PBF Energy Inc. (NYSE:PBF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Tom Nimbley: Sure. Thank you, Paul. By the way, the industry has got a very heavy turnaround cycle going on right now. and it is because with the demand pull in 2022. And obviously, the attractive margin environment, it was an incentive, obviously, to figure out how to safely and reliably continue to run your equipment and that meant that we were pushing out some turnarounds or doing scats instead of doing a full turnaround to get capacity back. But the units require maintenance. And what we’re seeing that right now in the country is there’s a very, very high turnaround period here in the first quarter and going into the second quarter in the U.S. And we are not immune to that. But we obviously, as Matt mentioned, we had scheduled turnarounds at Toledo and Chalmette for later in the first quarter but with the Christmas bomb that hit taken off some equipment we wound up — and it’s not the right — not perfect but we wound up advancing those turnarounds and in fact, we’re about to wrap them up, both at Chalmette and Toledo here by the end of this month or early into the next month.

We had a scheduled turnaround, a rather significant turnaround in Martinez that is underway, that’s on the flexi-coker block, as we call it. That’s a big turnaround. But that one also is going along reasonably well right now. And we would expect to have that turnaround behind us by the end of the month, early next month. And that leaves us with — for the balance of the first half, 1 significant turnaround and that is in Delaware where we’re going to take the fluid coker down and the coker block down. After that, the second half is going to be relatively benign for us. But it is a very, very heavy turnaround period for the industry. as we effectively repay the equipment and keeping a good work in order as we go forward. And I think that will be constructive obviously because there’s going to be lower utilization in the first half of the year.

Paul Sankey: Thank you, Tom. I missed the chance to make my Roger Leggett joke but .

Tom Nimbley: I would if you didn’t do that.

Paul Sankey: Yes. Well, the whole call is at me thinking about follow-up questions, a number of questions and everything else. The follow-up, Tom, would be just we are struggling, obviously, with this DOE number yesterday, you mentioned it yourself. And I just wonder if that turnaround I mean I think we all know that the inventory data in theory is the good part of the data, right? So I just wondered if you could further think about quite what’s going on and whether it is related to turnarounds that we would see such an enormous build as you mentioned.

Tom Nimbley: Actually, I looked at it when the stats came out and did my own little research, not the net that you folks do but I don’t think it’s a concern around I don’t because the actual utilization refinery utilization was down a couple of hundred thousand barrels a day. So a couple of hundred thousand barrels a day times build of crude. I just can’t make the crude number work. I was actually not concerned about the product side of the equation. We obviously had a drawer in distillate which is addressing and we had built and gasoline but it’s the crude side that is . So I regret to tell you I have no great insight on it. I could not find a reason why it would be anywhere near the level of build that we had.

Operator: Your next question is coming from Paul Cheng from Scotia.

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