Suncor Energy Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Suncor Energy second quarter 2025 financial results 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 the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Suncor Energy Senior Vice President of External Affairs, Mr. Troy Little.

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor Energy's second 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 second quarter earnings release, as well as in our current annual information form, both of which are available on CDAR, EDGAR, and our website, Sancor.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 second quarter earnings release. We will start with comments from Rich Krueger, President and Chief Executive Officer, followed by Chris Smith, Suncor's Chief Financial Officer. Also on the call are Peter Zebedee, Executive Vice President, Oil Sands, and Dave Oldry, Executive Vice President, Downstream. Following the formal remarks, we'll open the call up to questions. Now, I'll hand it over to Rich to share his comments.

Thanks, Troy. Our second quarter was about completing major maintenance and project activities and positioning for a strong second half. We successfully accomplished both. I'll highlight operational performance. Chris will cover financial. Let me first start with personnel and process safety. Following our two safest years ever in 2023 and 2024, I'm pleased to report the first half of 2025 has been even safer in all categories across the board, a credit to our employees and our contractors. Upstream production, our highest second quarter and our highest first half in company history. First half at 831,000 barrels a day, our previous best set last year by 28,000 barrels a day. For those keeping score, our past four quarters have all set quarterly records. First half upgrade or utilization 94% despite major base plant turnaround activity over two years, the first half of 25 versus the first half of 23 we've achieved a production increase of 89,000 barrels a day. This increase alone would rank as Canada's 10th largest oil producer. Refining throughput, again, highest second quarter and highest first half in company history. First half at 462,000 barrels a day beat our previous best, also set last year, by 20,000 barrels a day. Like the upstream, our past four quarters have all set quarterly throughput records. First half refining utilization, 99%. Here again, despite major turnaround activity, Over two years, the first half of 25 versus the first half of 23, we've achieved a throughput increase of 81,000 barrels a day. This increase alone would rank as essentially Canada's 10th largest refinery. Product sales, same story. Highest second quarter and highest first half in company history. First half at 603,000 barrels a day beat our previous best. Once again, set last year by 15,000 barrels a day. Like refining and upstream, our past four quarters have all set quarterly sales records. We've had 13 months in our history with sales greater than 600,000 barrels a day. Nine of the 13 have been in the past 12 months. Over two years, first half of 25 versus first half of 23 achieved a product sales increase of 72,000 barrels a day. This increase alone equivalent to 5% of Canada's entire refined product sales. Operating costs, first half OS&G, $6.46 billion, down $135 million versus the first half of 24, despite higher production, higher refining throughput, and higher product sales. Over two years, the first half of 25 versus the first half of 23, OS&G is down $765 million, despite 89,000 barrels a day higher production, 81,000 barrels a day higher refining throughput, and 72,000 barrels a day higher product sales. The message, we continue to achieve higher performance, significantly higher volumes, significantly lower costs, setting records, raising the bar, quarter on quarter, year on year, operating leverage, creating value, through our people, their expertise, commitment, and determination, focused on what we can control, embracing a culture that every barrel and every dollar matter. Let me move to turnarounds. Historically, greater than 20% of our capital, $1.25 billion per year, has been spent on turnarounds. For two years, we've been focused on improving cost and schedule performance. via benchmarking, risk-based work selection, work planning, and execution. In May of last year, at our Investor Day, we committed to reduce turnaround costs by $250 million per year over three years. With that backdrop, I'll highlight second quarter performance. Edmonton Refinery, large work scope, including major crude units. Previous turnaround of the same unit was 44 days. Our 2025 plan was 41 days. We completed it in 36, improving from the fourth quartile in North America to the second quartile. Previous cost, $159 million. This year, 142, $17 million or 11% lower. Compliments to Gavin Knight and the Edmonton team. Sarnia refinery, also several units, including major crude. Previous turnaround of the same scope, 44 days. Our 2025 plan was 40 days. We completed it in 28, improving from fourth quartile to first quartile. Previous cost, $108 million. This year, 94. $14 million or 13% lower. Credit to Leslie DeCarolis and the Sarnia team. Base plant upgrader one. Initial estimate was synced with the Coke drum replacement project at greater than 