Occidental Petroleum lands in Ireland the week the Gulf gas investment goes dark

Occidental Petroleum flew from Bufords Field in West Texas to Shannon Airport on June 10, a 7-hour 27-minute Atlantic crossing aboard its Gulfstream G650ER (tail N650XY). The plane had spent the previous week shuttling between the Permian Basin and Houston before turning east. Shannon is a routine refuelling stop, but the destination suggests a longer engagement with Occidental Petroleum's international assets.

The same week this flight lands, Occidental Petroleum is grappling with the aftermath of a drone strike that took its Shah natural-gas project in the United Arab Emirates offline. Per a March report from the Houston Business Journal, the Shah and Al Hosn gas development—in which Occidental Petroleum holds a 40 percent participating interest—was shut down after a drone strike triggered automatic safety systems. The facility remains under damage assessment, and no restart timeline has been issued by operator ADNOC. The outage compounds broader Gulf disruptions that have already trimmed Occidental Petroleum's international production and lowered full-year guidance, per the company's Q1 2026 earnings call on May 6.

The flight pattern in the preceding days shows the G650ER shuttling between remote Permian Basin airstrips and Houston, consistent with internal operational reviews. The Shannon hop extends that pattern across an ocean. Richard Jackson, who succeeded Vicki Hollub as chief executive on June 1, inherits a company whose overseas bets are now front-line risks—and the G280 and G650ER fleet are the tools for managing them in real time.