Gas

The United States government has said it aims to control Venezuelan oil sales indefinitely.

“We need to have that leverage and that control of those oil sales to drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday.

His comments come days after US forces abducted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro on Saturday. Since then, the administration of US President Donald Trump has announced a deal under which Venezuela would turn over 30 million to 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the US to sell.

That comes against a backdrop of demands that Venezuelan government officials open up access to US oil companies or risk further military action.

On Friday, executives from several major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, are slated to meet with the president to discuss potential investments in Venezuela.

Can the US control Venezuelan oil sales indefinitely?

“The US federal government can absolutely intervene, make demands, capture what it wants, and redirect those barrels accordingly. I don’t know of anything that would meaningfully interfere with the federal government if that’s what it decided to do,” Jeff Krimmel, founder of Krimmel Strategy Group, a Houston, Texas-based energy consulting firm, told Al Jazeera.

There are, however, geopolitical hurdles. The US has less leverage than it did more than two decades ago when the US military and its allies entered Iraq, another oil-rich country. Today, other superpowers could stand in the way in ways they did not in 2003.

“When we went into Iraq, we were living in a unipolar moment as the world’s only great power. That era is over. China is now a great power, and most experts consider it a peer competitor. That means it has ways to hurt the US economy and to push back militarily, including through proxy conflicts, if it chooses to oppose such actions,” Anthony Orlando, professor of finance and law at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, told Al Jazeera.

China is the largest purchaser of Venezuelan crude, although it only imports about 4 percent of its oil from the South American nation.

“It’s a question of whether they want to draw a line in the sand with the United States and say, ‘You can’t do this, because if we allow it, you’ll keep pushing further,’” Orlando said.

“If you’re a minor power like Venezuela, not China or Russia, you’re a country vulnerable to US intervention. That creates an incentive to align more closely with China or Russia to prevent it from happening, and that’s not a good outcome for the United States,” Orlando continued.

In the days since Maduro’s abduction, members of the Trump administration have also renewed calls to take over Greenland.

How does this compare with Iraq?

The US intervention in Venezuela has been compared to its involvement in Iraq, which began under the administration of former President George W Bush in 2003. At the time, Iraq had the second-largest oil reserves in the world, with 112 billion barrels.

However, production was limited. Prior to the invasion, Iraq produced 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), rising to 4.5 million bpd by 2018.

While the Iraqi government retained ownership of oil, US companies were often given no-bid contracts to operate there, including ExxonMobil and BP, and the majority of sales went to Asian and European markets.

In 2021, Iraq’s then-President Barham Salih claimed that an estimated $150bn in money stolen through corrupt deals had been “smuggled out of Iraq” since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Unlike during the Bush administration and its aims for Iraq’s oil, the Trump administration has been explicit about the role of oil in its attack on Venezuela.

“The difference between Iraq and this is that [Bush] didn’t keep the oil. We’re going to keep the oil,” Trump said in a conversation with MS Now anchor Joe Scarborough.

Comparatively, in 2002, prior to the US invasion, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asserted that the operation to take control of post-war reconstruction had “literally nothing to do with oil”.

“When the Bush administration went into Iraq, they claimed it wasn’t about that, even though there was substantial evidence it was a factor. This time it’s more explicit, so it’s clear it will impact oil markets. [But] one lesson from the Iraq war is that it’s easier said than done,” Orlando, the professor, told Al Jazeera.

Will this benefit oil companies?

Analysts argue that investments in Venezuela might not actually benefit oil companies due to rising economic uncertainty, the need for major infrastructure improvements, and the fact that large companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron already have capital programmes planned for the remainder of the decade.

“Either [the companies] will have to take on more debt or issue more equity to raise the capital needed, or they’ll have to divert capital expenditures from other regions into Venezuela. In either scenario, I expect substantial shareholder pushback,” Krimmel, the energy consultant, said.

Increased production will also require infrastructure improvements. Venezuelan oil is dense, which makes it more difficult and expensive to extract compared to oil from Iraq or the US.

Venezuelan oil is often blended with lighter grades from the US. It is comparable in density to Canadian oil, which, despite tensions between Ottawa and Washington, comes from a US ally with more modern extraction infrastructure.

“I don’t think Canada’s going to be too happy about all this,” Orlando said.

