HF Sinclair Corporation (NYSE:DINO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Atanas Atanasov: Maybe I’ll start and then Val can chime in on our forward look. Our guidance that we gave was 585,000 to 615,000 and that includes the turnaround at Puget and then it reflects slightly lower or actually quite a bit lower Mid-Con cracks earlier in the quarter and that impacted our economic runs. We’re laser focused on positioning the fleet for a strong Q2 and into the driving season for the rest of the year.

Valerie Pompa: Yeah. And I’ll just go back to our reliability focus. So we focused over the last couple of years really on — we’ve talked earlier about Parco. Our Parco facility achieved record crude runs this past quarter and we’re continuing to see improvements in their reliability and improvements at those facilities. Navajo, same story. And so we’re really — the path to 640,000 is reliable operation and a steady focus on stable runs over time and optimizing our turnaround intervals, that’s going to yield a 640,000 cycle time.

Joe Laetsch: Great. Thank you, all. I appreciate it.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Gabelman from TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Jason Gabelman: Yeah. Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is on asset sales. And in the past, you’ve discussed an interest in exploring selling the Lubricants business as performance has kind of straightened out there. Can you just discuss where were you’re on that journey and kind of maybe how the overall market for lubricants is for M&A at the current moment?

Tim Go: Yeah, Jason. Let me take a shot at that. We’re still very bullish on our Lubes business. In fact, we’ve just put in the books a third year of really strong earnings from that business. And again, we think 2024 is shaping up to be another good year for us. We still believe that the business is undervalued. We believe that it has a higher multiple than what the investors are giving us credit for. But as we put in these additional years of actuals in the books, we’re hoping that the market will give us credit for that going forward. So nothing has changed there. The chemicals market, in general, as you’re kind of alluding to, is at the lower part of their cycle. And so the market itself is not — is not the best market right now from a chemical standpoint.

And so what we’ve always said is, we’re going to look at this, but it’s not a short-term thing. It’s really more of a mid-term thing. The next two or three years, there’s nothing changed there as well. So it’s still something that we’re very interested in and looking at. But we want to give the market a chance to show that full value in our own stock price before we go out and do anything different. We also want know, as Matt talked about earlier, we’ve got a lot of opportunities to improve the base business. We still think there’s a lot more meat on that bone, and we’re continuing to drive forward structural improvements to our lubes business as well. So, Jason, nothing new to update basically, but to say everything’s still on course.

Jason Gabelman: Got it. Thanks. And my follow-up is just on the Rockies. And I think there’s another product pipeline expected to start up before summer driving season. Is that correct? And how do you view kind of that market in the summer and moving forward? There were obviously a couple of very strong years on product pricing with less refinery capacity in that region, but you have some coming back. So just general thoughts on maybe where you expect that market to price relative to where it was prior to COVID. Thanks.

Steve Ledbetter: Yeah. I’ll take that one. This is Steve. So we’re watching that product pipeline startup, I think you’re referring to the one that goes up into grand junction. And I think the premise there associated with that is that market gets tight and it gets long very quickly based on refinery supply issues or runs. And so I think they would be looking to take advantage of that. Our view in terms of the market, it’s still an important market for us. And our capability to go source logistically advantaged barrels into those markets is something that we’re going to continue to look forward and drive. I don’t think we’re going to give guidance on the pricing structure forward looking because there’s a lot of elements at play there. But we do see this as a strong opportunity for us, not only in our current footprint, but also to continue to go grow the Sinclair brand from a branded perspective in the Southwest.

Tim Go: And Jason, I’ll just remind, there was a Gallup Refinery up there, pre-COVID, that has shut down since and this pipeline is really going to be just replacing some of the barrels that were already there pre-COVID. We think the tariff structure is pretty high for that area and so we still think regardless, we’re going to have a competitive advantage to source barrels into that region.

Jason Gabelman: Great. Thanks for the answers.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time, so I’d like to hand back to Tim for closing comments.