100 days. Our 2025 plan required the turnaround completion in less than 91. We completed it in 67. Planned cost, $259 million. We completed it for 231, 28 million or 11% lower, improving from fourth quartile performance to second. Well done to Bruce Dernford and the Green Plant team. 2025's turnaround schedule is split between the second and third quarters, with third quarter events including firebag plant 92, Montreal Refinery, Edmonton Refinery, and Syncrude 8-1 Coker. Overall, we project 2025 performance to be approaching industry second quartile, with second quartile in North America representing best in class in Canada. Bottom line, we are exceeding our improvement targets. initially focused on duration and cost, now interval extensions. In fact, our 2026 business plan, which is under development, includes interval extensions on future base plant and syncrude cokers, Edmonton and Sarnia refineries, and all firebank plant turnarounds. Therefore, based on our improvement and our confidence, we are raising our annual turnaround capital reduction target by $100 million, from $250 million per year to $350 million per year. This does not include the added benefit of higher uptimes and associated volumes. I want to talk about two capital projects completed in the second quarter. Base Plant U1 Coke Drum Replacement, the most extensive coke drum replacement project in industry history. Eight 100-foot-tall, 26-foot-diameter drums weighing nearly 300 tons each. New drums, foundations, cutting decks, ancillary systems. 40 heavy lifts with one of the world's largest cranes, the heaviest equivalent to 620 Ford F-150 pickup trucks. We funded it at $1.2 billion. Initially scoped at more than 100 days, we committed to 91 in guidance, reviewed by third-party experts for validity. Well, Ryan Jackson and his team completed it in an astounding 67 days, a 24-day improvement versus guidance, 165 million, or 14% below funding, Our project was literally executed flawlessly. Every detail was mapped out. Every scenario was contemplated. We built full-scale models to practice the most critical steps. Bottom line, we systematically de-risked the entire event. World-class performance by any standard. Now, decades of benefits, modernized design, upgraded metallurgy, automated controls, enhanced safety systems, lower maintenance costs, and higher reliability, I would urge you to check out our website for a three-minute video on the project. Second project, Syncrude, Mildred Lake West Mine Extension, $1.5 billion gross project to develop 730 million barrels of bitumen replacing the North Mine. Project involved a new mine, haul roads, transport bridge, power lines, and pipeline. The oil sands lease is literally the size of Manhattan. We developed it without a new tailings pond or processing plant. We achieved first ore in April, six months ahead of schedule, at a cost $100 million below funding. Kudos to Niaz Ahmed and Adrian Larkin and their teams. Our 2025 project and turnaround performances illustrate that today's Suncorp delivers, beating ambitious, benchmark-based performance improvement targets. Guidance. Last December, we issued a 2025 capital guidance range of $61 to $63 billion. Since then, we have accelerated turnaround improvements. executed major capital projects under budget, and performed better across a wide range of base business activities with an intense organization-wide focus on capital and capital efficiency. As a result, today we issued a revised lower 2025 capital range of $5.7 to $5.9 billion, a midpoint reduction of $400 million. Incremental free funds will go to buybacks. And although it's too early in the year to update volumes, year-to-date performance points to the high end of all guidance ranges. Institutionalizing operational excellence. Fifteen months ago, on our first quarter 2024 earnings call, I described Suncor's longstanding system to manage risk reliability, and overall operational performance. A system that provided sites with operational requirements or expectations, but a system that left it up to each site to determine how to meet the expectations. I shared with you that we judged that system to be too complex and insufficient in meeting our high performance standards of today. As a result, we designed an entirely new system to achieve operational excellence based on work processes, processes such as managing reliability and managing maintenance, 21 standards detailing how to achieve operational excellence based on industry best practice. It was developed by subject matter experts and frontline employees for more than a year. Our objective to ensure clarity, consistency, and quality in how we operate. Conversion from the old system to our new system started in earnest in late 2024. I'm pleased to report we achieved our ambitious timeline with all sites now fully converted to our new system. The new system is literally a game changer, institutionalizing operational excellence, reducing site by site variation, and elevating overall performance. I personally reviewed page by page all 21 work processes and practices, and based on my 40 years of experience, I can attest it's best in class. Special call out to Sylvie Tran and her team who led this work, and to our site leaders for embracing the change. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris.

