Good morning. I'm Wayne Borduin, General Manager of Investor Relations for Chevron. We're very excited to share Chevron's value proposition with you all today, and we greatly appreciate you taking the time to spend a few hours with us from your respective locations. Today's presentation will contain four parts. We begin with a corporate overview by our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Wirth. This will be followed by a review of our primary operating segments presented by Jay Johnson, Executive Vice President of Upstream, and Mark Nelson, Executive Vice President of Downstream and Chemicals. Pierre Breber, our CFO, will wrap up with our strategy of higher returns and lower carbon. After the prepared remarks, we'll transition to a Q&A with the sell -side. Following a brief break, we will host four 30-minute breakout sessions involving eight members of Chevron's leadership team.
It's here that you'll have the chance to go a bit deeper into each of our different operating segments and our energy transition strategy. Before we begin, a reminder that today's presentation contains estimates, projections, and other forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ. Please take a moment to review the safe harbor statement that is on the screen and available online. Thanks for your attention. I'd now like to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Wirth.
All right. Thanks, Wayne. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Chevron's 2021 Investor Day. Joining me today are Jay, Mark, and Pierre. We wish we could be with you in person instead of virtually from California. 2020 was a year like no other, with tragic loss of life and damaging economic consequences. We've seen it around the world, in our workforce, markets, and in business results, but w e also saw something else. People around the world rose to meet this challenge. Healthcare professionals were recognized as the heroes they are, s tudents shifted to distance learning, b usinesses reconfigured supply chains and adopted remote collaboration, and scientists developed vaccines faster than ever before. Innovation, technology, collaboration, and the power of the human spirit coming together to conquer this terrible pandemic.
At Chevron, we've navigated 2020 better than most in our industry, relying on our culture and financial priorities as our guide, and we remain well-positioned to win in any environment. We're optimistic as we look to the future, and we're excited to share with you how we'll deliver higher returns and lower carbon. We originally planned to hold this meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Chevron's listing on the NYSE. Over our history, we've navigated pandemics, depressions, and world wars. While we can't be in New York this year, we can use this moment to reflect on what it takes to be one of only 29 companies to be listed for more than a century. Consistent values because the world changes, but our foundation doesn't. Staying prepared because our business has cycles. We need to remain disciplined in order to win in any environment.
Being adaptive. We live in a dynamic world where disruption has become routine. The best companies evolve with markets before someone else steps in. 100 years ago, our country was entering the Roaring '20s, an era of prosperity as it recovered from both a World War and a pandemic. Oil and natural gas were a much smaller part of a much smaller energy system back then. What's in store for the next 100 years? No one knows for certain. The future will be different than the past and will no doubt surprise us along the way. I do know that these three characteristics will live on in Chevron. They're part of our DNA and will help us navigate the future with success.
Today, you'll hear that Chevron is in a different place than others in our industry, with an advantaged portfolio further enhanced by the Noble acquisition, unmatched financial strength and flexibility underpinned by the industry's leading balance sheet. A commitment to capital discipline in our core business, in M&A, and in the energy transition. A track record of sustainably returning more cash to shareholders, our number one financial priority. A strategy to be a leader in advancing a lower carbon future. Let's start with some of our most important beliefs. First and foremost, we believe energy enables modern life. Affordable and reliable energy will be needed in the future to power a growing economy and lift billions of people out of poverty. Second, we believe everyone is entitled to a clean environment, and we all will play a part in addressing the risks of climate change.
As we have for many years, we support well-designed climate policies and believe a price on carbon is the most efficient mechanism to reduce emissions. Third, despite the difficulty of the last year, life on this planet keeps getting better decade after decade because of human ingenuity. We believe in the power of people working together to advance the technology and innovation that will help address society's highest priorities. Just like with the COVID vaccine, no one company, no one industry, no one country will develop the solution to the dual challenges of meeting the world's growing energy needs and addressing the risks of climate change. Which leads me to our commitment to ESG. As I just mentioned, Chevron is committed to protecting the environment. This includes water, air, land, biodiversity, and climate. I encourage you to read our newest climate report, which we're releasing today, and our sustainability report.
These detail our commitments, actions, and results. Living by our social contract with employees and other stakeholders was never more important than it was last year. Chevron hires, invests in, and retains the critical talent needed to lead in the energy future. I'm proud of how we were able to maintain our strong company culture, develop diverse talent, and support our communities during a time of tremendous need. Finally, Chevron holds itself to the highest governance standards. Our board of directors is composed of exceptional and diverse individuals. They've achieved excellence in their fields, and they expect excellence from us. They're committed to seeking outside views that challenge our perspectives. In 2020, we continued to engage with shareholders on important ESG topics and issued reports aligned with SASB, TCFD, and other standards.
As shown on this slide, Chevron is the industry leader in worker safety, spill prevention, and process safety. This reflects our commitment to protecting people and the environment and our unwavering determination to keep getting better at both. During a time of unprecedented challenges, we delivered one of our safest years ever. We were prepared with an enterprise pandemic response plan that allowed us to stand up COVID response teams all around the world early in February. I'm so proud of how the thousands of Chevron employees and contractors responded, working 24/7 on ships, platforms, rigs, refineries, and other operating facilities, safely delivering energy to a recovering global economy while our office workers provided necessary support from their homes. While we run our business safely today, we're also looking to tomorrow.
We believe the future of energy is lower carbon, and we intend to be a leader in advancing a lower carbon future by taking actions in three areas. One, significantly reducing our carbon intensity through cost-efficient investments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our operations. We've already exceeded our 2023 targets and are stretching even further with new goals for 2028. Jay will talk about these in a few minutes. Two, increasing renewables and offsets, primarily through investments to grow renewable natural gas and liquid products in support of our downstream business and increasing renewable power to our upstream operations. Three, investing in low carbon technologies focused on carbon capture and hydrogen, where we can enable commercial solutions leveraging our capabilities and operations. Our strategy supports our business, making it more sustainable with actions that are both good for the environment and good for shareholders.
Now let's turn to our portfolio. Our asset base has never been stronger. It's the result of smart choices over the years on where to invest, when to high grade, and what to acquire. It's diverse across geographies, asset classes, and value chains, yet concentrated in areas of strength where we have competitive advantage. During 2020, our portfolio showed its resilience, adjusting to extreme market conditions to balance short-term cash flow with preserving long-term value. Whether it's our low royalty position in the Permian, a growing gas business in the Eastern Med, our feedstock advantage chemicals plants, or our leading fuels position on the U.S. West Coast, we strive for businesses that are low cost, delivering results across the cycle, large scale, making a difference to our shareholders, and long lived, generating cash flow for decades.
Driving higher returns begins with capital discipline. That's why we're reaffirming our capital guidance of $14 billion-$16 billion through 2025. As shown on the upper right, our investment program is becoming even more capital efficient, led by short cycle investments that Jay will cover. We expect our non-cash affiliate capital to trend down to about 15% of our total as TCO spending decreases. As we said before, costs always matter in a commodity business. After operating as a combined company for several months, we've raised our Noble synergy target from $300 million to $600 million, twice our initial estimate. These incremental synergies come from more cost efficiencies as we integrated into one organization, procurement savings from leveraging the best pricing between our contracts, and even lower exploration costs.
We expect higher Noble synergies and the lower costs resulting from our transformation last year to drive overall 2021 operating expenses down about 10% from 2019. Our new streamlined organization has been in place for five months. With new ways of working and the latest digital tools, our workforce is more efficient and effective than ever. Lower costs and greater capital efficiency are the main drivers of delivering higher returns. At a flat $50 Brent nominal price, we expect to more than double ROCE by 2025. This improvement is anchored in self-help. We're not betting on higher prices to bail us out. We continue to focus on further improvements to costs and margin, including efforts announced last year to deliver more than $1 billion in run rate value chain improvements by the end of this year.
We're investing in only our best projects, funding only those that meet our high return expectations. If the market surprises to the upside, we'd expect to deliver double-digit returns like we showed at last year's meeting at $60 flat Brent. Our financial framework and continued discipline deliver results that work in both a downside and an upside price scenario. In a downside case, at flat $40 Brent for another five years, we expect net debt to peak around 35%, a level not far from the average of our peers today. In an upside case, at flat $60 Brent for five years, we expect to generate more than $25 billion of excess cash, available primarily for shareholder distributions over time. Most importantly, we expect the dividend to be secure in either scenario and every other one in between, w hich brings me to a key point.
Our financial priorities haven't changed, unlike others. In fact, when the full force of the pandemic became evident in 2020, our actions were guided by these priorities. First, protecting the dividend. We haven't cut it since the Great Depression, and we've increased it for 33 straight years. Second, investing in the business. We're able to sustain the enterprise at a lower reinvestment rate because of our vastly improved capital efficiency. Third, preserving our balance sheet. An industry leader pre-pandemic and an industry leader today, even after completing a major acquisition. Finally, when the first three priorities are met, we have a clear history of repurchasing shares as we have in 13 of the last 17 years. I'll reiterate, where others have changed their strategies, their priorities, and their financial commitments to shareholders, we haven't.
We offer something different to our employees, to our partners, to our customers, to our communities, and to our investors. We have a track record you can count on. I started today by calling out three characteristics that have helped Chevron succeed for 100 years on the NYSE and which remain key to our success today. Consistent. You don't have to guess what Chevron will do next. Prepared. You can count on us to be ahead of the game. Adaptive. We intend to lead this industry for a long time into the future. Not everyone can say this and back it up. With that, I'll turn it over to Jay to talk about upstream.
Thanks, Mike. Good morning. I'll start by highlighting one of our newest assets, the Leviathan facility in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Tamar and Leviathan fields supply the energy for around 70% of Israel's electricity, enabling a transition from coal to gas, which in turn is lowering carbon emissions and improving air quality. These projects have helped Israel move towards energy independence and created a supply hub within the broader region. We'll talk more about the Eastern Mediterranean and its attractive growth prospects later in the presentation. For now, let's start with the overall portfolio. This pie chart shows the scale and diversity of our resource base by asset class. As of the end of 2020, we have 84 billion barrels of unrisked resource, an increase of 18% from just a year earlier. In 2020, we streamlined our organization and eliminated overhead costs by realigning to three operating regions.
Our current portfolio of assets includes legacy positions in the Permian, Kazakhstan, Australia, and the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, as well as the newly acquired assets in the Eastern Mediterranean and the DJ Basin. Reserve and resource replenishment are important indicators of the sustainability of our business. The chart on the left shows our five-year reserve replacement ratio is 99%. On the right, you can see that over the last 10 years, our resource base has increased by 30%. Optimization of our resource base is evident when you see the barrels associated with asset sales are greater than our production over the 10-year period. We've been able to grow our resource base and replace reserves with predominantly shorter cycle, higher return investments despite sustained lower capital programs.
Our large resource base provides options, allowing us to focus on those assets that yield higher returns. Our advantage portfolio, combined with our commitment to operational excellence and a competitive cost structure, drives industry-leading performance. As shown on the upper left, we've maintained capital discipline over the last five years. Last year, we demonstrated the flexibility in our portfolio by quickly reducing upstream's capital spend from $17 billion to $11 billion, effectively making this a step change within a single quarter. We've said many times that costs always matter. As shown on the lower left, we've maintained a highly competitive cost structure. When combined with our operational performance and portfolio, we've delivered the unit earnings and leading cash margins shown on the right. Our focus is to drive those margins higher through disciplined execution, cost management, value chain improvements, and portfolio optimization. Let's turn now to our future investment opportunities.
As our portfolio has evolved, we've become less reliant on large-scale major capital projects. Our execution performance in short cycle projects continues to be a strength, where these types of investments have consistently met or exceeded expectations on cost, schedule, and most importantly, full cycle returns. As shown on the left by the darker bars, around 60% of our capital this year is allocated to short cycle investments. We expect this to grow to about 75% by 2025. Now, this flexibility allows us to respond to dynamic market conditions to deliver more competitive and predictable returns with lower execution risk. On the right, independent analysis performed by Wood Mackenzie suggests that our portfolio of new opportunities is positioned to deliver significantly higher point-forward returns than any of our peers. Now let's turn to the Permian. Last year, in response to market conditions, we significantly lowered activity levels.
Our current view of Permian capital spending is shown on the upper left. We continue to take a disciplined approach, and in the short term, we expect to invest at levels consistent with last year. Over the next five years, we expect to flex our activity higher as supply and demand come into balance. Now, consistent with this approach, you can see that our production profile shifts out due to the recent drawdown in activity while still maintaining long-term value. Our acreage continues to be advantaged with its low royalty and less than 10% exposure to federal acreage. As shown on the bottom left, we generated positive free cash flow last year. At a flat $50 Brent price, free cash flow is expected to grow by 2025 to more than $3 billion a year, with returns around 25%.
Our demonstrated performance in the Permian also extends to other short cycle shale and tight assets. We expect our other liquids-rich unconventional assets in the DJ Basin, the Duvernay, and Vaca Muerta to also play significant roles in the coming years. As shown on the left, factory models, comprehensive benchmarking, and fast adoption of evolving technology and best practice has reduced unit development costs by 20%-45% since 2017. With the acquisition of Noble, we've gained access to additional best practice and experience to further improve our performance. As in the Permian, we reduced activity levels last year and we're planning to increase activity as markets rebalance and spending at TCO FGP declines. The outcome, as shown on the right, is that we expect these assets to generate competitive returns with production levels of around 400,000 bbl/d in 2025.
Now, while I mentioned earlier that long cycle major capital projects represent an increasingly smaller share of our investments, improving their performance is critical. We're committed to improving the way we develop and execute major capital projects. It starts with a mindset that we, like you, are investors pursuing higher returns across our portfolio. More specifically, we're focusing on three key areas to improve project performance. First, we're applying a value-oriented approach to drive higher returns. This means conceptual designs with the simplest and smallest possible scope. Second, we're taking more ownership of our facility engineering and design. By shifting the concept engineering in-house, we can standardize designs, better leverage digital technologies, and develop a project that meets our expectations. Finally, we're following a conditions-based mindset focused on getting the right work completed at the right time.
Powerful digital tools allow us to organize and manage complex work in ways that were impossible even a few years ago. These tools support our commitment to deliver high-quality projects from concept to execution. Now these aren't just future aspirations, w e're implementing them with projects we're developing in the Gulf of Mexico and Australia. We're using these digital tools at FGP to deliver the right work in the right sequence. At FGP-WPMP, we completed the offshore module fabrication program and the associated sea lift to Tengiz, further de-risking the project. The quality of construction is high, and the modules have arrived at Tengiz complete and dimensionally accurate. With the project now 81% complete, all 40 production wells have been drilled and completed. Materials and equipment are on-site, module re-stacking is nearing completion, and the remaining work scope is focused on Tengiz.
As shown by the chart on the bottom left, the pandemic has had a significant impact. The blue line shows the number of workers planned before the pandemic struck, and the gray bars show the actual workforce. We demobilized 80% of the people in the second quarter of last year and began remobilizing in the fourth quarter. By year-end, we reached about 95% of our planned winter workforce. The result is a significant backlog of work that was not completed last year. Despite extensive safeguards, progress slowed again around the new year as a resurgence of the virus caused some camps to be placed under quarantine. The workforce is expected to be able to resume unrestricted activity later this month, and w ith effective safeguards, we expect to be able to continue remobilizing our workforce to pre-pandemic levels.
Looking forward, our ability to sustain the workforce and complete work productively and in the right sequence is critical to understanding the impact of COVID on the project. We'll keep you advised as to how we're progressing as we move forward. I am immensely proud of how the team has responded to the unprecedented challenge of continuing to safely deliver this project through the pandemic. In Australia, we've built a core LNG position that's expected to generate strong cash flow for decades. Repair work at Gorgon's Trains 1 and 2 is now complete, and Train 3 vessel inspections, any repairs, and the planned turnaround are expected to start in the second quarter. At Wheatstone, the offshore facility is also now back to full capacity.
We continue to systematically increase the capacity of the LNG plants, with the Gorgon Trains now 5% and the Wheatstone Trains 9% above their original design capacity. Together, Wheatstone and Gorgon have supplied over 1,200 cargoes since startup. We're leveraging existing infrastructure to ensure continued gas supply through the Jansz-Io trunkline compression project and the infill drilling campaign in the Gorgon and Jansz fields. At the North West Shelf, we've implemented third-party tolling agreements, a key element of our strategy to leverage future ullage in existing infrastructure to monetize our extensive gas resource base. In the Gulf of Mexico, we're progressing a queue of attractive projects that leverage our deep water expertise and incorporate our strategy to drive higher returns and lower carbon.
