Imperial Oil Limited (AMEX:IMO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

We’re not ready to talk about those details yet because the asset teams are still, kind of finding that work program, but when we get to Investor Day, we’ll start to lay out, kind of some more details on that. And at Cold Lake, you’ve heard us talk about Grand Rapids Phase 1, acceleration of that now for a startup to the end of this year. We haven’t talked a lot about it on these calls, but in parallel, to the Grand Rapids project, we’ve also initiated our Leming redevelopment project at kind of the original field at Cold Lake. And so that project is about a year behind Grand Rapids and a little bit smaller. It’s more like 8,000, 9,000 barrels a day, but it does represent another growth opportunity for us. We’re continuing to do, kind of infill drilling across Cold Lake, and that’s contributing to the higher volumes that we saw last year.

And then we’ve got a whole pipeline of additional solvent deployment opportunities at Grand Rapids, I mean at Cold Lake. You’ve seen us deploy SAGD, SA-SAGD, we’re continuing to explore future generations of opportunities that will allow us to not only grow production, but do that in a lower cost way and also, quite importantly, with lower emissions intensity. So, all that work is going on. Further out, of course, in the pipeline, we’ve got Aspen. And before we’re ready to progress that, we’re doing some more work on solvent technologies that we think have the potential to further reduce the capital cost, the operating cost, and significantly lower the emissions associated with that project as well. So, we’ve got a technology that we’ve proven in the lab.

We want to further validate it with a field pilot test, and so we’re progressing plans for that. So, really a strong pipeline of opportunities there. And then, of course, at Syncrude, we’ve talked before about the work we’re doing with Suncor, the operator and the other owners around how can we generate further value from that asset. And of course, the bidirectional pipelines has been a very positive contributor, but we’re continuing to look for other ways to increase reliability and productive capability out of that asset as well.

Dennis Fong: Great. Great. That was very fulsome answer. My follow-up here is more on the downstream side. I guess, expectations for some of your peers going into the first quarter suggest some level of downtime just on the back of extreme weather we saw going into the end of 2022. Do you mind talking to your ability to further take advantage of some of these increased margins that we’re seeing in the first quarter, as well as the ability of Imperial to capture value out of the commodity price volatility that we’re seeing both from an oil side, as well as the product side? Thanks.

Brad Corson: Yes. Thanks for the question. And I am pleased to be able to talk at this point of a very different result than from the weather than we saw a year ago when, of course, we did have some challenges at Kearl. For this year, despite those weather challenges across our assets, both upstream and downstream, including all three of our refineries, we’ve managed quite well through those extreme weather conditions, very high reliability. And so, we haven’t experienced the downtime that others have. And so, we’re quite fortunate in that regard and a great credit to our operating organization. And what that allows us to do is, as you made reference, we continue to find ourselves in a very strong margin environment. And so that high reliability, coupled with those high margins will allow us to generate significant value.