The latest wave of Covid-19 infections has delayed Chevron's plans to return employees to offices in California and Texas, Reuters reported this weekend, citing a company statement.
The company, like many others across industries, planned to return employees to offices from September, but now this has been pushed back to October for Texas. For California, Chevron has yet to set a return date for its office employees.
The company, however, said that about a third of its global workforce continues to work onsite at service stations and offshore platforms.
While still focused on its core business of oil production and marketing, Chevron recently announced that it was setting up a low-carbon business division dubbed Chevron New Energies.
The new division's focus would be on "commercialization opportunities in hydrogen, carbon capture, and offsets and support of ongoing growth in biofuels," the company said, as quoted by Offshore Technology.
Chief executive Michael Wirth explained that "Chevron New Energies reflects our higher returns, lower carbon strategy. We believe the dedication of resources in a new organization will accelerate growth in multiple business lines that we expect to be part of a lower carbon energy system."
Large-scale wind and solar, however, are not going to be part of Chevron's diversification efforts, according to chief financial officer Pierre Breber. Instead, Chevron will focus on operations where it feels it has the advantage over competitors. These operations, he said, would, on the one hand, help it bring down its carbon footprint and, on the other, advance its low-carbon business.
"What we are trying to do around lower-carbon really is connected to our assets, capabilities, and customers. So one thing we're not doing in lower-carbon is large scale wind and solar," Breber said, as quoted by Upstream Online. "That's a decision that we're making because we don't feel like we have the competitive advantage."
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry. More