However, Chevron, the only US company currently operating in Venezuela, is seeking authorisation from Washington to expand its licence to operate in the country after the US placed restrictions on it last year, the Reuters news agency reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources.

The US role in energy, particularly oil and gas, has surged in recent years amid the rise of fracking technology. The US is now the largest producer of oil in the world. But recent cuts to alternative energy programmes and increasing energy demands from the artificial intelligence industry have led Republicans to double down on expanding the oil and gas sector.

“There is an oil supply surplus. Even if we were in a supply deficit right now, military action in Venezuela wouldn’t unlock incremental barrels quickly. So even if you were trying to solve a short-term supply deficit, which, to be clear, we do not have, Venezuela wouldn’t be an answer because it would take too long and be too expensive to ramp production up,” Krimmel added.

While Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves, the OPEC member represents only 1 percent of global oil output.

Currently, Chevron is the only US company operating in Venezuela. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips operated in Venezuela before Hugo Chavez nationalised the oil sector in 2007, leading to a downturn in production over years of disinvestment and poorly run facilities. In the 1990s, Venezuela produced as much as 3.5 million bpd. That has since fallen due to limited investment, with production averaging 1.1 million bpd last year.

“Venezuela’s infrastructure has deteriorated under both the Chavez and Maduro regimes. While they are extracting oil, returning to production levels from 10 or 20 years ago would require significant investment,” Orlando said.

The United States says it will control sales of Venezuelan oil “indefinitely” and decide how the proceeds of those sales are used, as President Donald Trump’s administration consolidates control over the South American country after abducting its president.

The US Department of Energy said on Wednesday that it had “begun marketing” Venezuelan oil on global markets and all proceeds from the sales “will first settle in US-controlled accounts at globally recognized banks”.

“These funds will be disbursed for the benefit of the American people and the Venezuelan people at the discretion of the US government,” it said.

“These oil sales begin immediately with the anticipated sale of approximately 30-50 million barrels. They will continue indefinitely.”

The announcement comes just days after the Trump administration abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday in what legal experts say was a clear violation of international law.

The US has said it plans to “run” the country and take control of its vast oil reserves, with Trump saying on social media on Tuesday that Caracas would hand between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil over to Washington.

The US actions against Venezuela come amid a months-long pressure campaign by the Trump administration against Maduro, who has been charged in New York with drug trafficking offences that he denies.

That has included a partial US naval blockade against Venezuela and the seizure of several vessels that the Trump administration says were transporting oil to and from the country in violation of US sanctions.

Earlier on Wednesday, US special forces seized two Venezuela-linked vessels – including a Russian-flagged ship in the North Atlantic – for allegedly breaching those sanctions.

The seizures came as senior US officials briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill about the Trump administration’s plans in Venezuela.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher said most Republicans have backed Trump’s actions while Democrats have raised a slew of questions.

That includes “how long this operation in Venezuela will continue, what it will cost, [whether] any American servicemen actually be deployed on the ground in Venezuela, and what is the Venezuelan reaction,” Fisher explained.

“The Trump administration [is] hoping to get everyone on side before the end of the day,” he added.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on social media that Wednesday’s briefing was “worse” than imagined.

“Oil company executives seem to know more about Trump’s secret plan to ‘run’ Venezuela than the American people. We need public Senate hearings NOW,” she said.

Three-phased plan

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Wednesday that the Trump administration is pursuing a three-phased plan that begins with the sales of Venezuelan oil.

“That money will then be handled in such a way that we will control how it’s dispersed in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime,” Rubio said.

The second phase would see US and other companies gain access to the Venezuelan market, and “begin to create the process of reconciliation nationally … so that opposition forces can be amnestied and released from prisons or brought back to the country”.

“And then the third phase, of course, would be one of transition,” Rubio added.

Gregory Brew, a senior analyst on Iran and energy at Eurasia Group, said the US announcement about controlling Venezuelan oil sales hints at “a return to the concessionary system” in place before the 1970s.

Brew explained in a social media post that, under that system, “producer states own the oil but it is Western firms that manage production and marketing, ultimately retain the bulk of the profits”.

A group of United Nations experts also warned that recent statements from Trump and other administration officials about plans to “run” Venezuela and exploit its oil reserves would violate international law.

Specifically, the experts said the US position contravenes “the right of peoples to self-determination and their associated sovereignty over natural resources, cornerstones of international human rights law”.

