Suncor Energy Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Suncor Energy fourth quarter 2022 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr. Troy Little, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor Energy's fourth quarter earnings call. Please note that today's comments contain forward-looking information. 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 forum, both of which are available on CR, EDGAR, and our website, suncor.com. Certain financial measures referred to in these comments are not prescribed by Canadian generally accepted accounting principles. For a description of these financial measures, please see our fourth quarter earnings release. We will start with comments from Chris Smith, Interim President and Chief Executive Officer, followed by Alistair Cowan, Suncor's Chief Financial Officer. Also on the call are three of our senior operating leaders, Peter Zebedee, Executive Vice President, Mining and Upgrading, Shelley Powell, Senior Vice President, In-Situ and E&P, and Arnel Santos, Senior Vice President, Refining and Logistics. Following the formal remarks, we'll open the call to questions. Now I'll hand it over to Chris to share his perspectives on the quarter.

Thanks, Troy. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Since taking on the interim CEO role of Suncor in July of last year, I've been fully committed to improving the safety and reliability of our operations. We're also maximizing our value capture by leveraging Suncor's difficult-to-replicate integrated model and driving fit and focus across our asset base. I want to begin our discussion today with an update on several initiatives we discussed at our recent investor day. First, on safety. As planned, collision awareness systems are scheduled to go live at Syncrude's Aurora Mine by the end of the first quarter, and we are on track to complete implementation of collision awareness and fatigue management technology systems across all nine sites. As well, we continue to drive sharp focus on safety performance across the entire company, and to that end, we have doubled the safety component weighting of our 2023 Employee Annual Incentive Program to assure alignment with that focus. Second, with respect to costs, we are making progress on contractor workforce reductions in our mining and upgrading business and remain on track to achieve a 20% reduction by mid-2023. And to be clear, these reductions will not be replaced by in-source workforce. Third, with respect to reliability, our upstream assets performed well overall during our very cold weather at the end of Q4. ThinkCrew achieved the highest full-year production in its history, while our firebag and situ assets set a new quarterly production record. With respect to Fort Hills, while there will be variability between quarters during the next three years, as outlined at our recent investor day, our performance improvement plan is progressing as expected. By mid-2023, volumes will start to ramp up as our mine inventory increases until our planned five-year fixed plant turnaround in July and August. Last, we continued to adjust our asset portfolio to focus more on our core integrated business. We completed the sale of our wind and solar assets and are making progress on the potential sale of our UK North Sea assets. We also closed the acquisition of an additional stake in Fort Hills from Tech Resources. Considering the smaller than expected interest we acquired, we are updating our annual production guidance for Fort Hills to reflect a corresponding decrease of 5,000 barrels per day for an annual range of 85 to 95,000 barrels per day. Now on to the quarter. Looking at the fourth quarter results, Suncor generated adjusted funds from operations of $4.2 billion, or $3.11 per share. Total upstream production averaged 763,000 barrels per day. 70% of this was Syncrude crude oil, or synthetic crude oil, which commanded premium pricing due to higher distillate cut relative to WTI. 20% was non-upgraded bitumen from our in-situ operations in Fort Hills. And lastly, 10% came from our E&P segment and reflects the disposition of our Norway assets, which was completed in the third quarter. Downstream generated $1.7 billion of FIFO-adjusted funds from operations, with an average refinery utilization rate of 94%. and margin capture was strong at 99%. As previously communicated, our Commerce City refinery was put into safe mode following the impacts of the extreme weather in late December. It has begun a progressive restart and we expect it to come back to full production later in the first quarter. For the full year 2022, Suncor generated record adjusted funds from operations of $18.1 billion, which is 67% higher than our previous annual record. We paid down $3.2 billion of debt through the year, further strengthening our balance sheet. And at the same time, through dividends and share buybacks, we returned record cash to shareholders of $7.7 billion, representing nearly 45% of adjusted funds from operations, for a 13% cash yield. We also continued to drive capital discipline across the company, and our capital expenditures for the year were $4.9 billion, which was at the bottom end of our updated guidance range. Now, before turning things over to Alistair, I would like to highlight the significant progress we've made to date on the Oil Sands Pathways Alliance to Net Zero, a key lever in our sustainability leadership and the long-term decarbonization of the oil sands industry. Recently, it was seen that Pathways has signed an evaluation agreement with the province of Alberta, allowing further delineation of our allocated pore space. We hope to further advance this with a formal lease agreement before the end of 2023. As well, front-end engineering and design of both the pipeline and sequestration facilities progresses as we continue to work with both the Canadian federal and Alberta provincial governments on the required fiscal and regulatory frameworks to enable these important projects. And with that, I'll now pass it over to Alastair to go through the financial results.