Chevron (NYSE: CVX) delivered better-than-expected earnings in the second quarter of 2025 despite falling oil prices and weaker refining margins. Profits fell year-over-year. However, strong production in the Permian Basin and careful capital management allowed the company to generate solid cash flow. This also helped maintain returns for shareholders.
Alongside its financial results, Chevron reaffirmed its climate goals. This includes net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2050. It also involves ongoing investments in carbon capture, hydrogen, and renewable fuels. These efforts support a wider energy transition strategy.
Chevron’s Q2 Delivers Amid Oil Price Drops
Chevron Corporation shared its financial results for the second quarter of 2025. The results show pressure from lower oil prices but also show progress in its long-term strategy.
For the quarter ending June 30, 2025, the company posted net income of $2.49 billion, or $1.45 per share. After adjusting for special items, earnings came in at $1.77 per share, slightly higher than what Wall Street expected.
Total revenue came in at $44.82 billion, a decline of about 12% compared to the same quarter last year. This marks Chevron’s lowest quarterly profit in four years, largely due to weaker oil prices and refining margins.
Even so, the company’s earnings still exceeded analyst expectations on an adjusted basis.
Chevron’s earnings followed a similar trend seen across the oil and gas sector. Other major energy firms also reported lower profits, driven by high production levels and flat global demand.
In particular, weaker natural gas prices and reduced margins in fuels and chemicals impacted Chevron’s bottom line.
Strong Oil Production and Cash Flow Help Offset Weak Prices
Despite the decline in profits, Chevron maintained a strong operating performance. The company increased production in the Permian Basin, reaching over 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. This is the highest output the company has reported from that region since mid-2024.
Chevron generated $4.9 billion in free cash flow during the quarter, a 15% increase compared to the first quarter of the year. The company also returned $5.5 billion to shareholders through a mix of dividends and share buybacks.
Notably, Chevron continued its stock buyback program temporarily in the second quarter. The oil major’s ongoing efforts to acquire Hess Corporation will boost its access to oil reserves in Guyana.
Overall, Chevron’s operational strength and disciplined capital management helped it weather the effects of falling oil prices.
- INTERESTING READ: Big Oil’s Showdown: How Shell, Chevron & ExxonMobil Balance Big Profits with Net Zero?
Cleaner Barrels Ahead: Chevron’s Climate and Net Zero Plan
Chevron continues to work toward reducing its greenhouse gas emissions while meeting global energy demand. The company has a long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions for its upstream Scope 1 and Scope 2 operations by 2050.
Scope 1 includes direct emissions from Chevron’s operations. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from electricity and heat that Chevron buys.
Chevron measures emissions with a full value chain approach. This includes Scope 3 emissions. These emissions cover the use of sold products, such as gasoline and diesel. Although the company has not committed to a full Scope 3 net-zero goal, it reports these figures for transparency and to track progress.
In addition to these goals, Chevron has introduced a carbon intensity reduction target, aiming to cut emissions per unit of energy produced. The company’s target is to reduce its Portfolio Carbon Intensity by more than 5% by 2028, using a 2022 baseline.
Chevron’s reported greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 2024 are approximately:
-
Scope 1: 53 to 54 million tonnes CO2 equivalent (Mt CO2e)
-
Scope 2 (market-based indirect emissions): about 3 to 4 million tonnes CO2e
-
Scope 3 (mainly from use of sold products): between 416 million and 717 million tonnes CO2e, depending on calculation method (production, throughput, or sales method).
Chevron’s portfolio carbon intensity is at around 70.7 grams CO2e per megajoule energy produced. The oil giant’s upstream carbon intensity is about 23.9 kg CO2e per barrel of oil equivalent.
Investing in Lower-Carbon Solutions
Beyond reducing emissions from its own operations, Chevron is building a portfolio of low-carbon businesses. The company is investing in carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and renewable fuels.
According to its 2024 Corporate Sustainability Highlights, Chevron invested over $600 million in over 100 emissions abatement projects in 2024, which will grow to $1.5 billion this year. These projects aim to cut around 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent each year. These include:
-
methane emission reductions through facility retrofits,
-
electrification of natural gas compression stations, and
-
efficiency improvements at refineries and LNG plants.
Moreover, Chevron has invested over $1 billion in carbon capture and storage projects. These efforts aim to cut emissions by around 5 million tonnes of CO2 each year. The company is growing its range of abatement technologies and low-carbon investments. This shows a big increase from previous years.
These efforts aim to reduce the company’s upstream carbon intensity to around 24 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per barrel of oil. Chevron’s decarbonization plan includes energy efficiency upgrades, equipment changes, and the use of renewable electricity at production sites.
Chevron has partnerships with multiple firms focused on carbon removal, including projects that store CO₂ underground or use advanced technologies to capture emissions at industrial sites. These investments are intended to grow over time as demand for clean energy increases.
The company is also looking into hydrogen storage solutions. It has also invested early in fusion energy technologies. These ventures are still in development but represent Chevron’s effort to stay ahead of long-term changes in the energy system.
Chevron’s total planned investment in low-carbon businesses is projected to reach $10 billion through 2028. The company has made it clear that it wants to be part of the energy transition, even while continuing to supply traditional oil and gas.
Eyes on 2026: Risks, Rewards, and What’s Next for Chevron
Still, Chevron faces criticism from some investors and environmental groups. Concerns include how fast things are changing. There’s also a need for total emissions cuts, not just reducing intensity.
Plus, the company keeps investing in oil and gas production. Chevron responds by saying it must balance energy reliability, affordability, and sustainability. It also supports carbon markets, carbon pricing, and efforts to scale up verified carbon credits.
Though the amount or figure wasn’t disclosed, Chevron has bought millions of carbon credits. Between 2022 and 2024, Chevron’s Colombian subsidiary purchased around 3 million carbon credits. These credits support Indigenous community conservation projects in the Colombian Amazon through the REDD+ program.
Chevron also bought 1.8 million carbon credits from the Cotuhé Putumayo project. This purchase helped offset regional emissions. These credits mainly reflect avoided deforestation and conservation efforts.
Chevron believes oil and gas will remain important for decades. Their strategy focuses on cutting emissions from this supply. At the same time, they are developing new energy solutions.
The company’s Q2 results show the pressure facing oil producers in a lower-price environment. Even though revenue and profits fell from last year, Chevron posted solid operating results.
Whether Chevron can meet its 2050 net-zero goals while maintaining shareholder value and energy supply will depend on policy changes, market demand, and technological progress. But for now, the company is signaling that it plans to be part of both today’s energy system and tomorrow’s clean energy transition.
The post Chevron (CVX Stock) Powers Through Q2 With $5.5B Payout, Permian Growth, and Net-Zero Push appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Renewable Energy11 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits