Phillips 66 (NYSE:PSX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Royall : Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. So just hoping for a little more color on the DCP synergies that you called out in your press release, I think $300 million. I think you’ve probably been pretty anxious to speak about those numbers. And so any buckets you can speak to and anything on timing and how that should trade in?

Mark Lashier : Yeah. I think, John, the $300 million really falls into two categories. Operating synergies that we’re actively pursuing upfront now even before the close of the roll-up of the publicly held units. And then there’s, I think, even more prolific commercial synergies that we can capture as we combine — or as we roll the business into our own. Tim, you can provide a little more color there.

Tim Roberts : Yeah. At this point, Mark is correct. Look, we’re looking at this. It’s going to probably over a time frame, we came out with $300 million. We think it’s probably about third with regard to costs. You got two third on the commercial side. We’re anticipating this is going to take us around two years to fully capture this. It’s like anything else, once you get into it further and deeper, we’re hoping there’s more there and initial indications are that they’re likely are. And hopefully, I can update you another call later to validate or confirm that, but we do see the commercial side is probably driving that. It just makes sense. When you look at the integrated value chain, you put these two entities together, we, in effect, now have gas processing in the key regions.

We now have fractionation capacity at Conway, Mont Belvieu, also at Sweeny and long-haul pipelines coming in out of the DJ and coming out of the Permian. When you look at those, there are tremendous opportunities to make sure the barrel gets the right place. And in our world, the right place means where it creates the most value. So as we dig further on that, like I said, we’re looking forward to giving you more details going forward.

John Royall : Okay. That’s helpful. And then just looking at the chemicals market, do you expect that we’ve seen a bottom there? And how does China reopening impact the future of that market? And then let’s just say hypothetically, the market doesn’t improve from here. Is there any risk of CPChem’s ability to self-fund the two growth projects?

Mark Lashier : Yeah. I think, John, that you’ve seen at the ethane — that the polyethylene value chain margins kind of hit bottom. Those producers that were really squeezed pulled back on production. So you can see that clearly — we’ve hit a point where there’s great discipline and nobody is going to operate while they’re bleeding cash, and we’ve kind of passed through that period. Margins have modestly ticked up, and you’ll continue to see as the capacity that’s coming online in North America gets digested, we’ll be at that bottom for some time, but then start to work our way out because demand globally continues to increase. And China is certainly an upside and there are number of signs that China is coming back. We’re not going to call at their back. I think it could come in fits and starts, but certainly, the noise coming out of China is productive directionally.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ryan Todd with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead, Ryan.