HF Sinclair Corporation (NYSE:DINO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Mike Jennings: Those are mini questions, Doug. Thank you. Tim is going to take on the bulk of it. But for clarity, I would say, while I wasn’t the one who bought the lubricants businesses, there’s been no lack of commitment to growing those businesses and optimizing them once in the portfolio. They’ve been a nice contributor to the company. And as you recall, while refining was losing money during COVID, lubricants specialties were kicking out a steady $30 million a month of EBITDA. So that business has performed well and has been improved significantly under Tim’s stewardship. So Tim, I’ll pitch it to you because really the future is about your vision and what you’re going to do with this business.

Tim Go: Well, thanks, Mike. I mean I am excited about the opportunity and the challenge ahead. Mike has done such a good job of setting this company up for success, starting with the — really the HollyFrontier combination that occurred 11, 12 years ago. And then now with the Sinclair addition to it as well as the Puget Sound addition to it, we are really set up with some nice assets, some nice people and capability and really a bright future ahead of us. So I’m very excited about that. I can tell you there are some things that won’t change as we go forward, and that’s the focus on long-term growth, which Mike has clearly demonstrated, and the commitment to cash return to our shareholder, which again, Mike has really shown and demonstrated here in the last few years.

Things that we want more of, you hit the nail on the head. We need more progress, more focus on safety, reliability, operations excellence. That has been an area that we’ve been coming up from a point of behind, I guess, the competition. And we’ve been really trying over the last 3 years, at least that I’ve been here, to really catch up. And I think that’s going to leverage my skill set and my experience a little bit, trying to focus more on that, trying to take us to the next level. In fact, I think that’s almost my mandate from the Board. But I think we’ve made some good progress. And so Mike talked about on the prepared remarks how we set some annual records in not just crude throughput, but also in diesel and gasoline production. I will tell you that’s not just because of the additional assets that we added in terms of Puget Sound and in terms of the Sinclair assets.

Our individual plants, most of those legacy plants, El Dorado, Woods Cross and Tulsa, set individual crude throughput records, distillate production records and gasoline production records in 2022. And I think that’s a sign that we’re heading in the right direction. We have the capability to deliver that higher safety, reliability and operations excellence. But it’s going to be an up and down journey as we go along. And as long as we see that underlying kind of performance continuing to rise, kind of up and to the right, I’d like to say from a chart standpoint, it gives us confidence that we’re doing the right things and we’re heading in the right direction. I think from an integration and optimization standpoint, we’ve got — I almost feel like a kid at Christmas, we’ve got a lot of new opportunities, a lot of new assets, a lot of new people and capability that we still haven’t tapped fully into and we’re going to see more of that going forward in terms of trying to optimize, in particular, the Rockies area, the whole west area with Puget Sound in the Southwest.

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