Imperial Oil Limited

Good day and welcome to the Imperial Oil 3Q earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Dave Hughes, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Mary, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us on our third quarter earnings call. As usual, I'm joined by Imperial's senior management team, including Brad Corson, Chairman, President, and CEO, Dan Lyons, Senior Vice President, Finance and Administration, Simon Younger, Senior Vice President of the Upstream, Sherry Evers, Vice President of Commercial and Corporate Development, and John Wetmore, Vice President of the Downstream. Just let me first go over the cautionary statement. Today's comments include reference to non-GAAP financial measures. The definitions and reconciliations of these measures can be found in our attachment six of our most recent press release and are available on our website with the link to this conference call. Today's comments may also contain forward-looking information. Any forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance, and actual future performance and operating results can vary materially, depending on the number of factors and assumptions. Forward-looking information and the risk factors and assumptions are described in further detail in our third quarter earnings release that we issued this morning, as well as our most recent Form 10-K. All of these documents are available on CDAR, EDGAR, and on our website, so please refer to those. As usual, Brad and Dan are going to provide an operating and financial update, after which we'll cut over to the Q&A. So with that, I will turn it over to Brad for his opening remarks.

Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. I hope you're all doing well. I am really pleased to report another very strong quarter for Imperial. We saw outstanding performance across all of our assets, both upstream and downstream, and we are also seeing this strong operating momentum continue into the fourth quarter. The overall macro environment remains quite positive for our financial performance. We're continuing to experience high commodity prices driven in large part by supply challenges and ongoing geopolitical events, both of which serve to remind us just how important a stable and reliable energy supply is. Our unrelenting focus on safety and reliability enables our strong operating performance in this environment and underpins the results, which we will be talking about this morning. And we continue to look for ways to further increase production and ensure reliable energy supplies when Canadians need them most. And so far, the fourth quarter seems to be a continuation of this economic environment. With all of our major planned maintenance activities behind us, Our plans are to continue running at maximum levels as we have so far this year. This sets us up well for a very strong finish to the year. So over the next few minutes, Dan and I will detail the results of what was a very strong quarter. So now let's review the third quarter results. Earnings for the quarter were just over $2 billion, and our cash from operating activities was almost $3.1 billion. These results reflect the strong operating performance in the quarter, as well as the strong commodity fundamentals we are currently experiencing. I would also remind you that, along with strong financial results like this, comes increased royalty and tax contributions to the government that go to support our local communities. We achieved total upstream production of 430,000 barrels per day in the quarter, which reflects a return to normal operations at Curl post the second quarter turnaround and ongoing excellent performance at Cold Lake, as well as the impacts of a large planned turnaround at Simcoe. Performance of the downstream continues to excel. Our refinery utilization in the third quarter was 100%. which not only represents the fifth consecutive quarter of utilization above 90%, but also the highest utilization we have seen in over 40 years. This sustained outstanding performance is so important in the current environment, given the current supply challenges we have talked about. The third quarter also saw significant cash generated, including cash received from the proceeds of the sale of our interest in XTO Energy Canada which closed at the end of August. We opted to use those sales proceeds to reduce our outstanding debt by $1 billion. This also lowers our debt to capital ratio even further, from 19% at the end of 2021 to below 16% now. In addition to this debt repayment, we continue to maximize shareholder returns. Not only did we return $227 million in dividends, By mid-October, we had fully executed our current normal course issuer bid well ahead of the program's expiry in June of 2023. These buybacks represented an additional $1.5 billion of cash returned to our shareholders during the quarter and another $434 million in October. And finally this morning, We declared a dividend of 44 cents per share, payable January 1st of 2023. That represents an increase of 10 cents per share, or over 29%. This is the largest dividend increase in Imperials history. And we also announced our intention to initiate another substantial issuer bid to return an additional $1.5 billion to our shareholders in the fourth quarter. All together, as of the end of the third quarter, we have now delivered record shareholder returns of $5.1 billion this year, with more to come. And with that, I'll pass things over to Dan.