Thread regarding Chevron Corp. layoffs

Chevron’s stock doubled in the last 20 months, Dino-mite!

EV sales are growing exponentiallie. The most recent CAGR was nearly 30.

The price of oil is only going to up because of a lot of investors think the oil business will be replaced by green energy or that oil production is immoral (LOL). The oil business is not going away unless they stop exploring. Consumers love oil and gas and want more. Even if the price rises at the pumps consumers pay for it. BTW, a study in California, of all places, showed that 20% of EV owners wished they had not bought one.

IOC Competitors are racing to sell assets, trim capex and return dividends to investors. Production is forecast to fall 40% by the end of the decade. Chevron needs to get on the band wagon. Stop exploring and start selling while assets still have value.

If oil and gas companies are going to go out of business, then why is the consumption of oil and gas continuing to increase. If an oil and gas company is going to go out of business, it is because it cannot find economical quantities of oil and gas any more.

I'd recommend everyone on this thread read today's WSJ op-ed by economist Bjorn Lomborg "Today’s Soaring Energy Prices Are Only the Beginning: Current ‘net zero’ plans will cost many trillions while doing little to slow global warming." The author points out that the consumers, even in Europe, aren't willing to pay the high prices for energy that are necessary to make green energy viable.

It’s a perfect comparison. Dramatic change can happen rapidly and once important businesses can vanish. Companies in denial are at risk.

I always hear the comparison of Kodak to O&G. It's just a silly comparison. O&G is the foundation of the world economy. The greatest century in terms of human progress was made possible only by oil and gas. I challenge anyone to go a day without using a petrochemical product or electricity powered by natural gas - you will quickly see what it was like to live in the 1700s.

The demand for O&G will remain for all of our lifetimes. Even if you replace all of the consumer vehicles with electric and hydrogen (which will not happen), there will still be robust demand for oil and gas.

To understand how Kodak could stay in denial for so long, let me go back to a story that Vince Barabba recounts from 1981, when he was Kodak’s head of market intelligence. Around the time that Sony introduced the first electronic camera, one of Kodak’s largest retailer photo finishers asked him whether they should be concerned about digital photography. With the support of Kodak’s CEO, Barabba conducted a very extensive research effort that looked at the core technologies and likely adoption curves around silver halide film versus digital photography.

The results of the study produced both “bad” and “good” news. The “bad” news was that digital photography had the potential capability to replace Kodak’s established film based business. The “good” news was that it would take some time for that to occur and that Kodak had roughly ten years to prepare for the transition.

Chevron new energy’s.

• CCU
• windmills?
• electric power plant that’s gas fired?
• solar panel farm?

Ok go out and buy a company (profitable or not) from one or each sector. Slap the Chevdick logo on it keep them 100% separate like Noble and there you go. We are green baby.

"Legendary" stock picker Cathie Wood compared the current crude oil market to whale oil and predicted that it would meet the same fate. She went on to underperform the S&P by 50 points in 2021.

A lot of "smart" people have been betting against O&G for a very long time. They all end up looking very foolish.

The best analogy to Chevron is probably the big tobacco companies. Yes, they are still around and yes, they still have customers but most of the developed world has aggressive policies/laws/regulations to limit the use of their products. Culturally they are vilified and blamed for the consequences of the products they sell. Chevron will be the same. Even with all of the indications that the world wants and will pay for green energy, we are instead continuing to bury our heads in the sand and defending oil and gas as the primary energy source needed for decades to come. The energy revolution will pass us by and we will be left wondering where all of the petrotech jobs went.

Who moved my cheese?

Kodak, US Steel, Blockbuster. Common theme? All were too comfortable with their increasingly outdated products and business models. Oil will be around for decades? So has IBM - a big company, but pale compared to their late 70’s position (think Schlumberger). Again, failed to move away from what they were comfortable with even though all the winds of change were evident. Microsoft? Not slow moving, but not fast, either. Maybe the next IBM. Success cases? Amazon, Netflix. Both moved away completely from their initial products and business models. Maybe some of our ‘smart’ MBAs can educate us on the ‘agile’ management at the top of these companies.

We see fund advisors playing politics rather than doing their #1 (and only) job, make their constituents money. There’s plenty of money still around to keep O&G stock prices high. Maybe this is why MW is beholden to the dividend - it keeps the sensible investors happy.

https://fee.org/articles/41-inconvenient-truths-on-the-new-energy-economy/

According to the nonprofit DivestInvest, which tracks institutional divestments from fossil fuels, about 1,500 asset managers in charge of a combined $39.2 trillion have committed to dump fossil fuels over the past seven years.

Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary general, told delegates at a climate change summit in Copenhagen that big investors such as insurers and pension funds should cut their investments and focus on renewable energy sources instead.
His comments follow pressure from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas for the GBP 487m Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund (PFI, 23 October) to pull its investments out of fossil fuels.

Prince Charles also attacked the short-termism of pension funds and called for more sustainable investments at last year’s annual NAPF conference.

Speaking at launch of the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report’, Ki-moon called for fossil-fuel divestment.

“I have been urging companies like pension funds or insurance companies to reduce their investments in a fossil-fuel based economy [and shift] to renewable sources of energy,” he said.

Elsewhere at the summit, global climate campaign group 350.org called on investments in fossil fuels to fall by tens of billions of dollars

One of the world’s largest pension funds, ABP, is selling its €15bn-worth of holdings in fossil fuel companies, including Royal Dutch Shell, claiming it had been unable to persuade the sector to transition quickly enough towards decarbonisation.

Corien Wortmann-Kool, the chair of ABP, the Dutch pension fund for civil servants and teachers, said it would no longer invest in producers of oil, gas and coal, and that it would dispense with its current investments in those sectors by the first quarter of 2023.

The fund said it did not expect the decision to have a negative impact on long-term returns for its pension customers. It will invest instead in electricity companies, the car industry and aviation but Wortmann-Kool claimed the fund would be in a better position to push those companies towards being “more sustainable”.

Njew York City's pension funds have announced plans to divest about $4 billion worth of fossil fuel-related investments and Canada's second-largest pension manager, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, has said it will sell billions of dollars worth of oil assets

Norway’s $1.1 trillion sovereign fund will divest companies solely dedicated to oil and gas exploration and production in a bid to shield itself from a long-term fall in oil prices, the finance ministry said late on Tuesday.

The move will partly shift the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund away from oil and gas, as called for by the central bank, which had originally sought to remove all petroleum producers to protect the country if oil prices fell.

Greenwashing is the way to go. You have to put on the eco facade while pumping out the real energy that powers the world. Analysts want to see the posturing or they’ll bury you. Chevron knows where it’s bread gets buttered, but Jeff can go play in his corner of the sandbox with a couple mil. The first project that generates positive cash flow… that whole department is going to blōw their load on R&As.