Six Months after Chevron Corporation announced the appointment of Kevin McLachlan as its Vice President of Exploration, the company has poached Emmanuelle Garinet from TOTALEnergies to assist him.
McLachlan, who was TOTAL’s Senior Vice President Exploration between 2015 and 2025, started work effective November 1, 2025, “overseeing the company’s worldwide exploration programme”. He suceeded Liz Schwarze, who retired in February 2026.
Garinet was TOTAL’s VP Exploration for Africa. She will, from May 15, 2026, be Chevron’s Director of Exploration Americas & Sub-Saharan Africa.
Garinet joined Elf Aquitaine, the legacy TOTALEnergies’ forebear, as Exploration Geologist in 1997, after a Master’s degree in Geological/Geophysical Engineering at the IFP School in Paris.
She has been VP Exploration for Africa, a position based in Pau, France, for the past five years, and she counts as achievements: “seven (7) discoveries to date, including major Namibia discovery (Venus, Mangetti, Tamboti, Grenadier, Dalia deep, Ntokon, Ntokon NE)”, as well as “successful New Ventures captures with 11 new blocks entries as Operator, in five (5) countries (Angola, Nigeria, South Africa, Congo, and Liberia) “
On her LinkedIn Page, Garinet declares: “My ambition is clear: to expand Chevron’s footprint across these key regions, to unlock subsurface potential, and to deliver commercial oil and gas discoveries that will create long‑term value for both the company and its countries of operations”.
The fact that Chevron is hiring those who come across as internationally accomplished, technically honed “oil finders” from TOTALEnergies, a rival company with a better (recent) record of exploration successes in African frontier basins, is telling.
Chevron could clearly do better with frontier exploration plays in Africa, a continent it has highlighted as part of its near term focus.
The company has announced a number of exploration successes in Nigeria, but these “discoveries” are really incremental finds, right inside producing fields and don’t do well in mitigating the challenging optics of the recent dry holes in Egypt’s deepwater Herodotus basin in the Mediterranean and the Namibian Orange basin.
