02 Aug Bay Area Council, Local Congressman React to Chevron HQ Relocation

A Chevron station in Antioch. (Harika Maddala / Bay City News)

By Dan McMenamin
Bay City News

Chevron Corp. announced Friday plans to relocate the oil giant’s corporate headquarters from San Ramon to Texas.

Chevron said all corporate functions are expected to migrate to Houston over the next five years, with chairman and CEO Mike Wirth and vice chairman Mark Nelson moving before the end of 2024 to “enable better collaboration and engagement with executives, employees and business partners.”

The company says it currently has about 7,000 employees in the Houston area and about 2,000 in and around San Ramon. The company has two refineries in California, including one in Richmond, and supplies about 1,800 retail gas stations around the state, so positions in support of Chevron’s California operations will remain in San Ramon.

Chevron has faced headwinds locally in recent years and in November will see a ballot measure in Richmond that, if approved by voters, will tax the company $1 for each barrel of oil processed at its refinery there over the next 50 years.

The Richmond City Council placed the measure on the Nov. 5 ballot, with proponents saying it will help the city remedy the local effects of pollution from the refinery. A company spokesperson said Chevron believes Richmond crafted the proposal without enough community input and that voters will reject it after the company engages the community in discussions.

The Richmond refinery is the third-largest in the state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and a report to the City Council said the tax could generate as much as $90 million per year for the city.

Chevron on Friday also reported earnings of $4.4 billion for the second quarter of 2024, compared to $6 billion during the same time period in 2023.

The Bay Area Council, a regional business advocacy group, blamed local and state elected leaders for pushing companies like Chevron out of the area.

“Chasing jobs and employers out of California is no way to run the economy,” Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, said in a statement. “It’s an embarrassment for California that we’ve lost so many global companies because of misguided policies that make it incredibly difficult to do business here.”

U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Walnut Creek, whose district includes San Ramon, said he was “disappointed, but not surprised, to see Chevron’s announcement that it will be leaving San Ramon.”

DeSaulnier said, “For years I have encouraged Chevron to be a diverse energy company investing in clean renewable sources of energy as we in California have been responsibly transitioning away from climate destroying energy and towards clean energy that protects the climate and public health. Unfortunately, these efforts have been much less successful than I had hoped and, in many ways, Chevron left California years ago.”

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