Suncor Energy Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Suncor Energy fourth quarter 2021 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. And if you require any assistance during the call, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Trevor Bell, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Bell, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor's fourth quarter earnings call. With me this morning are Mark Little, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Alistair Cowan, Chief Financial Officer. Please note that today's comments contain forward-looking information. The actual results may differ materially from the expected results because of various risk factors and assumptions that are described in our fourth quarter earnings release, as well as in our current annual information form. Both of those are available at CDAR, EDGAR, and our website, suncor.com. Certain financial measures referred to in these comments are not prescribed by Canadian GAAP. For a description of these financial measures, please see our fourth quarter earnings release. Following the formal remarks, we'll open up the call to questions. Now I'll hand it over to Mark for some opening remarks.

Great. Thanks, Trevor. And good morning. Thank you for joining us. I wanted to begin by talking about the incidents that we outlined in our recent press release. On many occasions, inside the company and externally, I've talked about my personal commitment to safety above all else and our drive to operational excellence. I know that many are questioning our focus on this given the recent fatality and operational challenges. These outcomes are unacceptable and we know that we must do better. I and the Suncor leadership team are deeply committed to engaging our workforce so everyone goes home safely every single day and improving the operating performance of our company. I have a comprehensive plan endorsed by our board. We're executing this plan to address these concerns. Despite these challenges, we had several accomplishments in the quarter. We delivered the best quarter of adjusted funds from operations of $3.1 billion. On a per share basis, this is $2.17 per share and exceeds our previous quarterly per share record, which was set in Q1 of 2014 by 11%. We upgraded a combined 515,000 barrels per day of synthetic crude oil, which marks our third-best quarterly result due to 99 and 90 percent utilization rates at base plant and syncrude, respectively. We produced 151,000 barrels per day of bitumen from our in situ operations in Fort Hills, which resumed two-train operations in mid-December. Our E&P production of 77,000 barrels a day reflects the Golden Eagle disposition. And in the downstream, we achieved nearly $800 million of adjusted funds from operations with 96% refinery utilization. And once again, our Canadian refineries outperformed the Canadian refinery average utilizations. In terms of full year results, we continued to strengthen the company by reducing our net debt by nearly $4 billion. We returned nearly $4 billion of cash through the doubling of our dividend and share buybacks, and that's 40% of our adjusted funds from operations within the year. Based on our average 2021 average market cap, that's a 10% cash return to our shareholders. Looking at our 2021 full year performance, Suncorp generated adjusted funds from operations of $10.3 billion. Our regional oil sands assets contributed record annual funds from operations of $6.9 billion, despite completing the largest maintenance program in our history. These results reflect accretive investments, including increasing the utilization of our SunCore Syncrude interconnecting pipeline, higher volumes from Firebag D bottlenecks, improved margin capture through our trading logistics capabilities, and continued cash savings from reclamation using our past technology. I'll now pass it to Alistair to go through the quarterly financial results.