Exxon Mobil Corporation

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to ExxonMobil's third quarter 2024 earnings call. Today's call is being recorded. We appreciate your joining us today. I'm Jim Chapman, Vice President, Treasurer and Investor Relations. I'm joined by Darren Woods, Chairman and CEO, and Kathy Michaels, Senior Vice President and CFO. This quarter's presentation and pre-recorded remarks are available on the Investors section of our website. They're meant to accompany the third quarter earnings news release, which is posted in the same location. During today's presentation, we'll make forward-looking comments, including discussion of our long-term plans and integration efforts, which are still being developed and which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please read our cautionary statement on slide two. You can find more information on the risks and uncertainties that apply to any forward-looking statements in our SEC filings on our website. Note that we also provided supplemental information at the end of our earnings slides, which are also posted on the website. And now, I'll turn it over to Darren for some opening remarks.

Good morning, and thanks for joining us. ExxonMobil announced earnings of $8.6 billion this morning, one of our best third quarters in the past decade. Even more importantly, this quarter's results continue to demonstrate Our enterprise-wide transformation is improving the earnings power of the company. Our energy products business provides a compelling proof point. In 2024, year-to-date earnings are roughly double what they were in the same period of 2019 on a constant margin basis. For all of our businesses, we've been focused on reduced cost, high return investments, and selected investments to improve profitability, particularly in bottom-of-cycle conditions. This work has fundamentally transformed our refining business. For instance, we've high graded our portfolio by divesting less advantage sites. At the time of the Exxon and Mobil merger, we had 45 refineries. In 2017, when I stepped into this job, we had 22. I expect to end this year with 15, bringing us very close to an entire portfolio advantaged by location and configuration. We've also significantly improved our product yield. By investing in assets such as the Rotterdam Advanced Hydrocracker and the Beaumont expansion, we've increased the yield of higher-value products from lower-value feeds. Finally, we've achieved dramatic structural cost savings. In our overall product solutions business, we've reduced costs by $5 billion versus 2019. In energy products specifically, to take one example, We completed our first half of 2024 turnarounds for $200 million less than the previous turnarounds on these assets, a 24% reduction. Our results from the quarter also demonstrate the value of diversification by geography, resource, and product mix, providing natural hedges that increase the stability of earnings. In the third quarter, while liquid prices and refining margins were down, gas realizations, chemical margins, and specialty margins were all up. Underpinning our results is a relentless focus on execution excellence. We saw a good example of this in the quarter at our Joliet refinery in Illinois. In July, a tornado ripped through the site, cutting power, steam, instrument air, and potable water. We've never had a harder shutdown. With the extensive damage to the transmission system that provides power to the site, we were cold for almost two weeks. This was an unprecedented event that severely impacted fuel supplies for the entire region. Our community, the city of Chicago, local, state, and federal governments were all counting on a quick recovery. I'm proud to say that the men and women of Joliet, with a lot of support from across the corporation, delivered. Thanks to their remarkable efforts, we beat an aggressive recovery schedule and were supplying much-needed fuel to the market far faster than we thought possible, reducing the time to recover by a third. I want to take this opportunity on behalf of all of their colleagues at ExxonMobil and the communities that depend on them to thank everyone involved in the recovery for their hard work, commitment, and personal sacrifice. Thank you. You did us proud. As always, our success is our shareholders' success. This morning, we announced a 4% increase to the quarterly dividend to $0.99 per share. We've now increased our annual dividend for 42 years in a row. putting us in an elite tier of the companies known as dividend aristocrats. Less than 4% of S&P 500 companies have paid higher dividends every year for more than 40 years. We've also sustained our position in the top five of all S&P 500 companies with the largest dividends paid. We know how important the dividend is to our investors, particularly our millions of retail shareholders. We remain committed to a sustainable, competitive, and growing dividend. which is a key component of the attractive total shareholder return we are delivering. In the first nine months of 2024, we've generated a TSR of 20%, leading all IOCs, just as we've done over the last three, five, and 10 years. Turning to our upstream business, the portfolio of advantage assets we've built is the envy of the industry. In the third quarter, we grew production to 4.6 million oil equivalent barrels per day, a 24% increase versus the prior year quarter. To drive higher value, we continue to improve the profitability of the barrels we produce. Our progress has been exceptional. On a constant price basis, our 2019 unit earnings were about $5 per oil equivalent barrel. Year-to-date in 2024, excluding Pioneer, we've doubled that to $10 per barrel. The third quarter was our first full quarter with Pioneer. which added 770,000 oil equivalent barrels per day of highly advantaged production. As we said when we announced the deal, combining our technology, Pioneer's contiguous acreage, and the capabilities of our two organizations is allowing us to recover more resource more efficiently with a lower environmental footprint. In the third quarter, we drilled the longest ever laterals on Pioneer acreage at 18,350 feet. We're nearly three and a half miles. We're scheduled to