“You should not look for Chevron to participate in anything like what ConocoPhillips or Marathon has done,” Watson said after giving a speech to business leaders.

On June 30, Marathon’s refining, transportation and retail businesses split off from the parent to became Marathon Petroleum Corp, a move the company first considered in 2008 until the financial crisis put it on hold.

ConocoPhillips announced in mid-July that it would spin off its refining arm as well, creating the largest separate pure-play refining and exploration and production companies. ConocoPhillips is the smallest of the oil majors that include Chevron, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell.

Watson said ever-increasing development of liquefied natural gas, high-sulfur heavy crudes and natural gas liquids requires refining expertise and plants that can process them.

“It helps to be able to run those in your own refinery,” he said. “There’s never been a time when I have felt it was more important to be an integrated company.”

Chevron operates seven refineries, most of which are in North America, and holds interests in seven more in the Asia-Pacific region, company spokesman Sean Comey said.

In a separate development, an international tribunal ruled this week that Ecuador must pay Chevron $96 million in connection with claims made in Ecuadorean courts in the early 1990s.

The claims were unrelated to an $18 billion judgment rendered against Chevron by an Ecuadorean court earlier this year.

An international arbitration tribunal found on Wednesday that Ecuador’s courts violated international law through their delays in ruling on commercial disputes between Texaco, which was bought by Chevron, and Ecuador’s government.

“This ruling confirms that Ecuador can be held accountable for its obligations under international law,” Chevron’s general counsel, Hewitt Pate, said in a statement.

“Since Ecuador’s politicized court system has failed to provide impartial tribunals and due process, Chevron has had to seek international remedies,” he added.

The final award takes into account taxes, compound interest and costs associated with a preliminary award announced in March 2010.

Ecuador’s ombudsman, Diego Garcia, said the country’s government would try to nullify the ruling.

“We’ll start a legal action again against this ruling, which derives from powers that Ecuador has contested from the beginning,” he told reporters.

The decision by the tribunal, administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague, resolved seven claims Texaco filed in Ecuador between 1991 and 1993. The tribunal determined that the court delays violated Ecuador’s obligation under a Bilateral Investment Treaty with the US.

That treaty was also the basis for a claim Chevron made about Ecuador’s judicial independence in its long-running dispute over pollution in the country resulting from two decades of drilling there prior to Texaco’s departure in 1992.

Arbitrators, working under the PCA, in February ordered Ecuador to suspend enforcement of any judgment related to that case — just days before a court in Lago Agrio issued its multibillion-dollar verdict against Chevron.

In September, a US appeals court is expected to rule on a racketeering case brought by San Ramon, California-based Chevron against the Ecuadorean plaintiffs in the pollution litigation. The racketeering case is due to begin in New York in November.

The US judge hearing it has noted that the damages have more than doubled to about $18 billion from $8.6 billion originally because Chevron did not make a public apology, and when a payment to the Amazon Defense Front is included.