‘Onshore gas among fastest opportunities Bangladesh can tap into, but needs more work’

Chevron has been here for three decades. What has it contributed?

We have been part of Bangladesh's growth for more than 30 years, and in that time we have invested over $4.4 billion — in the assets and facilities we have built, the local partners we have cultivated, the factories and power plants we helped enable, and the jobs we helped create. 

Even today, our workforce is 98% Bangladeshi. We produce 60% of the country's domestic natural gas and 80% of its condensate. But beyond the numbers, what impresses me most is our reliability: benchmarked against Chevron's peers globally, our Bangladesh assets are consistently top tier for production efficiency. 

For 30 years, Chevron has been a force of stability in Bangladesh's energy system.

Forecasts have long said Bangladesh's own gas will deplete around 2030-31, and your fields must be declining. How are they doing?

I will not put a figure on the exact years, because reserve forecasts rest on many assumptions. What is certain is that all fields decline over time — that is true everywhere. 

Bibiyana is still the largest producing field in the country, though we have seen some decline over the last couple of years, and that is public data; Jalalabad and Moulvibazar remain important suppliers, especially in the Sylhet region. 

What matters is maximising the value we can still draw from these resources, on two fronts — the technical, how much we can get out of the rock, and the commercial, how much we can recover at the right cost. Our teams work on both, and through a global continuous-improvement programme, we ask our frontline workers for their best ideas and fund the ones with the most impact.

Chevron has developed its fields superbly, but its last discovery here was made by Unocal in 1998. Why no exploration since, when everyone knows Bangladesh needs more gas?

Oil and gas is a very long-term business. Our first discovery came in the 1990s, and it took about 10 years from discovery to first gas, then another five to 10 years of development drilling to ramp up to peak production — and only over roughly the last five years have we begun to see decline. 

Alongside that, we are working with stakeholders to explore new opportunities. The world has changed, too: through Covid-19, some countries and companies tried to move away from oil and gas; now every country is worried about energy security and about improving its own domestic supply. 

In that global competition for investment, Bangladesh can stand out, because the fundamentals are strong — a large, very young population and a government with ambitious growth goals, all of which will take energy.

So, will Chevron actually explore new gas and oil here?

We are always interested in new opportunities where we can bring our strengths — a very talented workforce, world-class assets that are now underutilised, and partnerships we have already built. 

Exploration carries risk, and it varies: onshore is a lower front-end investment than offshore, where you must build everything from scratch. But in every case, the return has to be predictable and matched to the risk a company is taking, which is why we keep coming back to the conditions for investment. 

Bangladesh remains geologically interesting, but it needs more work and understanding before we can make firm commitments.

A senior Chevron executive, Javier La Rosa, met the prime minister, who asked Chevron to help explore new opportunities. What can you say about that?

It has been my honour to meet the honourable prime minister — already twice since I started, once through the US-Bangladesh Business Council and again during Mr La Rosa's visit. I cannot share the commercial details, but we continue to work with the government on a shared understanding of energy security. 

At that council week every company was asking for the same thing, because we are all here as believers in Bangladesh. What we need is the right investment environment — predictability, so that what a company signs up for is preserved over the long term, and commercial terms that are competitive globally. 

Above all, it comes down to the certainty of contracts.

From your experience, what must the government do to overcome the gas crisis, in the short and long term?

Start with the long term. According to UN estimates Bangladesh has about 178 million people today, rising to 195 million in 10 years, and the prime minister has set the ambition of doubling the economy to $1 trillion in that time. 

All of that will require the energy system to grow by at least 50 to 100% over 10 years. So the challenge is not to choose which energy system is best, but to find the right mix, at the right scale, at the right time. 

In the shorter term, it comes down to investment, and we have long advocated for onshore natural gas exploration and production, because those are among the fastest opportunities the country can bring into its energy system. Offshore may be interesting, but it takes far longer and carries higher risk; renewables, nuclear and coal all have their place for the long term.

In a nutshell, your closing thought?

Having just arrived, I have been struck by the scale of the ambition and the opportunity, and by a collective understanding among stakeholders about creating the conditions to unlock it. Energy is at the centre of that — it is foundational to prosperity, to quality of life, to growing the economy, the jobs and the factories. 

Chevron has been a force of stability for over 30 years, and we wish to be part of the next chapter, helping to build Bangladesh's energy resilience.