Chevron Corporation (NYSE:CVX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Ryan Todd: Okay. And then maybe on the other side of your downstream business on the chemical side, it’s clearly been weeks for the last little while. Looking forward from here, is the combination of lower natural gas prices and the reopening of China having any impact on how you see margins moving throughout 2023, or do you anticipate that oversupply keep things weaker throughout the year?

Mike Wirth: These tend to be long period cycles for the most part, Ryan. And so, at the margin, I think that’s economic growth and development in China is a positive. But you don’t slide into the lower part of the cycle quickly or easily, and you generally don’t come out of it quickly or easily. So these things track over a longer period of time. And so, I do think we’re — it feels like we’re kind of bumping along near the bottom here, but I don’t know that there’s a steep climb out as opposed to a gradual climb over time.

Operator: Thank you. We’ll take our next question from Jason Gabelman with Cowen.

Jason Gabelman: Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to first follow up on the affiliate distribution guidance because it is taking a step higher year-over-year, and it sounds like that was due to TCO having excess cash. Is that kind of $5 billion to $6 billion, something you can maintain assuming oil price stays stable until the project actually starts up until TCO FGP starts up or would you expect that to fall off after this year? And then my second question is on a different topic, Venezuela. I believe you have now boots on the ground there again. Can you just discuss what you’re seeing in terms of the health of the infrastructure there, the ability to ramp production and the desire from Chevron’s standpoint to participate in that? Thanks.

Pierre Breber : On affiliate dividends, there are two main factors why the guidance this year is higher than last year. You hit one of them on TCO, not held excess cash last year. The second big one is Angola LNG. You recall, a lot of their cash distributions were actually return to capital. It’s an accounting concept tied to whether you have book equity or positive book equity or not now, they’re in that space. So we expect most, if not all, of the cash coming from Angola LNG in 2023 to be characterized as dividends. It was cash either way. It’s just one shows up in cash from ops, the other one shows up in a different part of the cash flow statement, but that’s the second driver. And in terms of the direction, I mean, this guidance is kind of notionally at the current — futures curve around $80.

So it depends on commodity prices and margins. There are some downstream affiliates in there, the chemicals, obviously, in there. But we talked about TCO. I mean, TCO’s heading up, right. As CapEx comes down and production comes up, we expect more dividends out of TCO going forward. And then again, we have the loan that we also expect TCO to pay back during the next several years.

Mike Wirth: Yes, Jason, on Venezuela, we always did have boots on the ground. We just were very limited in where those boots could go and what they could do. The shift in the sanctions policy has opened up a little more room. It’s allowed us to work with PDVSA to put some of our people into different roles in these mixed companies there. So we do have a little more ability to have influence and involvement in some of the decision making. Your question about the state of the infrastructure, there’s been a lack of investments there for a number of years in the infrastructure reflects that, and it will take time for things to turn around. We have seen some positive production response already in the entities that we’re involved in.

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