“Venezuela’s vast natural resources, including the largest proven oil reserves in the world, must not be cynically exploited through thinly veiled pretexts to legitimise military aggression, foreign occupation, or regime-change strategies,” they said.

Political situation unstable

Renata Segura, the Latin America and Caribbean programme director at the International Crisis Group, noted Venezuelan authorities have not commented on the US saying it plans to control sales of the country’s oil.

“And so we have to assume that either [the Venezuelan authorities] have accepted these terms, or that they’re just going to be forced to accept them,” Segura told Al Jazeera.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as president earlier this week following Maduro’s abduction, stressing on Tuesday that “there is no foreign agent governing Venezuela” despite US claims to “run” the country.

Segura explained, “There’s a lot of debate within the [Venezuelan] regime itself about how to move forward” amid the US pronouncements, stressing the political situation remains far from stable.

“It’s very important what the army might do,” she said.

“The military forces in Venezuela control enormous amounts of power – both economic but also on the streets – and there might be a moment in which they think they’re not going to be on board with this particular arrangement that the United States is presenting.”

Re “Lockyer Urges Steps to Cut Gas Prices,” Nov. 23: There you go again. The state attorney general, a typical Democratic politician, demagogues this issue without presenting all the facts. Your article and Bill Lockyer leave out the federal tax (14.1 plus 15 cents per gallon) which amounts to 29.1 cents for every gallon of gas. Add the five cents per gallon state tax and the four cents per gallon clean air cost and we have a total cost to the consumer of 38.1 cents per gallon.

If Lockyer really wants to lower gas prices, he should lobby the federal government to lower gas taxes.

HARRY BORLAND

Laguna Woods

*

One step Lockyer might consider is the state sales tax, assessed not only on the base price of gasoline but also on the federal taxes and on the state taxes. A state tax on a federal tax and on other state taxes. If that isn’t criminal, it ought to be. The state sales tax on gasoline is a dirty little secret. Every other item we buy as a daily need is clearly priced, and the sales tax clearly spelled out and added. At the service station, it’s carefully buried. So much at the pump, the placard says.

Take away the state sales tax, or even apply it just to the product, and you’ve removed much of the price differential. But don’t hold your breath until our Legislature recognizes this or does something about it.

AL V. CLINE

Rolling Hills Estates

Reporting from Sacramento — As a new poll found a majority of California voters want to repeal increases to the state’s gas tax and vehicle fees, Gov. Jerry Brown has begun campaigning to preserve them, arguing the sacrifice is needed to fix long-neglected roads and bridges and improve mass transit.

Repeal of the higher taxes and fees was supported by 51% of registered voters in the state, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times statewide poll.

The survey found 38% of registered voters supported keeping the higher taxes, 9% hadn’t heard enough to say either way and 2% said they wouldn’t vote on the measure.

The results bode well for a measure that Republican members of Congress hope to place on the November statewide ballot that could boost turnout of GOP voters by offering the chance to repeal the gas tax increase, said Bob Shrum, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

“If it qualifies for the ballot it will be, I suspect, very hard to sustain it,” Shrum said of the tax. “It’s almost dead.”

At issue is Senate Bill 1, approved by the Legislature and governor in April 2017. It raised the gas tax by 12 cents per gallon, boosted the diesel fuel tax by 20 cents per gallon and increased vehicle fees. The new charges will raise $5.4 billion annually for road and transit projects.

In launching a campaign to preserve the taxes, Brown has come out swinging, calling the proposed repeal initiative “devious and deceptive” in a speech Friday to Southern California transportation leaders.

“The test of America’s strength is whether we defeat this stupid repeal measure, which is nothing more than a Republican stunt to get a few of their losers returned to Congress, and we’re not going to let that happen,” Brown told the transportation officials at Union Station in Los Angeles.

The California Transportation Commission has so far allocated $9.2 billion for transportation projects throughout California as a result of SB 1.

The governor’s comments drew a sharp rebuke as “disgraceful name-calling” from Carl DeMaio, a Republican leader of the initiative drive who is a former member of the San Diego City Council.

The poll results are encouraging, he said.

New poll finds a volatile race for second place »

“It just goes to show you that in order for Gov. Jerry Brown and his backers to prevail in keeping the tax in place they are going to have to pull out all stops, and the level of dishonesty is going to be breathtaking,” DeMaio said.

