Kathy Mikells: Yes. I wouldn’t say there’s anything unique. I mean, this is a straight flow through of just what the industry refining margin reduction is kind of flowing through. We would see a much bigger reduction coming out of where we have a bigger footprint. So I would say even though the US tends to have better margins than the rest of the world, we obviously have a very big footprint in the US. And so, just that footprint drives a bigger absolute number and absolute decline, but it’s just a straight flow through from the change in industry margins.
Darren Woods: Yes, the size of our refining business is much, much larger than our peers. So the impacts associated with the changes in those margins have a bigger impact on us than you’d see with our peers.
John Royall: Sure. I was just looking at it’s kind of like a 50% cut to the 1Q number on the margin side. But yes, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Operator: We’ll go next to Roger Read with Wells Fargo.
Roger Read: Yes, hello. Good morning.
Darren Woods: Good morning, Roger.
Kathy Mikells: Good morning.
Roger Read: I’d like to follow-up on the chemicals margin. You made the comment on the opening about margin — excuse me, pricing where it was in 2018, but margins much better. That said, chemicals isn’t quite back to the 2021 high point. So anything else you can offer on how the chemical outlook is getting any better? And one of the reasons I’ll ask that question is, when we look at the softness in NGL prices in the US and this expectation of much higher exports, we hear talk about increase in China chemical capacity. So, how should we kind of juxtapose what looks like an improving market for you, certainly better margins versus potentially a lot of new capacity into that area.
Darren Woods: Yes, sure. I’ll give you a couple of perspectives on that and then see if Kathy has anything to add. I think, first of all, what I’d say is, the work that we’ve done over the years to make sure that we’ve got a well-diversified feed slate for our chemicals business continues to pay off, particularly in these markets as things are shifting around and price spreads are moving. Our organization is pretty adopted responding to those price signals and change in feed. So that continues to make its way to the bottom line and position us better than many of our peers with that flexibility and the feed optionality that we have. I think as you look around the world, early on there was — with China being in a COVID lockdown and recognizing the role that it has in chemicals demand.
That was kind of the back half of last year. And the impact and as we’ve come into this year, I think a lot of expectations for China to pick up and with that growth in demand in chemicals we are seeing that starting to happen. In fact, if you look at the — ourselves in chemicals, the second quarter was stronger than the first quarter. So we are seeing that. The demand looks pretty reasonable, I would say. I mean, the big — that challenge and you’ve referenced it is the amount of supply that’s come on. And that’s where I think our feedstock advantages and our footprint in the integration that we have with a number of refineries around the world actually positions us better. But it’ll take some time is my expectation for demand to kind of take us out of the supply, the excess supply that we’ve got on the marketplace, but I would just add that, we’ve made a lot of investment in chemicals over the last five years, fairly significant investments.
