PBF Energy Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the PBF Energy third quarter 2021 earnings conference column webcast. At this time, all participants are placed in listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions following management's prepared remarks. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, it is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Colin Murray of Investor Relations. Sir, you may now begin.

Thank you, Rob. 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, and several other members of our management team. A copy of today's earnings release and our 10-Q filing, including supplemental information, are 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 that 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 results today, excluding special items. In today's press release, we describe the non-cash special items included in our third quarter 2021 results. The cumulative impact of the special items increased net income by an after-tax benefit of $45 million, or approximately 37 cents per share. 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 Nimley.

Tom Nimley Thanks, Colin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. We are pleased to report positive quarterly net income for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. Reaching this point took longer than anticipated, yet it is indicative of the continuing global recovery from the grip of the pandemic. Demand has improved for our products as economic activity increased and more people resumed their pre-pandemic routines. Gasoline demand has been robust and is currently at pre-pandemic levels, while distillate demand is beyond 2019 levels. We are seeing improvements in all our regions and expect to see strong demand persisting as more people return to their offices, get on planes for both leisure and business, and we move beyond the impacts of the current COVID variant. Increases in demand coupled with clean product inventories that are at or below the five-year levels should be supportive of above mid-cycle margins in the near term. Additionally, we are seeing incremental crude oil production coming from some of the world's largest producers, which modestly widened medium and heavy sour crude differentials during the third quarter. We expect this production trend will continue because global markets are calling for increasing supply. Given our exposure to heavier and sour barrels, we expect widening differentials to provide an incremental benefit to the strong underlying demand. Heading into year end, rising natural gas prices have been gaining a fair amount of attention. In refining, natural gas is an important input in terms of both refining processes and operating expenses. For PBF, approximately 15 to 20 percent of our operating expenses are related to natural gas in terms of direct use and energy consumption. We do expect to see elevated costs relative to natural gas, but we also expect these costs to be somewhat offset through clean product margin support for liquid fuels, primarily distillate, as power providers and other end users elect to switch from gas to liquid fuels. Our belief is that domestic refiners, especially in the Atlantic Basin, are at a competitive advantage because higher costs associated with natural gas increases increase the advantage on a relative basis versus our international competitors. Demand remains the key driver. We expect that demand in 2022 Will it continue its strong recovery and certainly exceed 2021? With that, I will turn the call over to Matt.