at Israel Tuesday. Trump vented, saying the countries had been “fighting so long” they couldn’t make peace.

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“You know, when I say okay, now you have 12 hours, you don’t go out in the first hour just drop everything you have on them,” Trump said. “So I’m not happy with them. I’m not happy with Iran either. But I’m really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning because the one rocket that didn’t land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn’t land, I’m not happy about that.”

“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard, that they don’t know what the fuck they are doing,” Trump added.

The United States struck facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan related to Iran’s effort to develop nuclear weapons early Sunday morning local time, using as many as 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators in the operation, which involved a 37-hour flight by seven B-2A Spirit bombers.

The American strikes came ten days after Israel launched a military operation targeting the Iranian nuclear program. Iran has responded with repeated missile attacks on Israeli cities and a refusal to resume negotiations over its efforts to pursue nuclear weapons.

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