Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brian Mandell : Well, we’ll start with WCS differentials. There were a number of things that we’re kind of pushing and pulling on supply and demand. Inventories north of the board in Canada have been very high, and you had Keystone off the market for 22 days, which was 10 million barrels off the market. North of the border, you had about 4 million barrels of production off the market in December, another 0.5 million barrels off the market in January. And then you had the winter storm where refiners shut down. There was 27 million barrels of crude backed out, not all that’s heavy crude, but refiners weren’t pulling as much of the WCS. So all of that — if you kind of add all that up, it meant that WCS dips were weaker than they have been.

TMX provided an update in early January that they said that their 75% of the pipe is now in the ground. They haven’t changed their in-service date for the fourth quarter of this year. Our internal expectations are that start-up will slip into 2024 and full rates won’t be achieved immediately. We don’t think you need another pipeline to exit the product that is in Canada. So we don’t see it doing much. The first call for those barrels will always be Pad 2 and Pad 3 before they go to China or anywhere overseas, so they’ll have to price to get into those markets.

Matthew Blair : Great. Thank you.

Operator: Next, we have a follow-up question from Paul Cheng from Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Paul Cheng : Hey, guys. Just real quick. Because of the keystone downtime, can you share that how much is the WCS that you run in the fourth quarter? And then what do you expect you’re going to one year in the first quarter? And also, I believe with — after the turnaround actually has been running at a pretty depressed way. I think at one point, about 60%, 65% and where are we in the Wood River?

Mark Lashier: So we generally don’t, for commercial reasons, talk about what we run into refineries and how much we run. But of course, Wood River had some hiccups. In Q4, we ran less WCS in our system than normally. We are the largest importer of Canadian crude to the U.S. We expect, as Wood River comes back up, we’ll run more, Rich, maybe you can talk about where we are in Wood River.

Brian Mandell : Yeah. So Wood River, there was an unplanned event incident that occurred at Wood River and — let me start by saying our thoughts go out for the affected employees, contractors and their families that were associated with that event. But there was an incident there. We are working diligently right now to increase the utilization that was affected by this, and we expect that utilization to continue to increase through the first quarter and returned to normal operations early second quarter is our current outlook on that, Paul.

Paul Cheng : Okay. Can you tell us that what’s the current runway of Wood River?

Tim Roberts : Do we normally give guidance by plant?

Brian Mandell : Not that specific.

Mark Lashier : Yeah. Unfortunately, Paul, we don’t give that type of guidance by plant as to what our current run rates are.

Operator: We have now reached the end of today’s call. I will now turn the call back over to Jeff.

Jeff Dietert : Thanks, Emily. Thank all of you for your interest in Phillips 66. If you have questions after today’s call, please call me or Owen Simpson. Thanks for your time.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s conference. You may now disconnect.

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