Thomas G. Creery
Analyst · Credit Suisse
Thanks, George, and good morning, everyone. On the operations side we had a first quarter crude surplus of 371,000 barrels per day versus our guidance of 350,000 to 360,000 barrels a day, as driven by a heavy maintenance schedule. During the quarter, we successfully completed the very large turnaround at our Navajo refinery. In fact, this turnaround was one of the largest in company history and included the revamps to multiple units as part of our $40 million efficiency and de-bottleneck project, thereby increasing Navajo's overall throughput capacity and allowing us to run more of the higher API gravity crude oils coming out of the Delaware Basin. We had unplanned maintenance on our Tulsa reformer, and planned maintenance of the El Dorado vacuum tower. During the Tulsa outage, we were able to accelerate other maintenance and a catalyst upgrade originally planned for later this year, all of which allowed us to benefit from higher liquid yields and octane during the summer driving season. We have no major planned downtime until our scheduled turnaround at Tulsa West in November of this year. We are focused on improving operations and reliability at our Cheyenne plant, and we expect our performance to continue trending in the right direction in the Rockies region. During the quarter, we ran an average crude rate of 74,710 barrels per day. Cheyenne operations are improving, and we ran at a very strong 48,300 barrels per day crude rate in the month of March. Adjusting for HEP tariffs embedded in the Woods Cross and Rocky Mountain, OpEx was $8.91 per barrel. This amounted to a 10% reduction over fourth quarter of 2016. On the commercial side, we ran 26% sour and 19% WCS and black wax crude. Our average laid-in crude cost under WTI was $0.61 in the Mid-Con, $3.83 in the Rockies and $1.70 in the Southwest. We are continuing to see compressed differentials in both the synthetic and WCS crudes due to the Canadian synthetic production interruption coupled with apportionments on the import line from Canada. We are optimizing our crude slates to minimize these effects by increasing volumes of Permian Basin crudes that can be delivered to the El Dorado refinery by the Centurion and Osage pipelines. First quarter consolidated refinery gross margin was $7.74 per barrel, a slight increase over the $7.59 recorded in the first quarter of 2016. In the Mid-Con and Southwest, our realized margin was impacted by our maintenance at our Tulsa, El Dorado and Navajo refineries. In the Rockies, our realized margin was impacted by the temporary Salt Lake City pipeline outage. However, we were able to backfill a certain portion of our crude slate and capture the increase in product cracks. During the increase in our laid-in crude costs, improved operations at Woods Cross and Cheyenne helped us realize almost a $4 increase versus the prior quarter. Our RINs expense in the quarter was $66 million. We remain optimistic that flaws and inequities that are inherent with the mandate will be addressed by the present administration. For the second quarter of 2017 we expect to run between 440,000 and 450,000 a day of crude oil. And with that, let me turn the call over to Rich.