Great. Thanks, Rich, and good morning, everyone. Well, it definitely was a stellar turnaround quarter and a showcase of operational excellence. Now, before I review the quarter results, I do want to highlight our exceptional shareholder returns in Q2, delivered during a major turnaround quarter and ongoing commodity price volatility. In Q2, we again returned nearly $1.5 billion to shareholders, including $697 million in dividends and $750 million in share buybacks. Year-to-date, our buybacks are nearly double those of our nearest oil sands competitors, We have repurchased 2.3% of our equity float so far this year, or nearly 1.2% per quarter, supporting future dividend and free funds flow per share growth. Since the beginning of 2023, we've returned $13.6 billion to our shareholders via share buybacks and dividends, representing 22% of our average market cap through that period. Our integrated business model, coupled with focused operational performance, delivers high-quality cash flows that are reliable across the commodity cycle, which we are deploying to ensure strong returns for our shareholders. Now, turning to the second quarter overall performance, it was a quarter marked by continued volatility in crude oil prices. WTI ranged from the high 50s to the mid 70s in Q2, all within a very short window. averaging $63.70 U.S. per barrel for the quarter, a drop of almost $8 a barrel from Q1. Also, the light heavy differential tightened to $2.45 a barrel versus Q1, averaging a $10.20 U.S. per barrel discount relative to WTI, while synthetic crude improved by over $3 a barrel to a $1 per barrel premium versus T.I. 2-1-1 cracking margins improved in the quarter, driven by improving gasoline cracks and very strong distillate cracks. And our 5-2-2-1 refining index grew to $27.85 U.S. a barrel. Meanwhile, the Canadian dollar strengthened, with the CAD to USD exchange rate moving from 70 cents to 72 cents. Even with this headline crude price volatility, our integration across the value chain allows us to offset those headwinds, delivering reliable and high-quality cash flows. An example, based on our publicly shared sensitivities, an $8 drop in WTI and a two-point strengthening of the Canadian dollar would have about a half a billion dollar impact on quarterly AFFO, all else being equal. However, our best-in-class integrated model, which captured stronger refining margins and improved synthetic pricing, coupled with strong operational performance, mitigated over half that impact. That's an equivalent to an extra month of share buybacks at our current pace. That's the value of our unique integrated business. It enables us to reduce the inherent short-term variability of cash flow in a commodity business and deliver more stable, resilient results. and cash for our shareholders. Looking to the second half of 2025, we expect continued commodity market volatility, including ongoing concerns around global trade and tariffs. That said, the refining outlook remains constructive for Suncor with positive supply-demand balances, low product inventories, especially in distillate, and announced refinery closures supporting demand for our exports. As a 211 refiner Suncor benefits from widening distillate cracks and our traders are actively pursuing margin enhancing opportunities, both domestically and leveraging Suncor's export capacity from both the west and east coasts. On Q2 operation performance, even though it was a heavy turnaround quarter impacting production and refinery throughput, we were still able to put a number of records on the board. Upstream production was 808,000 barrels per day in the quarter, the highest second quarter in company history. Oil sands production in the quarter was 748,000 barrels per day, reflecting the impact of the turnaround and coke drum replacement project at base plant upgrader one. Meanwhile, E&P averaged 60,000 barrels per day in the quarter, which is in line with Q1 production. Also, despite the significant amount of turnaround activity in the downstream in the quarter, overall refining utilization remained extremely robust at 95%, with crude throughput of 442,000 barrels per day, the highest second quarter in company history. Refined product sales remained consistently strong at 600,000 barrels per day, thanks to our sales and marketing and supply and trading teams, who ensured continued product supply to key markets and that we maximize margin across our value chains. To that point, downstream margin capture relative to our 5221 index averaged 96% in the quarter, despite the impact of planned maintenance at both Sarnia and Edmonton. Even with all the planned maintenance, our focused execution, integrated model, and cost and capital management delivered solid financial results in the quarter. We generated $2.7 billion in adjusted funds from operations, or $2.20 per share in the quarter, and adjusted operating earnings of $873 million, or 71 cents per share. Total OS&G expense was $3.2 billion, which was down over $130 million versus Q1. Capital expenditures totaled $1.65 billion in the quarter, including $674 million of economic investments and $975 million of sustaining and maintenance capital. And as Rich has already mentioned, we are reducing our full capital year guidance by $400 million to $5.7 to $5.9 billion. Our balance sheet remains very strong with net debt at quarter end at $7.7 billion and trailing 12-month net debt to AFFO at well below one times. In Q2, we realized an expected working capital release of $269 million with a drawdown in inventories following the Q1 build in support of turnarounds. As a reminder, we expect net debt to fluctuate around our $8 billion target as we actively manage working capital and ensure continued deployment of 100% of excess funds to shareholders. Overall, it was a very strong quarter on every front, and people across the company continued to drive for more improvement, focusing on delivering industry-leading reliability and operational uptime, along with improving cost and capital efficiency. As an example of that, after in-depth work by our technical and operating teams, we're extending all future U2 coker furnace outage intervals by a year. This move delivers a triple benefit. It reduces our capital spend for 2025. It enhances profitability by delivering a greater proportion of higher value SCO relative to non-upgraded bitumen. and it supports future plans to extend U2 major turnarounds from five-year to six-year intervals. At Upgrader 1, the combination of the new coke drums and reliability improvements have already enabled us to extend the turnaround interval from five to six years, with minimal maintenance required between turnarounds, translating into lower costs, higher reliability, and more production between turnarounds. Also, at Fort Hills, we are extending our primary separation sell outages from every six months to once annually, moving this fall's turnaround to the spring of 26. These are tangible examples of the continuous improvement at Suncor, which marks a step change in our capital and operating profile, and are a clear illustration of Suncor's disciplined and focused actions on driving real shareholder value. We could not be more proud of what the Suncor team continues to achieve and its relentless pursuit of continuous improvement. And with that, Rich, I'll turn it back to you.

