Chevron Corporation, the second biggest oil company in the US said today that it had outlined plans to sell some of its global operations and reduce its workforce by 2,000 this year as part of restructuring of its global refining business.

With plans to improve returns and further streamline its downstream portfolio, the San Ramon, California-based oil major said that it plans to sell certain operations in Europe, including the Pembroke refinery in the UK, the Caribbean and select Central America markets.

The Pembroke plant having refining capacity of 10.5 million tonnes per year is situated on the Pembrokeshire coast in Wales in the UK and came on stream in 1964.

Chevron added that that it was also reviewing operations in Hawaii and Africa, outside of South Africa.

As part of the restructuring, Chevron will eliminate 2,000 jobs through 2011 and incur $150 million to $200 million in severance charges in the first quarter of this year.

John Watson, hired by Chevron to run the company in the beginning of this year, had said in mid-January that the company would undertake a restructuring of its global refining business that will see job cuts and closure of some of its refineries around the world. (See: Chevron to shut plants, axe jobs in refining business restructuring)

According to an analyst, Chevron's refineries lost more than $600,000 a day during the final three months of 2009.

Chevron, like many other global integrated oil companies, barring Chinese and Indian oil companies, has been hit by an overcapacity in crude refining bought on by recession and the high price of crude last year, which has curtailed demand for petrol, diesel and jet fuel as consumers reign back on spending as well as the use of alternative clean fuel.

In an interim report released in January, Chevron said that for its Gulf Coast refineries, profit margins were about 39 per cent lower in the fourth-quarter compared to the same quarter last year while it were 59 per cent lower in Singapore and 45 per cent lower in Europe.