Can Chevron Balance Oil & Gas with the Clean Energy Future?

While the push for renewables and clean energy continues at pace, Chevron still believes the need for oil and gas is equally as important.

The energy firm's Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth recently emphasised its dual mandate in a series of interviews, including on CNBC’s Power Lunch with Brian Sullivan, where he said: “We have to meet the demands of the economy today, even as we invest in technologies for tomorrow.” 

This simple principle underpins Chevron’s strategy to provide reliable, affordable energy while also lowering the carbon intensity of its portfolio and building out new lower carbon solutions.

Meeting energy needs today while investing for tomorrow

Global energy demand continues to rise due to population growth, industrialisation and the increasing needs of digital infrastructure. 

In 2025, Chevron expects to reach one million barrels of oil equivalent per day in the Permian Basin in the US, as well as bring on additional projects in the US Gulf of Mexico and achieve first oil at the Future Growth Project in Tengiz, in Kazakhstan. 

Mike also told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan: “We don’t control demand, we supply demand. And so, we will grow our oil and gas business over the next five years.”

While continuing this growth, Chevron is also accelerating investment in reducing operational emissions and scaling new energy technologies. 

“We need to reduce the emissions from traditional energy, which we’re doing by reducing our carbon intensity of oil and gas that we produce today,” said Mike. 

“At the same time, we’re investing in new technologies to grow new sources of supply as demand for all forms of energy continues to grow.”

Why this balance matters

The world is already witnessing record energy demand, with last year’s oil demand at an all-time high and this year's demand set to be even higher, according to Chevron.

Oil and gas are projected to remain a substantial part of the world’s energy mix to 2050 across a wide range of future scenarios published by the IEA, OPEC, EIA and others.

Sustaining energy security while lowering emissions is therefore essential.

Chevron is advancing multiple pathways to lower carbon energy, including:

• Methane reductions: working toward reaching its upstream methane-intensity target by 2028, after reducing the methane intensity of its oil and gas operations by more than 50% since 2016.
• Renewable fuels: now the second-largest producer of renewable fuels in the U.S.
• Hydrogen and storage: investing in a hydrogen project that enables utility- and industrial-scale storage of renewable energy.

Mike emphasised that durable climate progress requires pragmatic policy that “rules in” more solutions, not fewer. 

“There are three things that really matter when you talk about energy: affordability, reliability and the environment,” he said during an interview with Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global. 

“If you have an energy policy that focuses on only one of those, you can create unintended consequences and have something that is not sustainable.”

Just as important are scalability and speed. “If we can’t scale them up, they can’t make a difference,” he said in the interview. 

“And then if you get solutions that work on scale, we need to do it with some speed and that’s where capital markets come in and you harness private investment.

“If you start to rule parts of the solution out, you’re never going to solve the problem.  And so, we need to rule things in.”

The clean energy transition

While Chevron specialises in oil and gas, it also advocates for the importance of renewable and clean energy too.

“We have to be able to do both,” said Mike, speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit.

“One of the big challenges for an energy company like ours is we’ve got a big business today that meets the needs of the world, and we’ve got customers and economies around the world that depend on what we do to keep the lights on and the trains going.”

Natural gas is central to enabling an affordable, reliable and lower carbon system. It powers homes and industry, supports manufacturing, fertiliser production and hydrogen generation, and is widely used to generate electricity. 

With US electricity consumption projected to hit record highs in 2025–2026 and global electricity demand rising through 2026, gas-fired power provides dispatchable capacity that complements variable renewables and helps integrate more clean energy.

Chevron is expanding its global gas business to meet this demand. 

“If you think of the global energy system, it’s a key component,” says Brian Essner, Chevron’s General Manager of LNG Origination & Commercial.

“When there’s a failure or a change in how energy is provided to consumers, natural gas has the scale and is flexible enough to fill that gap.”

Freeman Shaheen, President of Chevron Global Gas, says: “Natural gas is a long-term enabler of progress. 

“Chevron is proud to be delivering the energy the world needs today, while helping to shape the system that will fuel tomorrow.”

Globally, Chevron holds natural gas positions across the Asia Pacific, Eastern Mediterranean, West Africa and the US, including the Permian and DJ basins, as well as an expanding presence along the US Gulf Coast. 

Chevron is contracted to export 6.35 million tonnes per year of LNG from the US Gulf Coast beginning in 2026 - enough energy to power a US city of more than three million people for roughly one year.

The company is engaged across the gas value chain, from exploration and production to liquefaction, shipping, pipelines, marketing and trading and power generation.

Chevron’s strategy reflects a pragmatic sustainability approach: expand reliable energy supply; reduce the carbon intensity of current operations; and invest in scalable, lower carbon technologies such as renewable fuels, hydrogen and advanced storage. 

It is an approach grounded in meeting today’s needs while accelerating tomorrow’s solutions—stable enough to “keep the lights on,” and ambitious enough to help the world lower emissions at speed and scale.