Reuters reports that Oxy CEO Vicki Hollub will retire this year. Photo courtesy Oxy
Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental (Oxy), is set to retire this year, Reuters first reported Thursday.
Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the oil and gas giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as chief operating officer and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.
Reuters reports that a firm date for her retirement has not been set. Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, is expected to replace Hollub in the CEO role.
Oxy is leading a number of energy transition projects.
It's subsidiary 1PointFive is developing a $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area that is slated to be the largest facility of its kind in the world. Known as STRATOS, it's designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
The company shared recently that Phase 1 of the project is expected to go online in Q2, with Phase 2 ramping up through the remainder of 2026.
“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos last year.
“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” she added.
Oxy was one of the first to set ambitious net-zero goals. In a 2020 interview during CERAWeek, Hollub outlined Oxy's future as a “carbon management company.”
“Ultimately, I don’t know how many years from now, Occidental becomes a carbon management company, and our oil and gas would be a support business unit for the management of that carbon. We would be not only using [CO2] in oil reservoirs [but] capturing it for sequestration as well,” Hollub said.
Oxy opened its Oxy Innovation Center in the Ion last year, focused on advancing low-carbon technology. It also operates Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others.