The governor and other supporters of the tax “might have a chance” to succeed, Shrum said, if they make the question about safe bridges, fixing the state’s crumbling roads and boosting the economy.

That is the tactic that seems to be emerging.

Caltrans officials held a news conference Tuesday in Oxnard to announce $68.6 million in SB 1 funds to build an overpass for Rice Avenue over busy rail tracks.

The project will end delays as cars wait for trains to pass and make safer an intersection that has been identified as one of the most dangerous in the state, officials said.

Brown had planned to attend the Oxnard event, but his flight from Sacramento was delayed. The governor plans similar events throughout the state, aides said, and he made his case to reporters in a conference call.

“It’s great to recognize this, one of many projects that SB 1 is going to finance,” Brown said. “It’s going to save lives. It’s going to make commuting and traveling easier and safer.”

That supporters of the tax are addressing voters outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco is also noteworthy. The poll found only 44% of voters in Los Angeles want to repeal the tax, but the number goes to 55% in the suburbs, 56% in the state’s Central Valley and 64% in Orange and San Diego counties and the Inland Empire.

Shrum said supporters of the tax should be concerned about the level of opposition by voters, including the poll findings that half of Latino voters want to repeal the taxes. “That’s not a promising number, given you have to use a Democratic base” to mount a campaign to keep the tax, he said.

“If Democrats are going to save this they are going to have to spend a lot of money,” Shrum added.

Coverage of California politics »

Hoping to boost turnout of GOP voters, Republican leaders providing major funding of the repeal initiative include House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, who, because he is poised to be the next speaker, has a lot on the line when it comes to who controls Congress.

The campaign against the initiative is backed by a coalition of deep-pocketed big businesses that often align with Republicans to fight higher taxes, and it also has support from labor, law enforcement and cities.

The “Fix Our Roads” coalition fighting repeal includes the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Bay Area Council, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the League of California Cities, the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California and the California Assn. of Highway Patrolmen.

A political committee set up to fight any attempt to repeal the gas tax has raised more than $1 million so far.

The poll did not shake the confidence of anti-repeal coalition leader Michael Quigley, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs.

“This campaign will be about whether voters want to rip away thousands of local projects, whether they want unsafe, congested roads, and whether they want to let partisan politicians take us backward,” Quigley said.

The governor’s leading role could help to keep the gas tax on the books, but his ability to assist is limited, said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist and consultant to the poll. “The governor’s numbers aren’t what they used to be.”

The poll found that 48% of voters approved of the job Brown has done and 40% disapproved.

The online survey was conducted from April 18 to May 18 and included 691 registered voters. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Jill Darling, survey director of the USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, contributed to this report.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Twitter: @mcgreevy99

UPDATES:

10:15 a.m.: This article was updated with revised figures from state officials who reported that the California Transportation Commission has allocated a total of $9.2 billion from SB 1 funds for transportation projects.

This article was originally published at 12:05 a.m.

Last February, I climbed into a Jeep and rumbled up a rocky shelf road that took me high above a breathtaking corner of the Mojave National Preserve. At the top was an old gold mine where an Australian company had recently restarted activities, looking for rare earth minerals.

The National Park Service had been embroiled in a years-long dispute with the company, Dateline Resources Ltd., alleging that it was operating the Colosseum Mine without authorization and had damaged the surrounding landscape with heavy equipment. Dateline said it had the right to work the mine under a plan its prior operators had submitted to the Bureau of Land Management decades before.

President Trump had taken office just weeks before my visit. Environmentalists told me the conflict posed an early test of how his administration would handle the corporate exploitation of public lands.

At the time, observers weren’t sure how things would shake out. Conserving public lands is one of the rare issues that’s popular on both sides of the political aisle, they pointed out.

Almost a year later, it’s clear that the Trump administration has sided with the corporations.

Trump directed the Department of Interior to inventory mineral deposits on federal lands and prioritize mining as the primary use of those lands. He instructed officials to dramatically fast-track permitting and environmental reviews for certain types of energy and critical minerals projects — and designated metallurgical coal a critical mineral, enabling companies that mine it to qualify for a lucrative tax credit.

His budget bill lowered the royalty rates companies must pay the government to extract coal, oil or gas from public lands and provided other financial incentives for such projects while reducing the authority of federal land managers to deny them.

Under the president’s direction, the DOI has opened up millions of acres of federal land to new coal leasing and moved to rescind both the 2021 Roadless Rule, which protects swaths of national forest lands from extractive activities by barring most new road construction, and the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which puts conservation and restoration on par with other uses of BLM land like mining, drilling and grazing.

