Marathon Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:MPC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Roger Read: Yes, good morning, everybody. Yes, another, certainly, I’ll give you congrats on the capture there. Well done everything. Maybe to change pace though a little bit. I’d like to ask about the process in Martinez, and how we should think about the upcoming timeline and any particular milestones we should be watching for, and maybe how you think about it contributing at a cash flow basis, whether that’s happens meaningfully in €˜23 or we should wait till €˜24.

Tim Aydt : Hello, Roger, this is Tim, I’ll take that one. I guess first on the schedule, we spent really the most the part of January, conducting startup and commissioning activities. And we put fresh feed and actually yesterday in the HDO unit. And we expect finished product the storage here next week. So we are on track to reach full phase production capacity, which is 260 million gallons per year of renewable fuels by the end of this first quarter here. You may know that we’re also what we refer to as Phase 2 is constructing some pretreatment capabilities. And those are scheduled to come online in the second half of 2023. And then the facility is expected to be capable of producing the full capacity, which is 730 million gallons per year, by the end of 2023. So we’re on track and feeling good.

Mike Hennigan: Roger, it’s Mike. The only thing that I would add is we feel really good about the project. And the team’s execution has been good. But in light of where the refining macro is today it’s not the contributor that it would be saying it when we get back to midcycle at some point, it’s going to be a meaningful contributor, but obviously, it’s dwarfed by what’s happening in refining today.

Roger Read: Yes, refining is certainly strong, but that kind of gives me my other follow up question is we’ve obviously seen some good things in terms of pickup in jet demand, gasoline has continued to look a little soft, I just wonder if he could give us an overview. I guess basically, across your system, how you see things.

Brian Partee: Roger, this is Brian. So I’ll start in just a little bit of reflection on 2022. Because I think we’ve as an industry really domestically here in the US exited at a point of inflection as relates to COVID recovery. So globally, really strong year in 2022, when you look at a year-on-year 2.3 million barrels a day of overall oil demand increase, as Mike mentioned, in his prepared remarks, we expect to see continued increases into 2023 and beyond. Domestically from what we’re seeing, and this is a bit of a triangulation, I know, there’s a lot of dialogue around individual marketing books, EIA, data, mobility data. So you have to be a little bit of a statistician and try to piece it all together to formulate an informed view around actual demand.

But from an overall perspective, backing through the back end of COVID, diesel has been resilient throughout. It remains resilient domestically here in the US, gasoline if you remember when we went into COVID, early on a lot of conversations around structural impacts. And we do feel like we’ve seen some structural implications as a result of COVID. But most of that’s been on the gasoline front. And we’re kind of at a point now where our call of post COVID demand is off about 3% on the gasoline front from 2019 levels. That’s probably pretty sticky. The headwind, there is obviously the work from home a little bit of tailwind. We’ve seen some decreased use in public transportation offsetting that, but 3% is been about the number that we’ve seen consistently as we look across our books.

And then as it relates to jet, steady rate double recovery as what we’ve seen the last couple of years, we expect to see full recovery domestically here, as we progress through 2023. So back half of 2023 seeing full recovery. As relates to our book, maybe I’ll just kind of wrap it up there. What we found in Q4, gasoline year-on-year, 2%. The bright spot of interest was the West Coast. So we actually saw a 5% increase year-on-year in the fourth quarter in the West Coast. Diesel was up 4% and jet was up 3% on year-to-year basis.

Operator: Our next question comes from Paul Cheng with Scotiabank.