---
title: "Chevron → Hess"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/chevron-buy-hess-2023"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2023"
---

# Chevron → Hess

Chevron's $53bn all-stock purchase of Hess — $60bn including debt — bought a 30% share of Guyana's Stabroek block, and took almost 21 months to close because the block's operator, ExxonMobil, claimed the right to buy that stake first.

Held up for about 21 months by an ExxonMobil arbitration claim over pre-emption rights in the Guyana field, resolved in Hess's favour in July 2025.

- **Acquirer:** Chevron (United States)
- **Target:** Hess (United States)
- **Value:** $53B
- **Announced:** October 2023
- **Completed:** July 2025
- **Sector:** Energy
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## Why it mattered

Chevron agreed on 23 October 2023 to pay 1.025 of its own shares for each Hess share, worth $171 a share and a premium of 10.3% on the 20-day average. In the same month ExxonMobil agreed to buy Pioneer Natural Resources for nearly $60bn in stock. Hess brought two things Chevron wanted — 465,000 net acres in North Dakota's Bakken shale and, above all, 30% of Stabroek, with more than 11bn barrels of oil equivalent of discovered recoverable resource. Chevron promised about $1bn a year of cost savings and larger buybacks.

The obstacle was not antitrust. ExxonMobil, which discovered the field and operates it with 45%, claimed a right of first refusal over Hess's stake, and in March 2024 it and CNOOC, the block's third partner, filed arbitration cases at the International Chamber of Commerce to stop the deal. Hess shareholders approved the merger in May 2024. The Federal Trade Commission cleared it on 30 September 2024 on an unusual condition: John Hess, whom it accused of encouraging OPEC officials to stabilise production and draw down inventories, could not join Chevron's board — the same remedy it had imposed on Pioneer's Scott Sheffield. The arbitration was heard in May 2025, and Chevron meanwhile bought 15.38 million Hess shares in the open market.

## What it left behind

The arbitration went Hess's way, and Chevron completed the purchase on 18 July 2025. A day earlier the FTC, reshaped under the new administration, lifted the ban on John Hess, who then joined Chevron's board; the order against Sheffield was reversed the same month. Chevron became a 30% non-operating partner in Stabroek beside the rival that had tried to block it. On 31 July 2026 Chevron said the business was fully integrated, that it had realised $1.5bn of synergies — 50% more than targeted and six months early — and that the Hess assets were generating free cash flow roughly double the incremental dividends. The case shows that when a target's value sits in a partner-operated asset, the joint operating agreement can carry more closing risk than any regulator, and deserves the same diligence as the antitrust file.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hess_Corporation