Thanks, Chris. I'll be quick. Today's Suncor about delivering operational excellence and high performance. We're sitting here in mid-2025. The year is shaping up to a good one, but I can assure you we are not done yet. We're operationally focused, financially strong, and determined to compete and win. With that, I'll turn it back to Troy.

Thank you, Rich. I'll turn the call back to the operator to take some questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And our first question will come from the line of Greg Party with RBC. Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning. Thanks for the really engaging summary. A couple of questions. Maybe just the first one, Rich, as it relates to stream day capacity now on year one. So with the project having gone well, enhancements in place, and so forth, has the stream data capacity risen there?

Yeah, I'll ask Peter to comment in second grade, but I'll just make one comment. The project was not only executed incredibly well, But what was equally satisfying was the startup, how we turned the key and this thing, you know, the engine roared and this thing has been humming ever since. Peter, you want to comment specifically on what we're seeing?

Yeah, thanks very much, Rich. Thanks, Greg. Stream date capacity on U1 remains the same today as it was historically in around the 140,000 barrel per day range. The real benefit of the drum replacement on U1 is the upgraded metallurgy, like Rich referred to earlier, and our ability to extend the turnaround intervals now structurally to six years. That's a combination of the work done to upgrade the metallurgy on the U1 drums, plus also some work that we did in the coca fractionation section, specifically around improving reliability around the trays, and some of the flushing and the pump-around circuits that we have there to manage fouling. So at the end of the day, it'll be a calendar day increase, but stream day remains the same.

Okay, understood. Thanks for that. And then it's really a financial question, but between the lower CapEx, which from everything you said sure sounds like it's going to be a structural reduction of $400 million plus margin enhancements, And then when you relate that to your $8 billion net debt target, is $8 billion the right number on a go-forward basis just presumably given better cash flow generation? And then is there any consideration or discussion amongst you in terms of doing a bigger buyback in addition to the NCIB, say like an SIB, if you did go the route with a higher allowable debt number?

You know, a very fair question, Greg. You know, the $8 billion was determined by kind of one-times coverage in a $50 a barrel WTI world. And as we put that three-year plan together, it was as we execute and deliver on that three-year plan, there's no doubt about it, we are ahead of schedule on delivering on that plan and in a number of areas exceeding it. I think that's something that we will need to examine. And as the business performance continues to achieve, it's natural to look at that. We haven't done it yet, but I think it's a fair question and something I would anticipate we'll talk about more in the future. Chris, you have anything else you'd add on that one?

Really too much, Rich. I think, you know, you just hit it on the head that as we're accelerating the pace of our improvement and we're looking at all dimensions of the business, we're certainly not looking at moving off our net debt target plan today, but we are generating a lot of cash flow. And Greg, you really pointed out the fact that we've got a lot of tailwinds behind us in terms of that cash generation. We are focused on increasing to the maximum amount possible excess free funds flow in to our shareholders, and so we'll be looking at all dimensions. We're just really pleased with how fast we've been moving, but we're not putting our foot off the pedal either. We need to continue focusing on driving that TI breakeven down and ensuring that we're managing the balance sheet and returning cash to shareholders.

One other point I'd make, and it relates to the buyback, it's a bit like a dividend in that we've talked about a reliable and growing dividend. A commitment to our shareholders is of the utmost priority to us. And Chris commented in his remarks about the our ability, because of the nature of our business and the integration on it, to really kind of dampen out the volatility in a commodity. And each month this year, the buybacks have been $250 million a month, and we kind of look aside and say, oh, yeah, what is oil price? It's not something that we wring our hands or fret on. So that predictability, that confidence, that confidence, Quality and cash flows that not only the dividend but the buyback provides are both high priorities for us. And if and as we can ratchet up that continued buyback based on the performance of the enterprise, that will certainly be something we will evaluate.

