All right. Thanks, everybody. We're going to continue now, shifting to an integrated downstream company. We'll fill up 66. We've got here, we're excited to have Kevin Mitchell, the EVP and CFO, and Rich Harbison, EVP of Refining, here with us. So maybe let's just jump in and start with the first question for everybody. which is that we might as well start with what's happening in the Middle East right now. It has ripple effects that are having significant impacts across multiple parts of your portfolio. So maybe at a high level, and we can touch in more detail later on, but at a high level, how is what's going on right now? How is it impacting your businesses across refining, across petrochemicals? And can you talk about maybe expectations in the near term and what the possibility might be for lingering impacts going forward.
Yeah, Ryan, let me talk about that a little bit. Thanks for being here. Always a great conference. First off, I would say that as a primarily U.S.-based company with mostly U.S. assets and access to hydrocarbon resources in the U.S., we are relatively well positioned as both a country and as a company given the extreme turmoil that's going on in the global markets, whether it's crude oil, LNG, refined products, petrochemicals. And so from that sort of big picture, while we see a lot of that volatility and turmoil out there, we're relatively well positioned because you look from a crude standpoint, we are running primarily U.S. crude oil and Canadian heavy crude, our primary sources. We are exposed to some import barrels, but that is a much smaller component of the total. And then likewise, when you look at the refined product markets and pretty significant implications in other parts of the world, in Asia, in Europe, in part because their access to crude has been significantly restricted given what's going on in the Middle East. and we're able to continue to produce and supply products to our customers. In chemicals, it's an interesting dynamic where we've come through this period of quite a long down cycle, a trough that has, for the last two years, we thought the trough was about to end and it's just continued. And so we see some light at the end of that tunnel from that perspective given reduced pet chems production in the Middle East, and it's also coming off in Asia because of restricted access to feedstocks. And so U.S. producers stand to see some benefit there. From our portfolio standpoint, about 15% to 20% of CP chems production is Middle East-based, and so certainly that's impacted. But the majority of the production is U.S. Gulf Coast with ethane feedstock. and so we're seeing some uptick there. Too soon to say what the long-term impacts of that are but certainly see some benefit from that standpoint. I think as you look ahead as to whether the longer-term outlook around this, it's a very tough decision to answer because it really comes down to when does the military activity cease and when do Middle East operations return to normal in the context of the Strait of Hormuz being back to fully functioning. So that's a tough one to answer. The other longer-term dynamic that's out there, and again, we don't know how this plays out, but we do run the risk that with elevated commodity prices, significantly elevated commodity crude oil prices on a global basis, that that translates into a significant economic downturn, which could ultimately have a pretty detrimental impact on the business because, as you know, in a business like ours, we rise and fall with the state of the economies and a sort of global recession would be a pretty ugly situation to be in, even though on a relative basis in the U.S. we would stand to position ourselves better than most. That's helpful.
um maybe i i want to follow up on the on the chemical side because i feel like there's probably been you know there's been a lot of discussion around the impact on on crude maybe a little less on refining and and probably you know even less on the pet chem side even though the impacts are material what's going on right now um we've been stuck in the midst of what felt like a a cycle that felt like the cyclical recovery was taking longer and longer and longer and we've been bouncing along a trough for a while. The near-term aspects or benefits are pretty significant, as you mentioned some of. What does this potentially mean for the cyclical recovery?
Is there a possibility that this accelerates the cyclical recovery in any way?
Or does it change how you think about the impacts on Asian petrochemicals? Does it do something to lift how you think about the margin over the medium term and how we get out of this eventually?
