Suncor Energy - Q3 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Suncor Energy Third Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. At this time, I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr. Troy Little, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Troy Little (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor Energy's third quarter earnings call. Please note that today's comments contain forward-looking information. Actual results may differ materially from the expected results because of various risks, risk factors and assumptions that are described in our third quarter earnings release, as well as in our current annual information form, both of which are available on SEDAR, EDGAR, and our website, Suncor.com. Certain financial measures referred to in these comments are not prescribed by Canadian generally accepted accounting principles. For a description of these financial measures, please see our third quarter earnings release. We will start with comments from Kris Smith, Interim President and Chief Executive Officer, followed by Alister Cowan, Suncor's Chief Financial Officer.

Also on the call are three of our senior operating leaders, Peter Zebedee, Executive Vice President, Mining and Upgrading, Shelley Powell, Senior Vice President, In-situ and E&P, and Arnel Santos, Senior Vice President, Refining and Logistics. Following the formal remarks, we'll open up the call to questions. Now, I'll hand it over to Kris to share his perspective on the quarter.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Great. Thanks, Troy. Good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining us. On our last call, I discussed that achieving best-in-class safety and operational performance is Suncor's core focus, and that my goal every day is to execute on our plans to drive that performance. A key element in delivering this is the focus of our senior leadership and operations leaders on driving changes through the organization to the front line. We're doing something a bit different than past calls. Our three senior operating leaders, Peter, Shelley, and Arnel, are with Alister and me today to demonstrate our increased focus on this and to answer any questions you may have on operations. Now, taking a brief look at the quarter. We generated CAD 4.5 billion in adjusted funds flows from operations, which included a FIFO loss in the downstream of CAD 585 million.

As it's designed to do, our physical integration between upstream and downstream mitigated the impact of wider, heavy crude differentials, delivering strong margins. Upstream volumes came in as expected at 724,000 barrels per day during the quarter, and I expect these volumes to increase in the fourth quarter as our maintenance activities at Syncrude and Base Plant Upgrader 1 were completed in October. In the downstream, we had strong Q3 margins on the back of a 100% utilization rate and the third-best crude refining throughput in our history. Downstream margin capture was 85%, reflecting higher than normal levels of processing of sweet crude in our refineries, primarily due to a planned outage in the Edmonton sulfur recovery unit in the quarter.

We continue to see solid volumes and margins in our sales and marketing segments with distillate demand, in particular, continuing to be strong. During the quarter, we distributed CAD 1.7 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. Also, we successfully completed an upsized bond repurchase tender that resulted in buying back our debt below face value and lowering our structural breakeven by nearly $1 per barrel on a WTI basis. These actions keep us on track with our capital allocation framework and move us toward our goal of reducing our net debt and, depending on commodity pricing, increasing capital allocation to share buybacks to 75% by the end of Q1 2023. Now, my comments on the quarter today are intentionally brief because we've delivered a strong quarter in line with our expectations.

Instead, the focus in my opening remarks will be on recent actions that we've taken on improving safety and optimizing our asset portfolio. Work continues across the company to improve safety and operational excellence with a particular focus on our mining and tailings operations. My priority has been to remove distractions from the organization and to focus our employees on safe, reliable operations and our biggest opportunities. With fresh external mining perspectives and a number of leadership changes in place, we are in position to execute and deliver on our plans at an accelerated pace. In particular, there are three actions I'd like to highlight today. First, I've initiated a thorough review of the makeup of our frontline workforce with a view to reduce our exposure hours, enable robust workforce planning, which will allow safe work execution, and improve efficiency and competitiveness.

As part of this, we are following through on an objective to reduce our contractor workforce in our mining and upgrading business by 20%. As of today, more than half of this objective has already been completed, and we are on track to safely achieve and sustain the full reduction by the first half of 2023. In addition to streamlining our contractor workforce, I'm also taking action to enhance our contractor management processes to ensure consistency and simplification in how we assure safe work practices in the field. We will continue to work together with our contractors to embed industry best practices and strengthen safety culture.

Second, as previously mentioned, we are installing industry-leading technologies for collision awareness on over 1,000 pieces of mobile mine equipment across our operating assets to mitigate a key risk in our mining operations. I'm pleased to say this initiative is progressing well, and two-thirds of Syncrude Aurora mine equipment will be outfitted by year-end, and installations on the remaining equipment at Aurora are expected to be completed by January 2023, nearly two months ahead of schedule. Deployment schedules for the remaining mines are on plan, with Syncrude Mildred Lake mine and Fort Hills going live in mid-2023 and Suncor's Base mine being complete by the end of next year. As well, our fatigue management system installation, as discussed in previous calls, will be completed across all mines by early 2023 and is already fully installed and functioning at Syncrude Mildred Lake and Aurora mines.

This technology has so far demonstrated the potential to reduce fatigue-related events by up to 80%. Third, and crucial to our long-term success, we are partnering with industry-leading subject matter experts to better equip our leaders across all our operations with practical skills to lead and sustain safe behaviors on the front line of our organization. I'm enhancing our leadership coaching and competency programs to ensure sustainment of visible, felt leadership. Our approach leverages human organizational performance principles consistent with other industry leaders to strengthen our safety culture while ensuring we have a strong focus on our material risks and assurance of our critical controls. These are a few key examples of how we're driving focus and improving safe, reliable operations going forward. I would now like to move to our progress on our efforts to optimize our asset portfolio towards our core integrated business.

As you know, we've initiated a robust process to divest from non-core assets to increase fit and focus in our portfolio. Recently, I announced the sale of our wind assets for CAD 730 million. During the quarter, we closed the sale of our Norway E&P assets. Meanwhile, the process to sell our U.K. E&P assets continues, and I expect that process to conclude in the coming months. A portion of the proceeds of these non-core asset sales is being used to increase our operated ownership interest in the Fort Hills asset by approximately 21%. This additional interest in Fort Hills demonstrates our confidence in the long-term value of the asset, which is backed up by a detailed assessment by our new and highly experienced mining leadership.

Last week, in our Fort Hills announcement, I discussed our multiyear performance improvement plan for Fort Hills, which will have short-term impacts to both production and cost over the next three years and set up the asset for long-term success. Although there is no change to our 2022 Fort Hills guidance, as we begin to execute this plan, we do expect volumes to be reduced in the fourth quarter as well as into Q1 2023. When combined with other factors, such as extended turnarounds in our oil sands business and at non-operated E&P assets, we expect overall company production to come in towards the lower end of our 2022 guidance. We continue to manage through the Fort Hills plan, and I look very forward to providing a more fulsome update at our investor presentation on November 29th.

This targeted portfolio optimization focuses Suncor on our core integrated business and along with our capital allocation framework, accelerates the execution of our plans to grow shareholder value. As well, a core part of our long-term success will also be on continuing to advance our plans to decarbonize our assets, a big piece of which is collaborating with our oil sands industry peers in the Pathways Alliance to reach net zero by 2050. I'm pleased to see the government of Alberta select the Pathways Alliance for pore space in the Cold Lake area, and this is an important milestone in Pathways' plans to develop a world-scale carbon capture system for the oil sands industry. I am encouraged by this progress and continued industry, government, and stakeholder co-investment and collaboration will be key to the success of this world-scale endeavor.

With that, I'll now pass it over to Alister for his comments.

Alister Cowan (CFO and EVP)

Thanks, Kris. I'll briefly focus on a couple of items. First, capital allocation. We continue to buy back shares and reduce our net debt. Year to date, Q3, we have returned CAD 6.3 billion in total to shareholders, comprising CAD 1.9 billion in dividends plus CAD 4.4 billion in share buybacks, and that's roughly 7% of our outstanding shares. We've also reduced net debt by CAD 2.5 billion, excluding approximately CAD 1 billion of foreign exchange translation loss due to the significantly stronger U.S. dollar this year. Depending on commodity prices, we expect to increase our allocation to share buybacks to 75% by the end of Q1 2023, and this will complement our 4% dividend yield. Next, during the quarter, we recorded a CAD 2.6 billion after-tax impairment related to Fort Hills.

Note that the impairment is carried by the transaction value of the recently purchased additional stake of the project. With that, over to you, Troy.

Troy Little (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Kris and Alister. I'll turn the call back to the operator to take some questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Again, to ask your question, please press star one one on your telephone keypad. We have our first question from the line of Greg Pardy of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead and ask your question.

