Michael Wirth: Sure. So yes, we have seen some action now from the U.S. government. We had been previously operating under an OFAC license, which was modified at the beginning of this year, a general license. There’s some specific licenses that go with that, that define the terms under which we can operate. The recent action in the new general license issued by OFAC really kind of opens up operating room for others more so than it does for us. We already – it doesn’t materially change our circumstances here. And so I think what you’ll see is some more people lifting crude, bring it to the – you’ll see more crude flow to the U.S. I don’t think the – the impact on our operations really is not particularly significant. We are up to something around 130,000 barrels a day from maybe 60,000 barrels a day earlier this year.
We still think we can get to 150,000 or so by year-end. So we are seeing improvements and expect there’s some more that we can see through the balance of the year. And that’s driving – the cash from that is going to pay legitimate operating expenses, tax and royalties, recover some past dues that we are owed. And we’re really working on what I would call pretty straightforward field maintenance and things to restore production that aren’t particularly long cycle or capital-intensive and staying within the kind of cash that’s being generated from those sales in order to fund that. I would expect that’s the posture we’ll remain in for a while here until we see how the longer-term sanctions environment plays out, the political situation in the country with elections and the like and continue to make progress on recovery of the past dues that I mentioned.
And so not a lot of change, I guess, I would say, from our point of view. Pierre, maybe you want to comment on the cash and production.
Pierre Breber: Yes. Consistent with what Mike just said, we’re continuing to do cost affiliate accounting, which means we are not – we don’t record production or reserves, right? So that’s not reflected in our numbers. And we only record earnings when we receive cash. So we’re not – we’re recording a proportionate share of equity earnings, but only what we actually receive in cash. And that’s something that we’ll continue to look at. And as Mike said, depending on all those potential triggers down the road, elections and such, we could go back to equity accounting at some point in time. But we have not made that decision yet. In terms of cash flow, it’s about 1% of our cash flow. So it’s modest, of course. But it’s more than it was before. And so as Mike said, operations there are continuing well. And we’re getting a little bit of cash. And we’ll just see where it goes from here.
Devin McDermott: Great. Thank you.
Michael Wirth: Thank you, Devin.
Operator: We’ll go next to Biraj Borkhataria with RBC.
Biraj Borkhataria: All right. Thanks for taking my question. I’m sure you get a few more on TCO. I just want to ask about the Permian. Last quarter, you gave some very helpful data points on well productivity this year. I was wondering, particularly for the New Mexico side, if you had any incremental comments for wells driven in the third quarter. Because I know it was a pretty small sample size of POPs in the first half of the year. So any comments there would be helpful. Thank you.
Michael Wirth: Yes. And I might give you some kind of broader commentary on Permian performance as well. Overall, production was down just a little bit, about 2% in the quarter. That was entirely driven by non-operated joint ventures. And primarily, a couple of the operators had delays in putting wells online due to frac hits and some other factors. There was also some takeaway capacity on the Permian highway that – constraints that resulted in some unplanned downtime. So co-op production in the third quarter was essentially flat from the prior quarter, which is what we had guided to. And that’s despite having some wells that were choked back due to some surface constraints. In one development area, we’re seeing higher-than-expected CO2 content in the gas and others in the area are as well.
