Occidental Petroleum flies into Houston after a busy week in the Permian Basin

Occidental Petroleum’s Embraer ERJ-175, tail N170XY, departed Tres Amigos Airport in southeastern New Mexico at 9:38 p.m. UTC on June 4 and touched down at Houston Bush Intercontinental an hour and 24 minutes later — a short hop that capped a week of shuttling among the company’s Permian Basin well pads and processing sites. Tres Amigos sits near the Texas-New Mexico line, a stone’s throw from Occidental’s enhanced oil recovery operations and CO₂ flood projects that the company has been leaning into hard.

The same week, Occidental Petroleum was navigating a leadership transition and a portfolio shock. CEO Vicki Hollub retired effective June 1, succeeded by former COO Richard Jackson, per an SEC filing [sec.gov](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/797468/000095015726000569/form8-k.htm). On the international front, a drone strike in the UAE took the Shah gas project — in which Occidental holds a 40% stake — offline, as reported by the Houston Business Journal [hoodline.com](https://hoodline.com/2026/03/houston-s-occidental-caught-in-gulf-crossfire-as-uae-gas-giant-goes-dark/). The gathering of senior executives at Houston HQ likely included briefings on both the succession plan and the outage’s impact on Occidental’s production outlook.

The ERJ-175’s flight history shows it spent June 2–4 working a tight circuit around Midland, Odessa, and Eddy County — consistent with Occidental’s push to squeeze more oil from existing wells via advanced recovery techniques. “More wells per pad, longer laterals, more simulfrac,” as Jackson described it during the Q1 earnings call [oxy.com](https://www.oxy.com/siteassets/documents/investors/quarterly-earnings/oxy1q26transcript.pdf). The trip appears to have been a routine but consequential field visit, one aimed at wringing capital efficiency from the kind of aging reservoirs that now define Occidental’s domestic strategy.