Holly Energy Partners, L.P. (NYSE:HEP) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Theresa Chen: Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Mike, I wanted to ask you about what you are seeing in the landscape for refining economics going forward following the strength this quarter. Clearly, impact spreads still remain elevated and you are seeing significant tailwinds from WCS. Just curious to hear about how you think this evolves through the rest of fourth quarter and into 2023 and on the product margin side, if you can give a flavor of the breakdown between diesel and gasoline, that would be helpful as well?

Mike Jennings: Yeah. I am going to ask Tim to take this question. Thanks, Theresa.

Tim Go: Yeah. Hi, Theresa. This is Tim. We definitely see a better for longer scenario here where we think Refining margins will continue to deliver above mid-cycle returns here for the foreseeable future. We are in a structurally short market. We continue to see that with refinery rationalizations that have occurred over the last couple of years, the Russia-Ukraine conflict that is causing trade flow disruptions. As you look forward, it’s hard to see that changing significantly in the near-term. We know that there’s going to be some additional start-up of some Refining capacity next year. I think the Beaumont Refinery, the Superior Refinery are going to be starting up, but we also know that the Lyondell Refinery has announced that it’s going to close the Rodeo Refineries announced that they are going to close.

So we think that there is the structural short is going to continue for quite some time, really until you get into 2024 when you start seeing the Mexico or the Nigeria refinery startup, we don’t really see a big change in the overall supply/demand. The whole energy transition theme is — I know it’s gotten a lot of attention over the last several years is really proving out to be more of a longer term evolution, right? With the high inflation that we are seeing right now, only going to slow down continued investments in kind of the green technology. And so we see that the demand for our products are going to continue to be strong and our refineries are producing as much as they can right now and still having trouble keeping inventories full.

So, I mean, the long story short, Theresa, we think the Refining market is going to be strong here for the foreseeable future.

Mike Jennings: I think to add to that, Theresa

Theresa Chen: Thank you.

Mike Jennings: the high run rates that we and others have attempted to produce in order to meet U.S. fuel demand is going to create additional maintenance outages, right? And that these plants have been running full and hard for quite a long time, trying to prevent supply shortfalls, and we think that, that during 2023 will show up in both planned and unplanned maintenance.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Todd from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Ryan Todd: Yeah. Thanks. Maybe if I could ask on the Refining side, results were strong in the quarter, but particularly in the Mid-Con, the sequential decline in capture rate was a little surprising. I know there’s a lot of moving pieces there. But especially given where crude differentials were in the quarter, can you — and how strong operational performance was. Can you talk about some of the things, positive and negative that may have impacted your ability to kind of capture the environment in the quarter there, in particular in the Mid-Con and how some of those may be trending in the fourth quarter?