The administration is seeking to roll back limitations on mining and drilling for specific pieces of public land, including portions of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the watershed feeding the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and a buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers overturned management plans limiting energy development on certain BLM lands in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Altogether, the Trump administration and its legislative allies have taken steps to reduce or eliminate protections for nearly 90 million acres of public land, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. That figure rises to more than 175 million acres if you include the habitat protections diminished by the administration’s moves to weaken the Endangered Species Act, the organization notes.

“All of these things represent in some ways the largest attack on our public lands and giveaway to large multinational mining corporations that we’ve seen probably since the 19th century,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, who likened the level of resource exploitation to “something like what happened during the robber baron era when there was no regulation or protection for our communities or the environment.”

Stansbury has introduced legislation that would increase the fees mining companies must pay to sit on speculative claims on federal lands and require those funds be used for conservation. She told me it’s just a tiny contribution to a larger effort to push back against the administration’s approach to initiate extraction on public lands, which she described as so frequent and pervasive that “it’s a bit like whack-a-mole.”

“So much damage has been done, both administratively and legislatively, over the last 11 months since Trump took office,” she said.

As for the Colosseum Mine, the DOI sided with its operators back in the spring, saying Dateline Resources did not have to seek authorization from the Park Service to keep mining. The announcement was followed by public endorsements from Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The company’s stock value soared, and by September, it had kicked off a major drilling blitz.

The company has already uncovered high-grade gold deposits. It’s taking a break for Christmas, but is expected to resume drilling in the new year.

More recent land news

The Pacific Forest Trust returned nearly 900 acres of land near Yosemite National Park to the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation in a transfer partially financed by the state, reports Kurtis Alexander of the San Francisco Chronicle. Members of the Indigenous group were forced off their ancestral lands during the California Gold Rush, when state-sponsored militias undertook efforts to exterminate them. Some now hope the new property will bolster their decades-long push for federal recognition.

California State Parks is violating the Endangered Species Act by allowing offroaders to drive over dunes that are home to western snowy plovers, a judge recently ruled in a long-running legal case over the use of Oceano Dunes State Recreation Area along the Central Coast. Edvard Pettersson of the Courthouse News Service reports that State Parks will need a federal “take” permit to continue to allow offroading at the popular beachside spot.

California lawmakers introduced legislation to conserve more than 1.7 million acres of public lands across the state, in part by expanding the Los Padres National Forest and the Carrizo Plain National Monument, according to Stephanie Zappelli of the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

The federal public lands grazing program was created as a bulwark against environmental damage but has been transformed into a massive subsidy program benefiting a select few, including billionaire hobby ranchers and large corporations, according to an investigation by ProPublica and High Country News. The three-part series also found a loophole allowing for the automatic renewal of grazing permits has led to less oversight over the health of these lands.

A few last things in climate news

President Trump’s media company is merging with a nuclear fusion energy firm in a $6-billion deal that some analysts have described as a major conflict of interest, my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen reports.

House Republicans pushed through a bill that would overhaul the federal environmental review process in a way that critics say could speed up the approval process for oil and gas projects while stymieing clean energy, report Aidan Hughes and Carl David Goette-Luciak of Inside Climate News.

The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol is likely to be removed from California milk cartons, my colleague Susanne Rust reports. The decision exposes how used beverage packaging has been illegally exported to East Asia as “recycled” mixed paper, violating international environmental law.

Wind energy is again under attack from the Trump administration, which this week ordered all major wind construction projects to halt. As The Times’ Hayley Smith notes, the White House has been consistent in slowing down clean energy development in 2025, but offshore wind has been a particular bête noire for the President.

We’ve published a comprehensive collection of stories looking back on the wildfires that burned though Altadena and Pacific Palisades last January and all that’s happened since, which columnist Steve Lopez calls “one of the most apocalyptic years in Southern California history.” Check out After the Fires here.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more land news, follow @phila_lex on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Footage shows security forces dispersing crowds with tear gas at rallies for Ugandan presidential candidate Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, in Kampala. The pop star-turned-politician is campaigning ahead of Uganda’s January 2026 elections, as officials warn against interference.

BP has tapped Woodside Energy’s Meg O’Neill as its next CEO, its first external hire for the post in more than a century and the first woman to lead a top-five oil major as the firm pivots back to fossil fuels.