In 2020, our Gulf of Mexico assets emitted less than 7 kg of CO2 per barrel of production, making them some of the lowest carbon intensity production in the world. On the St. Malo water flood, we've now drilled three of four new wells. At Mad Dog 2, the floating production unit was completed and sailed away from the fabrication yard in February. At Anchor, first oil is still targeted for 2024. All three of these sanctioned projects are expected to have development costs in the range of $14- $17/bbl , excluding the $2/bbl one-time technology development cost for Anchor. Looking forward, we expect to make a final investment decision on the Whale project later this year, and a t Ballymore, we're advancing the design and expect a final investment decision in 2022 for a subsea tieback concept to leverage existing facilities.
Let's return now to the Eastern Mediterranean. We're excited with how this collection of assets strengthens our portfolio in a region that is positioned for growth and plays to our core strengths. Noble developed a world-class position with a track record of strong project execution, reliable operations, and long-term offtake agreements. Tamar and Leviathan underpin this core position with around 2 Bcf/d of production capacity. With more than 40 Tcf of discovered resource, we're exploring various opportunities to monetize the additional gas. We believe ongoing growth is underpinned by the evolving geopolitical and commercial environment, supporting export opportunities and growing local demand. Pulling all this together, we're positioned to strengthen performance and increase cash without help from prices. Over the next three years, depending on market conditions, we expect to modestly grow production despite the expiration of contracts in Indonesia and Thailand.
Further growth is expected by 2025 as the Permian, other unconventional fields, and FGP-WPMP ramp up. The chart on the right shows that we expect to materially grow our leading cash margins, again, at a flat nominal price. We also expect to deliver these margins and lower breakevens by maintaining disciplined cost and capital spending across the portfolio and generating strong cash flow in the Permian. Additionally, we expect to see higher affiliate dividends from TCO as project spending decreases well before the startup of FGP. Our focus on margin growth at a flat price has a multiplying effect on our cash flow as our production also increases. This is a powerful combination that positions us well into the future. Alongside our commitment to drive higher returns, we're also working to deliver lower carbon. In 2019, we announced four greenhouse gas intensity metrics.
We've led the way in including all of our production in our metrics, regardless of operatorship. We're also reporting the carbon intensity for natural gas and oil separately to bring transparency to potential portfolio effects. In our updated climate change report, we announced that we've already reduced flaring by more than 60% and reduced methane emissions by about 50% relative to 2016. We don't intend to stop there. Since we've made faster progress than expected, we're setting new 2028 intensity reduction targets. With these objectives, we're driving our combined oil and natural gas intensity about 35% lower than it was in 2016. Lowering carbon intensity requires resolve, advancements in technology, and thoughtful investments. First, we're a leader in carbon sequestration and have invested over $1 billion in Australia and Canada.
At Gorgon, we've injected more than 4 million tons of CO2, giving us valuable insights in designing and operating world-scale carbon sequestration facilities. We're also teaming with Svante and Blue Planet to explore new technologies for carbon capture, utilization, and storage. After successful projects in the Permian and San Joaquin Valley, we're expanding the use of renewable power throughout our portfolio. Opportunities include the U.S., Australia, Kazakhstan, and Argentina to deliver 500 MW of carbon-free power to our operations. We've reduced absolute methane emissions in the U.S. onshore by about 85% since 2013 through actions such as removing high bleed pneumatic controllers and implementing leak detection and repair programs. We've made great progress putting out flares, and are committed to achieving zero routine flaring across our operations by 2030, in accordance with the World Bank Initiative.
We believe that the future of energy is lower carbon, and we're making the commitments and taking the actions today to deliver the cleaner energy the world needs. Thank you for your attention, and now I'll turn it over to Mark.
Thanks, Jay. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here to discuss Chevron's Downstream and Chemicals business. Similar to Upstream, we completed our restructuring in 2020, bringing our Fuels and Lubricants businesses together and streamlining our Chemicals structure. In our Fuels business, we have a focused portfolio of eight refineries and a strong network of marketing assets with leading brands. As mentioned, we've integrated our Lubricants and Fuels businesses to gain efficiency and leverage access to our sales channels and broader global supply chain. In our Commodity and Specialty Chemicals businesses give us a diverse, resilient, and large-scale portfolio of assets. This advantaged position is underpinned by access to low-cost feedstock to deliver competitive returns through commodity cycles. As you know, 2020 was a challenging year for the world and our industry.
In the fuels business in particular, demand and margins collapsed as the movement of people was constrained to help fight the spread of the virus. With several vaccines now deployed around the world, we expect demand to recover, as illustrated by this outlook for high-value products. With this demand recovery, more balanced inventories, and announced refinery rationalization, we expect refining margins to improve, but not to reach previous mid-cycle levels. This chart starts with our 2020 performance adjusted for these margins, demonstrates expected volume recovery, and most importantly, shows our self-help contributions, including increasing feedstock flexibility and high product yields, increasing productivity through new digital tools, optimizing product placement across our system, and of course, a relentless focus on controlling costs. Our self-help actions were well underway in 2020, and we're positioned to deliver significant earnings improvement going forward.
While we can't control demand or underlying margins, we can control feedstocks, OpEx, and how we sell our product. With improved modeling and asset flexibility, we've diversified the feedstocks available to our U.S. refineries by about 70%, generating more options in how and where we source feedstocks and creating opportunities for incremental margin. We've implemented structural changes that sustainably lower operating costs after an increase in our 2020 unit OpEx due to reduced refinery utilization. This work includes making turnarounds more efficient, safely extending the average time between turnarounds, and using advanced analytics to manage the on-site workforce. Additional opportunities exist in where we sell our high-value products. We've been able to place about 95% of this volume into our contracted sales channels, generating the best margins across our value chains.
With the acquisition of Puma Energy's marketing assets in Australia last year, we expect to more than double our profitable volumes there, providing a stable, attractive market for products from Asia. These are just some of the many self-help actions we're taking to improve earnings. We continue to take a disciplined approach to our attractive petrochemicals business, which is grounded in a constructive macro outlook, a track record of strong execution, and selective future growth. We expect demand to grow over the long term as the world population increases, and petrochemicals are utilized to create more efficient and cost-effective goods. With our ethane feedstock advantage, we're well-positioned to deliver competitive returns through the cycle. We anticipate unit OpEx reductions at CP Chem of approximately 5% by 2025 through cost management and debottlenecking.
At GS Caltex, we remain ahead of schedule and on budget for a third-quarter startup of the olefins Mixed Feed Cracker in South Korea, a remarkable achievement given the challenges presented by the pandemic. Future growth prospects in this segment are promising as well and are expected to drive higher returns through the cycle. We continue to assess the best alternatives for our U.S. Gulf Coast II project and are progressing FEED at Ras Laffan. As shown on the chart, both projects are well-positioned on the cost curve, benefiting from their ethane feedstock advantage. We're lowering carbon across a range of products. In renewable natural gas, we continue to find attractive partnership opportunities. We're capturing previously unabated methane from dairy farms and converting it into a negative carbon intensity natural gas. We recently announced the expansion of our partnership with Brightmark to further increase RNG production.
By 2025, we expect a 10x increase in RNG volumes compared to last year. We also see significant growth opportunities in renewable fuels. Progress continues with our capital-efficient project at El Segundo to co-process biofeedstocks starting mid-year. We expect to have more than half of our U.S. retail sites selling renewable or biodiesel by 2025. Lastly, we expect to grow our renewable base oil volumes significantly over the same time period. Leveraging our leading technology partnership with Novvi, we're looking at new markets and obtaining qualifications to grow sales and maintain our leadership position. Opportunities like these are consistent with our strategy of higher returns and lower carbon, demonstrating the discipline to invest in ways that are good for both our shareholders and the environment. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Pierre.
Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everyone. Why is our message higher returns, lower carbon? It starts with acknowledging where we are. The energy industry has been losing investor share to other sectors for a decade, and investors increasingly want both financial performance and societal benefits. Higher returns, lower carbon is our objective to address both trends and win back investors. Mike spoke earlier about how we'll increase returns. The chart shows our ROACE improvement by segment. We've adjusted the starting point for 2020 to $50 Brent and mid-cycle refining margins 10%-15% lower than last year's assumptions, and kept both flat in nominal terms through 2025. A doubling of returns with flat CapEx is a formula for growing free cash flow. Over the next five years, we expect free cash flow to grow at a compound annual rate greater than 10%.
Greater capital efficiency and self-help cost and margin improvement drive this double-digit growth rate, supporting future dividend increases, and all at flat nominal oil prices and margins. To regain investor confidence, energy companies have to commit to capital discipline in their core business, in M&A, and with the energy transition. Chevron has been leading the way with the most disciplined organic capital program among our peers in recent years, and a s Mike affirmed earlier, an outlook that keeps it that way. Chevron has also shown leading discipline in M&A. When we've sold assets in a stronger market pre-COVID or acquired them last year during a low part of the cycle, or walked away when the price was bid up. Lastly, capital discipline also applies to low-carbon investments. Let's talk more about our energy transition strategy. Mike provided an overview of our three action areas.
The first is to lower Scope 1 and 2 carbon intensity in all of our upstream assets, whether we operate or not. As shown on the chart, we've lowered it by 20% since 2016. Our 2028 goals are aligned with the second Paris Stock take and are expected to take us down 35% since 2016 to 24 kg/ BOE, which we expect to be first quartile ahead of the majority of the industry. The pie chart shows the categories of carbon reductions from our $2 billion of cost-efficient abatement investments between now and 2028. These reductions are based on our marginal abatement cost curves, or MACC, which rank carbon reduction opportunities by their cost efficiency. We're working towards a net -zero future beyond 2028, and intend to update our targets every five years in line with future Paris Stock takes.
Going forward, we'd expect our upstream to become lower carbon in this decade as carbon efficient assets, like the Permian, grow in our portfolio, and from their reductions enabled by the MACC investments highlighted on the previous slide. Looking further out, we have additional MACC investments identified. These projects are generally less cost efficient, require additional policy support, or are not as mature in development. These future projects have the potential to lower our upstream carbon intensity into the mid-teens. Additional reductions to net -zero by mid-century, about 20 million tons per year in total, need significant technology advancements, support of government policy, and development of large offset markets. Our second energy transition area is to increase renewables and offsets in support of our business. Mark already shared our growth expectations in renewable natural gas and renewable liquids.
Not only do these products reduce our customers' emissions, they also generate valuable credits that support our fuels refining business. With renewable power, we see partnership opportunities to supply more to our operations and aren't planning to pursue wind and solar as a standalone business. Finally, we're pursuing opportunities that will generate offsets for our emissions and those of our customers. Advancing a lower carbon future will require both conventional and renewable energy, i t won't be one or the other. Our products coexist with lots of alternatives and will continue to be the most competitive offering for many uses. Our third focus area is to invest in low carbon technologies to enable commercial solutions. Over 90% of global greenhouse gas emissions are not related to passenger vehicles. Finding solutions to emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, heavy duty transport, and other activities will require technological and commercial breakthroughs.
Carbon capture and hydrogen could meet some of these needs, we can leverage our technical capabilities and operations and our experience with both in partnership with others to accelerate progress with these growing technologies. Last month, we announced our second Future Energy Fund, 3x larger than our first, targeting venture investments in hydrogen and CCUS, as well as emerging power and mobility. Bruce and Barb will cover these and more in all three energy transition areas during their breakout session. We're planning to share a deeper dive of our energy transition progress in September during our management roundtable investor event. To wrap up, we're focused on increasing returns and lowering carbon, and we're backing it up by making changes to our compensation. To our long-term incentive program, we've added relative ROCE improvement. To our annual bonus program, we've added energy transition as a separate category.
Higher returns, lower carbon. To earn a higher valuation, we must do both and show that higher returns are sustainable in a lower carbon future. With that, I'll hand it back to Mike.
Okay. Thanks, Pierre. Before moving to Q&A, I'd like to recap the key messages from today's presentation. First, we're committed to delivering higher returns and expect to more than double ROCE by 2025 at flat nominal oil prices. Second, higher returns aren't enough. We also expect to lower carbon in our business, grow renewables, and advance new low carbon technologies. Third, we have the balance sheet and the discipline to be resilient to the downside, and more than $25 billion of excess cash shows our leverage to the upside. We're in a different place than others in the industry. A company you can count on in good times and in tough ones, now and into the future. Thanks for your interest in Chevron. Before we begin Q&A, just a couple of ground rules. If you'd like to ask a question, please do so using the hand-raising feature in Zoom.
Please remain muted until I call on you. Please limit yourself to two questions and ask them upfront so we can get to as many people as possible. There should be ample opportunity between this opening session and the breakouts that follow to get to everyone. Let's get started with Q&A. Today, batting lead off and in his last Chevron Investor Day with us, the pride of the Mississippi State Bulldogs, Doug Terreson from Evercore.
Thank you, Mike. Good morning, everybody. Michael, your focus on value creation and return on capital employed is not new as it's been an important driver of superior share price performance since you became CEO a few years ago. It seems to me like the company's doubling down on the value-based model today with the plan to double return on capital employed by 2025, p retty big objective. On this point, slide 14 seems to provide a credible pathway for this outcome. With my question being twofold, first, will the cost and margin and capital efficiency gains be split proportionally between upstream and downstream? Second, if oil prices remain near current levels, which seems pretty likely to us, surplus cash flow would be such that Chevron's net debt could approach zero in a few years, even with dividend growth.
My question is, how might capital management priorities change if oil prices stay near current levels? Two questions.
Okay, Doug, thanks. You're right, a value-based approach is going to continue to characterize the way we think about the business and the way we execute the business. Pierre, in his comments, had a chart that showed the relative contributions from the segments to improvement in returns. While they're both significant, I think we'll see a little bit more coming out of the Upstream business. It's a larger business for us than the Downstream. From a portfolio standpoint, we need Upstream to contribute a little bit more. On your question about cash, if we are in a price environment such as today, we certainly will generate cash surplus to the needs, and we'll use it in alignment with the financial priorities that we outlined. The dividend is number one.
We've kept the dividend secure through a very challenging period of time for the industry, and you can be assured that we're very mindful of the importance of the dividends to our investors. Number two, we said our capital program is what it is. We reaffirmed that guidance, so we don't need to put more money to organic capital spending. Number three, the balance sheet, in good shape right now even after this very difficult period of time. In the near term, the cash will go to the balance sheet, and you'll see debt come down. As I said in my comments, we've got a history. 13 of the last 17 years, we've repurchased shares. On average, the price that we paid has been within $1 of the average price over that entire 17 years.
We've got a track record of returning cash to shareholders through share repurchases, and I think that's something that all other things equal and our confidence in the future performance of the business and markets, you can expect our track record to continue there. Thanks for the question. Next, we're going to go to Phil Gresh from JP Morgan. Morning, Phil.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. First one will just be a bit of a follow-up to Doug's question, just on the capital allocation piece. I'm curious, with oil prices where they are, what is a scenario where you would consider higher levels of capital spending? What would you have to see to consider that in the Upstream business specifically? With respect to your answer to Doug's question on the balance sheet, is there a level of absolute leverage that you'd like to see the balance sheet get to before considering share buybacks, given that you didn't have a specific announcement around that today? Thank you.
Okay, Phil. Thank you. I'll take the first one, and then I'll have Pierre speak to the balance sheet. We've laid out our capital plan. It delivers improvement in returns. It delivers improved upstream cash margins, and it delivers a 10% compound annual growth rate in free cash flow. It's really premised on our long-term view of supply and demand and prices. We don't chase the price of the day, and the fact that today's prices have recovered pretty well from where they were last year doesn't really change our thinking about how to invest to create long-term value for shareholders. We're not going to chase an oil price and change our capital program because we're in a strong environment. Only if we were to see a collapse as we saw last year would we really gear it back in a weaker environment.
We're investing for the long term to create value. We've got a great portfolio, and our capital plan is premised really on our long-term view of prices, which no doubt will be both above and below at some point as we're progressing that. Pierre, I'll let you speak to the question about leverage.
Yeah, thanks, Mike. Thanks, Phil. Look, one other point I'll make on the first question is we're also looking to the equity markets. We've been on a good run, but our stock is still trading below pre-COVID levels, and the equity markets really allocate capital, and so the commodity markets maybe have the stronger price signal than the equity markets are showing right now. In terms of a debt range, we don't have one really to start a buyback program. What we're going to be, and Mike really alluded to this, is if we start a buyback program, we want to be able to sustain it for multiple years. It's not something you'd want to do for a few quarters. You want to do it hopefully for several years. As Mike said, we've done it 13 out of 17 years.
