Pierre R. Breber
Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Chevron
Well, thank you, Biraj, for recognizing PCI. Our teams will be very happy to hear that. We wanted to make a tool that was transparent where you could use it for other companies because I know comparability is of interest to investors. And so it's based on, again, transparent reporting data and comparability. And so thank you for taking advantage of that. And I encourage others to check it out. Let me just talk about TCO because as we look back, we had a very successful spring and summer campaign there.
We hit our productivity targets, and we achieved a lot of our milestones when we had a full workforce. So we had Delta variant wave, which caused some higher levels of isolation in the middle of the third quarter, but we ended the quarter with positive rates very, very low, and we're back to our full workforce. And as I mentioned earlier, we intend to maintain a peak manpower workforce level through the winter months. We have a vaccination rate over 85% for that workforce. So we're well positioned to make a lot of progress this winter.
Now we have to be thoughtful about it because it can get cold there. So we're sequencing the work in a way that we're saving a work that can be done indoors or in sheltered locations during the coldest months of the winter. So no change clearly in the guidance that we provided on second quarter in terms of budget and schedule. But I wanted to give an update. Things are going very well in Tengiz, and we're looking forward to a very productive winter season there. In terms of the dividend, you're right, it's the first dividend in three years, so that's nice to see.
We did have a modest loan repay back that occurred last quarter. And look, we'll give guidance on 2022, just like with Paul's question, when we look forward. It will depend clearly also on oil prices, but that's something that we'll give guidance on, on our 4Q call. In terms of asset sales, yes, we acquired Noble when -- or announced the acquisition when Brent was in the low $40s. And now Brent is in the low $80s. And so it's a commodity business. It has cycles, ups and downs. And when you buy or sell assets, timing makes a difference, where you are in the cycle.
And of course, strategic fit and all the elements. We're very, very pleased with the Noble transaction. We talked about timing of it, the first to do it. The synergies that were doubled and the tax benefits that we saw this quarter and interest cost savings. So we did tender a number of bond offerings earlier this month. A lot of those bonds are renewable bonds. Again, that was not included in our synergies because we weren't quite sure we could achieve that, and we'll save over $100 million in interest cost savings.
So Noble just keeps contributing to the company. And that's part of the reason why we're a better company now than we were several years ago. But it's a different market. So yes, I'd view it more as a seller's market than a buyer's market right now. And so you're seeing us modestly increase some assets that don't compete for capital as well in our portfolio. In fact, one of them is our position in the Eagle Ford. So that was a Noble legacy position. Chevron legacy was not in it. So we don't have quite the scale that we would like.
But again, essentially buying that position at $40 and now we have it on the market, that's in the public domain. And obviously, we expect to get much higher value than for what was implied in the purchase price. We have some other U.S. onshore assets that are on the market, again, that we feel are very attractive to a lot of industry players, but just won't compete for capital as well in our portfolio.
