Imperial Oil Limited

Good day and welcome to the Imperial Oil First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Peter Shaw, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. I'm joined this morning by Imperial's Senior Management Team, including Brad Corson, Chairman and CEO, John Whalen, President, Dan Lyons, Senior Vice President, Finance and Administration, Cheryl Gomez-Smith, Senior Vice President of the Upstream, and Scott Maloney, Vice President of the Downstream. 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 this conference call. Today's comments may 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. Forward-looking information and the risk factors and assumptions are described in further detail on our first 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 Plus and EDGAR and our website, so I'd ask you to 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 an operations update. Once that is done, we will follow with 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 first quarter earnings call. I hope everyone is doing well, and it was great to see many of you at our recent Investor Day in Toronto. As you are likely aware, this will be my last earnings call with John replacing me following next week's AGM in my retirement. But before I leave, I'm really pleased to report another strong quarter for Imperial with earnings of $1,288,000,000, which represents an increase of earnings per share by 13% year over year and by 6% on a sequential quarter basis. This represents our highest ever first quarter earnings in the company's history. We also generated free cash flow of $1,150,000,000 and ended the quarter with nearly $1,800,000,000 of cash on hand. So that puts us in a very strong financial position. And as you may have seen in the release this morning, we intend to renew our normal course issuer bid later this quarter. So while there is ongoing volatility in commodity prices, I remain very confident in our ability to grow shareholder value over the long term. Our upstream assets contributed solid production for the quarter, just shy of the record first quarter production we posted a year ago when adjusting for the divestment of XTO Energy Canada. Improved egress continued to support narrower heavy oil differentials than we've seen in the past. and especially during the winter months. And this in turn supported our price realizations. Our downstream business delivered once again with strong margin capture in a recovering crack spread environment. This business continued to benefit from many durable competitive advantages, including integration, proximity to feed stacks and market, efficient logistics, and our strong market position. Over the next few minutes, Dan and I will detail the results of this strong quarter. So now let's review the first quarter results. And as I just noted, earnings for the quarter were $1,288,000,000 with cash from operating activities of $1,760,000,000 when excluding the impact of working capital. Again, this represents our highest ever first quarter earnings. That sounded so good the first time I just had to say it again. These results reflect the strength of our integrated business model and our ability to capture value for our shareholders. In the upstream, we achieved total production of 418,000 gross oil equivalent barrels per day in the first quarter. Volume was supported by higher year-over-year production at Cold Lake, including continued strong results at Grand Rapids. We also utilized our enhanced winter operating procedures at Curl to manage through the extreme cold weather conditions in February. Syncrude production was steady year over year. In the downstream, refinery throughput averaged 397,000 barrels per day, which equates to a refinery utilization of 91%, while petroleum product sales averaged 455,000 barrels per day. Renewable diesel project construction continued at the Strathcona Refinery, and we are on track to start up mid-2025. We paid $307 million in dividends and finished the quarter with nearly $1,800,000,000 of cash on hand. We remain fully committed to returning surplus cash to shareholders in a timely manner and intend to renew our normal course issuer bid shortly towards the end of the second quarter. And with that, I'll pass things over to Dan to discuss our financial results in more detail.