spud the first ever 20,000-foot laterals on Pioneer's acreage this quarter. The benefits of long laterals are significant. Fewer wells, a smaller surface footprint, and greater capital efficiency. In Guyana, we completed tie-ins for the country's gas-to-energy project, on budget and schedule, and we are back to full production. Once the government completes the associated power plant, The gas to energy project is expected to provide the people of Guyana with electricity that is significantly cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable. This will further spur the Guyanese economy, which was the fastest growing in the world in the first half of 2024, with GDP up 50%. Our Paira project, which remained online during the tie-ins, continues to perform above investment basis. as has been the case with all the projects we've brought online in the world's premier deepwater development. We'll have much more to say about the upstream business during our spotlight next month. I promised Neil I wouldn't steal his thunder, so let me just say, on the Pioneer synergies alone, which are considerably higher than expected, we think you'll find the story compelling. As I've said many times, we're a technology company. Managing and transforming molecules provide products that meet society's greatest needs and deliver attractive returns. In our low-carbon solutions business, we continue to lay the groundwork for the world's largest low-carbon hydrogen production facility at our integrated site in Baytown. The facility represents a new energy value chain and will produce 1 billion cubic feet per day of virtually carbon-free hydrogen, with 98% of the CO2 emissions captured and stored. In the third quarter, two new partners joined the project to accelerate market development for this new energy value chain. ADNOC has taken a 35% equity stake in the facility. We're pleased to add their proven experience and global market insights to this world-scale project. In addition, Mitsubishi signed an agreement for the potential offtake of low-carbon ammonia and equity participation in the project. The ammonia will be used to generate power and heat for industrial applications in Japan. helping to establish a new supply chain for low carbon energy. The agreement with Mitsubishi follows a similar agreement earlier this year with Jera, Japan's largest power generator. While we still have some hurdles to clear, we're encouraged by the growing market recognition of the significant value and advantages of this first in the world low carbon project. Of course, the highest hurdle, as we've said, is the translation of the IRA's technology agnostic legislation into enabling regulations that maintain focus on the what, carbon intensity, and not the how. We are ready to move forward once the Biden administration publishes regulations consistent with the legislative intent. Assuming this happens, we plan to reach FID in 2025 with startup in 2029. We've also made noteworthy progress on the CCS front. In October, we announced an agreement with our first natural gas processing customer to transport and store 1.2 million metric tons of CO2 per year. This is our fifth agreement overall and brings our total CO2 contracted for storage to 6.7 million metric tons per year, more than any other company. In addition, we secured the largest offshore CO2 storage site in the United States through an agreement with the Texas General Land Office. The 271,000-acre site further solidifies the U.S. Gulf Coast as a leading market for carbon capture, transport, and storage. In addition to LCS, we're advancing other technology-driven businesses that have huge potential. We've spoken before about our Proxima thermoset resin, which is a revolutionary new material that is stronger, lighter, and more corrosion-resistant than conventional alternatives. We see a total addressable market in this space of 5 million tons per year and $30 billion by 2030. One major application of Proxima is rebar that is only one-fourth the weight but twice as strong as steel. In the third quarter, we signed a licensing agreement with Novocus Corporation, a North American manufacturer of rebar from Proxima. That allows rebar to be produced anywhere in the world. Rebar is just one example of Proxima's value and use. Others include high-performance coatings and a range of lightweighting applications for automobiles. In our carbon materials venture, we see a massive opportunity in the market for battery anode materials, which could grow at 25% per year and, like Proxima, reach $30 billion by 2030. The primary material in battery anodes is graphite, and we've developed proprietary technology that allows us to produce feedstock for next-generation graphite at scale. This innovative material has the potential to improve EV battery range by 30% and enable faster charging. ExxonMobil's history with transportation dates to the very beginning of the automotive age, when we provided fuel for Henry Ford's first automobiles. Some might find it ironic, but with the work we're doing in lithium for cathodes, graphite for anodes, Proxima as a lightweight battery case, and the plastics, lubricants, and cooling fluids we already provide, we may become one of the most important players in a new automotive age of EVs. And our corporate plan update next month will highlight how we're investing in technology-based high-return growth opportunities across all of our businesses, from the upstream to product solutions to LCS to new growth areas. What I would leave you with today is this. All our success, our continuously improving profitability, our execution excellence, our technological innovation, and our tremendous portfolio of growth opportunities flows from our strategy and focus on fully leveraging our core capabilities and competitive advantages, the most important being our people. We have the best team in this industry, and in my view, any industry. I look forward to sharing more of their work during the corporate plan update. Thank you.

Thank you, Darren. Now let's move to our Q&A session. And as a reminder, we ask each participant to keep it to just one question. And with that, operator, we'll ask you to please open the line for the first question.