Greg Pardy (Managing Director, Global Energy Research)

Definitely like what you and the team are doing in terms of steps taken. I wanna ask about Fort Hills, but maybe just before I do that, when I look at your downstream business going into the fourth quarter, two big advantages, obviously cracks, and the other one is just, you know, high utilization. Are you continuing to see a high utilization rate in your refineries? Is there just any other color you can give us on the downstream as we go through Q4?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Sure. Hey, thanks. Hi, Greg, thanks for the question. Yeah, to your point, we're certainly seeing a really strong cracking margin environment. We're expecting that to continue into the fourth quarter. You know, I do have Arnel here, our Senior Vice President of Refining. Why don't I pass to Arnel and just ask him to just talk a little bit about refinery utilization and our expectations in Q4.

Arnel Santos (SVP, Refining and Logistics)

Thank you, Kris. Let me first start by saying we continuously look at all the profitability drivers for our downstream business. That includes fixed stock mix, product slates, product channels, and of course focus on awesome capital delivery. As I look back in the third quarter when the overall utilization was 100%, we did have to account for the planned outage of the Edmonton Sulfur Recovery Unit, and this impacted our ability to fully capture the margins in that period as we reoptimize our crude slate. For the fourth quarter, I am anticipating similar utilizations, while slightly weaker cracks, but still well above historic levels.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah. Thanks, Arnel. I think we're setting up for a strong end to the year, Greg, is the way I would say it on the downstream side. You know, I'd expect as we go into 2023, the macro environment for refining is gonna continue to be quite strong for us. Now, you said you had another question on Fort Hills.

Greg Pardy (Managing Director, Global Energy Research)

Let's come back maybe to Fort Hills exactly. With the remediation plan, there's several I wanted to dig into and recognize you're gonna talk more about this at the investor open house. Can you talk maybe just about a bit about ore variability, water, and then maybe what some of the differences are between the South Central and North pits. Then, I guess, overall, how you'd sort of characterize that resource distribution. Where is most of the ore, and how does the plan now set you up for long-term success at Fort Hills?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah. No, thanks, Greg. Yeah, we will definitely talk about this in detail at the Investor Day and as we talk also about our 2023 guidance. As we said, we have this improvement plan related to the asset to deal with a lot of the issues that you're just raising in your question. I have Peter here beside me, Peter Zebedee, who's our Executive Vice President of Mining and Upgrading, who's obviously been working extremely closely with his team. Maybe I'll just pass this one over to Peter to provide a color to your question.

Peter Zebedee (EVP of Mining and Upgrading)

Yeah. Thanks very much, Kris. Let me first start off by saying that we've myself along with the team have done a really in-depth review over the last few months on the Fort Hills asset. Firstly, I think it's important to note that our fixed plant facility really is world-class, and our focus around and the challenges that we've seen have really been around the ore body and the mine, as you stated. Some of the issues that we're seeing are related to 2021 events and really around physical constraints in the pits, and this will require changes on how we mine and sequence the ore in the years to come. You're correct.

Fort Hills asset has three mine pits, the South pit, which we're currently completing mining in, transitioning to the center pit in the early part of 2023, and then ultimately the North pit. It is indeed the North pit that has the largest amount of reserves and is largest in surface area. The new plan really accelerates the transition that we have to both the center and the North pit. This will ultimately give us more operational flexibility, and it gives us more ability to increase our operating efficiency in the year to come. We are actively monitoring the risks around Devonian water pit wall stability.

We have controls in place, and while the new plan is not without risks, we believe we have a good handle on what's to come, and we've got appropriate mitigations in place.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Great. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Greg, for your question.

Greg Pardy (Managing Director, Global Energy Research)

Thanks very much.

Operator (participant)

Thank you so much, Greg. Your next question comes from the line of Doug Leggate from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Kalei Akamine (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, good morning. This is actually Kalei Akamine for Doug Leggate. Thanks for taking my questions here. I've got a couple. The first one is just on the reliability. It seems like you guys are making some improvements there. We can see it in the numbers. Can you just talk about what's changing in your operations to drive that better performance?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah. No, thanks very much for the question. That's, you know, exactly one of our key focus areas in all aspects of the business, upstream through downstream. The teams have been working on that specifically and with a lot of focus. You know, it isn't one thing. It's really the combination of driving the focus across the organization on the performance of the assets reliability and just the work that all the teams are doing across all the assets, fixed plant, as well as our mining assets, as you know, you heard a bit in Peter's comments. You know, I'm really pleased to see the progress we're making on it, and we're gonna continue to move quickly in that direction to continue to improve on reliability.

