Imperial Oil Limited

and welcome to the Imperial Oil Second Quarter 24 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Peter Shaw, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. I am joined this morning by Imperial's Senior Management Team, including Brad Corson, Chairman, President, and CEO of Dan Lyons, Senior Vice President, Finance and Administration. Sherry Evers, Senior Vice President of Sustainability, Commercial Development and Product Solutions. And Cheryl Gomez-Smith, Senior Vice President of the Upstream. Today's comments include reference to non-GAAP financial measures. The 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 today's conference call. Today's comments may also contain forward-looking information. Any forward-looking information is not a guarantee of future performance and actual performance, and operating results can vary materially depending on a number of factors and assumptions. Forward-looking information and the risk factors and assumptions are described in further detail on our second quarter earnings release that we issued this morning, as well as our most recent Form 10-K. All these documents are available on CDAR+, EDGAR, and our website, so I would ask that you refer to those. Brad is going to start with some opening remarks and then hand it over to Dan, who is going to provide a financial update, and then Brad will provide operations update. Once that is done, we will follow up the Q&A session. So with that, I will turn it over to Brad for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Peter. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I hope everyone is doing well. I wanted to start today's call by taking a moment to talk about the serious wildfire situation that has occurred across Western Canada over the past few weeks. We are deeply thankful for the courageous work of the emergency services as they battle the fires in very difficult conditions to keep our community safe. Our thoughts are with the community of Jasper and others who have been tragically impacted by the destruction of the devastating fires and now as the communities work to rebuild. There have been large fires in the Fort McMurray region near our Curl operations and to a lesser extent around Cold Lake. The teams at our operations have been working closely with local and provincial agencies to ensure we're taking necessary precautions to protect our people and our assets. And fortunately, to date, there have been no impacts to our production and the situation has improved over the past few days. And of course, it's a situation that we will continue to closely monitor and take appropriate actions. Now, turning to our performance over the quarter, our upstream saw record production coupled with stronger price realizations due to the combined benefit of strengthening WTI prices and the tightening of WCS crude differential. We were pleased to see the successful startup of TMX in May, bringing additional egress capacity for Western Canadian Crudes, which has resulted in structural tightening of the differential, reduced price volatility, and a net benefit to Imperial. Our downstream business also performed well over the quarter and contributed very solid earnings despite significant turnaround activity. and some softening of refinery crack spreads. The downstream continues to realize the structural benefits of the Canadian market, including advantaged feedstocks and import parity pricing. So now let's review the second quarter results. I'm very pleased to report a strong second quarter with earnings per share up over 80% year over year. These results were underpinned by strong operations that included the safe and successful execution of several major planned turnaround activities across our integrated portfolio. And while we still have some scheduled turnaround work ahead, we're well positioned for a strong second half of the year. Earnings for the quarter were $1,133,000,000 with cash from operating activities of $1,508,000,000 when excluding the impact of working capital. I'm very pleased by the strong financial results we achieved, especially from a quarter which included significant planned turnarounds both in the upstream and downstream. In the upstream, we achieved total production of 404,000 gross oil equivalent barrels per day in the second quarter. This marks the highest ever second quarter production over the past 30 years when adjusting for the sale of XTO in 2022. The results were underpinned by strong and reliable operations across all of our assets and successful turnaround execution at Curl and Syncrude. Curl had another fantastic quarter and matched the assets record for highest second quarter production. This result contributed to achieving the highest first-half production in the asset's history. And you may recall this follows a record second half in 2023. Coal Lake also saw a strong second quarter, including first production from our Grand Rapids Phase I project, the industry's first solvent-assisted SAG-D operation, which we will discuss in more detail shortly. In the downstream, we continue to see strong operating performance as well. Refinery throughput averaged 387,000 barrels per day, which equates to a refinery utilization in the quarter of 89% and includes the successful month-long turnarounds at both Sarnia and Strathcona. Overall, we feel very positive about the strong first half of the year and are well-positioned to meet our annual guidance. we continue to deliver significant value to our shareholders through our reliable and growing dividend and share repurchase programs. And consistent with our commitment to return surplus cash to shareholders, we announced this morning our plans to accelerate repurchases under the normal course issuer bid with a target to complete the program prior to the end of this year. With that, I'll pass things over to Dan to discuss our financial results in more detail.