That means to start one, you want to have confidence that we have confidence around the excess cash generation in future years and a strong enough balance sheet to weather some downturns in oil prices. We have a track record that's very strong in this place. We're looking at it very closely. In the short term, as Mike said, excess cash goes to the balance sheet. Because capital is in a very tight guidance range, because our debt is very strong, over time, that excess cash will be returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and a sustained buyback program.
Okay, Phil, thank you. Next, we're going to go to Jeanine Wai at Barclays. Morning, Jeanine.
Hi, good morning. Can you hear me okay?
I can.
Okay, great. Sometimes I have issues. I just wanted to maybe dovetail and press a little further on Doug and Phil's question. The balance sheet is in a good spot. You talked about the leverage. You talked about your history of return of cash, but can you maybe just review your five-year view of supply and demand, and how that specifically affects the level of buybacks? I guess the main question that we keep coming back to is, previously, your old plan, $60 Brent, flat nominal, you had a $5 billion a year share buyback. Arguably now, you may be in a better position to do that because capital efficiency is better. You've high-graded your projects and you've repositioned the cost structure.
I think the main question is, people are seeing that a lot of the levers are fixed, with CapEx being fixed, the leverage kind of guidance out there and price forecast. Are you in a better position to do something like a $5 billion a year, or would it be something less given your view on supply demand and maybe add a conservatism?
Okay. First I'll start with supply and demand, Jeanine. Look, we've come through a pretty difficult time here recently, and markets are rebalancing, but there's still a ways to go. There are several million barrels a day of demand that hasn't returned versus pre-COVID levels, and there are several million barrels a day of supply that are withheld from the market. The rebalancing process, while it's been perhaps a little stronger from a price standpoint and relatively orderly, there's still a ways to go on that. I think we have to watch this carefully and there's certainly the prospects of volatility and perhaps surprises still ahead of us on this. Longer term, if you look out, the drivers that we look at remain largely intact.
Demand growth in energy around the world is driven by a growing population, 7.5 billion people on the planet today, 9 billion by 2040, and a rising middle class. All of that requires more energy, and it will require energy of all types. We see still continued growth in our core business out for the next couple of decades. That said, we've seen with shale and other things that we can get capital costs down, and we can develop these at competitive prices. We've got what I would call a sober view on the long-term balances and what that means for prices. Your second question, we have improved our situation as we've come through this challenging time. As you note, our forward capital guidance is lower.
We've been able to take some cost out of the business, and we showed the upside and the downside cases. In the upside case, at $60, we generate $25 billion over five years. As Pierre just said, that is going to go back to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases in that scenario. I don't want to commit to an exact share repurchase level. That's a decision that would lie ahead of us if and when we chose to resume that. We'll consult with our board on both the dividend and the share repurchase program. Fundamentally, we're in a very strong position. I appreciate that all through these questions have gotten to the strength of our portfolio, the strength of our cash-generating capacity, and our intent to return cash to shareholders.
I just don't want to speculate on when and how much, as we're still in this process of rebalancing, but you can be assured that we are absolutely committed to it. Okay. Next question will be Neil Mehta from Goldman Sachs. Morning, Neil.
Good morning, guys. Thanks for the time and the presentation today. The kickoff question is just related to two projects that got some discussion point, but if you can dig in a little bit deeper, it would be terrific. This might be for Jay. The first is Tengiz. It sounds like you guys are making progress in terms of remobilization. When do you think you're gonna be in a position to provide an update to the market around either capital, and how are you thinking about the timeline of in-service for that asset in the forecast? The second is Gorgon. While it's been a strong cash flow generator, its performance over the last couple of months has been choppier. An update on both of those assets would be helpful.
Okay, Neil. I'll just make a comment about TCO, then I'll hand it over to Jay to add a little bit of color, and I'll let him address Gorgon as well. At TCO, there are a number of significant accomplishments over the last few quarters that significantly de-risk the go-forward construction. Jay mentioned all the modules have been completed. The quality is extremely high, and they're all on site. The logistics were done in three shipping seasons, which was a risk that we were very attentive to. We've got all the modules on place. Nearly all of them are set on foundations. The big pressure boost compressor facilities, all four of those are on foundation. We've got 75 preassembled pipe racks that are in place, have been set, and have been welded up. We've built a hospital there to deal with COVID risk.
We're preparing to launch a vaccine program in the not-too-distant future. We're 81% complete, and there have been a lot of really positive developments that de-risk the go forward. The pandemic is still the challenge as we go forward. There's a lot of safeguards in place that will guide activity in the field. Jay, why don't you build out a little bit more on when we expect to be able to provide some further updates? Then I'll let you touch on Gorgon as well.
Thanks, Mike. As you pointed out, we've put a lot of safeguards in place and made some critical progress over last year. Clearly, the biggest impact of the pandemic has been to force us to demobilize most of our workforce through the main work season of last summer. We started remobilizing in the fall. We reached about 95% of our planned winter workforce, which was good, and the safeguards were proving effective. In the winter, we had a resurgence of virus as we saw around the world. This also happened in Kazakhstan and in our camps. Importantly, instead of having to demobilize again, this time because of the precautions we had, the medical facilities Mike talked about, we were able to quarantine the camps where we had incidents of the virus and keep everyone in place.
As we said, we're expecting to be able to work without restrictions, hopefully towards the end of this month. What's really critical for us is to move into the spring campaign, start gearing up the momentum that we had. Quite honestly, before the pandemic hit, we were making great progress and really had a lot of momentum. We need to rebuild that, and we need to show that we can sustain a workforce through the spring and summer to really address the backlog that's in front of us. That backlog has to be worked off in the right sequence. We have to take work to completion. The good news is we have all the materials and equipment on site. The restacking operations are nearing completion, and those modules are being set on foundations.
Each time we set a module on foundation, we open up another group of work fronts, and w e are taking a very disciplined approach. We are staying very focused on cost. We're not just throwing people at these projects, but we're working in a disciplined fashion to achieve the productivity, the sequencing, and the completion that we need. It's too early to be able to tell you what the overall impact on cost and schedule are going to be at this point. We need to see how these programs advance through the spring and summer. We will keep you advised as we move through the year.
Okay, Jay, do you want to talk about Gorgon and the last couple of quarters and the go-forward view on Gorgon?
Thanks, Mike. Happy to. On Gorgon, we have successfully completed the repairs to the heat exchangers on both Train 1 and Train 2. Now in the second quarter, we've really got three issues or three tasks ahead of us. The first is to do the inspections, and if there's any repairs required on Train 3, we'll do those here in the second quarter. We also have to take the scheduled turnaround that was planned for Train 3, which will also occur in the second quarter. The reliability of Gorgon has been steadily increasing, and we're actually quite pleased with it. These defects that we're having to address on the first two Trains, Trains 1 and 2, the investigation's still underway, but the initial indications are that these were manufacturing defects that were there from the beginning of manufacture, not an operational issue.
Overall, we've actually been quite pleased with the advancing reliability of the Gorgon facilities and the ability of them to run at their capacity. As I mentioned in the opening remarks, we've actually increased the initial capacity by 5%, and that incremental 5% is pretty valuable for us. We look forward to getting through the second quarter and establishing a good run of production as we enter the second half of this year.
All right. Thanks, Jay. Let's go to Paul Sankey from Sankey Research. Good morning, Paul.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me okay?
I can.
Can you hear me? Great.
Yes, I can.
A top Chevron shareholder has requested that I state that I am not a cat to start this. Anyway, if we can go to my first question on slide 12. Mike, one of the successes that you've had in terms of relative performance was really a cap on CapEx post-2014 downturn. Can you commit to the $16 billion that you've got in your outlook at the upper end as being a hard cap, that you won't exceed that? Further to slide 15, could you just talk about what goes up in terms of CapEx at the higher oil price assumption? Obviously, you can see there that you've got the $40 assumption where you cover yourselves, and then you've got the $60 assumption. I assume we derive that you're planning the company at $50, but I just wonder how much and where the extra spending comes in.
That's part one. Part two, which is a huge question, is how would your plans change in the case of the carbon tax that you're now calling for? Thank you.
Okay, Paul. Well, look, I'm glad to hear that you're not a cat. Thank you for clarifying that. On capital spending, yeah, we laid out a five-year plan through 2025, $14 billion-$16 billion. That's a budget. We intend to stay with that budget. If you want to call it a hard cap, you can call it a hard cap. We can deliver the plan that we outlined within that range of capital spending, and that is consistent with the way we've been running the company, and it's consistent with the strength of the portfolio that we have. If you look at the scenarios, the $40 and the $60 scenarios, you do see that capital flexes up and down a little bit in there, and that really is moving to the lower end of that range, moving to the higher end of that range.
The big swing is in our flexible capital spending, which is unconventionals. It's the Permian, it's the DJ Basin, it's Argentina, it's Canada. There's a little bit of sequencing, perhaps, of early stage development as we might go into a lower case on some of the other capital projects within our portfolio and keeping them apace in a higher price environment. One of the things that the last year should have demonstrated to everyone is we have not only the capacity to flex our capital, but we've got the will to do it. In fact, that is what we did last year, and that's how we intend to continue to respond. Look, that's a pretty broad fairway, $40-$60 on average over the five years, and we can manage well within that.
I'm not going to speculate on a carbon price and how it might change capital allocation because the details on these things really matter, Paul, and the magnitude of the carbon price, the timing, the way it would be administered. It's one of the things, as we talk about support for a price on carbon. We've been careful not to sign on to a particular proposal yet because we've got a whole series of attributes that we think are part of well-designed and sound carbon pricing policy that we would like to see. If there were to be a proposal brought forward that doesn't reflect broad-based application across the economy, balanced and equitable step up of the carbon price, transparency so the consumers know the impact, these are things that matter, and we would work hard to get those in.
We may not support a bill that doesn't have, or a proposal that doesn't have what we would think is a well-constructed foundation. More to follow as we see whether or not this becomes a reality here in this country. Certainly, in many places we operate, there is a price on carbon today, and it's reflected in our capital allocation. The last thing I'll say is all of our planning includes a price on carbon, and those are different prices in different jurisdictions where they exist or where we anticipate them. Just like our oil and gas and refining margin assumptions, we have prices on carbon that vary around the world, and we have ranges that we use to plan for that. We already use it in our planning, and if we were to see something here in the U.S., that'll become part of the planning as well.
Okay. Next, Biraj Borkhataria. Sorry about that, Biraj from RBC.
That's okay. Thanks for the presentation, and some of the incremental details. Really appreciate it. A couple of questions. The first one's on carbon intensity. Appreciate the details, slide 43 and 44. If I'm thinking about it in a wider context for the upstream, Chevron's figures are higher than the industry average, obviously you're trying to drive that lower over time. When I think about the portfolio over the long term and what changes, obviously the Permian is the biggest change in terms of that growth coming. Can you reference that because of where the Permian sits relative to the group, just so I can get a sense of how that moves over time? Some figures around that would be helpful. The second question is on renewable fuels. Mark, you referenced this in your section.
Regulation remains very supportive and it looks, if anything, things might accelerate. I was wondering, particularly focused on the U.S., how you can look to accelerate your exposure to that space, if at all? Thank you.
Biraj, you broke up a little bit, I think I got the question on carbon intensity, let me try to respond to that, I'll ask Mark to address the renewable fuels question. Our current carbon intensity is actually well below industry average if you look at global industry average. That's where you broke up a little bit, I couldn't quite understand your comment there. We're well below the industry average, in fact, really top quartile, we intend to stay top quartile. We have reported our data on 100% basis whether we operate or not, because just as we account for profit from every barrel, we think we should account for carbon from every barrel and not exclude things just simply because we're a non-operator. It's a very complete inventory of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.
You asked about the Permian Basin. It's actually one of the lowest emitting assets that we have, and we're working to take those emissions even lower. We're a leader in eliminating methane. There's third-party data you can look at that says we're essentially the best in the industry. We don't flare there, and w e're using new technology to ensure we can identify any leaks very rapidly and address those. We're looking to electrify the drilling and completion activity to a much greater degree than before. Talked about renewable power to support our Permian operation, and we're looking to accelerate that. There's things we think we can do to bring Scope 1 and Scope 2 down even further in the Permian.
The portfolio effect in the chart that talks about the path to net -zero, in large part, is a reflection that as the Permian grows within our portfolio, it's lower than our portfolio average today, and it helps bring that down even further. Mark, maybe you can take the question on the renewable fuel opportunities.
Thanks, Mike, and Biraj, thanks for the question. You are right. We do intend to grow renewables as part of our business. It does help to be in policy-enabled markets. Given our presence in the U.S. West Coast, we see significant opportunity there, and that's evidenced by our tenfold growth that we mentioned in the earlier presentation for renewable natural gas. Given our approach to renewable natural gas, that's actually the most carbon negative intensity fuel available, and t he system supports that. Renewable diesel, given our strong hydroprocessing capabilities in the U.S. West Coast, we look forward to participating in both the manufacturing and marketing of renewable diesel over time. Renewable base oil is a little bit different. That actually is not policy-enabled today. That's driven by our own technologies and the ability to have better quality products in the marketplace.
We can talk in more detail perhaps in the breakout sessions later. Thanks again for the question.
Okay, next we're going to go to Devin McDermott with Morgan Stanley.
Great. Good morning. Thanks for the time today. I have two questions. The first one is asset specific, and the second is a higher level strategy question. On the asset side, along with the Noble transaction, you also acquired a large gas position in the Eastern Mediterranean. It's been, I guess, a little over a year now since Phase 1 of Leviathan came online, and there's a lot of opportunity for further high return, low decline, expansions, both through those facilities into Israel and also elsewhere in the region. I was wondering if you could talk in a little bit more detail around some of the milestones that would be required for additional expansion there in the Eastern Med to come to fruition or the extent that's baked in or not baked into some of the volume growth in your plans. That's question one.
Question two is around sustainability and some of the lower carbon strategy. You just talked about some of the renewables investments in the core business, but another pillar of that is this new energy fund and some more early-stage investments. My question specifically is around the strategy to incorporate some of those early-stage investments into the core business over time. How are those monetized? Maybe give some examples from the phase 1 fund on what you're able to do there.
Okay. Thanks, Devin. Yeah, I'm glad you asked about Leviathan and the gas position in the Eastern Mediterranean. Terrific resource and an area where we're seeing, particularly on the geopolitical and commercial front, a lot of progress in relationships regionally that are opening up trade opportunities between Israel and neighboring countries. There are a number of different ways that we can grow that business. We've got capacity at both Tamar and Leviathan today that we can further utilize. There are opportunities to deliver gas by pipe to take advantage of LNG facilities that have ullage capacity that's unused right now. There are opportunities to move that gas into power generation and then export the power into neighboring markets. Finally, there can be opportunities in energy transition with gas and some of the things that can enable in terms of hydrogen or other opportunities.
A number of different potential pathways to further commercial success , you asked about milestones, and I think the milestones to watch will be commercial milestones that allow us to further sell out the capacity that exists today in those assets and would put us in a position then to potentially engage in further expansion. All credit to Noble Energy, terrific job in preparing that. We bring certain things in terms of our experience with big international pipelines, with LNG sales and customers around the world, with some of the things around energy transition technologies, with our balance sheet that are additive to what Noble was able to do in commercializing the initial production there. We think the combination of those two is really exciting. Last thing I'll say about that is we've got a number of good exploration blocks as well in the Eastern Mediterranean.
As we put the two companies together, we're acquiring seismic right now, and so it's an area that certainly offers the potential for even additional resource. On the question about our venture fund in Future Energy Fund 2, which is 3x the size of the initial fund, we're putting this into a wide range of companies, carbon capture, carbon storage. Within the last couple of weeks, we've announced two different geothermal investments, w e've talked about advanced nuclear fusion technology, more efficient motors. There's a range of things. These are startups. These are small companies with novel technology ideas, and it's early to know which of those will be commercially successful, which will scale up. We're prepared to be very involved in pilots, in being a customer, being a partner, being an investor in helping to scale these.
From the first energy fund, it's still early to declare any winners on that, but this is something we've been doing for 20 years. The last thing I'll say is, in our core business, we've been investing in venture firms or venture capital for two decades. We've had a number of successes that have scaled up. We've more than covered our initial investment and got a return on that, but i mportantly, we learn. We learn where some of these technology vectors are headed, how they can change our business. It's been a profitable enterprise for us, but it's also been good in terms of broadening out our capacity and our technology capabilities. I'm very confident that in the energy transition themes, that same pattern will play out. Okay, next we've got Alastair Syme from Citi.