Kalei Akamine (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. I appreciate that. Second question is just a follow-up on Fort Hills. After this acquisition where you acquired your non-op partner stake, can you talk about any other incremental M&A opportunities that might be on your radar? Maybe other assets that you own a piece of that we would like to own more of.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah. No, thanks for the questions. You know, first of all, just to be clear, we're not looking to do M&A. What we do is if there's an opportunity that's going to provide compelling value to our shareholders that's on strategy, then we'll take a look at it. The example of the transaction we just did at Teck is a clear example of that, where we had an opportunity to take a partner interest in an asset that we operate, we know well, it's a long life asset, has low intensity GHG barrels, and we were able to transact at a very compelling value for our shareholders. When we can do that sort of thing, we'll be very disciplined, and we'll be very opportunistic.

Kalei Akamine (Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Neil Mehta of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead and ask your question.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Neil, are you there?

Neil Mehta (Head of Americas Natural Resources Equity Research)

Teck, about the recently announced acquired interest, is that sort of a natural stopping point at that particular asset? Or are there any kind of longer-term plans to increase ownership, obviously acknowledging the recent announcement had a strong element of price associated with it?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

All right. Thanks for that. I think you know the question is. I'll give you the answer I just gave to the last question because it's the exact same. You know, we did this transaction based on all the dimensions I just said, extreme compelling value for shareholders, strategic fit, and it was an opportunity that presented itself to do that and add significant value for our shareholders. We're not in the mode of looking to do M&A, and we really just if those types of opportunities present themselves, then we'll obviously take a close look at it if it's gonna create compelling value for our shareholders.

Neil Mehta (Head of Americas Natural Resources Equity Research)

Okay, thanks. Just as a follow-up on CapEx, acknowledging you'll be talking about this a little bit more later this month, but how are you thinking about next year's spend with West White Rose and the elevated cost environment as well as continuing to monitor Fort Hills?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, we're going to be talking about that in detail at our upcoming Investor Day on 2023. We're going through the portfolio very carefully and our capital plan, and we'll be in position to share that with you, then.

Neil Mehta (Head of Americas Natural Resources Equity Research)

Thanks.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Your next question will come from the line of Menno Hulshof of TD Securities. Your line is now open.

Menno Hulshof (Managing Director, Institutional Equity Research)

I'll start with your incremental free funds flow targets. I believe the plan is still to get to cum CAD 2.15 billion by 2025, and it looks like you're targeting CAD 875 for this year and CAD 1.3 billion for next year. Can you just give us a sense of how much of your cum CAD 875 million target for 2022 has already been achieved and how you're tracking on your CAD 1.3 billion target for next year?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah, no, thanks very much. Yeah, we continue to push forward on that program. Just a reminder, that program is made up of initiatives and investments that drive increased revenue and margin enhancement as well as cost reductions. We're on track relative to those plans, and we're seeing those come through. Examples, we've talked about them in the past. An example is the interconnect pipeline that we invested in and that we really started in 2022 really leveraging that asset, and we're seeing the benefit of that asset through the performance of the business. We're also driving cost reduction. Now cost reduction, we're expecting more of that program to be playing out in 2023, 2024.

Obviously, we have inflation headwinds that we're going to need to work through, and so we're actually working and pushing the team to find other cost reduction offsets knowing that we've got these inflation headwinds in front of us. We feel we're on track relative to the program. Still much to do on the back half of it and a lot of focus by the team to deliver.

Menno Hulshof (Managing Director, Institutional Equity Research)

Thanks, Kris. My second question relates to turnarounds in utilization for 2023, and maybe this also falls into the wait till the end of the month bucket, but I'll throw it out there. Can you just remind us or maybe just walk us through where we should expect to see the largest turnarounds and impact to utilization across upstream and downstream in 2023?

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Sure. Thanks, Menno. You know, on downstream, it's gonna be a what I'll call a regular turnaround kind of program through 2023. Probably the largest event is gonna be at the Commerce City Refinery with the turnaround for plant 2. Why don't I ask Peter, actually? We do have U2 as planned maintenance next year. Why don't I just ask Peter to provide a bit more color to your question?

Peter Zebedee (EVP of Mining and Upgrading)

Yeah. I would say for 2023, the biggest events are indeed U2, as you mentioned, Kris, and then a Syncrude turnaround also next year. I do wanna highlight, though, maybe just building on what you said, Kris, what is different for us compared to historical performance really is this interconnect pipeline between Syncrude and the base plant. It really helps us give much more operational flexibility. In the past, when we needed bitumen production, the coker and hydrogen treating units, we really needed those to start up together in sequence. With the use of the interconnect pipeline, we've decoupled that, and we can really prioritize bitumen-producing assets to start exporting bitumen as the cokers aren't ready, or, you know, on the other side, export sour crude as the cokers are online and the hydrotreaters are still down.

