Jamie Smyth and Michael Taffe in New York Published September 20 2026 Chevron plans to dramatically increase drilling next year as part of a spending surge to overhaul oil and gas search strategies. Kevin Mc Lachlan, recruited from Total Energies last year to lead Chevron’s exploration arm, revealed his budget would jump by more than 50 per cent compared with 2025. The extra funds support a unit shake-up featuring greater artificial intelligence use, enhanced accountability, and new hires.

Chevron’s conventional exploration and appraisal spending plunged 36 per cent to $1.82bn between 2021 and 2025. After a decade focusing on less risky US shale programmes, the company is now expanding activity in frontier locations including South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Mc Lachlan stated the programme will include 20 exploration wells and five to six appraisal wells next year, a significant increase from the 10 drilled two years prior.

He prioritized increased seismic data spending as the enabling piece to generate prospects. Last year, Chevron boss Mike Wirth expressed dissatisfaction with exploration results after the company missed commercial quantities at a highly anticipated well in Namibia’s Orange Basin. Chevron’s reserves had fallen to a decade low of 9.8bn barrels of oil equivalent by end of 2024, nearly half of Exxon Mobil’s.

Mc Lachlan, credited with turning around Total Energies’ exploration division, previously achieved high-profile discoveries in Suriname, South Africa, and Namibia. Exploration teams under his leadership at Total won Wood Mackenzie’s “most admired explorer” award in 2020, 2021, and 2023, and the “Discovery of the Year” award in 2023 for the Venus discovery offshore Namibia. Mc Lachlan said he came to Chevron specifically to replicate this success at the company’s “exploration factory”.

Chevron’s total exploration spending, including unconventional projects, is likely to surpass $1.5bn this year, up from under $1bn last year, as the company makes larger bets to find oil and gas.