Great. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple questions on the shale part of the portfolio. On the Permian, you look like you've increased your return on capital target despite the fact that you've lowered the oil price assumption. It sort of hints to much greater efficiency gains. Can you talk around how you sort of frame the debate about NPV efficiency, given that rate of growth and volume is going to be a pretty big part of that calculation for NPV? The other question was just on the other part of the shale and tight portfolio. Can you just sort of briefly frame how you distinguish between the DJ, the Vaca Muerta, and the Duvernay around break evens and resource potential? Even if it's just a sort of simple ranking of those three plays. Thank you.
Yeah. Look, we're trying to drive higher returns. One of the things, and Jay made mention of this in some of his comments, Alastair, we've changed our approach to project development. There was a time when we would really optimize around NPV, which could lead to an over-investment up front in facilities. There are ways to be more disciplined and austere in the capital side of these things to drive higher returns, and y ou may sacrifice a little bit of NPV in theory, but what you do is you simplify designs, you improve execution, and you create future options for follow-on investment should the conditions support that. We're really driving at a high return business. Look, it's got a big NPV too.
I'll just say, if we were to optimize around NPV, we might approach it a little bit differently, but I think we would trade off something in terms of returns. Returns are our primary focus, and improvement in returns, improvement in cash returns to shareholders. That's the way we look at it. You're right. The returns continue to look better in the Permian because our performance, our understanding of the resource continues to improve. On the other, shale and tight, we're earlier in the development of all of these. The DJ is very attractive. As you saw, the development costs in the one chart that Jay showed are amongst the lowest that you'll see anywhere. In Argentina, we've recently done some additional exploration and appraisal work up in the north, and we're evaluating now the performance of that. We're relatively early in the Duvernay.
I don't want to put them in a rank order other than to say they're all very attractive. They're attractive versus a lot of our other alternatives. They're all a little bit unique in terms of the oil, gas, or condensate production and the market access. It's not just a matter of resource quality or development cost, it's also a matter of market and what you see in terms of realizations, and we look at these really on an end-to-end basis. They're all good. They're all a little bit different from one another. Next, we go to Paul Cheng at Scotiabank. Morning, Paul. Paul, you might be muted. I'm not hearing you. Let's see here. Looks like we're having a little bit of difficulty with Paul. Maybe we'll come back to Paul and I see Doug Leggate's smiling face there. He's not smiling yet.
There he is. Good morning, Doug.
Thank you, Mike. It's great to see you guys, and I appreciate you making the accommodation to be virtual. It really helps all of us out, so thank you for that.
You're welcome.
My question is, this might be for Pierre, but whoever wants to jump in. I've got to say, I'm pretty impressed by what you guys are showing as a free cash flow outlook. I want to ask a little bit about slide 41. It looks like the cash margins and the volumes are not that different from last year, given the dominance of the upstream in the story. The free cash flow looks like it's stepping up pretty significantly in 2025, while maintaining the same kind of level as you did $10 higher in 2023. Last year, you showed us at $60. This year, you're showing us at $50. It looks like a big improvement in the free cash flow story.
I'm just wondering if you can walk us through the moving parts as to how you've been able to do that with a $10 lower oil price.
Okay. That's a great question for Pierre because he spends a lot of time on this, so I'll let him take that one.
Thanks, Doug. Look, we do have strong free cash flow growth, and we did also last year, as you said. Actually, we had doubling free cash flow per share in last year's Investor Day because we did have the $5 billion buyback each year, which was resulting in accretion to the share count. Fundamentally, it's the same drivers. You're seeing Tengiz come on, which are very cash efficient barrels when they come on, and the Permian grows. That's the lion's share of it. We just talked about on Alastair's question how we're able to get more efficient in the Permian in particular. The return on capital and the free cash flow generation that you're seeing for our Permian operation is not too different at $50 as it was from $60, as we continue to get better and more capital efficient. We have the royalty advantage.
We have now a little additional scale even with Noble. It's fundamentally from those two assets. It's similar to what we saw last year without the benefits of the accretion from the share buyback.
Okay. Thanks, Doug, and I appreciate the fact that you do see the free cash flow strength that we're representing in the plan because I think it's a very compelling part of our investor proposition. Let's see if we can get Paul Cheng connected back in here. There he is.
Hey, Mike, can you hear me this time?
I can hear you, Paul.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. Two questions. First, Mike, looking at longer term, let's say 10, 20 years from now, do you still see yourself, your core domain is oil and gas, or that is a broader base energy? In other words, that in the lower carbon, over time, do you see your overall asset mix or your maybe the revenue or profitability cash flow from your current core operation will come down as a percentage? That's the first question.
Okay. Why don't you ask both, Paul, so we can get to both here, and we're just trying to do that from an efficiency standpoint.
Sure. The second question is that on a ESG effort, CS R, do you look at those that as just a company offset of being internal that could evolve to become a really a profit center going forward and a [audio distortion]
Okay, I'm gonna answer the first question and then we-
[audio distortion] for you, and what is need in order for you to get there, and what in your technologies?
Okay. Paul, you really broke up on that second one. I'm gonna answer the first one and take a quick shot here at technologies at the end on the second one, and if I don't get to it, we can come back in the breakout. 10- 20 years from now, will our core domain be oil and gas? I actually think the answer to that is yes, I think it will be. Because 10- 20 years from now, the world is going to be using more oil and gas than it is using today. I know that may not be something everybody believes or everybody wants to be the case, but that is in fact what I think the data really does suggest. We intend to be one of the very best, one of the most responsible, one of the lowest carbon oil and gas companies.
For us to step away from what we're really good at, for us to step away from what we might be one of the best in the world and then leave that to others to do, I don't think is something that's good for the trajectory towards a lower carbon future, and I don't think it's good for our shareholders for us to step away from our core strengths. Now, having said all that, I think 10- 20 years from now, we will be seeing changes in mix. Mark talked about a number of renewable products that we're getting into, w e're investing in carbon capture and storage. Pierre mentioned hydrogen. I think 10- 20 years from now, these things will have begun to become bigger parts of our business.
Which ones and how still remains to be seen, but I have no doubt that those will be a bigger part of our portfolio in the future. I think the mix will change. Will the core still be oil and gas? Yes. Will oil and gas be much lower carbon intensity? Absolutely, it will. Will we be producing a lot more renewable fuels? Absolutely, we will. I expect us to still be a very strong player in that future. On the second question, Paul, where you broke up, I'll just say from a technology standpoint, I've mentioned carbon capture and storage already. We've mentioned hydrogen.
Geothermal is an area we've got a lot of history, and there's new and novel ideas on geothermal, where our subsurface capabilities can match up with some of these other companies and technologies and perhaps really unlock things more broadly geographically than historic geothermal has been. There are a number of technologies we're very, very high on, and we're placing our bets on those things that we think match up with capabilities we have or are likely to be able to leverage. Okay, we've got a couple of minutes left. I'm gonna try to squeeze in one more and maybe two. Lucas Herrmann from Exane. Let's see if we can get to you.
Mike, thanks very much for the opportunity. A couple of questions, if I might. Just in line with the way that you're thinking is it's shifting towards more value, less carbon. How does that leave the way that you think about your portfolio going forward? You've always been very active in terms of managing it, but where does that leave you thinking around disposition? The second, if I might. I mean, one of the things that struck me as very attractive about your portfolio in particular is you've got considerable duration in it, and you've got a portfolio which many assets strike me as requiring relatively limited maintenance spend.
As Tengiz falls out in 2023 or around that time frame, and the substantial CapEx associated with that program fall away, what do you think the actual scope is for you to continue to actually put considerable downwards pressure on the capital profile of your business, especially if there's greater focus by that time on more of the short-cycle assets?
Yeah. From a portfolio standpoint, Lucas, we're gonna look at higher returns, lower carbon. Assets that can deliver higher returns, assets that can deliver lower carbon will be favored in our portfolio. It'll be a balance, and we have to do both. It's not an either/or. I think that will continue to be a dominant theme. In terms of duration, we do have a lot of long-lived assets. We continue to bring our sustaining capital down, and it's a very capital-efficient portfolio. I think that's the predominant message I'd like you to take away, is we can be disciplined on capital because our portfolio allows it, and our capabilities continue to get better, and that allows us to deliver these strong long-term cash flows at relatively low CapEx.
I'm getting the message here that we've got to go to break. Sam, I think we had Sam Margolin teed up. We'll get to you in the breakout, I promise. We are right at the bottom of the hour here. Thank you for staying with us for the first part of the presentation. We now have a 15-minute break, and then we will pick up in the four breakout sessions. I think everybody has received links and instructions for that. We'll see you back in 15 minutes at 45 past the hour in whatever time zone you're in. Thank you.
[Presentation]
My name is Maria, and I am a Lead Data Engineer. My passion is running, and my life goal is to run a half marathon in each state. If I can do it, that means that you can too. I'm going to keep trying, and I'm going to be the best that I can be. The same thing with the analytics space. I am going to try my best to essentially implement the latest and greatest based on my capabilities. I am a Hispanic descent, and I'm a female in a tech field, but I get to bring in a different perspective to the table. You're actually providing value to people.
My name is Steven, and I'm a Reservoir Engineer here at Chevron. My passion is rock climbing. There's so many factors at play when you take on a big wall, whether it's weather or route finding. You have to prepare for all of the potential uncertainties so that when there's an issue, you're able to adapt and continue climbing. That's very similar to what we do at Chevron, where we undertake these massive projects, and there's so many moving parts. Through teamwork and all of the skills that people have, we're able to pull off some of the biggest projects in the world.
My name is Laura, and I am a Geologist at Chevron. My husband and I decided to start a nonprofit where we adopt shelter and rescue dogs and train them to be service dogs for veterans suffering with PTSD. Compassion describes my hobby in so many ways. Veterans do so much for us, and there just isn't enough done for them when they come home. You do have to have compassion at Chevron, having that understanding that there are things that are going on outside of work. Not every struggle is visible, and I think that's very important for people to understand.
My name is Ashwin, and I work as a Competitive Intelligence Lead. My passion is volunteering at my daughter's school. My daughter's small class has representation from more than seven, eight countries. The exchange of ideas and learnings that goes on in that small group without any kind of bias, it always helps me relate it back to the focus we have in Chevron on diversity and inclusion. It makes me a better team member. It helps me listen to them more carefully, understand where they're coming from, and then make the most out of the teamwork.
[Presentation]
My name is Maria, and I am a Lead Data Engineer. My passion is running, and my life goal is to run a half marathon in each state. If I can do it, that means that you can too. I'm going to keep trying, and I'm going to be the best that I can be. The same thing with analytics space. I am going to try my best to essentially implement the latest and greatest based on my capabilities. I am a Hispanic descent, and I'm a female in a tech field, but I get to bring in a different perspective to the table. You're actually providing value to people.
My name is Steven, and I'm a Reservoir Engineer here at Chevron. My passion is rock climbing. There's so many factors at play when you take on a big wall, whether it's weather or route finding. You have to prepare for all of the potential uncertainties so that when there's an issue, you're able to adapt and continue climbing. That's very similar to what we do at Chevron, where we undertake these massive projects, and there's so many moving parts. Through teamwork and all of the skills that people have, we're able to pull off some of the biggest projects in the world.
My name is Laura, and I am a Geologist at Chevron. My husband and I decided to start a nonprofit where we adopt shelter and rescue dogs and train them to be service dogs for veterans suffering with PTSD. Compassion describes my hobby in so many ways. Veterans do so much for us, and there just isn't enough done for them when they come home. You do have to have compassion at Chevron, having that understanding that there are things that are going on outside of work. Not every struggle is visible, and I think that's very important for people to understand.
My name is Ashwin, and I work as a Competitive Intelligence Lead. My passion is volunteering at my daughter's school. My daughter's small class has representation from more than seven, eight countries. The exchange of ideas and learnings that goes on in that small group without any kind of bias, it always helps me relate it back to the focus we have in Chevron on diversity and inclusion. It makes me a better team member. It helps me listen to them more carefully, understand where they're coming from, and then make the most out of the teamwork.
Hi, welcome back. This is our first breakout session. I'm Jay Johnson, the Executive Vice President of Upstream. For these sessions, they're all going to be similar in that we will clear the queue at the end of the previous session. Please raise your hand to re-enter the queue for each subsequent breakout session. I'm joined today by Eimear Bonner . Eimear most recently was the General Director of Tengizchevroil, or TCO, in Kazakhstan. She's here, and she can give you a lot of insights into what's been happening at TCO and the project, as well as our base business operations. Eimear now is heading up our new Chevron Technology Center. As part of our restructuring last year, we integrated all the different lines of technology that we have into one center.
This improves the integration, the teamwork, and actually makes us more efficient and effective at delivering the technology that we're building our business on. They're great partners with ours, Eimear and I work closely together in that aspect as well. Our first question is going to go to Sam from Wolfe Research. Sam, please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Great to see you. I guess I'll start with the Permian. It was an unusual year, to say the least, with curtailments and a real pause in activity that was probably longer than anything you'd done in the unconventional space ever. I wonder if you could describe a little bit the effect of the resource on your decline rates maybe, and what is the impact of this kind of cadence in activity to your longer-term targets? I could see a scenario where your base decline was moderated significantly, so maybe they're more achievable at lower activity. Whatever you can say about 2020's activity basis and its effect on today would be very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Sam. Yeah, I can give you a number of perspectives on the Permian and our other unconventional. We've talked a lot about the flexibility in our portfolio and how important that is, and we really got a chance to demonstrate that last year. The first quarter was strong, w e were seeing great performance out of the Permian. In the second quarter, as the supply-demand balance went totally out of whack, we quickly made changes and brought our activity levels down. As I mentioned in the presentation earlier, from about a $17 billion rate in the upstream down to an $11 billion rate, and a lot of that was in the Permian.
One of the things we also were able to do was bring our teams together quite rapidly, and I was really proud of how they came together with our midstream folks, our upstream folks, to look at the flow assurance. We even had flow assurance issues and concerns around crude oil, as you know, at one point in time. This team worked very effectively together, looking at our crude flows around the world, how those crude flows needed to change, where we were in danger of not being able to move our products through the systems, and what changes to make. We were able to navigate that very successfully because of the work that people did together.
In the Permian itself, as we went through the restructuring, as I said, we brought the activity levels down, but it was always with a mind that we would want to flex that activity level back up once the supply-demand balance came back into where we'd expect it to be in a more balanced state. We have not cut all the capabilities out of our organization, the reservoir engineering, the exploration work, the asset teams that plan the execution of work. We've kept that largely intact in the business unit. We have scaled back to what we consider to be enough to continue to exercise our muscle. We're currently running about five rigs in the Permian with two completion crews. We're allowing some DUC inventory, drilled but uncompleted wells, to build a little bit, but that's not a particular issue. We've got a fairly good balance right now.
As we continue to watch the supply-demand balance, we'll continue to use our flexibility and ramp up when the conditions are ripe. As we showed you on the chart that I presented earlier, it's really just a shifting of the curve to the right but not a loss of long-term value. In fact, we continue to innovate through this period, so our capital efficiency only gets stronger. As to the decline curves, you can really see when you look at that chart, you see one little dip, which were the curtailments that we took because of flow assurance concerns in the second quarter. Overall, what you're seeing is a pretty muted amount of decline given the heavy pullback in activity levels that we saw last year. Part of that being offset by the introduction of the Noble acreage into our portfolio in the Permian.
We really remain quite confident in our ability to exercise our flexibility and move up to take advantage of conditions as we look forward. Thank you, Sam. Our next question is going to be from Roger Read at Wells Fargo. Roger, please go ahead.
Yeah. Hey, thanks. Good morning. Good to have you all on. Appreciate the time. Jay, question from me is on the LNG front since you're the guy that made sure that we got Gorgon and Wheatstone up and going, to go to that first. 5%, 9% improvements, I think longer term, we've talked about before 15%, maybe 20% versus nameplate capacity. I was just curious, as you've made this progress, does that sort of level of improvement over time still seem achievable? The second question to follow up on, as you discussed the opportunities in the Eastern Med, where else you would look for LNG growth over time within the Chevron footprint? Ultimately, are we thinking brownfield developments in Australia, or would it be something else altogether?
Thank you very much, Roger. I'll start with Gorgon and Wheatstone. We've never actually put targets on what we expect that capacity creep to ultimately yield. We've talked about the tremendous progress we've made at Tengiz with roughly a 20% increase in capacity there over the years. Certainly as we look at Gorgon and Wheatstone, each plant is unique and different. We've seen that good progress so far, and I think this will continue as we move forward, and we identify what's the next constraint that holds us back. In the Eastern Med, as we think about, wait, before I move off of that, the LNG, you were asking about other places potentially for LNG. We certainly have opportunities to continue to expand on our base in Australia.
