“Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, said on Wednesday its production of oil and gas has declined from a relatively strong fourth quarter while work on two of its three biggest U.S. refineries cut into downstream performance.
Output from oil and gas wells – accounting for about nine tenths of the company’s business – declined in the first two months of the first quarter from the previous quarter, due to maintenance in the Gulf of Mexico and weather-related downtime elsewhere.
Maintenance at Chevron’s largest refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the ninth-largest refinery in the country, led to a decline of 145,000 barrels per day in U.S. refining input from the previous quarter to 557,000 bpd.
Its domestic refining operations have already been hit hard by the shutdown of a key unit at its plant in Richmond, California, after a fire last August. That unit is due to start up at some point this quarter.
In the second quarter of 2012 – the last period of full U.S. refining production before the fire – input was 928,000 bpd.
Unlike past quarters, the San Ramon, California-based company did not indicate where its first-quarter earnings were headed in its quarterly interim update on Wednesday….”
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