Chevron executives detailed the company's decision to move its headquarters out of California during a roundtable with reporters on Thursday.

Chevron Americas Products President Andy Waltz said the protests against conventional energy producers in California have hurt the company's operations. decision The company will move its headquarters to Texas. Measures such as California's ban on internal combustion engine vehicles and their exhaust emissions by 2035 will Cap and Trade Waltz said those regulations were specific headwinds that influenced the company's decision to move its headquarters to Houston.

“This is a hard place to do business. It's a hard place to have a headquarters. And we finally said, 'enough is enough. We've reached our capacity and we're moving.' We're going to do better by having everybody in the same place,” Waltz explained.

Waltz said one of the reasons for Chevron's move was that some of its operations and senior management are already based in Texas, and that it believes it will perform better if its employees and executives are in the same location. The company has no plans to give up its California assets and plans to continue to operate them, Waltz said. (Related article: What has California's war on fossil fuels actually accomplished?)

“California is a tough place to do business. It's a tough place to recruit. It's a tough place to move employees. A lot of our employees get promoted within the company and get experience in different regions and locations, but a lot of them don't move to California. That's what makes it difficult,” Waltz said. “California is a tough place to have a large employee base. It's tough, the cost of living is high, and we couldn't get our employees who don't live there to move to California. It's just not sustainable for us, frankly.”

According to Forbes magazine, California is the third most expensive state to live in, behind Hawaii and Massachusetts. Rated California has experienced a net population outflow in recent years, with more than 800,000 people expected to move out of the state in 2022 alone. According to To Forbes.

Additionally, more than 350 companies are expected to relocate their headquarters out of state between 2018 and 2022, according to Forbes magazine.

“California has said, 'You can't buy a new car with an internal combustion engine after 2035,' and that's a headwind for investment in refineries. Legally, California has a windfall tax, a penalty, and they're looking at how to deal with that. They want to put a cap on how much profit you can make in a refinery. That's a headwind for people who want to put money into it to get a return on their investment,” Waltz said. “And then, maybe even to make it a little bit more complicated, California has a program called cap-and-trade, which is a tax on carbon dioxide emissions in California. And that tax keeps going up every year, and it gets more and more burdensome every year. Those three regulations, those three policies really discourage people from wanting to put more capital into California. So I think the business case for California is very difficult.”

“My competitors are facing the exact same situation as me, our money is going elsewhere and California can't get supplies from Houston,” Waltz said. “This isn't working.”

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recently finalized emission standards for light-duty and medium-duty vehicles have been met with criticism from critics.EV MandatoryThese are other policies that Waltz believes will get “results” if implemented.

Waltz's comments about California's business climate echo recent comments made by Chevron CEO Mike Wirth. The Wall Street JournalIn it, he said, “California is rife with policies that raise costs and harm consumers.”

When news of Chevron's headquarters relocation broke in early August, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's office told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the company's decision was “the logical conclusion of a lengthy process that Chevron has repeatedly heralded.”

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