As I mentioned in my remarks, we were successful in getting tariff terms put in place for North West Shelf so that it can turn into a third-party processor of liquefaction capacity as the ullage starts to open up in that facility. We certainly have a lot of gas resource base in Australia. We can move through those types of facilities. We've got a couple of different options in Australia. Angola LNG continues to run with very high reliability, I've been very pleased with it. In terms of new opportunities, as we move to the Eastern Med, there is liquefaction capacity already on the ground in the region that potentially has opportunities to fill with gas from Israel moving through pipelines. It also has opportunity for the Qatar bid that'll be coming up at some point.
We'll evaluate each of those different opportunities based on the returns that we think we can generate and the relative cost structure that each one of those represents. I think no matter what, it's important to have LNG and gas supplies that are at the lower end of the cost structure, as well as the fiscal terms that allow us to make the returns that we're looking for. In the Eastern Med, the nice thing there is that there are a number of different pathways available to us for further expansion.
That capacity that Mike talked about that we have at both Tamar and Leviathan, as well as other discovered resource in the area, we can move that through some of the opportunities, whether it's ullage and LNG facilities, growing regional demand, or even putting some of this coal switching gas in place of coal, then of course, turning it into power and exporting power throughout the region. Those are the different areas that our teams are exploring in the Eastern Med. Thank you, Roger. Next question is going to be from Ryan Todd from Simmons Energy. Go ahead, Ryan.
Great. Thanks. Maybe if I could start with one on the cost side. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the 10% reduction versus 2019 levels. I think a lot of your peers have highlighted both some structural declines as well as unsustainable cost savings that they saw over the last 12- 18 months. You're seeming pretty sustainable. Maybe can you talk about what the primary drivers are there and including the outsized $600 million target for the Noble acquisition on synergies? As a follow-up, just wanted to ask about M&A. Obviously, you did the Noble acquisition not that long ago, w ould you still have potential appetite for future moves if the opportunity arose? What type of characteristics would the target need to have?
Would you still characterize the current market as a buyer's market, or is it starting to change with the oil price improving?
Okay. It's a lot of ground to cover. I'll take a good shot at it. I'll start out by just talking about our cost structure. I think we are really ahead of the curve, and we entered a, you can call it a transformation, you can call it a restructuring, but we started that even before the pandemic hit, and so we were already well in progress. As I talked about our upstream, we shifted from four operating companies to three regions, but we also really embarked on a mindset change and that the regions and the headquarters are there to support our businesses. Throughout each of four businesses, we went through a major restructuring, and we looked at every single business unit. While we retain the geographic orientation of our businesses, that works particularly well for us, w e did eliminate one to two layers in the organization.
We were able to increase spans of control and organizational health. We were able to make some very structural changes to our organization to allow us to capture many of the cost savings and be able to move forward. The other aspects that are more transformational, we are seeing the advances in digital, changing how we work, becoming more efficient in the way we work, and o f course, those are permanent as we adopt those. As we move through the pandemic, the digital platforms that we've been establishing are really starting to already pay off. The use of drones to be able to do remote inspections, HoloLens technology, other things that allowed us to do remote audits, remote inspections, to match subject matter experts with the challenges and opportunities that are presented in the field without physical travel.
The increased teaming that's occurring right across our organization have been instrumental in really helping us work more effectively together to lower not only our capital, but our operating costs. We benchmark comprehensively across our businesses with the best in the industry. We want to know what the best looks like, and we want to compare ourselves not against our business plan so much, but against what the best are doing out there and know, therefore, where we need to change, where we can focus to continue to drive our performance to a leading position. As we have deployed more and more of this throughout the organization, it's pretty powerful and it really enrolls our workforce with a clear understanding of what our objectives are and how to go about bringing those costs down, and m ost importantly, our revenues and margins up.
Costs are only half the equation, w e're working on our value chains, w e're working on getting the highest net backs possible. We're seeing excellent cooperation between our midstream and upstream organizations and working with our downstream, where it makes sense. In terms of the M&A, we continue to evaluate opportunities. We'll always do that. We were doing it before. We'll continue to do it. As I also mentioned in the resource picture, we do a lot of portfolio optimization. We're going to continue doing that as we move forward. In fact, you saw where I showed that we actually sold more resource barrels than we produced as we continue to make discoveries and look at our portfolio, evaluate what is the most competitive place to put those limited capital dollars that we're going to spend.
As we think about all that, and we look at new opportunities, we're able now to actually take those potential targets, put them into our portfolio, and understand where they're going to be accretive on cash earnings and returns, and where they would fall in terms of their ability to attract capital into the future, and how much we can afford to spend on them before it's no longer the case. These analytical tools and our ability to characterize the portfolio have really been powerful in us determining what to pursue and what not to pursue. With that, I'm going to turn to Jon from UBS for the next question, please.
Yeah. Hi, Jay. Thanks. You've got a roster of Gulf of Mexico projects in various stages of development, both post and pre FID. You've talked a lot about the flexibility, and optionality that you need to have in a portfolio. Can you talk a little bit about how your thinking has changed around how those hosts and those developments should look like from a sort of financial, economic return scale, concept design as you've sort of built in the macro views that you have and the need to have flexibility? I imagine that you have been changing your thought process around them. Then secondly, just to pick up on a point that you mentioned on the LNG question. You sort of raised the potential for some supply through Egypt. You talked about Qatar.
Is there some ambition within the organization now to build some portfolios, a broader portfolio of LNG presence rather than just such a big concentration on the two Australian projects?
Thank you. On the projects first, we have changed our thinking quite a bit about projects, and I think there was a drive. The question came up earlier, if you recall, about NPV versus efficiency. There was always a drive to get the maximum NPV, which tended to drive for larger and larger scale, and looking at that next incremental bit of value that we could try and carve out of a project. This led to very large, complex facilities that are difficult, quite honestly, to engineer with high quality and then execute. Our thinking now is to move back to a very much a returns-focused with minimum functional objectives. We're looking at what is the minimum functional scope that we can build that satisfies the economic objectives that we're pursuing.
We do look at some of the opportunities that may be in the future in terms of, will we need water flood capacity or things like that that could be added later, and make some judgments in terms of providing for that in the scale so that we don't preclude opportunities in the future. Fundamentally, we're trying to get to very standardized designs, designed around systems that we know will work, and using standard equipment and subsidy hardware so that we can make our process more uniform. We have, as part of our restructuring, developed a position called asset class directors, t here's four of them. One of them is a deep water asset class director. Just as we've done so powerfully with the unconventional by linking our different unconventional assets together to share best practices and evolving technologies, driving our performance higher, our cost structures lower.
We're doing the same now in the deep water. Whether it's deep water Australia, deep water Gulf of Mexico, deep water off the west coast of Africa or down in Brazil, we want to make sure that we're leveraging our best practice in technology and standardization across all those. We're doing that with our partners as well. I would say we're much more focused on capital efficiency now. We're focused on keeping it simple. As you notice, these projects almost form a queue. We're not trying to take on a bunch of projects all at the same time at the same place in their development to where it stretches our capability beyond what we can do effectively. We want to stay within the capacity of our organization to execute very well and with good discipline.
As we think about LNG, yes, we'd like to be able to build on Australia. We are looking at the potential and the value that can be added through working more of a portfolio of both supply and customers. That is something that we'll continue to think about as we evolve, but we will always stay focused on generating the highest returns. We think the LNG markets will continue to evolve from a point source to a point destination into more of a liquid market, no pun intended. As we do that, we want to make sure that we're building the optionality and the ability to get the highest value creation out of our LNG supplies with our customers, and meet their needs at the same time. Thanks for the question. Okay, our next one will be from Jason Gabelman from Cowen. Jason?
Thanks for the question. The first one on international unconventional. On slide 24, it looks like there's a decent amount of growth in that part of the business in the Duvernay and Vaca Muerta, y ou've been talking about both of those for quite some time. The Duvernay, you had discussed potentially growing a few years ago, and neither has really gotten off the ground. My question is, what's different now in those assets where you feel like now is a good time to grow them versus a few years ago when you had discussed growth and really not much has materialized over that timeframe? My second question, just on the split between short cycle and long cycle CapEx growth. You said you're at 60% short cycle CapEx and upstream right now growing to 75%.
Given the energy transition going on and the expertise within the business, is 75% short cycle CapEx share the right number or do you see that continuing to move higher over time? Thanks.
Thanks for your questions. As far as the international unconventional, there's been a lot of work to continue to de-risk and lower our unit development and operating costs for these assets. They have to compete for capital for funding. Again, because they're short cycle, we have a lot of flexibility to either ramp up or scale back depending on how they're performing relative to the other opportunities in our portfolio. As Mike said, we've set our capital targets moving out. We've given those to you. Our role is to decide what is the best way to utilize that capital to deliver the returns outlook and the cash flows that we're looking for as we move forward. We're actually pretty pleased with the rocks and the developments and some of the new opportunities in the northern part of the Vaca Muerta that we're seeing.
It's early days yet, and we're still in the appraisal stage. I think the decision on when to flex and increase activities, increase capital, really depends on the evolving supply-demand picture and when those products are gonna be in demand and can generate the returns on a sustained basis. We're not looking to ramp activity levels up and down. We really want to be as steady state as we can and only use that flexibility when we need to. It's nice to have options, and it's nice to have more opportunities than we're willing to invest in just so that we can exercise those options as we see the opportunities present themselves going forward. Both Duvernay and Vaca Muerta, I think, have a lot of potential for us, and we continue to see the value of those assets increase.
In terms of the short cycle and long cycle, we're going to need to establish new basis, and so that's why we've got long cycle projects still in the portfolio. Exactly, there is no ratio that we're targeting in particular. It's really more of an outcome of not only looking at our programs for this year and next year, but we project those programs forward. We plan 10- 15 years out into the future as we look at our assets and the effects that our capital investments are going to have. We shared some of that with you last year , if you recall, at the Investor Day, we gave you a 10-year look ahead. We continue to work that, and right now, our view is that we're gonna be moving from about 60%-75% with the asset performance that we're seeing today and the current list of alternatives.
As that continues to evolve, it may change over time. Our primary focus is gonna be on delivering the returns and the lower carbon picture that Mike talked about earlier. Thank you. Okay, we're now going to Dan from Mizuho.
Hi, thanks. Thanks, Jay. Looking at the projections you put out there, pretty impressive growth in production up to about 15%-20% by 2025, which is actually quite similar to the same CAGR you used to expect at $60 oil, but you're looking to do it at $50. When I look at the cash margins up another 20%-25%, again, kind of growing the cash generation. Two questions are, can you talk about what's driving that cash improvement in terms of asset portfolio mix versus improving cost? The second question is when it comes to maintenance CapEx of the upstream portfolio, I think last year you guys talked about $10 billion. You add Noble, that adds another $500 million-$600 million. How should we think about that maintenance CapEx changing as we get out to 2025?
The mix is quite different five years from now versus today. Thanks.
Thanks, Dan. On the cash, as Pierre said in his comments earlier, two of the primary drivers of the cash, one is the growing cash that's coming from the Permian. As we develop that critical mass there and continue to move forward, the efficiency has been such that we generated positive cash flow last year even, and we expect to generate a lot more as we move forward. You saw that our projections, given the expectations around activity levels, would be about $3 billion of cash at about a 25% return at a $50 price in 2025. That's a big contributor to cash. The other, as Pierre said, is really TCO, and it's the dividends that start to flow that we anticipate as capital project spending on FGP starts to ramp down. That actually happens well before FGP starts up.
It's simply the absence of the capital spend starts to flow now back to the shareholders. Those are the two key areas where we expect to see additional cash that drive that improvement in margins. Of course, we're focused on maintaining a very competitive cost structure, working on our value chain opportunities in our various crude streams and gas streams to make sure that we're driving for the highest returns we can get across the business. In terms of the maintenance CapEx, it's not really a construct that we use to manage the business. I know it's one that's very popular with analysts, but I would say that in general, our maintenance CapEx has come down. It's probably more in the $9 billion a year kind of a range. One of the challenges of it is over what time frame are you talking about?
To maintain production for a year versus maintaining production for 10 years is two quite different things. Over this near-term period that we've shared with you, we would expect to see about a $9 billion number would probably maintain our production through that period. Okay, we've got one last question. That's from Neil at Goldman Sachs, but we need to be really quick. Our next session will start on time regardless of when we finish. Neil, let's go quick if we can, please.
All right. I'll ask the question quick, and it's one that could take a little bit of time to respond to. Just federal lands exposure, how are you thinking about that risk in the context of your business, and does that affect the way you're thinking about prosecuting your Permian opportunity set?
Thanks, Neil. There's really two places where federal lands have an impact. In the Permian, it's actually pretty small. It's less than 10%, and it's all in New Mexico. It really doesn't represent a major part of our portfolio or plans forward at this point, although it could in the future because it takes some of that acreage potentially away. Most of it is not going to be affected at this point by the federal lands. In the Gulf of Mexico, clearly, the deepwater is all federal land managed by BOEM/BSEE, and that's something we continue to work with as we look forward. I'll remind people that the Gulf of Mexico has some of the lowest carbon intensity production in the world, represents very good jobs, high-paying jobs, and it represents a very important energy source to the United States and the United States economy.
We'll continue to work with the administration, but that's our view on the federal lands issue as it looks for us. Pretty minimal impact at this point. Okay. Thank you very much. That's going to be the end of our session. Our next session will start at quarter past the hour. Thank you.
Well, thank you for letting us join your Q&A session. As a reminder, you'll want to leverage the Raise Your Hand feature so we can put you in the queue and call on you for questions. With us today, we have Colin Parfitt, our Vice President of our entire midstream segment, and you have me, Mark Nelson, Executive Vice President of Downstream and Chemicals. We're looking forward to your questions here over the next 30 minutes or so, and we'll start off with Manav from Credit Suisse.
Hi, can you hear me?
We can.
Okay. My question is on RNG. You indicated that you want to grow the volumes by tenfold. First of all, you're Chevron, you can pick any fuel you want. Why RNG? What's the appeal of RNG? The second question is, you're growing it through a number of very interesting JVs. I think you have something called Adopt-a-Port program, then you have something called Brightmark LLC, and then you recently announced something with Microsoft Schlumberger, although I think that's biogas, not biomethane. The last one is, a slide says you want to grow retail offering. Are you actually going to build the stations or somebody else will take care of that? Thank you.
Thank you for the question, Manav. First off, why RNG? I would start by saying it leverages our strengths, and it fits with higher returns and lower carbon. In regard to our strengths, it's an area that requires you to be good with partnerships, that you have to be able to think of a value chain, both the feedstock and production side, as well as where it's going to be placed in the market. You have to really understand the low carbon fuel standards and renewable fuel standards in California and the United States, respectively, both of which Chevron is very strong. Our philosophy has been to leverage the dairy, and to some degree, pig farm feedstock solution, and that makes it the lowest, in fact, the most negative carbon intensity fuel available.
It's lower cost, it's lower risk in execution, and we certainly have a brand that can help place the product over time. We think we can do higher returns and lower carbon with RNG. To your question about partnerships and how that all works, there's partnerships on two sides of the value chain. The first would be on the feedstock side of the equation. What you've heard us announce would be something called CalBio and Brightmark in fact a recent expansion of our Brightmark arrangement. Those are both us working with collections of farms to acquire and then produce from the pig or dairy farm feedstock. The Adopt-a-Port program is a means of facilitating in the ports in Southern California, the ability to have trucks help us participate in trucks transitioning to CNG abilities.
Yes, we do have an ability on our very large retail network in the U.S. West Coast to either add and expand towards CNG sales directly or like we do with much of our marketing activities. We can leverage our brand to have other people build the stations where we will supply the product. You mentioned a recent announcement with Microsoft and Schlumberger, and that actually is different. You're right, and that's a good question to ask of Bruce Niemeyer and Barbara Burger when you see them later in a breakout session. Thank you for getting us started, Manav. Let's go to Neal from Truist Securities. Neal.
Yeah. Thanks for the time. My question, kind of along the lines what Manav was asking, I'm looking at that slide, what is it here, 38, that just shows the opportunity, not only in obviously the RNG, but the renewable base oils tends to stay. It looks like the investment in. Can you talk about maybe just near term, I see the 20x growth, but I'm hoping for more color there, specifically how much dollars going that way, and number two, can you talk about the patented innovative technology? A little bit more color on that as well. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Neal. Let's step back. From a renewable diesel standpoint, this is one that's actually not policy-enabled. We've chosen to do this because we believe we have a very strong partnership, in fact, a company in Novvi, where we are a major owner that has patented technology, including our ISODEWAXING technology, that allows us to take nearly all biofeedstocks and turn them into renewable base oil. That renewable base oil actually has qualities that we believe are going to be very useful to the long-term creation of high-quality lubricants over time. The concept here, and the 20x growth, of course, is on a very small base, because you'll recall in August of last year, we announced the first commercial production of renewable base oil.
