Mike Wirt: Yes. I might have Roderick work with you. So we’re clear on the question when we get to the Investor Day on how to compare and size things relative to the portfolio. But we said today in our press release that we’re very confident we’re going to exceed our 3% compound annual growth rate over the next five years. You can’t do that unless you get depth in the portfolio, which we have. And you got quality projects they’re moving along on a good pace. And so I’ll assure you that, that is the case. We will talk about this more at Investor Day, and you’ll have a chance to kind of go deeper into it with our folks.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Paul Sankey with Sankey Research.
Paul Sankey: Hi. Good morning, everyone and Roderick, congratulations, all the best. Mike, I was a bit surprised by the major buyback announcement. Obviously, the $75 billion is very splashy. But within that, it seems that your guidance has remained that you’ll be in the $5 billion to $15 billion a year range based on the Q1 guidance. Is there — are you expecting to step that up, or is this a five-year authorization? And were you conscious that it would probably cause a lot of political backlash? Thanks.
Mike Wirth: Yes. So, Pierre answered the question earlier, it’s not a five-year authorization. It’s an open-ended authorization. It is — it’s our intent to maintain it across the cycle. I’ll just say that again. It’s actually aligned with our upside in our downside cases from the 2022 Investor Day and consistent with our track record of being in the market steadily buying $2 below the market over nearly the past two decades. And we could increase our guidance range, Paul. We need to be confident we could maintain that higher rate for multiple years across the cycle. And I think that you should read it as a signal of confidence and we’ll continue to talk more. We raised our buyback rate three times last year. So we’re not averse to doing that.
And I would just say stay tuned. In terms of the reaction to it, I think it’s perhaps been a touch overblown given that it’s an open-ended program, and we could have sized a smaller one and just been prepared to do another one sooner. Pierre said, we’re closing one out. We just looked at something that would last over a number of years, and we were trying to be splashy when we’re trying to create any reaction out there. We’re just trying to indicate the confidence we have in our cash generation.
Paul Sankey: Understood. And offset to that, Mike, you’re spending more on exploration. Could you just talk about the highlights that you see coming up in 2023. Obviously, we’re aware of East Med, but there’s other stuff out there and the spending has stepped up quite a lot, hasn’t it?
Mike Wirth: Yes. I don’t know if I describe the spending as being up quite a lot. We’ve got a nice portfolio that we like. And I’ll just touch on — you mentioned Eastern Med. We still have a lot of blocks in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. We’ve got block in Suriname that we’re still working on and that are on trend with some of the things in that region. We’ve picked up acreage in Namibia that’s on trend with explorations in that part of the world as well. And so we got stuff in Brazil, we had stuff in Mexico that we acquired a few years prior to that. So we’ve got a nice portfolio of opportunities that we continue to work on. And we don’t go out and drill the wells until we’re ready to drill them. But it’s spread across a number of basins where there’s good working oil and gas systems. And the Nargis discovery is a recent example of what happens when you focus in those areas, and I’m optimistic that we’re going to see more of that in the future.
Paul Sankey: Thanks a lot.
