Imperial Oil Limited

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.

All right. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first quarter earnings call. With me today is the management team. We have Brad Corson, Chairman, President, and CEO. Dan Lyons, Senior Vice President, Finance and Administration. Simon Younger, Senior Vice President of the Upstream. Jerry Evers, Vice President of Commercial and Corporate Development, and John Wetmore, Vice President of the Downstream. Starting with the cautionary statement, today's comments include reference to non-GAAP financial measures. Definitions and reconciliations of these measures can be found in attachment six of our most recent press release and are available on our website with a 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 a number of factors and assumptions. The forward-looking information and the risk factors and assumptions are described in further detail in our first quarter earnings release that we issued this morning, as well as our most recent Form 10-K, and all of these documents are available on CDAR, EDGAR, and on our website, so I'd ask you to please refer to those. So as usual, after Brad and Dan go through the prepared remarks, we'll be switching over to Q&A. So with that, I'll hand it over to Brad.

Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. I hope everyone is doing well and had a great start to the year. I'd also like to take a quick moment to thank everyone for attending our investor day last Wednesday, both in person and virtually. It was our first in-person investor day since 2019, and it was great to get to see so many folks in person again. Your positive feedback on the event was very much welcome and appreciated, as is your ongoing support. I want to open by providing a brief update on our efforts to address the seepage issue at Curl that we have been talking about over the last several weeks. We continue to work closely with regulatory officials from the Alberta Energy Regulator and other government officials. We have about 200 people working to advance our mitigation efforts related to the Environmental Protection Order, and we're making very good progress. Most of this work was completed by the end of April, and we expect to finish by the end of May. In addition, we are continuing to engage directly with local indigenous communities to share information and are providing regular updates on progress. Throughout this incident, testing has continued to show drinking water in the region is safe and there were no impacts to fish populations in nearby river systems. I want to say again that we are deeply apologetic for this situation and we're working hard to correct it and ensure that it does not happen again. At our last earnings call in February, We reported what was the best year in Imperial's history. This performance was underpinned by strong operating performance and reflected the robust commodity price environment. And we've carried that momentum into the new year. The focus we have been consistently placing on safe, reliable operations continued to pay off in the first quarter as we delivered another strong quarter both financially and operationally. We did see some moderation in crude prices and diesel cracks, but the overall commodity price environment remains quite supportive. On the operations side, we had a record first quarter for production at Curl, and we delivered another very strong quarter in our downstream with utilization of 96% based on the restated higher capacity we talked about in our year-end reporting. And finally, after a year which saw our highest level of shareholder returns ever, we have continued to demonstrate our commitment in this area with the announcement of a $0.06 per share dividend increase today. Over the next few minutes, Dan and I will detail the results of what was another very strong quarter. So now let's review the first quarter results. Earnings for the quarter were $1.25 billion, with cash from operating activities of over $1.5 billion when excluding working capital impacts. Total upstream production in the quarter was 413,000 gross oil equivalent barrels per day, a result of strong operating performance across our entire upstream portfolio. I'll talk about each asset in more detail in a few minutes. We also had another great quarter in the downstream, refining throughput averaged 417,000 barrels per day, which equates to a refinery utilization in the quarter of 96%. As we talked about throughout last year, these high utilization rates are delivering significant value in the current commodity price environment. We continue to invest for the future with our focus on the work to progress what will be Canada's largest renewable diesel manufacturing facility at our Strathcona refinery, following the final investment decision announced earlier this year in January. We also successfully started up the third boiler flue gas unit at Curl as we continue to progress an initiative that once complete is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 220,000 tons per year. And finally, we continue to demonstrate our commitment to shareholder returns by announcing a second quarter dividend of 50 cents per share, which is an increase of six cents per share or 14%. versus the last quarter. With that, I'll pass things over to Dan.