In this space, what you have to do is you have to get qualifications from original equipment manufacturers, which we're working on today, and then we can scale up production over time. In the scheme of the capital for the corporation and even downstream in chemicals, this is not a capital-intensive type of investment. In fact, we can even license this over time, should we choose from our Novvi company. It's one that we can do with relatively low capital, and we can scale as demand grows over time, and we're looking forward to that here over the next two to three years. Thank you for the question, Neil. Let's go to Paul from Scotiabank. Paul.
Hey, Mark. How are you doing? Can you hear me?
Very well, Paul. Good day. I can hear you, but I can't see you. There you go. Now I can hear you and see you.
All right.
Go ahead, Paul.
All right. Thank you. Just two quick questions. One, California is always trying to pride themselves at the forefront of the environmental or the ESG, and they're trying to ban the fossil fuel vehicle probably sooner than the rest of the country. With your California system, how are we refining configurations? Do you think you may or may not need to change, given the government policy outlook over there? That's the first question. Do you want me to ask the second question, or should I go ahead and ask the first?
Go for it. No, go ahead, Paul.
The second question is that now that you already bought Pascagoula, and that for what? I mean, the Gulf Coast refinery, you bought it for a little bit more than a year. Can you tell us that in hindsight, do you still think that that is a good investment, and what have you learned?
Okay, Paul, you broke up a little bit on the second question, but I think it was about the Pasadena refinery.
That's correct
Let's start with California. Okay, California, kind of the market conditions and our configurations in California and Pasadena. From a California perspective, it's somewhat ironic. Pandemic notwithstanding, the demand for transportation fuels in California has actually remained very strong. In fact, with the announcement of some of our competitors about closures or conversions, some forecast that in the next five years, the U.S. West Coast will be tight on motor gasoline and jet supply. We're very well-positioned to take advantage that mobility data for California suggests that California is one of the places that people really like to move around. Of course, they want to do that reliably and for the right price.
For the foreseeable future, I believe success in California will center around very reliable refineries, a brand and an infrastructure that's strong, and the ability to comply and engage with the government for lower carbon standards. We've been here 100 years, and we've demonstrated the ability to do that. Perhaps the undercurrent in your question is around the renewable diesel space. What I would leave you with there is a few key beliefs for renewable diesel. The first thing from our standpoint is feedstock is critical, and partnerships and being able to garner the right feedstock is essential. The second thing is that markets work, and so margins and some of the returns you're seeing in the renewable diesel space over time would naturally normalize, and it's no surprise to see some of the weaker refineries perhaps go to closures or conversions first.
Whatever solutions or investments you consider for this space, they need to consider all of the heavy-duty transportation options and sustainable aviation fuel going forward. Finally, they need to be capital efficient, and that's exactly what we're doing at El Segundo today. Our small investments in El Segundo are allowing us to test running biofeedstocks through a diesel hydrotreater and an FCC to produce small amounts of both sustainable aviation fuel, renewable motor gasoline, and renewable diesel. From that and our hydroprocessing position in the West Coast, we believe we'll be able to use existing kit over time as we choose to produce more renewable diesel. A long-winded answer to your question, Paul, but I was trying to get to the essence of your question. The second one was about Pasadena. You're right.
It was over a year ago that we acquired the Pasadena refinery. If you think back to why we did that, it was actually to strengthen three value chains. First, it was to connect with our own equity light tight oil, so the ability to place our equity light tight oil. The second one was to supply our own Texas and Louisiana retail businesses with our own refined product. Finally, to have Pascagoula and Pasadena work together in regard to scheduling turnarounds and leveraging intermediates. The premise for all three of those has proven very true. That is all exactly as we anticipated. We did not anticipate a pandemic nor a winter freeze of Uri, of course. Since acquisition, we've been able to place more than 70% of our own equity crude into the facility.
We've had reliability increase significantly month to month as we've begun to operate the asset. Finally, we continue to test alternatives for capital-efficient ways to expand our light tight oil processing capability, and we're leaning towards a hydro skimming focus in that regard. Again, a capital-efficient approach because we're in search of high returns. Paul, thanks for the question. Let's go to Biraj from RBC.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask you about marketing. If I look at and think about the recent presentations from Chevron the last few years, maybe the retail or marketing element hasn't been such a huge focus in terms of growth versus some of your peers, maybe. I was thinking, as you're building out your low carbon product suite, renewable diesel, renewable natural gas, things like that, does that change your view on whether you want to grow that business more directly versus the sort of franchise model and the low capital model? Or do you think you can generate sufficient value without being directly attached to the customer to that extent? The second question is just lubricants performance overall. Could you say where 2020 earnings were versus 2019?
Just looking at, again, another peer group, there's a huge range, some up 30%, some down 50%. Just trying to get a sense of where Chevron was in 2020. Thank you.
Thanks, Biraj. On the marketing side of the business, actually it's a very critical portion to our value chain mentality. Using the U.S. as an example, we like to make sure that we can refine what we can sell. If I step back, we actually believe that we have a very strong retail marketing position wherever we operate around the world, and it's based on world-class brands, right? Chevron, Texaco, and Caltex. What we try to do from a higher returns standpoint, we leverage those brands to cost effectively place our branded fuels where we have the highest margins. I suspect most of you don't track the OPIS brand report, but those collection of brands and the Chevron brand in particular, garner the highest margins in the market.
When you go around the world today and see our 13,000- 14,000 retail sites around the world, the vast majority of those is where retailers have chosen our brand, and it's generally their capital. From a returns standpoint, that's a fantastic way for us to make returns in the business, and it shows our ability to partner and leverage those strong brands, which we do invest in. In fact, we also have another franchise, which is the convenience retailing franchise, one of the best, called ExtraMile here in the United States, and it will have its 1,000th site open up later this year. we believe that's an approach to place product, leverage quality brands to do it in the highest return fashion.
For the lubricants business, we don't actually disclose our earnings for that particular business itself, but most parts of the world had strong performance relative to the rest of the downstream businesses in 2020. It's because demand held more steady than the traditional transportation fuels. Our lubricants portfolio provides both passenger car, heavy duty, and industrial type oils, but we're skewed more towards heavy duty and industrial, and you can imagine that that was a stronger demand last year, and that proved in our financials as well. We are the one international oil company that has high-quality Group 2 base oil production, a very strong additives company within our portfolio under the name of Oronite, and then a very strong finished lubricants business. When you combine all that, we do believe that the lubricants business can continue to provide good returns for the portfolio over time.
Biraj, thanks for the question. Let's go with Doug from Bank of America. Doug?
Thank you, Mark. Can you see me?
We can hear you. There we go. Now we got you both. Yep. We can see you.
All right. I think I just turned it on. Thanks. I wanted to go to the slide on the earnings improvement that you showed this year and ask you what's changed year-over-year. I guess what's at the root of my question is, downstream improvements tend to get computed away, t his is on slide 35.
Okay.
I'm just trying to understand how much of that you think you're going to be able to hang on to, and what's driving specifically the self-help?
Thank you, Doug. Well, first off, if you step back and you think getting back to traditional returns in the downstream and chemicals segment, we've really said three things are required. The first thing is that refining margins get back to closer to historic norms and that volume recovery continues, and f inally, self-help. You're right, o n the chart that you referenced, our self-help amounts to approximately $1.5 billion of opportunity by 2025. To your point, given that we've reduced our refining margin assumptions just a little bit, that is a slight increase from what we showed last year in our security analyst meeting, and t hat's because of the progress that we actually made in 2020. There's really three categories to the things that make up that self-help. The first one is productivity and efficiency.
The second one would be value chain, margin improvement, and finally, turnaround and maintenance management. If you'll bear with me a moment, I'll run through those. In the productivity and efficiency space, like the rest of the corporation, we made significant changes to the number of layers and boxes, but that wasn't the primary driver. The primary driver was actually changing how we work, and we've been able to prioritize a lot of lower value work out of the system. We've been able to leverage digital tools to help us replace what we used to have in regard to boxes on the organization chart, and w e're finding more and more ways to get cost out of the system. One of the recent examples, we don't get to go very often to refineries these days, w e have to do virtual tours.
Just two weeks ago, I had a chance to be in El Segundo Refinery where we have so many projects going on in a refinery, as you can imagine, and it requires work permits, and you have to close out those work permits with inspections. In the old days, back when I used to be on refineries, it would take us 18 hours sometimes or 18 days to close out the number of work permits that were going on. Today, with drones, we can do that in 18 hours. a significant saving of cost, and there's numerous examples like that in the productivity and efficiency space.
On the value chain margin improvement side of the equation, that's actually about us continuing to grow our branded sales volumes, leveraging data analytics to actually better determine to whom to sell, where to sell, and at what price to sell our products. We're finding a huge opportunity there from margin improvement perspective. Similarly, in the refining part of the business, our ability to enhance our linear programs to be able to take advantage of what we've learned on yields over the past 12-18 months, as well as this feedstock flexibility that I mentioned in the primary presentation. There's a lot of money sitting there as well. On turnarounds and maintenance management, I've talked about this in the past, but there's significant opportunity for us in regard to how we are scoping using risk-based inspection to prioritize work.
2020 was a great example where we got all of our turnaround work done for under budget and without pushing scope forward. That's the essence of the self-help, and it's something that you should continue to ask us about going forward. Thanks for the question, Doug. Let's go to Sam.
Hey, thanks for calling on me. My question is about biofuels and, [Ram], both renewable diesel, SAF, RNG, basically all of it. The suite of products is clear, c arbon benefits, right? You talked about it. It's what you want to do. There's a lot of regulatory support, but they're not cheap. They don't really compete on cost. The question is: Is there a scenario, is it part of your outlook that these products ever penetrate markets that are more cost-conscious, like developing Asia or even OECD Asia, where hydrocarbon fuels still are going to maintain dominant market share just because of their cost? Is this really just a North America, Europe story, and then after that we really can't expand past that? Thanks.
Yeah. Sam, you hit on a key question about policy enablement and then the actual consumer's desire for affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner energy, all at the same time. Sitting in California, we don't have much from a downstream perspective, much exposure from a fuels perspective to Western Europe. California is a place where a lot of these ideas have germinated. Where it's policy-enabled and where we have a footprint, we believe that we can take advantage of that, and we'll do that in a way that's very capital efficient. Renewable natural gas, admittedly, from a scale standpoint, it's not a very large market, but it's one that we think we can play well in over time, and you'll see us do that. Renewable diesel.
I can spend a moment on renewable diesel for just a moment and say we're trying to be very wise about how we think about that. We do want to participate in both the manufacturing and marketing of renewable diesel, but we want to be very thoughtful about it. We have some key beliefs, and we've touched on these before, but I'll run through them really quickly. Feedstocks are really important. Markets work, so margins will normalize over time. You need to think through sustainable aviation fuel at the same time you're considering renewable diesel investments. You do need to make sure that it's very capital efficient. We think we have a portfolio that can allow us, if the market warrants it, to leverage our hydroprocessing capability to do that over time.
Just to be clear, renewable base oil is actually not policy enabled today. That's one where it's actually just driven by market interest and the qualities of that product. There are differences. As policy enablement expands over time, we can grow those businesses. Those are signposts that we do have to watch. We're having a lot of discussions in all the markets in which we do business over time with governments where we try to help them think of what I'll call technology-neutral solutions that consider lifecycle emissions. If they consider those and enablement of that over time, the best decisions can be made by people like ourselves. Great question, and one that I think will remain dynamic over time. Let's go to Jason from Cowen.
Yeah, thanks. I wanted to ask, I'll stick on the renewable diesel theme for a second. I wanted to ask specifically about feedstocks. Some other participants in the space are looking at some new feedstocks, things like algae, municipal solid waste, and you mentioned feedstocks are a critical component here. In your VC startups or whatever else you're investing in, do renewable diesel feedstocks figure into this, and do you see any promising leads there to alternatives to kind of the waste oils and vegetable oils that are currently used? Second, just switching gears on the pet chem projects, the two pet chem projects that you have in your backlog. It seems like you're progressing the Qatar project, but the U.S. Gulf one, it sounded like there was maybe a step change in your pursuit of that project, and you may be re-examining it.
Can you just talk about the status of those two projects, when they could be sanctioned and kind of things to watch out for there? Thanks.
Thanks, Jason. On renewable diesel feedstocks, the interesting part of your question is the creativity on feedstock also can have an implication on the investment required to produce the product itself. That balance, it's almost commonly viewed that soybean oil is certainly available and can be used to produce renewable diesel over time. Everything after that can create higher margins but requires a different type of metallurgy and a different type of investment over time. You're absolutely right. We consider all of those in regards, and you think of all the technology that we have in Chevron, we're both testing all of those and considering what we think is the best option. It's a balance of technology, creativity, and the investment required to create that flexibility over time.
We assess all of that, and some of that is what we're doing at our El Segundo project today. That will work itself out over time, but having the hydroprocessing capacity that we have in the U.S. West Coast in particular should allow us to figure out the economic balance of that question. We do have many seeds planted in the technology space, as you mentioned. On the petrochemical projects, listen, I would step back for just a moment and remind everybody that we do view the petrochemical space as a place that we can wisely grow over time, i t's because we still see continued growth with the pace of GDP, and we still believe that ethane is the advantaged feedstock, and we'll focus on that. Any project that we consider has to be competitive on the supply stack, right?
The best part of the supply stack. It has to be competitive from a project cost perspective, and that's leveraging the strengths of CP Chem in regard to both scale and technology. We have to have high confidence that we can execute on it. Today, we have three projects that are either underway or in progress in some respects. One we mentioned in the formal presentation, GS Caltex Mixed Feed Cracker. That one's going very well despite the pandemic. Really impressive progress there. You mentioned Ras Laffan. We continue to work FEED for Ras Laffan, and the earliest that would start up is 2025. We continue to work with our partners to have the same criteria on that project as we do others.
In the U.S. Gulf Coast, we completed FEED, and then p aused the project, and that was both part of our capital discipline activity, as well as ensuring that the project could be competitive. In fact, if not competitive, one of the best projects on those key metrics or criteria that I described. We continue to assess that right now, and if it meets those criteria over time, we certainly would consider pursuing it. It's important to remember in the petrochemical space that we're percentage owners of each of these. I know you all know that. Jason, thank you for the question. Okay, we'll go to the very last one, and we'll have to be quick because I was so long-winded on the last one. Let's go to Ryan at Simmons Energy. Ryan.
Good, thanks. Maybe I'll follow up on a different angle on from the earlier questions on renewable diesel. If you look at the California market right now, 20%-25% of the current diesel mix has been displaced by biodiesel or renewable diesel. As you look forward five, 10 years in advance, given the lower NCI targets under the LCFS program, the displacement of traditional diesel is going to be pretty significant over the next 10 years. As you think about your refining business, as you think about your petroleum-based refining business in the state, how do you manage that? It looks like diesel is going to be displaced more quickly than gasoline. Does diesel have to become more of an export product? How do you look at managing those traditional refining dynamics as renewable fuels increase their penetration over the next five-plus years?
Thanks, Ryan. I'll do the quick answer on this one. I apologize that we're running out of time. You're onto something there. Most people over the next five to 10 years believe that the U.S. West Coast will be tight on motor gasoline and jet supply and continue to be long on traditional diesel supply. That does create an opportunity for how you adjust your hydro processing capability in the U.S. West Coast. Given our strong position, we ought to be able to do that as economically and perhaps more capital efficient than anybody over time, and we can talk about that more in the future. Listen, thank you all for your questions and your continued interest in Chevron, and it's time for us to transition to the next Q&A session. Thanks again for your time. Thank you.
Good day. I'm Bruce Niemeyer. I'm Vice President of Strategy and Sustainability, and I'm joined today by Dr. Barbara Burger, who is the President of Chevron Technology Ventures and the Vice President of Innovation for Chevron. This particular breakout is dedicated to discussing the energy transition, and we look forward to taking your questions. As a reminder, if you can use the raise your hand feature, that will alert our team to get you placed in the queue so we can get to as many of your questions as time allows today. Let's start with our first question from Jeanine Wai from Barclays. Jeanine, over to you.
Hi, good afternoon, Bruce and Barbara. Thanks for your time today. On the energy transition. Hi. Can you talk a little bit more specifically about your transition investment in California in terms of the percent of your LCFS and cap and trade obligations that you expect to offset? The second question would be: Does your experience in California give you more comfort with investing in a regulated environment? Do you see these investments as scalable as other jurisdictions implement to more LCFS standards, which kind of seems to be where we're headed in the U.S?