Yeah, I do think it will provide some benefit relative to where we were. And just for context, the situation we've been in for the last two, three, four years, which is one of global oversupply of capacity relative to demand. Demand has not been the problem. It's just there's been so much new supply come on primarily in China. China has also benefited by having access to discounted feedstocks. And what I mean by that is over the last few years, they've been buying discounted crude oil from Venezuela, discounted crude oil from Iran, and discounted crude oil from Russia. And they're primarily NAFTA-based cracking, and so their input cost is lower than any of the other sort of traditional market players, and that's setting that price level. If coming out of this as a base case, they're paying market price, true market price for feedstock, that will raise the level of the commodity pricing just because that floor has been raised because they're paying market price for feedstock and no longer benefiting from discounted feedstocks. We still need to fundamentally get global supply and demand back into balance, and some of that will materialize as demand increases incrementally as a percent of GDP. So we'll see that, and we still think there's capacity that needs to rationalize because it's uneconomic for the long term. um the the the light feed cracking the u.s gulf coast crackers on ethane supply are extremely competitive from a cost curve um cost positioning standpoint um and so we'll see some benefit i don't think we're it solves the problem permanently um but i do think it probably gives us a step change improvement um toward a more mid-cycle environment relative to where we
were previously perfect um before we get into some of the maybe deeper into some of the impacts on refining i want to i want to take a step back a little bit and from for a high level view of the company which is you've been in the midst of kind of a multi-year process over the last few years of to kind of drive improvements across particularly like refining profitability but also capital allocation cost structure balance sheet a number of these things you've both been at the company for quite a while um at your level like what has changed over the last three four five years or a few years um what's changed in terms of you know the approach to the business
or the allocation of capital uh that you know that's helped drive some of the improvements that we've seen um and where do we go from here maybe i'll give kevin a break for a second and then you can come in on the on the macro side of that so i i've been in the business for 37 seven years now associated with the company. And when I step back and see the transformational change that's occurred in the company, it's really fundamental around this concept of integration. And it's not just at the molecule level, but it's also at the business operational level and we used to run the company as really as separate entities you had the refining business you had the midstream business and you had the commercial marketing business and yeah was there a little bit of interface here and there absolutely but we we have taken that culture and completely changed that to one that now is looking for ways to be better at what we do each and every day and And it's driving efficiencies into our business decision-making at the corporate level, the enterprise level. So we're really seeing a shift to general interest decision-making, which is benefiting the overall bottom line of the company. One of the fundamental structural changes that is helping support that was a shift that we made a few years ago to a single bonus structure for the company. We used to have individual bonuses for each of the business units and then even subdivided underneath that. Now it's one for all, all for one type bonus structure, which has fundamentally, again, changed the decision making process and really pushed us to general interest decision making. Now, one of my, I'll call my career successes is, you know, when we were talking about refining and there was a lot of pressure when I came into the role about you got to fix refining, you got to fix refining. Well, it became very clear to me very early that to fix refining wasn't just a refining issue. Certainly, there was some challenges there. We needed to absolutely improve our performance. But this is really an enterprise-wide effort that needed to occur. Refining relies on the midstream. Refining relies on the marketing and commercial organization. And it also absorbs a lot of the overhead that comes in from the corporate office. So we needed to be more efficient at the corporate level. We needed to be better integrated in decision-making across all of these. And that cultural shift has completed. I mean, we're certainly not done with all the efforts that we got to do on this, but we have improved the way we're making decisions and, as a result, getting better general interest decisions. And refining ourselves is a bit of a microcosm associated with that. We used to run each refinery as an individual business unit. We now run it as a fleet. And we have centralized a lot of the functional support around the system, which has driven efficiencies into the business. And then we have also that indirect effect or direct effect of that has also allowed the management teams that are running the sites to be more focused on operating safe and reliably. And we've seen that come through in our performance. and that's also showing through on all the financial components of the business that we're working on and you can see it in there. You see that our cost per barrel has been creeping down. We've seen our utilization numbers creeping up. We've seen our earnings per barrel also showing nice progress. Market capture has been very good and so steady, steady progress as it goes and we're not done yet. That's the most exciting part about all of this is that we've got plenty of opportunity to continue to capture additional market opportunities and integration value for that matter as well. Kevin, you want to add anything else, sir? I think you've covered a lot.
On the integration side, I mean, I appreciated that you talked about the integrated nature of the decision-making because having covered the company for a long time, I would say that, you know, there certainly seems to be, you know, a greater coherence in terms of the capital allocation across the entire company. And maybe one example of that is something like the Western Gateway pipeline project that you're doing, which has benefits across, you know, midstream of marketing and refining. Can you maybe talk about the example of that? Like, you know, how is that an example of maybe how the approach has changed a little bit and what the opportunity set is there?
