California’s regulatory environment is so hostile, it is nearly impossible to dig, drill, develop, mine, log, graze grow, or manufacture anything
California’s own Chevron Oil company is moving its headquarters to Houston, Texas from San Ramon, California, the latest big business to flee the Golden State. Chevron is in good company joining X/Twitter, Space X, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Charles Schwab, and Toyota Motor North America, to name a few of the mega-businesses leaving California because of the state’s leftist/Marxist politics and regulatory environment.
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This comes as no surprise to anyone watching California Governor Gavin Newsom deflect from his own debacles and radical policies to the oil and gas industry, demonizing producers and refiners as evil polluters and price gougers, even filing a lawsuit last year against five of the largest oil companies, including Chevron.
Except, Newsom is wrong. Newsom claims that the state’s highest-in-the-nation gas taxes and prices are not what led to dramatically spiking gas/oil prices but because of price gouging by the oil industry. In May, Newsom even signed a gas price gouging law into place.
“We have created a regulatory environment in California where it is nearly impossible to dig, drill, develop, mine, log, graze, grow, or manufacture anything,” Ed Ring said in the Globe in January. And Gov. Newsom is orchestrating all of this despite California’s need for oil and gas. “Despite being a sunny, solar friendly state, with ample areas blessed with high wind, California still derives 50 percent of its total energy from crude oil. Another 34 percent comes from natural gas. This fossil fuel total for California energy, 84 percent, actually exceeds the world average for 2022, which – including coal – came in at 82 percent.”
The California Energy Commission disagrees with the governor, showing that gas price spikes occurred in the last few years because of refineries temporally going out of commission because not enough oil was getting to them. The CEC also said that lower prices this year were caused by many factors, including a cut in industry costs and profits, lower crude oil costs, and in how much environmental programs are getting from the industry, the Globe reported. Prices could even be lower, but as the CEC noted, the only thing that went up was the gas tax itself.
Adding insult to injury, last year Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Tai Milder his “Oil Czar,” to lead the state’s investigation into California’s perpetually high gasoline prices. Milder will decide “whether it should impose a cap on oil refiner profits in order to reduce the perpetual gulf between California’s gas prices and the rest of the country’s,” Politico reported parroting the governor.
Friday Chevron announced their corporate relocation to Houston Texas from the Bay Area, where it has been based since 1879.
“The company expects all corporate functions to migrate to Houston over the next five years,” Chevron said. “Positions in support of the company’s California operations will remain in San Ramon.”
Chevron Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth and Vice Chairman Mark Nelson will move to Houston before the end of the year to be closer to other senior leaders, employees and business partners, NBC Bay Area reported. Other employees based in San Ramon won’t be impacted immediately, and the company said it expects the move to Houston to happen over the next five years. Those who work in positions that support Chevron’s California operations will remain in San Ramon.
Chevron has roughly 7,000 employees in the Houston area and 2,000 employees in San Ramon, the company reports, NBC Bay Area said. The company operates crude oil fields, technical facilities and two refineries in California. It also supplies more than 1,800 gas stations across the state.
Another nail in the coffin came from local politicians. In June, Richmond city leaders voted unanimously in favor of a ballot measure that will ask voters whether or not Chevron should pay an additional business tax on its refinery operations, NBC Bay Area reported. “The mayor and vice mayor of Richmond have said the new tax would raise millions of dollars annually for the city.”
If I was the Chevron CEO, I’d also leave California.
California voters aren’t buying the governor’s lies about the price gouging either. A recent poll found nearly half of all Californians blame the state’s gas tax for why California’s gasoline prices are so high, with only around a third saying that price gouging is to blame.
I have watched and reported on this for about two decades – so it’s no surprise at all, other than I’m not sure how oil and gas companies lasted so long in California.
As we reported in March, the California Governor, Legislature and State Air Resources Board are working hand in glove to restrict the availability of oil and gas and increase the cost of gas at the pump so severely, middle class and working class drivers will be making choices between groceries and fuel for the car.
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