Yeah. Very good. Yeah, let me take the second one first. I think, being headquartered in California, working for decades here in California is a natural advantage. We're working in a very well-developed carbon market. In fact, we were engaged with the governor and the legislature here in the creation of this market, providing our insights and advice in terms of how that market could be created and might unfold. That experience gives us a direct insight into how markets can function and evolve. I think we've also demonstrated to ourself and to others that we can be very successful in this kind of market.
As we think about the future, our portfolio more broadly of going outside of California, is in the majority. 60% of our activities are in markets that either have or are considering the development of a carbon market or a price on carbon or something similar to that. I think we're well-positioned given our history. With respect to LCFS, Jeanine, can I ask you to ask that again? As you were asking it, you were breaking up just a little bit. I just want to make sure that I'm getting to the right part of your question.
I was just wondering, in terms of the percent of your LCFS and cap and trade obligations that you anticipate that you'll be able to offset.
Okay. Yeah. We expect to be fully compliant in our work in California. We've got a very active operation between our downstream organization and our midstream organization that's engaged in trading activities. We are an obligated party, which is getting to be a little inside baseball here, but we're an obligated party. In California, we have certain obligations. We have a long track record of meeting those obligations very effectively and a very positive manner. There is maybe one extrapolation to make that as the world seeks to achieve the aspirations of Paris, one of the things that we think is a natural evolution is a development of a more broader carbon market. Although it might not be the first thing that we rely on as a society in terms of offsets, we think it's gonna be an important part of the future solution.
Having carbon markets established that allow trading, and the meeting of your obligations in the market through a variety of mechanisms is an important way to underpin efficiency. Have the aspirations that we share, that are described in the Paris Agreement, have those aspirations accomplished most cost effectively around the world. Thanks for the question. Let's move to Doug Leggate from Bank of America. Hi, Doug.
Thank you.
Nice to see you.
Hey, Bruce. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah, I can. Can you hear me?
I was looking for my square. I couldn't see myself there. It's a bit disconcerting. Nice to see you.
Yeah.
I wanted to revisit a question I've asked you before, and you've gone through this. Obviously, you've reviewed the strategy. ESG, the profile has raised dramatically in the past year in particular. I'm curious what the investor feedback has been as you've been formulating the decision to stay as a big oil company as opposed to a big energy company, the way that the European majors appear to have gone. Obviously, as part of your answer, I wonder if you could just touch on the relative resource opportunity. Really investor feedback, do you think you can win that investor perception war remaining essentially a hydrocarbon stock?
Yeah. Doug, thanks for the question. We engage consistently with our investors, not only through events like we're engaged in today, but throughout the year. Begins with our board. We have board members that engage directly with investors on a regular basis. We have our IR team that engages full time. A few years ago, as we heard from investors a greater interest in ESG matters, we established a dedicated ESG team, and they now full-time engage with investors around those subjects. Then, of course, members of our management team engage on a regular basis. We spend a lot of time listening to investors about all aspects of what they think of our business. In this particular space, the discussion we've had around higher return, lower carbons, we've gotten a lot of positive feedback around.
We've got a lot of positive feedback around the building, the fact that this strategy seeks to build on our strengths rather than pivot to businesses in which we don't have distinctive or differentiating capabilities. We've also received feedback on something we believe that the future of energy is lower carbon. The things that you have to do in order to be successful in the future have to evolve, y ou have to be adaptable, and we've certainly been that way for the past 100 years. It is part of what has allowed us to evolve our business to the position that it's in today. We recognize that the future of energy is lower carbon, and that we will have to reduce the carbon intensity of our current operations. We think that's a good thing.
We think deploying renewables, but in a smart way, in our view, in support of our business, we think aligns best with our strengths and capabilities. Investing in low carbon technologies that will enable the future, w e think that's a smart one, two, three approach. The feedback that we have gotten has been very constructive and very supportive of that approach. We have detailed a lot of this in the climate resilience report, which we published today, and I'm sure in that report, we will get feedback again from our investors, which we will look forward to receiving and to considering as we continue to evolve our approach in the energy transition. Thanks, Doug. Appreciate that question. Let's go next to Jon Rigby from UBS. Jon, over to you.
Hi. Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Maybe this ends up being a bit philosophical at this point, but you clearly have skill sets and knowledge and understanding around things like CCUS. Hydrogen fits very comfortably into a lot of the things that you do, big projects, bit of chemistry, a bit of physics, bit of HSE, all sorts of stuff that probably you're best to do. Do you see these things as effectively mitigating the profile of yourselves as a carbon emitting entity? Do you think ultimately these can be new lines of business whereby you're actually generating earnings and returns from the investments that you're making because you're deploying it across a wider set than just your own activities?
Yeah, Jon, I think maybe the direct answer is it could be both. Certainly, you take something like hydrogen. We're very familiar with hydrogen, as I know you're aware. We handle great volumes of hydrogen in our refinery operations every day. We've had hydrogen fueling stations in the past. We have a demonstration fueling station through our joint venture affiliate in Korea today, and likely there'll be some more in the future. We're very familiar with hydrogen, and we use hydrogen in our operations today. The development of blue or green hydrogen could certainly be part of the decarbonization of our current businesses. We also think that hydrogen holds great promise, and we're very optimistic about its potential for decarbonizing hard to abate sectors in the economy. In that, it could eventually represent something incremental to our business.
It might be useful just to talk a little bit on what we think about hydrogen in the technology aspect. I might ask Barb, just if you could weigh in here a little bit on what we think about hydrogen from a technology standpoint and where are we looking to innovate.
Sure, thanks, and thanks for the question. I guess I'd start where Bruce talked about that we did some early work in hydrogen probably 15 years ago, i n my organization, the Hydrogen Highway in California. It wasn't economic at the time, but it was a demonstration of technology. We typically get in long before the technology is in the money. We work with startups to look and help them develop and then de-risk the technology and then scale. We see a lot of innovation, a lot of promise in hydrogen, first as a fuel, as an energy carrier, and as storage. Really cut across actually all of the investment thesis categories that we're looking at, but t he cost needs to come down. On the generation side, we need to solve some issues around transportation and movement. We can't just use the current infrastructure that we have.
There's a number of technological opportunities there, and then obviously, we need to build the actual market for hydrogen, again, as a fuel, as a storage, as a carrier. My organization focused more on the generation, whether it's green or blue or there's also turquoise, natural gas pyrolysis. Looking for innovative ways to lower the cost of those, and then that transportation area. One of the things that I've learned in innovation is scale happens at both the supply side and the demand side. Getting those two somewhat synced in is actually part of the challenge.
I think being able to look at both sides of those and work both of those with our partners and with our existing operations is going to be critical for us to decide which of these businesses could offer incremental revenues to Chevron beyond just lowering the carbon intensity of our operations.
Thank you. I might just close, Jon, by saying that we've described our approach to the energy transition as being organized in three action areas, which is useful for us to think about, but t he lines blur between those. We find success and innovation in that third action area where we're investing in a lower carbon technology. We might find it carries over to the first action area to reduce carbon intensity because of its application, as well as representing new sources of revenue. Let's move to the next question, to Devin McDermott from Morgan Stanley. Devin, over to you.
All right. Thanks for taking my question. I have two on the renewable power side. The first relates to the strategy of incorporating renewables into your own assets and energy use to drive down the carbon intensity. You've done that so far largely through PPAs and purchase power agreements, but you also have this partnership with Algonquin to do some direct equity investment in wind and solar projects. Just wondering if you could walk through why, in some instances, it makes more sense for the equity investment versus PPAs, and just how the decision process works and whether or not more equity investment over time in renewables projects might be something you'd consider, why or why not? The second question is geothermal.
It was mentioned in the remarks earlier today, and I know it's an area that you've invested in in the past, largely haven't in recent history. What's changed from a technology or policy standpoint that makes that an exciting opportunity again?
Yeah. Thanks for both questions. Let me take the first one, and then I'll kick the second one over to Barb. With respect to how we're thinking about renewables, we did take our first steps with PPAs, both in wind and solar projects that are feeding various operations in North America. We were pleased with how those unfolded, and we thought there was an opportunity to lean in more. The approach we've taken there is a partnership. In fact, you'll see that as a common element across a large number of things that we do in the energy transition. The nature of the challenges that we're facing as a society, we think are going to be solved by partnerships and very rarely by one company or another going it alone, even maybe one sector.
You'll see a common, maybe a bit unstated theme at times, of partnerships being very important to progress here. We saw the opportunity to take the powering of our operations further in the case of the Permian and Argentina, Kazakhstan, and Australia, and felt that a partnership was the right way to go. Doing that requires the consideration of some investment in that. It's limited, but some investment in that. It also gives you different options. You can put the generation on either side of the meter, so to speak, and there are some technical benefits to being in one place or another. We get different options associated with that.
It's still not a business that we're pursuing as an independent merchant generating, revenue generating sort of activity, because as we've said in a number of places, we don't think we bring something distinctive to that. We know the geographies where we operate today. We know the loads that we're trying to address. Combining our understanding of those things with a company that knows renewable power very well, we think there's a partnership that can be beneficial to both. It gives us some incremental options as opposed to the PPA of the kind that we did in the first couple instances. That's a little bit of how our thinking has evolved. Geothermal is your second question. Barb, why don't you go ahead and take that one on and share a little bit how we think about that?
Sure. Yeah. Thanks for the question, Devin. On geothermal, so you mentioned we had a conventional geothermal business, and there's been a lot of excitement and progress being made on what I would call next generation geothermal, whether it is enhanced geothermal or closed loop. We see the opportunity and the promise for this next generation geothermal as a dispatchable low carbon source into the grids, particularly as the amount of the intermittent renewables increases. We see that market need increasing and increasing across a number of geographies. A number of different solutions are vying for that wedge, so t hese next generation geothermal technologies do need to get their cost down. We've invested in the companies. We've got geothermal experience. We've got subsurface capabilities. We think we bring something to bear and to partner with our startup companies.
We always look for something beyond just writing a check and investing in the companies. We think that investing in these companies, watching how the technology is de-risked and developed and the market grows will also give us a sense of is the opportunity for geothermal going to play out, and is there a place along that value chain for Chevron to have a differentiated position? It's very attractive? Thanks for noticing we made some recent investments, and we look forward to working with those companies and our co-investors. Some early work we'll do is to actually validate the technology in places around our operations to be able to understand where the progress of the technology is at this current stage and what else needs to be done. Thanks for the question.
Thanks, Devin. Thanks for those questions. Let's move to Manav Gupta from Credit Suisse.
I'm sorry I asked this question in the wrong breakout, so I still to ask it here. You did announce a kind of partnership with Schlumberger, Microsoft, and another private company. It looks more like biogas, not actual renewable gas. Can you talk about the partnership, what you're building over there, and what the final product will be? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for the question. Yes, we did, last week, announce a project in partnership with Schlumberger and Microsoft to build a bio feedstock-sourced electricity plant, is what it is. The product that we'll produce is electricity. They'll sell electricity into the grid. The feedstock into the plant is waste agricultural products, principally almond trees. In the Central Valley of California, this is in Mendota, California. The Central Valley of California is a large agricultural area. As a natural consequence of that, they have almond trees that have reached the end of their useful life. Presently, they're disposed of through burning, which is something that the state looks to cease doing by 2025.
What this project will do is it will take those trees, convert them into feedstock into this plant, and utilizing some technology and a few other things, what will come out of it is electricity, which will be sold to the grid, and CO2, which will be captured in a concentrated form and sequestered in a suitable reservoir in that area. What that will create is negative carbon electricity for the grid. It will create a solution to a present problem with the burning of that agricultural waste. It will create construction jobs, and it will create ongoing operation jobs. It will also, because it's a real project with real economics, it will create a pathway for carbon capture and sequestration in the State of California.
We hope that will then enable follow-on opportunities as well for the state, because most researchers see that in order to accomplish the aspirations of Paris and hold global warming well below two degrees centigrade, deployment of carbon capture at large scale is going to be required. In order for that to occur, projects like this that are able to make progress on the pathways in terms of what has to happen from a policy standpoint and some of the technical aspects of what's required to do that, h aving that all come together will be very productive in making carbon capture an option and an opportunity for the state going forward.
We're very excited about it. We're very excited to have high-quality partners that bring differential capabilities to that project, and we're moving through the feed process now, and we are looking forward to making a lot of progress. Thanks for noticing that we've done that, and it'll inform a lot of carbon capture progress, we think, for the state. Let's move to Roger Read from Wells Fargo. Roger, over to you.
Hey, guys. How are you? I guess we could go to slide 44 in the presentation. It's the one with the marginal abatement cost curves and showing out to 2028 and on 2029. I was wondering if, as we think about the technology that you have in place, tested, dependable, et cetera. Is that what we see through 2028 a s we go beyond 2028? Or we run into things that need to be developed, or do you have a better line of sight on it? What are some of the things that maybe are post-2029 as opposed to pre-2029 in that technology curve?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. The slide is in part constructed around our marginal abatement cost curves. That process internally goes through a collection of the carbon abatement project ideas that exist around the company. They're collected in a central spot. We do some portfolio analysis just like we do through our organic capital program and high grade the best opportunities so that we are making the greatest carbon abatement for the dollar invested. The things that were sanctioned first, which is in the first bar on that slide labeled MAC projects, are the projects that we have in flight between now and 2028. They meet our expectations of being or supportive of high returns and lower carbon. The next set of projects, which are listed as future MAC projects, are identified. They're part of the MAC curves today. They're actual projects. We know where they're at.
Usually, as Pierre said, there's something about them that makes them a little less attractive today. They need some additional development. We have to work concepts further. Maybe we need some policy support or some additional innovation. For one reason or another, they're less certain or less economic. We think with time, as we continue to work those projects, they'll improve, then t hose will be the next set of projects we would execute. Then the last bar deals with all the remaining emissions that are required ultimately to achieve a net -zero. We know where those emissions are, we know where they are by business unit, we know which operations they're in and which activities.
They get to the continued operation of certain kinds of equipment where we have combustion going on, and we're going to have to somehow capture that emission and do something with it. It really is across a variety of things. It does reinforce that we need additional development and technology in order to accomplish this. Not only us, but really everybody in our industry. We also need, in some cases, additional policy evolution to be supportive and have the right kind of environment to be able to make those future investments. We have, what you see on that slide is a roadmap. We've set some targets that guide our actions and hold us accountable to it, and then have parsed out what's a very challenging question of achieving net -zero into discrete, actionable steps in a prioritized manner, and that's what's represented on that slide.
We've got a line of sight on it. Obviously, there's a lot of work that has to occur. We're up against our time, and so I thank you very much for your continuing interest in Chevron and for your questions around the energy transition. We'll close this session, and in about four minutes, the final session will begin right on this same channel. Stay put and have a very good rest of your day. Thank you.
We're here now for the final Q&A session. I know we're back with the sell -side. Wayne's given me the cue here, but I actually want to start with Sam Margolin, because Sam, I think we had you in the big session, and I couldn't get to you. Let's start out with Sam.
I have to embarrass myself in front of the bigger crowd. I have a question about slide 12. It's the chart on the top right of slide 12, the percentage of CapEx of cash flow. I just wanted to get your thoughts on what do you think the effect of this on the industry is, because it's becoming very homogeneous. Everybody seems to have a plan that's sort of aligned with maximizing free cash flow. Part of that is modeling because it looks tight because we can't forecast which one of your peers are going to miss cash flow. Notwithstanding that, everybody seems to be on the same plan.
Does this mean that the industry needs to consolidate because there's now homogeneity around strategy, or is there some kind of supply outcome from this? I saw that slide, and it just made me think there was something more to it on the back of it.
Well, Sam, let me make a couple of comments on this, and then I'll let Pierre add his thoughts. Number one, it's been a decade of investors calling for capital discipline in this industry, and an industry to not outspend its cash flow. Look, we were in that boat ourselves, if you go back a decade ago. I think what you're seeing here is the inevitable outcome of a period of time when the industry was over-investing in a market that people thought commodity prices would only go one direction. We were struggling to get good execution quality on major capital projects. Investors have had enough. Pierre showed the chart that you're all familiar with, which is the sector's participation in the S&P 500.
I think most companies get it now, and I'd like to believe we got it before most of the others that you're referring to, Sam. I just think it's a necessary reality. We're in a world where shareholders expect to see distributions and returns. The last thing I'll say before I toss it over to Pierre is, I actually think there's much more differentiation in strategy today than you've ever seen. You got a group of companies that have said, we're not going to grow production ever again. It's going to go down over time. And we're not going to go into new countries, and a lot of things like that. You've got, on the other hand, biggest QO projects, best projects we've ever seen, but maybe not the right time to pursue them all at once.