It just gives us a bunch more operating flexibility, and that's really changed the game for us.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Great. Thanks, Peter. Any other question set up?

Operator (participant)

Yes. We have your next question from the line of John Royall of JP Morgan. Please go ahead and ask your question.

John Royall (Research Analyst)

Question. Just one on capital allocation. A couple of your peers have been using buybacks and in addition going to special or variable dividends more recently. I think your framework really just allows for the buyback. Maybe you can just talk about how you think about a variable dividend as a tool relative to the buyback and the preference there to buybacks.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Yeah, no, thanks for the question, John. We're very focused on being disciplined against our capital allocation framework. Actually, I'm gonna ask Alister to take that question.

Alister Cowan (CFO and EVP)

Thanks, Kris. John, I mean, essentially, we set out a capital allocation. You know, we're 50/50 between buybacks and the debt reduction. We expect to move to 75/25, pretty quickly in the next few months, as I laid out. Variable dividends, at this point, given the inherent value in our stock, are now part of the equation, but I've never ruled them out longer term, as being, part of the capital allocation as we go forward. When I look at the value of our stock, it's significantly undervalued, and our focus is definitely on buying stock back.

John Royall (Research Analyst)

Okay. Thank you, Alister. Then, if I could just follow up on the 75% level and, certainly not looking to split hairs here about a month or two here or there. But, just if you could clarify what you mean by a dependency on the commodity environment. Is that if, you know, if price declines precipitously, you might not move to the 75%? Just trying to understand exactly what that comment means.

Alister Cowan (CFO and EVP)

Yeah. I think if we have commodity prices in line with where we're at today, I think, you know, no problem in meeting the end of Q1 next year. If you saw a very significant reduction in commodity prices and cracks, obviously that would get extended out.

John Royall (Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you so much. The last question comes from the line of Doug Leggate of Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Doug Leggate (Managing Director and Head of US Oil & Gas Equity Research)

You're doubling up here. I was caught in another call earlier, but I did want to, Kris, first of all, I did want to say, you know, I don't know if it's been called out yet, but the strong operating performance again this quarter ahead of the Analyst Day. I'm sure everybody's happy to see that. My question is on the slide deck. I might be getting ahead of the Analyst Day here, but the CAD 2.15 billion target is now, I think, being characterized as offsetting headwinds, obviously inflation among other things. Should we think of that as signaling that the CAD 2.15 billion is no longer an absolute, or sorry, is no longer a net, and maybe an absolute with some offsets?

Any early look to how you're thinking about that ahead of the end of the month would be helpful. Thanks.

Alister Cowan (CFO and EVP)

Yeah, I'll take that one, Doug. Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, we're still, as Kris had mentioned earlier, moving through on achieving, you know, the specific items we had in that 2.15 revenue margin, some cost reductions with a big focus on cost reductions coming in 2023. Then obviously in 2024/2025, we have the addition of the margin and revenue from the cogen. If I look at what was inherent in that assumption was that we would absorb, you know, sort of regular inflation around 2%-3%. We're obviously not in that environment. While we are targeting and asking our operations to find additional offsets, it's certainly gonna be difficult to offset inflation across our business to the extent that we're seeing it today. Some of it will be used to offset inflation, there's no doubt about that.

Doug Leggate (Managing Director and Head of US Oil & Gas Equity Research)

Great. We'll wait on the Analyst Day. Thanks a lot, Alister.

Alister Cowan (CFO and EVP)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you so much. We don't have any questions on the queue. I would now like to turn the conference back to Kris Smith for closing remarks.

Kris Smith (Interim President and CEO)

Great. Thanks, everyone for joining us and for the questions. I hope everyone can join us for our upcoming investor presentation on November 29th. You know, in preparation for that, the leadership team and I are completing a deep review of the portfolio towards providing a robust company guidance for 2023, and I'm looking forward to the conversation with everyone on that day. In closing, I just wanna emphasize that I am taking action to drive shareholder value and achieve operational excellence. Make no mistake, this is the focus of our leadership team every day. That's my top priority. Thanks everyone, and we'll end the call there. Thank you, operator.

Operator (participant)

Presenters, thanks to all our participants for joining us today. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.