Brad Corson: Yeah, thanks for the question. I mean, we’re quite excited about the value that this is bringing to our business. And as you noted, we have now 100% autonomous in the mine with our heavy haul trucks, total of 81 trucks, and we are seeing kind of that transition, the use of autonomous or driverless trucks as delivering all of the value that we expected in terms of lower unit operating costs by around a dollar per barrel. We see increased safety and reduce safety risk because of fewer human machine interfaces, and we’re seeing increased productivity as well. And so, there is no doubt that having that autonomous haul fleet has contributed materially to our ability to achieve these record volumes, as well as significant improvement in operating costs.
And we’re still, I think, kind of realizing the full potential of that, because it’s only been in the last quarter or so that we’ve completed that full conversion. And now at the same time, we’re also looking for, well, where can we expand this autonomous concept beyond just the heavy haul trucks. And so we have a lot of work underway as to where else we can leverage this to further improve productivity, reduce costs, improve safety. And I think that’ll be a key element of our discussion when we get to our Investor Day later this year, to really talk about kind of the potential that this technology is bringing and how we can expand it further.
Dennis Fong : Great, I appreciate the color there. My second question kind of continuing on with Kearl there is, you’ve shown very strong production and you’ve discussed opportunities to potentially continuously or at least average maybe 300,000 barrels a day sometime in the future. Can you talk towards some of the secondary recovery initiatives, as well as the mine optimization opportunities that help kind of drive you to that 300,000 barrels a day and where are you at with respect to the engineering and the development of those next steps? Thanks.
Brad Corson: Yeah, thanks for the question. We are very focused first on getting to 280,000 barrels per day. That’s job number one when it comes to volumes at Kearl. We’ve just delivered our highest annual volumes at Kearl with 270, now we got to get to 280, and then we’ll get to 300. So it’s kind of one step at a time. But this evolution takes several years of planning, engineering, in some case, investment. So we are progressing steps to get us to 300,000 barrels a day. I plan for us to talk more specifically about what that roadmap looks like when we have our Investor Day. But certainly we’re focused on what are the next steps in reliability, what are the next steps in optimizations around turnaround durations. We’re looking at additional steps in deep bottlenecking, our processing facilities, we’re looking at how can we extract even more bitumen out of all of the ore that we extract through further processing, of course sands tailing and so it is a whole suite of activities.
We’ve talked about floatation column cells. That specific project we have detailed engineering well advanced. We’re targeting a startup in 2026. It’ll be a major contributor to the next step after 280 and moving us towards 300. So a lot going on there and I’m really excited about it. Because again, I think when you look at what we’ve achieved in the second half of the year, what we’ve achieved in the fourth quarter, certainly monthly and daily records, it continues to demonstrate just the potential that we have with this asset. Now again, the challenge is to link together all of those records over an entire year, right. And a significant driver still in our overall production for the year is the annual turnaround. And so, we have to not only achieve those sort of records, but then we have to offset kind of any planned maintenance, turnaround or other plan maintenance over the course of the year.
But I have confidence we’ll get there. So thanks for that question.
Dennis Fong : No, I appreciate it. I’ll turn it back.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Doug Leggate with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Doug Leggate : Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Brad. I don’t know if you’ve looked to your share price this morning, but this dividend bump, we continue to believe that is a huge mechanism for market recognition of value, so congratulations on that decision. My question is, where do you think your dividend burden needs to be to have a competitive yield versus your peers?
Brad Corson: Yeah, thanks for your — first, your recognition of our dividend strategy, the impact it’s having. And yes, I can assure you I’ve looked at my share price today. I look at it every day as a wide aspect [ph], and we’re quite pleased with the market receptivity to the board’s decision to raise our dividend. And maybe I’ll give Dan a chance to make some comments about our dividend strategy. But first, I think you can see the consistency of our strategy with continuing to raise that dividend now for 30 years. And you can see the materiality of those increases for the last few years, obviously underpinned by our strong performance. Dan, talk about the future.
Dan Lyons: Yeah, hey Doug. Thanks for acknowledging the dividend. I know you’re a dividend growth lover from our prior conversations, so we always listen to you. But, as we’ve said, the dividend, a reliable and growing dividend, and competitive dividend is sort of the foundation of our shareholder return strategy. And if you look over in the last number of years, our compound annual growth rate is very competitive and above most of our peers. So we continue to be focused on growing our dividend, but for us it’s really critical that it’s sustainable. And so as we look out into the future and look at relatively conservative assumptions, we look at that kind of analysis. We look at our competitors are doing and that drives our recommendations to the board and ultimately the board’s actions.
So it’s certainly an area of focus for us. We’re glad we’re delivering that kind of growth to the market. But I can’t say there’s a particular target or payout ratio or burden level that we’re exactly targeting. Oddly, it’s dynamic, but we look ahead and we – and our focus is on reliable and growing and making sure we’re never in a situation where we have to cut it.