O’Neill, an Exxon veteran, will take over in April following the abrupt departure of Murray Auchincloss, the second CEO change in just over two years as the British oil major strives to improve its profitability and share performance, which for years has lagged competitors like Exxon.

The company embarked on a major strategy shift earlier this year, slashing billions in planned renewable energy initiatives and shifting its focus back to traditional oil and gas. BP has pledged to divest $20bn in assets by 2027, including its Castrol lubricants unit, and reduce debt and costs.

“Progress has been made in recent years, but increased rigour and diligence are required to make the necessary transformative changes to maximise value for our shareholders,” new BP Chair Albert Manifold said in a statement.

When Manifold took up his post in October, he emphasised the need for a deeper reshaping of BP’s portfolio to increase profitability and faced pressure from activist investor Elliott Investment Management, one of BP’s largest shareholders, which called for him to urgently address the company’s shortcomings.

Elliott saw the change of CEO as a sign of BP’s willingness to act swiftly to deliver cost cuts and divestments, a person familiar with the situation said.

An external change

O’Neill, a 55-year-old American from Boulder, Colorado, and the first openly gay woman to helm a FTSE 100 company, headed Woodside since 2021, having previously spent 23 years at Exxon.

Under O’Neill’s leadership, Woodside merged with BHP Group’s petroleum arm to create a top 10 global independent oil and gas producer valued at $40bn and doubled Woodside’s oil and gas production.

The acquisition took the company to the US, where it embarked on a major Louisiana liquefied natural gas project, which it is progressing in an LNG market braced for oversupply.

BP spent more than 40 percent of its $16.2bn investment budget in the United States last year and plans to boost its US output to 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by the end of the decade.

Markets react

Woodside shares fell as much as 2.9 percent after news of O’Neill’s departure. At BP, shares were up 0.3 percent, compared with a broader index of European energy companies.

Like BP, Woodside shares have underperformed rivals. In absolute terms, though, the stock has risen about 10 percent during O’Neill’s tenure.

BP’s executive vice president, Carol Howle, will serve as interim CEO. Auchincloss, 55, will step down on Thursday and serve in an advisory role until December 2026.

BP said O’Neill’s appointment was part of its long-term succession planning, though it had not publicly announced a search process.

Auchincloss became CEO in 2024, taking over from Bernard Looney, who was fired after lying to the board about personal relationships with colleagues.

After an ill-fated foray into renewables under Looney, BP has promised to increase profitability and cut costs while re-routing spending to focus on oil and gas, launching a review in August of how best to develop and monetise oil and gas production assets.

During BP’s third-quarter earnings call last month, the company did not give an update on the closely watched sale process for its Castrol lubricants unit, the centrepiece of its $20bn asset-sale drive to slash its debt pile.

“We question whether this is set to change BP’s thinking once again on key strategic initiatives – should they defer the sale of Castrol? We think yes. Should they cut the buyback to zero and repair the balance sheet further? We think yes,” said RBC analyst Biraj Borkhataria.

Woodside said in a separate statement that O’Neill was leaving immediately, and it had appointed executive Liz Westcott as acting CEO, while intending to announce a permanent appointment in the first quarter of 2026.

More than two months after an explosion erupted at the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo, neither the company nor the regulators responsible for monitoring the facility have released details on the cause and the extent of the environmental fallout.

Here’s what we do know so far: Around 9:30 p.m.on Oct. 2, a large fire broke out in the southeast corner of the refinery, where Chevron turned crude oil into jet fuel. The resulting violent blast allegedly wounded several workers on the refinery grounds and rattled homes up to one mile away.

The refinery carried out emergency flaring in an effort to burn off potentially hazardous gases, as public officials told residents in neighborhoods nearby to stay indoors. That warning held until firefighters managed to extinguish the fire the following day.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District — the agency responsible for regulating the refinery’s emissions — said Chevron would submit reports detailing the potential cause of the fire and any unexpected equipment failures within 30 days. But the preliminary reports were handed in nearly a month late — and without any significant updates from what was said in the days immediately following the fire.

In those reports, Chevron said the fire was “unexpected and unforeseeable.” The cause is still under an investigation that probably won’t conclude until next month, an air district spokesperson told me recently.

