PBF Energy Inc. (NYSE:PBF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Tom Nimbley: Very good, Roger. And once again, you’ve demonstrated your ability to get a number of questions in. Congratulations. We are constructive. Obviously, all built on the fact that the inventories while I’ve been building and I can’t make sense of the stat numbers that came out yesterday. I don’t know how we built $16 million accrued but I’ll leave that aside. The fact is inventories pretty much across the board across the — in the U.S. and across the globe are tight. They remain well below the 5-year averages in most cases. And in PAD 1 , even though there was a big build in PAD 1 in both gasoline and distillate yesterday, below the 5-year averages on gasoline and distillate. So we see — we are constructive. We are also constructive on or believe that we’re going to see some tailwinds behind gasoline as we move into the driving season.

We’re going to obviously be going to low RVP gasoline. We’re going to be taking the butanes out of gasoline. We’re going to be taking octane away when we do that. because butane has a high octane, so we’re going to wind up having some strength likely a widening of the ARPOB/PBOB spread. So overall, we think that things are looking reasonably positive for products and perhaps gasoline will be leading the way there. Tom, would you have anything you would add to that?

Tom O’Connor: I mean I think just to reiterate your point there, I mean, as gasoline’s got a constructive setup as we’re heading into the driving season. distillate has clearly been the market leader. It’s gone through a little bit of a wobble with a mild winter and as we’re really trying to work through with the Russian balances of gas oil is going but certainly leadership at this point is — could be moving towards gasoline but the distillate balances still remain constructive as well.

Operator: Our next question is coming from Neil Mehta from Goldman Sachs.

Neil Mehta: Congrats, Karen and congrats on the joint venture. Maybe I’ll start on the joint venture I think on the last call, the team indicated you think of the project is $400 million of normalized EBITDA. Just wanted to get a now cast of that number and remind us how much capital is left to be spent on the project at this point?

Matt Lucey: So if you look over the last year, EBITDA has ranged between $1 and $1.50 a gallon EBITDA margin. And we’re going to be generating or producing just over 300 million gallons a year. So that being said, markets will tighten and loosen at different times. But that’s what’s happened over the last year and that’s sort of what it looks like currently. So we’ll stick with that. In regards to how much of the project has been spent on, we have approximately $200 million left to spend, thereabouts. And then obviously, Andy will come in sort of when we close and when we become operable, that will offset the spending for PBF clearly.

Neil Mehta: Yes, that’s really clear. Okay. And then on cash balances, you’re at $2.2 billion. Karen, you had indicated you want to get to $750 million to $1 billion of cash over time. Do you have — how should we think about the cadence of how long it takes to get to your normalized cash balance, especially because you got incremental cash coming in associated with the joint venture? And then what is your preferred way of getting that cash down? Is it through buybacks?

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