Cenovus Energy Inc. (NYSE:CVE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jonathan McKenzie: Yes. And just to put a finer point on it, John. And sorry, it’s John McKenzie speaking. The assets worked as designed in terms of what we’ve built in our midstream and downstream business, as we talked about earlier. So because of the outage that we had on Keystone, we inventoried about 18,000 barrels a day of heavy oil. We expect to relieve our inventory of that in Q1. And then the other impact that we would have seen with Keystone is they did have to cut rate on the WRB refineries, which are fed off the Keystone pipeline, which would kind of be a secondary impact from that outage as well.

John Royall: Great. And then just thinking about the downstream side and little bit more kind of near term on the throughput guide, and I understand you guys — you give only annual guidance, but just hoping maybe some high-level color, and it sounds like you’re getting superior with partially at some point, mid-quarter and maybe a little later for Toledo. You also have lower rates, you mentioned in Wood River, and I think some maintenance. So I realize you don’t get quarterly guidance, is there any kind of high-level way of helping us think through where you might be on throughput or utilization for 1Q maybe relative to 4Q, or any other way we can think about it?

Keith Chiasson: Yes, John, it’s Keith. I think the way I would be thinking about it is, we had some challenges, both due to the Keystone outage as well as the weather impacts, but all of our operated assets came back up by mid-January and have been running well since then. On our nonoperated assets, Borger was back up and running at good rates by mid-January. And then with regards to Wood River, the rate cut due to the incident in early December, you should think of that as ramping up through the first quarter substantially getting back to normal throughput. Then you have to remember that there are some turnaround activities happening across our assets in the second quarter. With regards to Superior, we’re happy with the progress.

Obviously, this asset has been down since 2018. We’ve been doing the rebuild since the Husky merger, and we’re now at a point where we’re introduced hydrocarbons and we’re working to bring in crude in the mid part of March. That will take a little time to line out, and we will work on ramping up the refinery kind of through the second quarter. Toledo, we’re ready to take the ball on March 1, and we don’t think we’ll lose any progress on the repair and rebuild of that asset. And those repairs are looking like that will happen by the end of April, and then we will start working on restarting that asset through the May, June time frame. So all of it’s coming together, a lot of it at the same time, but that’s kind of how it’s looking over the next several months.

Operator: . We’ll go first to Chris Varcoe with Calgary Herald.

Chris Varcoe: This is a question for Alex. Alex, why did you make the decision now to step down as CEO and moving to the executive chair role as you said, you could have stayed on for maybe another year or longer, but why now?