Shell PLC

Welcome to Shell's 2024 First Quarter results. It's been nearly a year since Capital Markets Day when we showed you our plans to deliver more value. And in March, our energy transition update showed how we will do that with less emissions, demonstrating our commitment to being a net zero emissions energy business by 2050, whilst delivering enhanced shareholder returns. As we continue to turn our plans into action, I'm pleased that 2024 is off to a good start. we delivered yet another set of strong operational and financial results in the first quarter. In upstream, our conventional oil and gas business performed very well, with many of our core assets delivering high controllable availability. We also started production at our Rydberg field, which is connected to our Appomattox production hub, reinforcing our leading deep water position in the Gulf of Mexico, where our oil production has some of the lowest greenhouse gas intensity in the world. This is another project that supports the energy security the world needs and underpins the longevity of our cash flows. At Shell Polymers Monaca, our petrochemicals plant near Pittsburgh, we have successfully ramped up to full operation in Q1 and are on a pathway to longer term stability. In our renewables and energy solutions business, we have strategically diluted part of our stake in the Texan Brazos wind farm, whilst keeping access to 100% of the offtake as part of our integrated power strategy. This allows us to build on our strengths and leverage our world-class trading and optimization capabilities. We continue to focus on maximizing the value of every electron and molecule to help us deliver on all our targets. Moving on to our financial results, we continue to deliver strong results in the first quarter of 2024. Despite above average well write-offs, our adjusted earnings were $7.7 billion. and we generated $13.3 billion of cash flow from operations, driven by our consistent focus on performance. In the first quarter, we had high liquefaction volumes coupled with strong seasonal trading and optimization in our integrated gas business, even though market conditions were less favorable than in Q4. In chemicals, we saw marked improvement in performance compared with previous quarters, and we still have potential for further growth. and it was a strong quarter for our products business, particularly in trading and optimization, where we were able to capture high margins due to global product supply disruptions. Moving on to our financial framework, we continue to be disciplined about our capital spend and our balance sheet is strong. Regarding shareholder distributions, today we have announced another $3.5 billion share buyback program, which we expect to complete by the time of our Q2 results announcement in early August. That brings our expected shareholder distributions for the first half of the year to well over $10 billion. This demonstrates how we generate attractive shareholder returns in line with our guidance of 30 to 40% of our CFFO for shareholder distributions through the cycle. So to summarize, Q1 was a good start to the year, a quarter of strong operational and financial performance, And for the rest of 2024, we will keep driving performance, focus on our strengths and continue to deliver more value with less emissions. Lastly, there's an important upcoming event for your calendars. Our Annual General Meeting 2024 is on May 21st. We ask our shareholders to support our Energy Transition Update, in which we outline how we continue to make good progress in reducing emissions from our operations whilst investing in areas where we have strengths. These investments are helping our customers to decarbonize. With this in mind, we have set a new ambition to reduce customer emissions from the oil products we sell by 15 to 20% by 2030. Therefore, we ask our shareholders to vote against the alternative resolution. By doing so, our shareholders will be endorsing this management team, our board, and Shell's aim of being the investment case through the energy transition. Thank you.

We will now begin the question and answer session. People dialed in, if you have a question, please press star one. If you wish to be removed from the queue, please press star two. Phone callers are requested to mute the audio on their computer webcast and listen attentively to their telephone audio as we begin to progress through the telephone questions.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope that after watching this presentation, you've seen how we delivered strong results and how we continue to focus on operational performance. Today, Sinead and I will be answering your questions. But first, I'd like to just take a moment to thank Jörg Hausinger for all the work that he has done for us here at Shell. Chirk has had a 35-year career, a very impressive career, and has been pivotal in integrating the external market perspective into our strategy. So we thought we would wish him well with a very strong quarter and thank him for all the effort he has put in. And now, if we move to the questions, Luke, can we please have one or two questions, please, from every person on the call? And I hand it over to you, Luke, to let us know who the first caller is. Thank you.