Yeah, I guess it's, you love it when a plan starts to come together. And you can, this Western Gateway project is really a result of some other critical moves that we were making on the portfolio. First, we were, you know, basically pulling out of the California market, right? We found that, that we were not competitive in that market. It was a drag on our earnings portfolio, and so it was the best move for us was to withdraw from that market. Still committed to supply the market with the barrels coming in because we had a very strong marketing organization and portfolio in that area. And then the other second component of that was to really take over the full operation of our Wood River and Border operations, and we bought out that JV and moved to 100% operation of those assets and integrating that with our third refinery in that area, which was Ponca City refinery. So now we have this nice portfolio of very strong refining presence in an area of the country that we are very competitive. We've created a short, essentially, in the area on the West Coast. the natural next step is let's let's fill that void and let's do it on an integrated basis so a small team of folks got together they put a lot of thought to it and they came up with this concept of this pipeline operation into the west coast from the mid-continent area and you so you're now connecting the energy corridor and even in a market that can be long at times with the energy island of of the west coast and uh we're currently working through that process right now we're in the second open season for this project it uh we've opened up the aperture on it a little bit it was originally a pipeline from st louis to phoenix and then from phoenix to colton which is southern southern california and um there was a lot of interest in that but there was more interest uh from folks to see if we could get actually into the heart of los angeles distribution system so we opened up a second season to extend the delivery into central la the watson area if you're familiar with that and also opened up origination location from the gulf coast which was also a lot of feedback we got on the first open season so that second open season The season's in progress right now and should close here, March, April, early April timeframe. And we're very hopeful. We've got a lot of positive interest in this, and we're very hopeful that this eventually moves to a final investment decision somewhere second, third quarter of this year. And then we will be in a position now to supply from our core assets in the MidCon to the West Coast.
And I would just add that the way the company was run previously, I'm not sure we could have come up with this project and gotten it to where it is, because by its nature, this is an integrated project. And ultimately, we'll see benefits in refining, in midstream, and in marketing. So all of our primary operating segments will be beneficiaries of a project that I'm not sure we could have done it in the old world when we were very much silo-focused and nobody was incentivized to come up with integration opportunities. Thank you.
I want to touch on a couple quick things on refining. We came into the year at the start of the year, and it was all Venezuela all the time, right? And it was, you know, one of the biggest themes in refining was widening of crude differentials, right? There's going to be crude diff, more Venezuelan barrels, heavy, medium, sourd differentials are going to widen out. The current issues in the Middle East probably have, you know, somewhat of an opposite effect on crude diffs. How do you think about these balancing factors? Where are we going in terms of crude differentials from here? and how do you think about how that impacts your system and your portfolio?
Yeah, maybe what I'll do is let me start. There's a lot going on right now. Let's start with – let's set the Middle East activity aside for a moment. I'll talk a little bit about how we saw the supply and demand balances working out here over this year and next year. So with the Middle East activity set aside, we saw strong crude deliveries, strong crude supply into the marketplace. We also saw strong distillate and jet demand through the system. We saw gasoline flat in the U.S., maybe slightly growing worldwide. So there was a little bit of growth on the gasoline front. And in refining, we saw refining capacity that was tight, but new plants on, still going through some startup, and some additional capacity in Asia coming on on the back half of 2007. When we looked at all of those, very bullish on refining, because refining was a bit of the bottleneck in that whole supply chain for transportation fuels. Now let's layer in the current activity. So this year has been really a tale of two tapes. Originally started with the Venezuela action, which for us increased the heavy crude supply to the market in North America. that put pressure on the crude heavy crude price it opened up the heavy light spread on crude and we saw that it was starting to move from 2000 or 2025 it was running around 12 13 dollars and it started moving up into the 13 14 dollar range and maybe even into the bouncing off the 15 dollar range when the venezuelan crude came on the market now the activity occurs in in iran middle east that closes off the saudi barrels coming into the market with the medium sours and heavies that basically reversed that activity with venezuela and we saw the heavy light spread then move back to essentially where it was last year 2025 in that 12 range um hopefully this is short-lived right and um this activity eventually solves itself out the strait gets reopened here in the not too distant future there's been no significant impact to the global gdp and things start to iron out uh to back to where we were projecting them where these barrels start coming onto the market we see the heavy light spread open up a little bit more which is very favorable for our kit that we operate puts some pressure on the western canadian select crude which we think the incremental barrel clears through the gulf coast because the tmx to the west pipeline is is essentially full and those barrels are clearing through the west coast with the venezuela barrels coming in and the saudi barrels coming in we see pressure on that heavy light spread which is favorable to our refining kit which also plays into the heavy distillate and jet demand because this crude definitely shifts your profile your yield profile to distillate and jet as well so it all it all comes together nicely for us with
