PBF Energy Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the PBF Energy fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following management's prepared remarks. If anyone dialed in should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Colin Murray of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, Darrell. Good morning and welcome to today's call. With me today are Tom Nimley, our CEO, Matt Lucey, our president, Eric Young, our CFO, Tom O'Connor, our senior vice president of commercial, Paul Davis, our president of Western Region, and several other members of our management team. A copy of today's earnings release, including supplemental information, is available on our website. Before getting started, I'd like to direct your attention to the safe harbor statement contained in today's press release. In summary, it outlines that statements contained in the press release and on this call, which express the company's or management's expectations or predictions of the future, are forward-looking statements intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions under federal securities laws. There are many factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations, including those we describe in our filings with the SEC. Consistent with our prior periods, we will discuss our results today, excluding special items. In today's press release, we provide a detailed list of the non-cash special items included in our fourth quarter 2020 results. The cumulative impact of the special items decreased the Q4 2020 net loss by an after-tax benefit of $246 million, or $2.04 per share. Additionally, due to the significant losses in 2020, certain deferred tax assets were revalued and drove a significant reduction in our effective tax rate for the fourth quarter and full year 2020. Going forward, we continue to recommend using an effective tax rate of approximately 26% for modeling purposes. As noted in our press release, we'll be using certain non-GAAP measures while describing PBF's operating performance and financial results. For reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the appropriate GAAP figure, please refer to the supplemental tables provided in today's press release. I'll now turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, Colin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. While we are starting to see some improvement overall, the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on families, communities, and businesses globally. PBF was hit hard by the pandemic and our employees dealt with many hardships at home and at work. Our employees, contractors, and business partners operated under enormous pressure during the year and their resilience allowed PBF to operate safely and reliably through what has hopefully been the worst of the pandemic. The demand destruction experienced by the industry is unprecedented in its severity and duration. Our immediate response was to ensure the safety and security of our people and our facilities. On top of the normal challenges presented by our 24-7 operations, the demand destruction for our products required PBF to operate our assets at lower rates than we had ever attempted over an extended period of time. Beyond our immediate response to the pandemic, PBF embarked on a strategic review focused on driving efficiency in all areas, including our refineries, logistics assets, systems, and corporate back office. We focused on reducing costs, eliminating redundancy, improving processes, and determining the appropriate configuration and path forward for the company in order to create a stronger base business. Ensuring the company was financially positioned to operate through the pandemic was a top priority. We raised approximately $1.8 billion to provide the company with the liquidity required to weather the pandemic and stabilize our financial footing. As a result of our strategic review, we reconfigured our East Coast refining assets to operate as a fully integrated system, allowing us to maintain the most profitable aspects of each business while idling redundant capacity, which should result in $150 million in annual operating and capital expense savings. We expect initial results of our ongoing cost reduction programs will generate an incremental $100 to $125 million in operating expense savings for the rest of our refining system. In total, our cost reductions in 2020 resulted in over $700 million of savings for the year. Our goal is to make our business more cost competitive, ensuring that all of our assets remain safe and reliable, and our positions to ramp up rates as demand for products improves. We do believe that marketing conditions are improving. Lower utilization rates in 2020, while operationally challenging, meant that supply and demand were reasonably well matched following the initial surge in inventories last spring. By the end of the year, inventory levels were relatively in line with the normal five-year historical ranges. We are not out of the woods yet as the pandemic continues to dominate our lives and business, but we are seeing positive signs. The vaccine rollout is improving and more people have now received the vaccine that had tested positive for COVID. This is a good trend that needs to continue in order for demand for our products to recover as people are able to return to their normal routines. We will continue to solidify the savings and operational improvements we've made over the course of 2020. And we anticipate that the fruits of our labor will show as the recovery gains momentum. Lastly, I would like to thank all of our employees for following our pandemic protocols while continuing their tireless efforts in maintaining the safety and integrity of our operations. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Matt.