Ryan Todd : Great. Thanks. Maybe starting out with 1 on shareholder returns. The buyback was strong this quarter. As we think about 2023 going forward, you’ve provided guidance at the recent Analyst Day that would suggest something on the order of $500 million to $700 million a quarter of buyback in a mid-cycle environment. We’re clearly above the mid-cycle environment. You were at the high end of the guided pace this quarter. How should we think about the use of that excess cash? Should the backdrop remain very constructive? And how aggressive might you look to be on shareholder returns versus building more cash on the balance sheet?
Kevin Mitchell : Yeah, Ryan, it’s Kevin. So you’re right, we did the high end of the range in the fourth quarter, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that we would continue somewhere round about that level. We’re also — we’re sitting on a decent healthy cash end of the year just over $6 billion. And just to give some context to the overall balance sheet condition relative to where we were before the pandemic. Over the pandemic, we added $4 billion and I’m ignoring the impact of BCP debt consolidation here. We added $4 billion over the pandemic. We subsequently paid off 3.5 of that but we’ve improved our cash position by $4.5 million since the end of 2019. So net-net, we’ve enhanced the balance sheet by $4 billion from where we were going into the the pandemic.
And so that gives us a lot of flexibility. But we’ve also got the DCP roll-up to take care of, which we expect to be sometime in the second quarter. So that’s a $3.8 billion transaction. And while we won’t use all cash for that, we want to make sure that we retain plenty of flexibility as we go into that and close on that rollout. But I do think what it all speaks to we continue to see these above mid-cycle conditions, we will have some good flexibility to — I would tell you really do a bit of all of it. We’ll want to pay off some incremental debt, especially as we think about the impact of the DCP roll-up, but we should also be positioned to look at the cash returns to shareholders, both in the context of the dividend, we would expect to increase the dividend.
This year, we remain committed to a secure, competitive growing dividend. And we’ll look at the buyback pace. We’re clearly at a very healthy level today, but there’s potential flexibility on that. And so we — it’s something that we’ll prioritize and keep very focused on. But in the near term, we’re probably pretty comfortable with where we are given that we’ve got the DCP transaction out there ahead of us.
Ryan Todd : Excellent. And then maybe shifting gears somewhere else. I wonder if you could discuss a little bit about what you’re seeing and what you expect going forward in European refining. There’s some big moving pieces in recent months, the natural gas spread between Europe and the U.S. has declined significantly and you’ve got an upcoming Russian product ban going into effect. What are you seeing in the market right now? And any thoughts on expectations in the coming months?
Brian Mandell : I think with natural gas coming off some. We’re not — I mean Rich can talk about the natural gas issues at the plant.
Rich Harbison : So natural gas for us, certainly has some impact on our operations, primarily for the purchase of electricity, but we see that really not as a disadvantage to our peers either. So the competitive nature of refining will continue to be there with some cost impacts associated with higher natural gas and that’s the numbers we put out in the past are still in play today as well. The challenge for that will be the continued impact of the Russian supply scenarios and then the resupply are that will set the really the minimum price for those marketplaces, and we’ll see that shapes up here as the market moves forward.