Thanks very much.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Dennis Fong with CIBC. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions and congratulations on a record Q2. Rich, I appreciate your opening comments in relation to obviously the OEMS implementation. I was actually hoping you could talk a little bit more towards how you're really driving the stronger turnaround performance and reducing the, we'll call it the variation around kind of the performance of all of your individual assets and how that translates through into, again, that higher confidence around stronger turnaround performance.

Sure. Thanks, Dennis. You know, and just a little bit of, and I'll turn it over to Dave here in a second, but just as a little bit of a recall, literally two years ago on this exact call, I flagged to you how we would be putting an acute focus on turnaround performance. We saw the size of the prize in terms of our capital and then what it does for days offline. And particularly in the second and third quarters where we have, you know, annual lows. And our vision at that time is we want to reduce that variability, be a more rateable manufacturing organization across the year. So we made some structural changes in terms of how we support turnarounds. leadership. I put Dave and Shelly Powell, Shelly's not with us today, in charge from a senior most executive level in terms of driving turnarounds. And today we're exceeding the targets we set, but it's not just luck and it's not just, well, try harder. It has been a very systematic, comprehensive approach to achieving best-in-class performance. Dave, why don't you kind of comment on, you know, what are the magic, what constitutes, how do you achieve best-in-class turnaround performance?

Yeah, thanks, Rich. And I think you said it well. And, Dennis, you pointed out that, you know, we've had, you know, we've safely executed our turnarounds with significant improvements over historical performance. And, you know, that's not by accident. That all starts two years ahead of a turnaround. execution, and we've been executing a plan for the last couple years to deliver consistent world-class turnaround performance. World-class turnaround performance really begins two years prior to the event. It starts with benchmarking, knowing what the best of the best can deliver, and rallying the site teams to hit a competitive target. It's a challenging target, but a target that they all need to believe in if they're going to be successful. Once we have that, then we follow our discipline processes. Risk-based work selection to get the right work scope. Detailed planning following our OEMS work processes that reduces variability, as Rich mentioned. And then finally, strong execution in the field. Sounds simple. There's a lot of details that have to go in to make that happen. The most exciting part is I think we still have room to improve. We initially focused on our benchmarking, our work selection, and our field execution, but now we're expanding our approach to extend turnaround intervals. And that's the duration between each outage. So we're not done yet. Lots of opportunity to continue.

You know, I'll just amplify a point Dave made. The people in this room right now can talk to you about 2027 turnarounds. The work scopes that we're trying to lock down, the materials management that we need to have, the labor strategy and requirements. Two years in advance, we can now talk about that, where previously we were focused on what was immediately in front of us the next three months, six months. It's a rigorous approach. Quite frankly, it's what world-class organizations do, and that is increasingly what we are.

Great. Really appreciate that color and kind of the fulsomeness of the planning looking forward. My second question, if we could switch gears a little bit, is towards Fort Hills. Understandably, you've gone through some turnaround in maintenance there. Just from the work that we've done, it seems like progress has been made on the North Pit as well. Can you provide us a little bit of an update as to where that's at and how you think about the asset performance as you kind of go forward, specifically as it relates to access to resource and ore?

Yep, sure. Thanks, Dennis. Yes, Fort Hills is actually delivering exactly on the three-year plan that we set out. In fact, I think it's 13 months in a row now they've hit their budget.

They've actually beat it 13 months in a row. Better beat it. We're going to audit that and see what's going on. What are they leaving in the bank? We want more.

And so they are reliable, predictable. Importantly, they are managing the geological risks that manifest themselves a number of years ago, and we have that well on our radar screen with controls and mitigations going forward. North Pit development is progressing per plan. We're well established out there in the North Pit now, doing lots of stripping activities and dewatering activities, and I would say I'm confident in our ability to develop that resource per the plan and incrementally increase production from Fort Hills in the coming years.

Maybe I'd add just, Peter, one other comment to that is, you know, we have a nameplate on Fort Hills of 194,000 barrels a day, the two plants. And we've mentioned before how when we have maintenance work, we're testing the capacity of each plant. And I think some of the numbers we've shared is each plant, we have confidence we can get 110,000 barrels a day or more through each plant. what peter and his team are doing now though is they're looking at that entire from the very front end through it the sustainability of that are there any things we would need to do to achieve a a higher rate on a sustainable level with metallurgy with processing capabilities anything and that work is still ongoing but i think it it it exemplifies the not only striving to achieve our commitments, but then looking at, okay, and how can we make it better? And Fort Hills is a classic example of we want to achieve that plan, but then it's what's next. How can we get Fort Hills to create more value through further de-bottlenecking? And I think we're early on, but I think we're pretty encouraged by what we're finding today.

Thank you very much. I'll turn it back. And congrats again. Thanks, Dennis.

