A major American energy company is leaving California for Texas after enduring years of “adversarial” state policies.
Chevron, one of the largest oil companies in the U.S., announced Friday that it is moving its corporate headquarters out of California and will relocate the center of its operations to Houston, Texas. The company’s decision to leave California follows years of aggressive environmental policymaking from California Democrats that hurt Chevron’s business.
“The company’s headquarters will move from San Ramon, California, to Houston, Texas,” the firm wrote in a press release announcing the move. “Chevron Chairman and CEO, Mike Wirth, and Vice Chairman, Mark Nelson, will move to Houston before the end of 2024 to co-locate with other senior leaders and enable better collaboration and engagement with executives, employees, and business partners.”
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Chevron was the lone major oil company based in California before it decided to move its headquarters to Texas after spending 140 years based in the Golden State. The company had already started to shift investment and operations out of the state — due in part to California’s “adversarial” energy policies — before it announced that it is moving its headquarters, according to Forbes.
Some of Chevron’s senior leaders have wanted to move out of California for some time, but the company stayed put until Friday in large part because of its history in California and its existing assets in the state, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“We believe California has a number of policies that raise costs, that hurt consumers, that discourage investment and ultimately we think that’s not good for the economy in California and for consumers,” Wirth told the Journal.
In the first week of 2024, Chevron announced that it wrote down its existing interests in California by more than $4 billion thanks in large part to the state’s onerous environmental regulations.
California is considered to be on the leading edge of climate policy, according to Stateline. Apart from regulations on oil and gas production, the state has pushed aggressive electric vehicle and truck rules, pursued a climate lawsuit against Chevron and other oil giants alleging that they deliberately attempted to deceive the public on climate change and enacted a landmark corporate emissions disclosure requirement.
“For well over two decades now, politicians like Governor Newsom have hammered California’s conventional energy producers, both large and small, with excessive taxes, regulations, and threats of profit taking,” Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in January. “Many companies have already moved out of the state, along with hundreds of thousands of residents as a result of these and other harmful policies … like a cap on profit margins, that hurt consumers by making conventional energy investments uneconomic. These types of policies have outsourced jobs to other states and increased California’s reliance on oil and electricity imports — all with little or no environmental benefit.”
Newsom’s office did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Featured image credit: Screen Capture/ABC7 News Bay Area)
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