Suncor Energy Inc. (SU) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending September 30, 2022

November 3, 2022 9:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Suncor Energy Third Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instruction] At this time, I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr. Troy Little, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Troy Little

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor Energy's third quarter earnings call. Please note that today's comments contain forward-looking information. Actual results may differ materially from the expected results, because of various risk factors and assumptions that are described in our third quarter earnings release as well as in our current annual information form, both of which are available on SEDAR, EDGAR and our website, suncor.com.

Certain financial measures referred to in these comments are not prescribed by Canadian generally accepted accounting principles. For a description of these financial measures, please see our third quarter earnings release. We will start with comments from Kris Smith Interim President and Chief Executive Officer; followed by Alister Cowan, Suncor's Chief Financial Officer. Also on the call are three of our senior operating leaders; Peter Zebedee, Executive Vice President, Mining and Upgrading, Shelley Powell, Senior Vice President, In Situ and E&P; and Arnel Santos, Senior Vice President, Refining and Logistics. Following the formal remarks, we'll open up the call to questions.

Now I'll hand it over to Kris to share his perspective on the quarter.

Kris Smith

Great. Thanks, Troy. Good morning to everyone, and thank you for joining us. On our last call, I discussed that achieving best-in-class safety and operational performance at Suncor's core focus and that my goal every day is to execute on our plans to drive that performance. A key element in delivering this is the focus of our senior operations leaders on driving changes through the organization on the front line. We're doing something a bit different than past calls our three senior operating leaders, Peter, Shelly and Arnel are with Alister me today to demonstrate our increased focus on this and to answer any questions you may have on operations.

Now taking a brief look at the quarter. We generated $4.5 billion in adjusted funds flow from operations, which included a FIFO loss in the downstream of $585 million. And as it's designed to do, our physical integration between upstream and downstream mitigated the impact of wider heavy crude differentials, delivering strong margins. Upstream value volumes came in as expected at 724,000 barrels per day during the quarter. And I expect these volumes to increase in the fourth quarter as our maintenance activities at Syncrude and base plant upgrader one were completed in October.