One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Yeah, good morning, Rich and team. You know, I wanted to really unpack this upstream production volumes this year. The guide is, of course, 810 to 840. But you had a lot of maintenance in Q2. So the back half, it feels to us like you can get to the top end of this range full year, or maybe even exceed the top end. Just your perspective on that, and maybe you can break it down between oil sands, Fort Hills, and Simcrude.

You know, Neil, if you go back, if you look at, I'm going to offer you a couple of numbers here. If you look at 2021, 22, and 23, during the second quarter, we averaged about 720,000 barrels a day while we did a lot of the turnaround work. The last two years now, we've averaged almost 800,000 barrels a day, of course, this year higher than the last. And what Peter and his team are doing as we do our major maintenance work, we talk about how we're improving performance, but there are very, very comprehensive efforts to reduce variation, the seasonal aspect. So the interconnectedness of Fort Hills and Firebag so that if we have – Work going on in the base plant line, for example, that we keep upgraders full. Or while we're taking down upgraders, we can divert bitumen to market. So we're continuing to find ways and approaches that increase overall performance. And if we go back to when we said guidance, we knew this was a heavy turnaround year. The U1 was really the 800-pound gorilla in that. We completed it early. It's up and running, and the teams keep finding ways to do better. I'll feel more comfortable when we get through the work that we have ongoing now over the next month or two, but I think you rightfully point out when I say all indicators are pointing to the high end of guidance. I could have said either the high end or above guidance. It's the organization, it's our people continuing to find ways to do things better. When we provide those clear priorities and what's most important, what we're seeing is an organization and an asset base deliver. And I'll literally comment that they are repeatedly exceeding my expectations. And I think it's been said a couple of times, we're not done yet.

That's great, Rich. And then not only on volumes, but also CapEx. So the 5.7, the bottom end of the new CapEx guide range, is a year ahead of the 26 schedule. So is it fair to say that we have achieved a new normal for CapEx and that the sub-6 is what we should now start to anchor to on a go-forward?

where you rightfully flag it is what you're seeing this year is structural in nature. We are looking at whether it's turnarounds, whether it's our base risk management and compliance capital, every dollar matters. And we have different teams, expert-led teams of people looking at how we spend our money. And we've known that For us to achieve our financial objectives, to achieve the resiliency we want to, we needed to be more frugal, thoughtful about managing CapEx. And I think this, you know, we're putting the plan together for 26 and beyond. But you're really looking at the new norm. We're not going to have these years where that capital blows up by a billion or less. We want to spend within our means, be very, very thoughtful on it so that we can not only, you know, reliably increase that dividend year on year, but we can also reliably continue to return capital to shareholders via buyback. So I don't have a number yet for you for 26, 27, 28, but you accurately said we are ahead of our plan to structurally lower the capital spending of this enterprise.

Thank you, Rich.

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Doug Leggett with Wolf Research. Your line is open.

Good morning. This is John Abadon, Doug Leggett. I want to go back to the CAF discussion earlier on capital returns. Really, I mean, just what you're doing on the cost side and you sort of think about your corporate break even going lower. How do you think about the future dividend capacity of the firm? I know you want a reliable dividend. You want a steady reliable dividend growth. How do you think about You're built to grow your dividend over time. How do you see that future capacity?

John, it may be you, but you sound an awfully lot like Doug on this one. I think he primed the pump on this question.

Chris, why don't you talk about it? You bet. Hey, John. Listen, and we laid this out during our investor day. Our view is that we're setting up this company for consistent, reliable dividend growth, and that's how we're going to approach our dividend. At the same time, we're going to ensure we're maintaining the resilience of the company. and directing that substantial excess refunds flow back to buyback. And one of the joys of this, John, is we do these buyback programs, and it really funds the dividend growth, and we maintain that resilience and break even. It's really a great – I call it a flywheel that we're establishing here, just this consistency and quality of our cash flows that are growing over time that allow us to grow the dividend consistently. Our shareholders should count on that. And also kicks off a lot of excess cash for return back to our shareholders.

You know, and, John, if I just kind of add to that, this is not hardwired, but if you look back over the last several quarters, as we improved our financial performance through the operation – we have been able to lower that net debt, drive down the break even, create a resilience that allows us to feel comfortable in whatever world we're in. And so as we've been buying back shares and increasing the dividend, the total dividend payments have really essentially remained the same. So as we continue to improve performance, buy back shares, that allows us to grow on a dividend per share basis even faster without growing the overall dividend expenditure or burden, keeping our resilience high, our break-even low, and growing the dividends. I think these are very interrelated, but they're all driven by improving the fundamental performance of the enterprise. And then it's sources and uses of funds kind of come thereafter. But I feel quite good about what we're achieving in being able to buy back shares and enable a very competitive growing per share dividend year on year on year. That's the construct we've been after. And if you look back over multiple quarters now, you see that occurring in the bottom line numbers.

