Prior to the merger of Texaco and Chevron in 2000, the two majors “were fighting for dead last in the exploration sweepstakes, in terms of money in and results out,” according to Gary Luquette, head of Chevron North America E&P. Speaking to a group of service company executives in Houston, he said a lot more positive things are going on now and the company has, in the past two years, risen to the top. “Some of that is because we expanded our process of evaluation and we went to doing a global ranking of our basins.” (For more, see the blog http://blogs.oilandgasinvestor.com/leslie/)