SAN RAMON, Calif. _ Battered by a deep slump in worldwide oil prices, Chevron posted its third straight quarterly loss, a setback that shoved the company's shares lower on Friday.
The energy giant lost $1.47 billion during the quarter that ended in June, compared with a profit of $571 million for the year-ago second quarter.
"The second quarter results reflected lower oil prices and our ongoing adjustment to a lower oil price world," John Watson, Chevron's chief executive officer, said in a prepared release.
Besides low oil prices, a one-time impairment of certain money-losing operations at Chevron fueled the red ink for the second quarter. The impaired assets in Chevron's upstream business for exploration, development and production aren't expected to produce enough revenue to cover their costs.
All told, Chevron recorded impairments and other non-cash charges that totaled $2.8 billion.
Not every segment of Chevron's operations struggled during the second quarter, however.
"Our downstream business continued to perform well," Watson said, citing the company's refinery and retail operations that include a giant plant in Richmond, a city north of Oakland.
Chevron in recent years has focused its business on the upstream operations for development and production of oil and gas. But the protracted slump in oil prices has undermined that strategy.
The company said it realized an average sale price per barrel of crude oil and natural gas liquids of $36 a barrel during the second quarter, which was down 28 percent from its sale price of $50 a barrel in the year-ago second quarter.
The struggles have shown up in Chevron's weakening pace of energy production. Chevron produced 2.53 million barrels of oil during the second quarter, down 2.7 percent from the 2.6 million barrels the company produced a year ago.
The company hopes that ramped-up production in western Australia and other locations will help bolster production levels.
Chevron's upstream business of exploration, development and production lost $2.46 billion, while the downstream units of refining and retail earned $1.28 billion.
The energy giant's refinery and retail operations in the United States earned $537 million, but that was down 26.5 percent from a year-ago profit for the segment of $731 million.
San Ramon-based Chevron has slashed its capital spending and instituted far-reaching job cuts to help offset its revenue weakness.
Layoffs in Chevron's worldwide workforce that began in 2015 will run through the end of 2016 and eventually total 8,000 job cuts. As of May, on the day of the company's annual shareholders meeting, Chevron was about half-way through that effort.
"Our operating expenses and capital spending were reduced over $6 billion from the first six months of 2015," Watson said.
