Fact Sheet: Chevron Fuels Israeli Apartheid and War Crimes

Written by the Action Center for Corporate Accountability, March 2024, for the Boycott Chevron campaign

Photo by Brooke Anderson

Chevron’s business activities in Palestine/Israel

Chevron operates and partially owns the largest Israeli natural gas fields, Tamar and Leviathan.

These gas fields are located in the eastern Mediterranean sea, west of Haifa. The gas from Tamar is processed in a rig that is located farther south, off the coast of Isdud/Ashdod.

Chevron also operates and partially owns the East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) Pipeline, which runs from Israel to Egypt, off the shores of the Gaza Strip.

Similarly, Chevron is the operator and partial owner of the Dalit gas field, which is yet to be developed, and the Mari B gas field, which has been depleted and inactive since 2013.

As the operator of these gas fields and the pipeline, Chevron is in charge of all operations of these projects, including planning, construction, production, and supply.

Chevron is a major owner of the CPC oil pipeline in Russia, used to supply crude oil to Israel. It is also a partial owner in the main Kazakh companies which supply crude oil through that pipeline.

Chevron made an estimated $1.5 billion in revenue from Tamar and Leviathan gas sales alone in 2022.

Between 2021 and July 2023, Chevron spent over $21 million on lobbying the U.S. government, including on energy issues related to Israel.

Chevron entered the Israeli market in 2020, with the acquisition of Noble Energy. It can choose to sell off this investment at any time.

Chevron fuels Israeli apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism

Chevron is a major economic partner of the Israeli government:

Israel collects hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tax revenue from Chevron-operated gas fields. In 2022, this amounted to over $462 million.

The country’s energy production relies on the supply of natural gas: about 70% of the electricity produced in 2022 used natural gas, and almost all of it was supplied by Chevron. The Tamar gas field alone supplied 98% of the needs of the state-owned Israeli Electric Company (IEC), with a contract continuing until the end of 2030.

Chevron fuels apartheid and war crimes:

The Israeli Electric Company (IEC) supplies electricity to all branches of the Israeli government and to the vast majority of Israeli households. This includes all Israeli military bases, prisons, and police stations, as well as hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank that rely on Chevron-produced electricity.

The supply of electricity across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory is used as a tool of subjugation, collective punishment, annexation, and dispossession. In the occupied West Bank, the IEC took over the Palestinian power grid after the 1967 occupation, making the Palestinian population dependent on its services.

Some Palestinian communities inside Israel and across the Occupied Palestinian Territory are banned from connection to the grid, some are provided subpar services, some are charged differently than neighboring Jewish-Israelis, and many suffer punitive power cuts as a form of collective punishment. This is energy apartheid.

As part of the military blockade of the Gaza Strip, Israel has destroyed civilian energy infrastructure, repeatedly bombed the one remaining power plant, and consistently deprived Gaza of adequate fuel supply. This has made the IEC an indispensable supplier, providing about 30–50% of the electricity to Gaza, paid for by the Palestinian Authority.

The supply of electricity to Gaza has been used as leverage against the population, frequently reduced or shut off in violation of international law. It was cut off completely after Oct. 7, 2023.

Chevron fuels and exploits the military blockade of Gaza:

Chevron operates and partially owns the EMG pipeline, which connects Israel and Egypt, passing west of the Gaza shoreline. Regardless of its exact location, kept secret for security reasons, this pipeline is not under Israeli jurisdiction, and any economic gain in this area without Palestinian agreement is illegal under international law.

The Tamar processing rig and its pipelines are located about 13.5 nautical miles offshore near al-Majdal Asqalan/Ashkelon, just outside the territorial waters of Gaza. Over the years, the Israeli Navy has secured the rig, as well as the EMG pipeline, by restricting all shipping in the area—tightening the naval blockade on Gaza to 3–6 nautical miles—with devastating impacts on Gaza’s economy and fishing industry.

Chevron fuels the destruction of our planet and communities

Chevron fuels environmental destruction:

Chevron is one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. By 2017, the company was responsible for approximately 3.2% of the world’s total emissions.

