Shell plc (NYSE:SHEL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Sinead Gorman: Sure. I would say Q4 was a very strong trading quarter. It was exceptional in isolation, absolutely. But we tend to, as I’ve said before, really is good to look at it across the 12 months. So when you look at it across the 12 months, our Integrated Gas as an entirety to both the physical assets and the trading and optimization part have had a great year. It really is fabulous. And when you look at that, of course, trading and optimization has played a key role in that, but I wouldn’t look at it from quarter-to-quarter. As I said, it’s much, much better to look at it across the 12 months.

Operator: So the final question is from Jason Gabelman at Cowen.

Jason Gabelman: My phone actually cut out on the part of that question, so I may be asking the same question I was just asked, and if so, I apologize. I actually have 2. The first one is on Integrated Gas. And there’s clearly an elevated seasonality in the business, as you alluded to, that seems kind of underappreciated by the market. And I’m trying to understand how to quantify that. And I guess I’ll ask the question in this way. 4Q was very strong. If we had a similar environment in 2Q or 3Q, do you have any sense of how much different the earnings would have been? Can you give us an order of magnitude on that? And then my second question is on the…

Wael Sawan: Sorry, Jason, we lost you when you started to talk about the second question. Can you repeat the second one?

Jason Gabelman: Business model. The way it was kind of communicated was add a lot of options in optimizing those electrons value chain, which I would have guessed included this retail energy business. If you decide to move away from retail energy in Europe and that removes one of the avenues to optimize those electrons, does that change how you think about the return profile potential of the renewable power business?

Wael Sawan: Thank you for that, Jason. I think I picked up the second one. Let me take a shot at both and build off what you said there, Sinead, on the first one. So Jason, I think the way to reflect on this and what Sinead had mentioned earlier is the importance of looking at this across 4 quarters. And what’s important is that we typically have a portfolio that is geared towards the Northern Hemisphere winter. So we try to go — to try to go longer in the Q4, Q1 months. And the way we do that typically is through supplementing our equity production with third-party volumes. So the best way to look at some of the underlying performance is just look at the volumes we provide on a — over the last 2 years. And what you will see is quite some differences quarter-to-quarter in terms of that volume.

Now I think what’s important to recognize is there’s different ways we create value in the Integrated Gas value chain. Of course, there is at the asset side, and you can see how much equity production we’re selling. We then create a significant amount of value at the T&O side. And then there’s a small piece that is also opportunistic as we play it. My best advice is just look across the different quarters, look at the prices there, and you’ll get a good sense of it. This is not about us trying to not be transparent, but of course, as Sinead also said earlier, our hedging, the way we price manage our exposure is such that we look at it over an entire year and not simply quarter-by-quarter. We don’t manage it on a quarterly basis. And that’s why you can see sometimes the disruptions on a quarterly basis as you did in Q3.

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