Company officials said the fire significantly damaged power supply, utilities and gas collection systems in that section of the refinery. Repairs are underway but could take months. Meanwhile, the majority of the 1,000-acre refinery is operational, distilling crude oil into gasoline and diesel.

At an air district meeting on Dec. 2, Chevron asked for leniency from conducting equipment testing at the damaged wing of the refinery that is now offline, and the air district obliged.

One member of the agency’s hearing board, Cynthia Verdugo-Peralta, said she understood that the investigation was “quite involved” but stressed the need for “some type of response” from Chevron on the cause.

“I’m hoping that this will never happen again,” she said. “Hopefully this repair will indeed be a full repair and there won’t be another incident like this.”

Environmental regulators like the South Coast Air Quality Management District often rely on the very industries that they oversee to arrange for monitoring and investigations into disasters. For obvious reasons, that’s not ideal. Experts say this system of self-reporting is somewhat inevitable, given that many government agencies lack the staffing, budget and access to provide adequate oversight.

But it often leaves the public waiting for answers — and skeptical of the findings, when they finally arrive.

For example, there are still serious questions surrounding the air monitoring systems at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery that were supposed to act as a safety net for the public nearby during emergencies like the October fire.

Under state law, refineries are required to install, operate and maintain real-time fence line air monitors. Indeed, over four hours after the Oct. 2 fire at El Segundo, Chevron’s fence line air monitors detected elevated levels of volatile organic compounds, a category of quickly vaporizing chemicals that can be harmful if inhaled.

However, at the time of the incident, the refinery’s monitors oddly did not detect any elevated levels of some of the most common types chemicals that experts say would have been likely to be released during such a fire, such as cancer-causing benzene, a typical byproduct of burning fossil fuels.

Experts are now asking whether those monitors were fully functioning at the time.

Earlier this month, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District fined Chevron’s refinery in Richmond $900,000 after the agency found 20 of the oil company’s fence line monitors were not properly calibrated to detect the full range of emissions, potentially allowing excessive air pollution to go undetected and unreported.

As for the El Segundo facility, neither the South Coast air district nor the refinery could confirm whether the air monitors were working properly on Oct. 2. A spokesperson said the air district is scheduled to audit Chevron’s fence line air monitoring network sometime next year.

But it may already be too late to warn nearby communities. Since October’s explosion, there have been more than a dozen reported incidents of unplanned flaring at Chevron’s refinery in El Segundo, according to air district data.

Each one raises the question: What happened?

More news on air pollution

The holiday season is associated with fragrant candles, incense and gathering around the fireplace. But health experts say these traditions should be done in moderation to avoid respiratory risks, according to Associated Press reporter Cheyanne Mumphrey.

That’s especially true in Southern California, where the air district continues to issue no-burn advisories, prohibiting burning wood to limit unhealthy levels of soot, per Pasadena Now.

Almost a year after the Eaton and Palisades fires, the health effects from breathing wildfire smoke are still coming into focus. L.A. Times science and medicine reporter Corrine Purtill writes that emergency room visits rose 46% for heart attacks at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the 90 days after the fires. The findings suggest the death toll could be much higher than the 31 fatalities that have been linked with the fires.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta sued the Trump administration — for the 50th time — after the suspension of $3 billion in federal funding that Congress approved for building more electric vehicle chargers, according to Times climate reporter Hayley Smith. California alone stands to lose out on $179.8 million in grants that could help reduce smog and greenhouse gases.

A few last things in climate news

The Trump administration announced it will dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s premier Earth science research institutions, per reporting from the New York Times. Scientists fear this could undermine weather forecasting in an age when global warming is contributing to more intense storms and other natural disasters.

A new analysis from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found the rate of sea-level rise has more than doubled along U.S. coastlines over the last 125 years, according to Washington Post environmental reporter Brady Dennis. The research rebuts a controversial federal assessment published this summer that concluded there was no acceleration in rising ocean waters.

The U.S. and Europe continue to abandon their electric vehicle aspirations, ceding the clean car market to China, Bloomberg auto reporter Linda Lew writes. The European Commission recently scrapped an effective ban on combustion engine vehicles by 2035, and Ford Motor Co. walked away from plans to significantly overhaul its EV production — including the imminent demise of its all-electric Ford 150 Lightning truck.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced ‘the largest gas deal in Israel’s history’, worth around $35 billion, with Egypt. Cairo has been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but experts say the country is facing an energy crisis.