That’s lower than we have guided to over time. And so over time, you can expect the balance sheet to move back towards the 20% to 25% gearing range that we’ve identified as where we’re comfortable through the cycle. And then the fourth are the share repurchases. And we’ve got a range now of $10 billion to $20 billion. We’re at the high end of that range when we close the transaction with Hess with $17.5 billion annually. Today, that’s 5% to 6% of our float each and every year. And we’ve – I won’t go through the details, but we’ve indicated we can sustain that in a lower price environment. And that’s where the lower end of that range would apply. And certainly in a higher price environment, which is where we find ourselves today, we’re at the high end of that range.
And so we would expect to be consistent, predictable and to sustain that. I mean, consistent and durable being the keywords here. So I think the broad framework is likely to remain unchanged. And I think our behavior will be very consistent with what you’ve come to see from us historically.
Neal Dingmann: Okay. Thanks, Mike.
Michael Wirth: Thank you, Neal.
Operator: We’ll take our final question from Alastair Syme with Citi.
Alastair Syme: Thanks. Hi, Mike, Pierre and Jake. Can I go back to Hess? For several years, Chevron has looked a bit different to the other integrated oil companies in terms of the low downstream exposure. And of course, now you’re re-weighting even further to the upstream. So does that balance bother you at all? Or maybe how do you think about what an integrated oil company is?
Michael Wirth: Yes, Alastair, the short answer is no, it doesn’t bother me. We actually have been becoming a more downstream-weighted company the last several years. And that may not be obvious to most people, but we’ve been – our CapEx into the upstream has been below our depreciation. So our upstream business has been declining as a percentage of capital employed. In the downstream, we’ve made some big investments. We acquired a refinery in Texas. We acquired a renewable energy company. We’ve invested in new petrochemical facilities. We’ve got two more of those petrochemical expansion projects underway right now. And so we had gone from 80-20 weighting or 85-15 weighting upstream to downstream and chemicals to 80-20 over the last few years.
When we close this transaction, we’ll be back at 80-20, which is – or 85-15, I’m sorry, which is where we’ve historically been. And that reflects a fundamental view that we believe that over the cycle, returns in the upstream are likely to be structurally higher than in the downstream primarily because refineries are hard to close. They get built for reasons other than just pure economics. And governments tend to intervene in transportation fuels markets, in particular, when prices are high, which kind of takes you out of full cycle economics. And they kind of clip – tend to put the peaks off of those, whereas in the upstream, you’ve got a declining resource base and you’ve got growing demand. And so the fundamentals rebalance more quickly.
You remove a little bit of investment. And you see decline takeover and you see demand continue to grow. And so markets get imbalanced and the upstream rebalance more quickly. We also have been more oil-weighted than some of our peers. And fundamentally, that reflects a view that there are more alternatives to substitute for gas, particularly in power generation than there are for liquids in transportation. And so those are kind of high-level drivers of why our portfolio has been constructed the way that it is. We want to be an integrated company. We think there are real opportunities to capture economic value through integration to build the capabilities to run our entire business by bringing capabilities, technology, skills to bear across those different segments.
