Chevron now plans to double Venezuela output, a bigger goal than it set in July

Chevron's three joint ventures in Venezuela now plan to roughly double their output, to about 600,000 barrels of oil a day by 2031, chief executive Michael Wirth said as the company reported results for the September 2026 quarter. The ventures intend to invest $7 billion over five years, under what Chevron calls improved commercial terms on expanded acreage. Those volumes are gross, for the ventures as a whole rather than Chevron's own share, and the company expects them to reach around 300,000 barrels a day by the end of this year.

The economics Wirth described rest on cheap barrels from fields that already have their plumbing. He put total cost below $20 a barrel, with no major upgrades needed because the infrastructure has been kept up; chief financial officer Eimear Bonner said that figure covers both capital spending and running costs. Chevron also now lifts and sells all of the ventures' crude itself, rather than leaving the marketing to the state oil company PDVSA, so the revenue passes through Chevron's hands before taxes, royalties and costs are paid out.

The goal has been widened during the year. In January Chevron saw room for up to 50% more output from a base of 250,000 barrels a day. By July the base had reached 280,000 barrels a day and the guidance was up to 50% more by the end of 2028, an endpoint of about 420,000 barrels a day calculated from those two figures. The new plan is both larger and three years longer, and it is worded as a target to reach rather than a ceiling.

What changed in between is the condition Chevron itself set. In May it described Venezuela as a place where it was still recovering money owed from old loans, and said more capital would wait until tax, royalty and dispute-resolution terms were settled. Now Wirth says: "With new fiscal terms, Venezuela is now more competitive within our portfolio and immediately accretive and free cash flow positive." He added that the contract carries stability and international arbitration clauses he rated as strong as any the company sees. Those are management's own descriptions of the terms, and they are what the doubling now rests on.

The funding claim matters most to a holder. Wirth said the ventures are repaying the last of the money owed to Chevron on loans made long ago, and that from here the programme will be paid for out of the ventures' own revenue, without fresh capital from Chevron. For scale, even if Chevron put up every dollar of the $7 billion, the yearly amount would be about 2.7% of the cash its operations generated over the past year, calculated from the reported figures.

Chevron's own surplus, meanwhile, is going to the balance sheet. Net debt fell by $7.8 billion in the quarter alone, to $20.7 billion at the quarter's end. Chief financial officer Eimear Bonner said there was no change to capital allocation, with buybacks kept within the existing quarterly range; the quarter's repurchases sat at the bottom of it.

The quarter's numbers also show that Venezuela's growth is still ahead. Brent averaged $97 a barrel, up from a year earlier, yet Chevron's net production was lower than a year ago, which the company put down mainly to smaller entitlements at higher prices and the Middle East conflict; one month of Venezuelan output was counted after a switch to equity accounting. Wirth said more detail on the 2027 capital programme would come in December, after the board meets.