Iraq is on Chevron’s radar for expanding production opportunities: CFO

00:00 Speaker A

the growth between now and the end of the decade and the end of the next decade can really be summarized in in two in two categories. Growth that we’ve got on hand, so growth that’s underway, Gulf of America and the US, Eastern Mediterranean growth through the end of the decade, growth in Guyana and South America. But then for next decade, we’re starting to stack up options to really assess. and those options include the options that you talked about in Iraq. And I would say overall, it’s well known that Iraq has an enormous amount of discovered resource. and we’ve been um pleased to be engaging with the Iraqi government and the Prime Minister at a at a very steady pace around some of the opportunities there. They comprise the producing assets, so assets that are online already, the West Corner 2 field that’s got plenty of running room. So that’s the the first option that we’re looking at. But we’re also looking at another area, the Nazaria field that um could have expiration potential and so um both of those um opportunities are we’re very excited about. In addition to that, we’re also looking at well, how if we were to develop uh beyond the existing producing assets, how we might export some of the oil out of the country and so we’ve been engaging also in discussions around what diversified um uh export routes might look like. So, so yes, so we’re excited about that. It’s not the only thing that we have in our portfolio, but we’re certainly stacking up the options that um for the next decade.

01:34 Speaker B

There’s strong demand for refined products. How long do you think that that can last?

01:39 Speaker A

Well, we anticipate that the performance gains that we’ve seen um over the first half of the year, we we estimate that that’s strong strong performance will continue. I mean, obviously the cracks um can move around and we don’t control price, but what we do control is how much margin we capture. and that’s what we’ve been focused on over the course of this year, running the complex refinery kit that we have and running it very well and optimizing it using all the levers that we can to deliver uh high value products to customers. We’ve also seen in the optimization that we’ve done, we’ve also seen that the um secondary products are also receiving high margins too. So it’s more of optimization of the system, putting the right crude into the right refineries and ensuring that we can continue to supply supply the market.