Mike Wirth: Thank you, Irene. So, we do have the capacity to do M&A. We don’t need to do M&A. And so, we’ll only do deals that are value-creating deals. You interestingly contrast the traditional oil and gas market with the new energies market. What I would observe is given commodity price strength in oil and gas, we’ve seen companies that previously might have been languishing from a value standpoint, strengthen. And I think there’s some optimism in the eyes of other companies about the future. And so, the bid/ask spread on oil and gas companies is maybe a little wider right now given the strength versus when we did our deal a couple of years ago. In lower carbon, with interest rates rising and spacs kind of receiving and the like.
A little bit of the kind of froth may have come out of that market, but they’re still some optimism in valuations there as well. And so, we’ll be very thoughtful and careful as we evaluate those. And there are a lot of companies out there that have got business models in this space. So, we watch them all. We will be back to talk to you if we have anything that’s interesting. Let me touch on IRA and then ask Pierre to add a little more color. The IRA will probably accelerate some activity in the US. There’s no doubt. Hopefully, what that does is it allows technologies to be de-risked. The cost of technologies to be reduced and the attractiveness of these investments to improve. A bill like that with kind of a grab bag of different policy incentives doesn’t necessarily change our long-term view on how we want to build businesses.
It does perhaps change the trajectory at which some of those businesses become more economically viable. And if that’s the case, that could feed through into our similar investment decision. But it’s kind of a second order effect rather than a first order effect.
Pierre Breber: And just to add some of the other important effects, permitting really critical for traditional energy, super critical for new energy, new technology developments, you’ve seen us make some investments on technology to reduce the cost of capture of CO2 and then scale, getting cost down. So it’s helpful, but it’s just one element, as Mike said.
Mike Wirth: Thanks, Irene
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Ryan Todd with Piper Sandler.
Ryan Todd: Thanks. Maybe if I could ask a couple on the downstream side. First, there’s been a lot of noise earlier this year about refinery maintenance activity looking to be well above average in the US, particularly in the first half of the year, especially amongst independent refiners. Your first quarter guidance seems to suggest turnaround activity in 1Q that’s reasonably light or at least not terribly heavy. Any thoughts on whether 2020 — year 2023 outlook as a whole for Chevron looks normal or heavy in terms of refining and maintenance. And then maybe more broadly, how you see general tightness in global refining markets this year over the course of 2023?
Mike Wirth: Yes. I would say it’s a pretty typical year for turnaround activity. We’ve got the FCC at El Segundo in the first quarter of this year, which Pierre mentioned in his comments. But there’s nothing unusual in our turnaround plan for this year. What you do see across the US and I think in some of the other markets are two things that are really kind of still echoes of COVID. One is you’re just seeing capacity go out of the system. And two, you see maintenance that was deferred during COVID is — had to be rescheduled and replanned. And so there’s probably still a bit of a bow wave of pushing through the system in some places of activity that needs to get done for safety and reliability and regulatory reasons. And so that could be driving some of the speculation. I can’t really comment on other companies’ plans. I’ll let you talk to them about that.