the way we see it over the next two years maybe one last thing before we leave refining there's been you know chatter in the news over the you know on and off of the last week about possible export bans or lifting the jones act um what are you seeing what do you what do you think about the possibility there are these real possibilities if so what would be the impact
yeah i well who knows what's possible i i don't want to predict politics that's for sure there's a reason i'm not in politics but you know if we've been through the no export scenario just not too terribly long ago under the previous administration, there was a lot of talk about no more exporting products. And I think we were successful in educating the administration on the total impacts of that. And we will do the same thing with the current administration if that's one of the proposals. The Jones Act, it's a real possibility, right? That is one that essentially opens up more marine equipment available to ship supplies around in the u.s and and the the markets that will benefit from that will be the ones that are are generally short product right so you got the west coast and then you've got the east coast so the barrels would move into those markets likely out of the gulf coast was is where that would come so it makes a lot of sense to move that around. However, there's always been traditionally very strong resistance to any significant Jones Act waivers because of the underlying, I guess, points of view on that particular act. So, you know, there's also been some talk around, you know, RVP waivers and things like that. So we'll see how that all plays out. But when you have to rack and stack the options that are in front of the administration, you're likely going to see the ones that administrative executive orders can take the action first. And that would be the Jones Act or the RVP activity. And then it gets increasingly more difficult because you have congressional action required for some of the other things that are on the list. And that is more and more
unlikely that would occur um shifting to midstream real quickly you've got a target to hit four and a half billion in ebitda by by the end of 2027 um can you talk about how you think about the you know the the drivers and the risk of hitting that number and then you haven't talked a lot you certainly haven't provided targets but you've got a decent amount of organic growth opportunities that should provide continued growth in the midstream business and well beyond 2027. So maybe how confident should we feel in hitting the $4.5 billion number and how do you think about the opportunity set post-2027?
Yeah, we feel very good about the $4.5 billion target. That's an end of 2027 run rate adjusted EBITDA for midstream. We were at essentially $4 billion end of 2025 and we have organic projects in plight that will get us to that number between the we brought a new gas plant on last year the Dust Picos 2 plant will be up to a full year contribution of that facility in 2026 we have another gas plant under construction the Iron Mesa plant that comes online early 2027 we're expanding the coastal bend pipeline So we acquired the Coastal Bend System, formerly known as EPIC, that NGL system in early 2025. We've completed a first phase expansion of the NGL pipeline at the end of last year. We're undergoing the second phase of expansion that we'll complete by the end of this year, early next year. We are also evaluating, we continue to evaluate additional gas plant opportunities as well as additional frack capacity. Our most likely next frack expansion project would be on the coastal bend system at Corpus Christi. That will be the most capital-efficient frack expansion that we can do. Now, to be clear, that wouldn't be part of the 4.5. That would go beyond that. So I'm kind of blending into some of the opportunities that we see as we go beyond 2027. But with the capital budget we have this year of growth capital for midstream, $700 million budget, We expect it to be about that level for the next couple of years at least. That will get us to the 4.5 as we continue to also, from a commercial standpoint, optimize the flow of molecules around the system and maximize the margin uplift and capture that we can across that full NGL value chain. And then as you look beyond 2027, post the $4.5 billion, if you assume about a similar level of capital spend, and to be clear, it's not a given that that amount of capital is available to midstream, but if they have the right projects, the right opportunities that, remember, our priority here is not growing for the sake of scale. It's growing to increase the returns on capital employed in that business. So all of these projects we do, the ultimate benchmark is, is this consistent with our objective to grow return on capital employed? But with the opportunities we see, you look at projects like Western Gateway, that is further out. That would be a sort of 2029 completion on the assumption that project goes ahead. it, we feel very good that there is line of sight to continued rateable growth in midstream earnings, not anything dramatic in terms of significant increases in capital, but just continuing to work away on additional gas plants, pipeline expansion, frack capacity, Western Gateway, and then optimizing around the entire system.
Great. I think that's all the time we have. But Rich, Kevin, thanks so much for being here. Thank you.