We've been in a different place, I think, both on higher returns, on discipline with our portfolio, and on an honest conversation about the energy transition. I think there's actually a large degree of spread among the companies in what they're trying to do today, and it's not a homogeneous set of choices at all. Pierre, do you want to add anything else?
Yeah. Sam, I think it's a fair point. just to build off Mike's comments there. We just have five models, so I think the bigger takeaway is kind of the trajectory that we're on, which you can see we're going from near the top of the range to the bottom of the range. I think the confidence in our ability to deliver relative to others, I think, is what you're alluding to also. Look, our ability to grow and sustain this enterprise at a capital program of $14 billion-$16 billion, I think, shows how capital efficient we are going forward. then we have as more leverage to oil price upside than anyone else, and we showed that in our oil upside case. the confidence that our ability to invest very efficiently, and that gives us the ability to return more cash to shareholders.
Okay. Next, in anticipation of the Big Ten tournament on Selection Sunday, let's go to Michigan alum, Phil Gresh.
Hey, Mike. We'll see how things go here. We've lost two of our last three. In terms of just thinking about bigger picture versus a year ago, your capital spending on average, your guidance is down about $5 billion at the midpoint, and your production is still growing to at least a similar level for 2025 that you started a year ago, layering in Noble, of course. I'm curious, how do you think about that construct? How do you come up with that being the right production amount, the right production growth? As you look beyond 2025, how do you think about the company bigger picture, the asset base, and what you might look to achieve over the next five years thereafter? Thank you.
Yeah. Phil, I kind of come back to something I try to remind people of. We don't solve for production. Production is an output of solving for financial performance, and we're really focused. I tried to say it many times today and in other sessions, higher returns and lower carbon. Our organization is absolutely focused on return on capital employed, and what can we do to improve returns. We have to grow cash flows. We've got a dividend to satisfy. We want to grow that dividend. Production is what it is. In fact, we showed in the Permian, production this year is going to be lower than it was last year. We're not looking to maintain plateau production in a market that hasn't really incented that. We're looking to preserve long-term value and really improve returns.
The fact that the production number looks the same as last year is, in some ways, a bit of coincidence because we're getting there via a very different pathway with the acquisition of Noble, the reprioritization of organic CapEx to another level. The fact that those numbers are similar is not something we held as a constant. It just happens to be the outcome of the opportunity to do a really good acquisition last year at an opportune time. The impact of the discipline on our capital spend and our focus on higher returns, a s you get out longer term, Phil, I don't think the story really changes. We get to at $50, as we showed, a kind of a 7% return on capital employed.
That's a heavy lift at a flat nominal price from where we are today, but it's not a number I get particularly excited about. It's a waypoint on a journey to even stronger returns. Again, at flat $50 Brent, that's a lot of work to get there. It's a lot of self-help. We're going to stay focused on improving returns even as we get to that point into the second half of this decade. Again, production will be an outcome. We've got a very strong portfolio. We've got a lot of good things we can invest in. We'll only invest in the best of those and continue to focus on higher returns and lower carbon. Okay, let's go back to Biraj at RBC.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. I had a question on the future energy funds that you launched. When I think about the Chevron strategy, it's very much focused on your strengths. Obviously, that type of vehicle allows you to venture way beyond your core skill set and kind of see what's out there and gain some of that expertise. I'm just wondering, in terms of the scalability of some of these investments, do you have built-in options that if it turns out that direct air capture can be done very economically, you can roll that out within the Chevron portfolio. How does the end game for these investments work? Thank you.
Yeah. They all create options of some sort, Biraj. We try to preserve different pathways. In the early days, it's through sometimes advisory seats on boards. It's through participation in technology development. It's through field pilots, which we're doing with some of these companies, and the prospect for scale-up. We could scale up as a customer, we could scale up as a partner, we could scale up as an owner. We don't really predetermine the path to large-scale commercialization as much as we try to preserve options. Of course, the founders of the companies want to preserve those options as well. A reality is some of our peers are investing in similar kinds of things. In some of these companies, we have some of our peers that have also invested in.
There's always a commercial negotiation around the terms, so that you don't find investors advantaged or disadvantaged unduly unless they've somehow earned that right. This is all early-stage, nascent technology development in these companies. Some of them won't prove out, others will. We think having bets across a broad spectrum of things that we could conceivably scale and bring into our business is a smart way to approach this. You're right, we're looking to invest in things that would either be a natural fit with capabilities we have today or a logical extension of capabilities we have today, as opposed to something that would be completely foreign to the basic competencies and skills of the organization today. Okay, Jeanine Wai, we'll come back to you.
Hi, Mike. Hi, Pierre. Thanks for the extra time today. I do appreciate it. My question is just on risk and the balance sheet. I know in Phil's question in the main Q&A, Pierre, you said that Chevron, as you said before, doesn't have a hard and set target for the debt-to-cap ratio, but 20%-25% is where you feel comfortable through the cycle. Our question is whether, we've noticed in your forward forecast now, whether the higher percentage of spend on short cycle assets, if that means that you are more comfortable with maybe running at a higher debt to cap than you have historically. Where we're kind of coming from is, you mentioned also that you kind of like to have steady operations, not whipping things around. We know that ensuring return of cash to shareholders through cycles is important.
We noticed also in your downside scenario that you are taking on debt versus cutting back on CapEx. How do you think of that percentage now that you have 75% in your future plan as short cycle? Thank you.
You want me to jump in there, Mike?
Please.
Yeah. Look, it's a great question. What I'd say is the 20%-25%, again, is over the cycle. It does reflect that our portfolio is different. If we were to go back five, 10 years ago, and we had long-dated major capital projects and a much higher break-even, then it would be different. It'd be 10% or 15%. The fact that we have a much more flexible capital program, which we showed the flexibility on in the last 12 months, and that we have a break-even the last two quarters under $50, even with a challenging Downstream and Chemicals margins, at least the second half of last year. That gives us the confidence to be able to be in that 20%-25% range. Again, we can be below it, and we have been below it. We could be above it.
We would just want to be working towards it over time. If prices are a little high, you'd expect us to be heading below. If prices were low, like the $40 stress test, you'd see us at the high end. Look, we're not trying to be a 35% net debt ratio company. The point of that is it is a stress test. It's a debt ratio that's not too different from the average of where our competitors are right now, and that's five years from now at five years at $40. It's a real test to show the confidence you should have in the dividend. We did tweak a few assumptions. The $40 case and the $60 case aren't exactly the same. CapEx is closer to the bottom of the range. We have a little bit more in asset sales.
it's not a fully optimized case, but it's more than just applying our cash flow sensitivity. That's how we think about it. The 20%-25% really factors in that we have a very flexible capital program, and we have a low break even, and that gives us confidence to be in that level. Now we got to remember, three times in 10+ years, oil prices have corrected more than 50% in very short order, so there's a reason why we need to maintain a strong balance sheet.
Okay, let's go to Lucas Herrmann.
Mike, Pierre, thanks very much. I suspect this is a question you've been asked far too frequently in the other sessions, can you just talk about how your dialogue with investors has evolved over the last 12- 18 months, not least around Scope 3 emissions and investors' thoughts on accounting for those or otherwise? If you could tie that in with investors perhaps starting to ask more about the opportunities that you have to play a role in the transition? Again, going back to everything around hydrogen, carbon capture, et cetera, areas where I think this industry has natural skills. Thanks very much.
Okay. Thank you. . We have a lot of discussion with shareholders about Scope 1, 2 and Scope 3 emissions. Our approach has been to take accountability for Scope 1 and 2 emissions, to take full accountability. Not to distinguish between things we operate and things we don't operate, to create transparency, so oil and to gas, so you can see portfolio effects, and to commit to reductions today, a s Pierre did today, lay out the realities about what it takes to keep making progress on this towards net -zero in the future. On Scope 3, we've reported the emissions from the use of our products transparently for nearly two decades. We've never tried to do anything. We've been very transparent on that. These are about customer choice and activity that's beyond our control.
Our position has long been that rather than aspire to or claim to be able to control that, we think well-designed policy, and by that we really mean a price on carbon is the right way, the best way, the most efficient and economic way, to get after Scope 3 emissions, which allows markets to work. It allows consumers to make choices. We continue to advocate for that. I think, with a lot of the shareholders that we meet with, they understand that. I think shareholders are learning too, about this, right? This is a complicated subject. On Scope 3 emissions, one of the things you can do is say, okay, just imagine a barrel of oil that's produced in Saudi Arabia. It's moved on a ship to an independent refiner in the United States who refines it into products.
Products are sold out through distributors. They're ultimately marketed, let's just say, at a high volume retailer like a Costco. An Uber driver fills up, and a consumer takes a ride in an Uber. Who's responsible for those emissions? The producer, the shipper, the refiner, the distributor, the marketer, the Uber driver, Uber itself as a company, the consumer? How Scope 3 emissions actually are accounted for and where the accountability lies is not a simple thing. Markets are good at sorting those out. Last thing I'll say on Scope 3 is we're working to enable our customers to lower their emissions through the renewable products that Mark talked about. We're working on being able to offer offsets to customers that might want access to those and then investing in these low carbon technologies.
Second part of your question, look, we'd like to see these things turn into businesses that generate returns and earnings. We've invested a lot of the venture investments that I'm sure you've heard about. These things also take time. These are emerging technologies. The ones that are proven are things like wind and solar that we really don't see a differentiated capability or advantage in. Our intent is to build from strength into things that very few people can do that we think we can uniquely contribute to that actually help address the challenge. Okay, let's go to Jon Rigby. I haven't seen Jon yet today from UBS.
Hello, Mike.
There he is.
Yeah, thank you. Can I just ask two things? One's a bit sort of granular is just on the CapEx that you, I mean, you've got the $14 billion-$16 billion, but I'm guessing all of your projects work at $50 very well, I would imagine. Is there very much difference between a $50 and a $60 world and the CapEx that you would plan to be spending? I'm assuming, given you've got strong balance sheet, you've got projects that work, you can recognize value add. You've got a hard ceiling, you'd probably run presumably at the oil price is about $50 at $16 billion for the whole of the 2022-2025 period. Is that a correct way of thinking about it? You drop down if you had to go down to $40?
Yeah. I do think that's the right way to think about it, Jon. I think if we were in a sustained $60 world, we're probably closer to the high end of that number. If we're in a sustained $40 world, we're near the lower end. Kind of toggling in between, it really doesn't change our decision making much. The other thing that may have been mentioned in the big session, but it's worth repeating, is, I think most people know this, but we've got $2 billion-$2.5 billion a year of capital going into Kazakhstan right now, which is beginning to roll off. Certainly as we get past this year, that'll come down, which opens up flexibility and room within that range.
If you think of it as a $2 billion range between $14 billion and $16 billion, well, that becomes a $4 billion range if you take the $2 billion that's going into Kazakhstan and throw that in there too. There's a fair amount of flexibility for us to pursue the right things and to optimize that through that period of time.
The other question I was just going to ask, I don't know whether you can share anything with us on this, is that obviously you've popped up as one of Berkshire Hathaway's big investments. They have a very particular view of the things they like to invest in. They like long-term franchise. They like a moat around a business, et cetera. I think he's had a number of not exactly positive outcomes when investing in the energy sector. I was just wondering whether you've had any conversations with them about what they saw in you, what you could say about your business to them that kind of had a match in terms of their appetite to own what is a very large chunk of your stock?
Well, the short answer is I haven't had a conversation with them yet, John. We no doubt will, as we do with all of our big shareholders. I'll tell you, we're very pleased that they see value in our stock. They are historically a long-term buy and hold type of an investor, and they invest in the kinds of things that you talk about. Look, I believe our stock is a good investment. I think it's been undervalued. I think we do have a strong franchise. I think we've got a value proposition that is differentiated from our competitors significantly. I think over time, as you see some of these strategies play out for some of our competitors, I think that differentiation will grow.
Pleased to see a well-regarded long-term shareholder that sees those same things, and frankly, has already done quite well, as they began entering the stock around the middle of last year. Look forward to conversations with Berkshire Hathaway in due course, and very pleased to see them in our stock. Okay, we got a couple of opportunities still to get in maybe two more questions. Roger Read with Wells Fargo, we'll go to you next. Hey, Roger.
Yeah, thanks, Pierre. Just I wanted to say, Mike, thanks for, I don't know if I'd say defending or stating the obvious, that oil and gas demand will grow for quite a while and needs to be a core part of your business. Transitioning just a little off of that for my question. Pierre, you talked about being able to achieve lowest quartile in terms of emissions by the 2028 period. I was wondering, one, how do you actually compare to others? Is there an independent group that's doing that, or is that your own work? Secondly, as the 10% of management compensation that is part of emissions, how does that factor in? Is that one of the goals within that program?
Yeah. On the 10% that's part of our incentive compensation, that applies really to virtually every Chevron employee. That has metrics and milestones in all three energy transition action areas. That includes the lowering carbon intensity, but also increasing renewables and offsets, and investing in low carbon technologies. That'll be reported out in our proxy statement like we report out on all of our scorecard metrics. In terms of the top quartile, look, it's a really good question. It's not a straightforward answer because you will see other metrics out there. We're happy to take you through with Michael Rubio, our ESG general manager of ESG communications to walk you through it. We're comfortably below it. Our assessment of the median is something in the 40%, and then where we're at and where we're heading, we believe that that's top quartile.
We're not ending there, right? My working towards net -zero chart had post-2028 being in the mid-teens. Which is clearly very leading carbon intensity. You heard Jay talk about Gulf of Mexico being under 10 kg/ Boe, and Permian is mid-teens. This is a portfolio that's going to get more carbon efficient over time. When we say we're not done there's a 20 million tons of annual absolute emissions that we'll continue to work with offsets or new technology improvements. Our goal is to be among the most carbon efficient producers where we think we're largely there, but we're not stopping there. We're going to continue to make improvements.
Okay. Thanks, Roger. Let's go to Jason Gabelman from Cowen.
Yeah. Hey, thanks for fitting me in. I wanted to ask about TCO. I understand the focus is still on constructing the facility, but I'm reminded of what happened in Kazakhstan when another large project tried to start up a bout a decade ago, it had some issues. Are you concerned at all about the startup process as a more complex project to start up than others? The other question on TCO is what happens to those co-lending flows once that project starts up? Do you get some of that cash back that you lent out? Just how do we think through that? Because that's kind of an underappreciated part of maybe the cash flow flux up that you have after the project starts up. Thanks.
Okay. I'll take the startup question and then hand the loan question to Pierre. Look, project startups are always important, and we need to be really disciplined and conditions-based as we start up a complex facility. This is quite different than the project you're referring to, which was out in the Caspian Sea and had a whole host of different issues related to the weather conditions, the design parameters, and things that made that a challenging startup. This project, we started up a project now a little bit more than a decade ago called the Second Generation Project in sour gas injection, which was the first time sour gas had been injected into a high-pressure reservoir. What we have now is essentially, it's not quite a carbon copy of that because we're injecting all the gas that injected a portion of the gas.
Basically, the subsurface and the surface processing are what we're already doing at Tengiz. The technologies are proven and understood, and the risks are well defined. While there's no startup that you would say is without its risks, this one is not a unique startup like some other projects that have had difficult startups. We'll approach it with discipline and care, but you shouldn't believe that there are inherent risks in this that are not things we've already done before in Kazakhstan and done very successfully. Pierre, do you want to talk about the co-lending?
Yeah. The short answer, Jason, is yes. We're going to get repayment of what we've loaned, and we're going to get dividends. We've talked about growing free cash flow 10% compounded a year. The majority of that free cash flow growth is coming from the Permian and from Tengiz. Again, we haven't received a dividend in the last two years. We have been co-lending. All of that reverses as capital, first of all, starts heading down. It's more than $2.5 billion this year. It'll go down to $1 billion next year and $1 billion the year after that. That frees up space to pay dividends. Then as the project starts up, we'll get paid loans, and we'll have additional dividends. It's a big source of our free cash flow going forward.
Okay. That gets us to the end of our time today. Let me just thank you all for covering the company, many of you for quite some time. Some of you are newer. Look, I hope today was useful for you and informative. We really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us. We've worked hard to try to make executives available to you so you can ask deeper questions in your areas of interest. I'm sorry we can't be with you in person. I'm really looking forward to getting these vaccines in enough arms that travel becomes something we all can do again. I hope that later this year, Pierre and I are out on the road and able to see many of you in person, get on road shows with shareholders, and I look forward to seeing you in person.
Until then, please stay healthy, stay safe, and again, thanks for spending time with us today.