I appreciate that. And just a quick follow-up, just another quick one from us. I mean, how are you sort of looking at portfolio cleanup in this environment here? I mean, I guess in particular, the non-off assets in the Northeast, on the East Coast?

Yeah, you know, a couple of things. We've put such a priority on getting the most out of the asset base we have. I think, you know, Commerce City is a great poster child on that. Commerce City had an operational incident in late 2022. The first half of 23 was a difficult recovery period. And since then, that refinery has been performing at an extremely high level. And the East Coast is a little bit of, you know, it's a tale of two cities there. You've got the non-operated platforms, Hebron and Hibernia, and then the two, one operated and one non-operated floaters. And what we've been, our focus has been completing the work that we had targeted at Terranova for us, participating in the work at West White Rose. And then as we look at the relative contribution and value of those assets, it's the same question we ask really of kind of anything. Are they worth more to us or are they worth more to someone else? But we're not, you know, at Suncor, we want to be sure we get... best value for anything we might either choose to buy or sell. And when an asset performs at its highest level, you don't put a for sale sign up or hold a garage sale when you're not performing at your best. And I think that's exactly what we're starting to do across our asset base. And then we'll make the judgments, are they worth more to us or worth more to others? And, you know, asset sales is always an interesting conversation because, you know, we've got the outside world listening, but I have a lot of our internal world listening too in terms of, uh-oh, are we on the block or not? And the message we give always to our employee base, perform at the highest level possible and all the rest of it will take care of itself.

Thank you very much for taking our questions.

Thanks, John.

One moment for our next question.

and that will come from the line of manav gupta with ubs your line is open good morning i i wanted to ask you that something which is somewhat underappreciated in your portfolio because there was so much focus on this turnaround is the growth potential at what point will you guys start talking a little more or giving us more details about you know multi-stage lewis in situ project, or fire back the bottleneck, or fire back expansion, all of which could actually add to your volumes on a go forward basis. So when can we start expecting you to talk about those growth projects?

So Manav, I know it's just you and I on the phone, so I'm going to let you inside the tent. Here's the plan. A little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, we put out a three-year plan, 24, 25, 26, and we have been blowing the doors off of that plan. We have been exceeding it. And what my intent is, we get to the end of the year, we put our head up and say, how are we doing on that three-year plan? And I could think of nothing better than either getting close or achieving that three-year plan in two years. And so then the question becomes, what's next? And that's not a commitment we're going to do that. You know, the vectors are pointing in the right direction. And it's at that time I feel we will have re-earned the credibility to talk about the long term. And I'm spending, and this leadership team is spending a lot of time on that right now, and I like it. I like how it looks. In fact, we spent two days with our board last week looking at longer-term plans and options in different business environments. And one of the things I will tell you that I don't mind is I didn't appreciate, and I don't think we've done as good a job as we could do, is helping the outside world understand the internal options that this company has for either, certainly for value growth, value over volume for the long term. So I see that as something in the first half of 2026. will give you a very fulsome, longer-term outlook on what is this company going to look like 5, 10, 15 years from now. But it is a work in progress right now, and I like what I'm seeing.

Perfect. My quick follow-up is if you could provide us some comment on the refining macro. It looks like some of the global capacity additions have come to an end, and outlook is better. So if you could help us understand how you're looking at both the diesel and the gasoline market and general refining cracks on a go-forward basis. Thank you.

Sure. I'll turn it to Dave here in a second, but I think it's important, you know, we're Crude is truly a global market, and you've got price differences based on location and type of things. Refining, we've got a bit of a different situation here because of some of the structural advantages. Access to crude supplies, dislocations in pricing from New York and Chicago, and then, of course, the performance of our asset base. So, that's all quite good, but Dave, do you want to comment on kind of, and Chris made some comments in his opening about kind of the fundamentals and what we see?

Yeah, for sure. And thanks, Manal, for the question. Refining macro environment, we see it being fairly robust over the short term. As you pointed out, there's some capacity, you know, there's some capacity offline, there's capacity that came on that is struggling to get to full capacity. And we're seeing particularly diesel cracks being very strong. And that's in part a global trend. That's in part a U.S. trend with some renewables that are offline due to lack of incentives in that space. But in any case, it provides a pretty robust environment for us. And we, as you know, we are diesel machines in Suncor. We make a lot of diesel and strong diesel cracks are good for our business going forward. We completed turnarounds in Edmonton and Sarnia this past quarter on primarily diesel producing units and we're now up producing record diesel production. Moving a little more locally, if we think about our business in Canada, Our best outlet for our products is through our retail network, and we're seeing retail sales for our Petro Canada brand up 8% year-on-year thanks to our retail growth. So we see strong global as well as strong local environment for our downstream business.

Thanks, Dave. Thank you so much.

One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Menno Holshoff with TD Cowan. Your line is open.

Thanks, and good morning, everyone. I just have one question on the deployment to Autonomous Hall at Syncrude. Can we maybe get a refresh on where things stand on that front and whether the economics and cost savings are going to look any different from deployment at this time?

Yeah, absolutely. I'll turn to Peter in just a second, but I'll give you a couple of numbers. It was in May of last year, we had 20 trucks that were autonomous at that time. In May of this year, we had 120. And we've talked about the savings that go with each truck. Our plan is to be 150 or more by the end of the year. Peter, do you want to give a little bit of an update on it?

Yeah, thanks, Menno. Things are going really well with the base plant continuing deployment. As Rich said, we're really scaling that up through to the end of the year and we're seeing some real efficiency gains in our ability to extract productivity out of that system. Our plan for Syncrude is to implement autonomous haulage into Syncrude in 2026. The economic case is consistent with that of the base plant, different starting points just given the different types of operations. But we really see this as a strategic move for us. It helps us to improve safety. Again, this is a real kind of systems engineering approach. And we really believe as time goes on, our ability to extract a differentiated productivity relative and will be the basis of our mine plans going forward.

So all the expected benefits, safety, direct cost, productivity, all of those, we are on track to see or achieve all of those or more than we would have hoped for.

To tell you both, I'll turn it back.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Patrick O'Rourke with ATB Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Good morning, and thanks for a very comprehensive and spirited rundown so far.

I guess the first question I would have – I think that was feedback from me.

I guess the first question I would have, you kind of touched a little bit on Fort Hills and nameplate capacities there and some of what you've been achieving. But I guess when you look at the asset, what do your high output days look like right now? What's the variability? And I guess, you know, you've pointed to the top end of production guidance for the full year, but how does that come into play here?

Peter, I didn't put Patrick up to this question because I want to know too, Patrick. So, Peter, you comment on some of the testing you're doing and what you're seeing.

I think I said three years ago when I started here that plant is a Ferrari, and I think that's proving true. Stream bay capacities, we have demonstrated stream bay capacities in excess of 220,000 barrels a day. So we know that potential is there. The work of the team is to ensure that we can do that reliably going forward and as well coupled with a mine plan to support those types of rates while still managing all of the risks that I talked about earlier. So it's a balance, but we are quite confident based on the testing we've had over the last couple months here that the stream date capacity of that plant is quite robust.

And a real enabler is going to be when you get both of those two pits in the north line kind of conditioned and ready to go. That's when we'll rev up that Ferrari.

That's right. Okay, great. And this is more of sort of a strategic question, but obviously on the back of the success that you've had with I think you touched on maybe asset disposition side a little more earlier in the call, but when you look at the success and the implementation there and you think about the potential for acquisitions and creating shareholder value through implementing that on other assets, what does that sort of look like for you right now and how is that appetite versus some of the organic greenfield growth opportunities you talked about earlier?

Well, you know, I'll reiterate. I believe we have more internal opportunities than perhaps we understood or certainly than we helped the outside world understand. So as we look at kind of our base capability to create value with what we have, that gives us a better lens to look at external opportunities. Do they add to the enterprise or they just make the enterprise different or bigger? And we're not about being different or bigger. We're about being more valuable. So the more we've sharpened our understanding of our standalone internal set, that really allows us to say is, you know, I shared the example with our board last week. You know, you go by the mall, just because there's a for sale sign up doesn't mean you've got to buy. And it's all about can we create value in a unique way relative to our other opportunities. And, you know, I'll never say never, but I like a lot of the cards we're holding.

Okay. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Rich Krueger for any closing remarks.

Okay, I'll be brief on it, folks. You know, I hope what you're hearing over, Patrick referred to the spirited conversation. So today's Suncor, this is a different company. We've got great assets, great people, strong results, team-based, results-oriented, high performance. a different attitude, a different culture. And I understand we play a little song at the start of each of these. I listened to the one today, and my favorite line is, you can keep the silver, we came for gold. That is the attitude at this company today, and look forward to sharing our future progress and results with you on subsequent calls. Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for joining our call this morning. If you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to our team. Operator, you can now end the call.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.