Chevron has yet to clean up the 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater it deliberately dumped into Ecuador’s Amazon Rainforest between 1964 and 1990, which poisoned the lands and waters of indigenous and rural Ecuadorians in what is considered the world’s largest oil-related catastrophe.

The company has also not cleaned up pollution it left behind in the Niger Delta, which decimated the region’s ecosystem and devastated indigenous groups’ waterways, food systems, and livelihoods.

In 2021, the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, spilled an estimated 600 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay, posing life-threatening contamination and exposure risks to local communities.

Chevron fuels violence against indigenous communities:

Chevron has been repeatedly sued for its involvement in violence against indigenous communities around the world, including at least 13 accusations of genocide and 17 accusations of torture.

In 2000, Chevron began building a pipeline from Chad to Cameroon on indigenous lands, displacing some 22,000 indigenous persons through the contamination of their water sources and soil and the destruction of their fisheries and other food sources. Protests against this land destruction led to violent conflict.

Between 2005-2024, Chevron was one of the owners of the Yadana gas project in Myanmar. Revenue from Yadana has disappeared into offshore military accounts, funding atrocities against the people of Myanmar. Since the 2021 military coup, the military has broadened its attacks from targeting ethnic communities in border areas, to also carrying out mass atrocity crimes against resistance actors throughout the country. Immediately following the coup, Chevron lobbied the U.S. government not to impose sanctions on Myanmar. In 2022, Chevron announced it would exit the country. In April 2024, it ended its participation in the Yadana project.

Beginning in the 1980s, Chevron’s activities in Nigeria have led to the destruction of ancestral lands and the forcible displacement of multiple indigenous communities. In several documented incidents, Chevron-paid military forces destroyed indigenous communities’ homes and infrastructure to clear lands for pipelines and executed indigenous rights activists.

The company’s activities have played a role in the destruction of marginalized people’s homes, resources, and livelihoods in Azerbaijan, Angola, Argentina, Canada, China, East Timor, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Poland, Thailand, Venezuela, the U.S., and other countries.

Good to know: more about natural gas in Palestine/Israel

The Chevron-operated Tamar and Leviathan gas fields export natural gas to Jordan and Egypt. In July 2023, it was estimated that over 80% of Jordan’s energy production needs were supplied by Leviathan. An even larger amount of gas is exported to Egypt.

Israel has prevented the development of the Palestinian Gaza Marine gas field since its discovery in 2000 about 19.4 nautical miles off the shore of Gaza. In June 2023, Israel announced that it would begin the development of the field, in cooperation with Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. The field is owned by CC Oil & Gas of the Consolidated Contractors Co. and the Palestinian Investment Fund.

For a little over a month after Oct. 7, 2023, the Tamar processing rig and the EMG pipeline both halted operations due to increased security risks. Gas supply to Egypt continued through the Jordan pipeline, and production at Tamar resumed in mid-November. Israeli authorities are considering several long-term alternatives to the EMG pipeline.

Starting in 2023, at least half of Israel’s gas needs are estimated to be provided by the newly developed Karish gas field, owned and operated by a Greek-British firm, Energean Oil and Gas plc.

The other international companies with a large stake in the Israeli natural gas market are Mubadala Petroleum, an Abu Dhabi state-owned company, which partially owns Tamar; and Energean Oil and Gas plc, a British-Greek company that owns other Israeli gas fields: Karish, Karish North, Tanin, and Katlan.

In March 2024, the U.K. company British Petroleum (BP) and the Abu Dhabi company ADNOC decided to suspend a planned investment in the Leviathan gas field, citing "the uncertainty created by the external environment."

On Oct. 29, 2023, in the midst of its onslaught on Gaza, Israel granted six new gas exploration permits, which were contested by Palestinian human rights organizations as including areas inside Palestinian maritime territory. The companies that received exploration licenses include Italian company Eni, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, U.K. companies BP and Dana Petroleum, and SOCAR, the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan.