Suncor Energy Inc.

Suncor Energy Inc.

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Nov 03Next Earn

Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 4, 2026

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Suncor Energy Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Results Call.

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session.

To ask a question during the session, you will need to press *11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised.

To withdraw your question, press *11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Suncor Energy Senior Vice President of External Affairs, Mr. Adam Albeldawi.

Please go ahead.

Adam Albeldawi

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor Energy's fourth quarter earnings call.

Please note that today's comments contain forward-looking information. Actual results may differ materially from the expected results because of various risk factors and assumptions that are described in our fourth quarter earnings release, as well as in our current annual information form, both of which are available on SEDAR+, EDGAR, and our website, suncor.com.

Certain financial measures referred to in these comments are not prescribed by Canadian generally accepted accounting principles. For a description of these financial measures, please see our fourth quarter earnings release.

We will start with comments from Rich Kruger, President and Chief Executive Officer, followed by Troy Little, Suncor's Chief Financial Officer. Also on the call are Peter Zebedee, Executive Vice President, Oil Sands; Dave Oldreive, Executive Vice President, Downstream; and Shelley Powell, Senior Vice President, Operational Improvement and Support Services.

Following the formal remarks, we'll open the call up to questions. Now, I'll hand it over to Rich to share his comments.

Rich Kruger

Thank you, Adam. Our fourth quarter of 2025 was about finishing a very good year on a very strong note, and that is exactly what we did.

I'll review operational performance; Troy will cover financial. Let me start with safety.

2025 was the safest year in company history, our third consecutive safest ever across the board: fewer incidents, lower severity, both personnel and process safety. Relative to 2022, injuries and incidents are down 70% in 3 years.

This is a credit to our people, our priorities, and our processes. Now, I recognize we put out an operational update earlier in the year, I'll be relatively brief in summarizing some operational performance.

Upstream production: 909,000 barrels a day in the fourth quarter, our best quarter of any quarter ever, 34,000 barrels a day higher than our previous best, which was the fourth quarter of '24. Full year at 860 kbd, again, best ever, by 32,000 barrels a day versus '24, our previous best, and 20,000 barrels a day above the high end of our original guidance.

Over the last 2 years, we've increased production 114,000 barrels a day with the same asset base: no costly acquisitions, no major capital-intensive projects, growth from within. Upgrader utilization: an outstanding 106% for the quarter and 99% for the year, again, best evers.

Refining throughput: 504 kbd in the fourth quarter, our best quarter of any quarter, again, ever, 12,000 barrels a day higher than our previous best, which was literally the prior quarter. Full year at 480, best ever, by 15,000 barrels a day versus 2024, our previous best, and 30,000 barrels a day above the high end of original guidance.

Over the last 2 years, we've increased throughput 60,000 barrels a day with the same asset base: no costly acquisitions, no major capital-intensive projects, growth from within. Refining utilization: 108% for the quarter, 103% full year, both best ever.

All four refineries operated at 100% or higher for the second consecutive quarter. Product sales: 640,000 barrels a day in the quarter, our best fourth quarter ever, 27,000 barrels a day higher than our previous best, which was last year.

Full year at 623 kbd, also best ever, by 23,000 barrels a day versus '24, our previous high, and 38,000 barrels a day above the high end of our original guidance. Over the last 2 years, product sales have increased 70,000 barrels a day, supported by the same assets.

After never having achieved 600,000 barrels a day sales in any quarter ever, we've now exceeded 600,000 barrels a day in six consecutive quarters. Capital and cost: OS&G, full year $13.2 billion, within 1.5% of 2024 despite nearly 4% higher upstream production, more than 3% higher refining throughput, and nearly 4% higher refined product sales: higher absolute volumes, lower unit costs.

Capital: full year at $5.66 billion, down $510 million versus '24 and 540 below original guidance. Yet, we executed our business plan as designed.

We simply delivered it at a lower cost. How?

Through rigorous value testing, challenging design bases, quality job planning, disciplined cost stewardship, and superior execution once in the field. To institutionalize, we now perform detailed readiness reviews before we spend money and comprehensive post-execution reappraisals after we spend money.

Simply put, we are increasingly better stewards of our shareholders' capital. Final reflections on 2025: best ever in most all regards, safety, operational integrity, reliability, et cetera, with volumes every category, upstream and downstream, quarterly and full year, was best ever, breaking records largely set a year ago.

For more than 2 years, Peter's upstream team, Dave's downstream team, and Shelley's central support team have not only been breaking records, they have been shattering records, all above the high end of guidance for 2 years in a row. How?

Through crystal-clear priorities, establishing ambitious daily, weekly, monthly performance targets, embracing industry best practices, promoting collaboration and teamwork, and by rewarding our teams when they deliver with performance-based incentives. We continue to systematically raise the bar, delivering higher, more reliable, more ratable operational results, and consequently, higher, more reliable, more ratable cash flow.

Now, I'll turn the clock back 2 years, Suncor's Investor Day in the spring of 2024. We outlined a series of commitments for a 3-year period, 2024 through 2026, including upstream production growth, reduction in WTI breakeven, increase in annual free funds flow, reduction in annual capital spend, and a net debt target with 100% of excess funds to buybacks thereafter.

One year ago, February '25, we detailed progress after the first year of the plan. Recall, we achieved nearly 2 full years of progress in 1 year.

At the time, I hinted at the possibility of perhaps achieving a 3-year plan in 2 years. However, behind the scenes, I challenged our team to do exactly that.

Now, 2 years into an ambitious 3-year plan, very pleased to report, we indeed achieved 3 years of performance improvement commitments in 2 years, three in two: 114,000 barrels a day of production growth in 2 years versus a target of 108,000 barrels a day in three; greater than $10 a barrel reduction in breakeven in 2 years versus a target of $10 a barrel in three; greater than $3.3 billion increase in annual free funds flow in 2 years versus a target of 3.3 in 3 years; capital reduced to $5.7 billion in 2 years versus a target reduction of 3 years; net debt of $8 billion achieved in the third quarter of 2024, 9 months early, and at $6.3 billion today, our lowest in more than a decade. Bottom line, we met or exceeded every single target a full year or more early.

In life, trust and credibility are earned by delivering on commitments, and today's Suncor delivers. What does all this mean?

We're bigger, better, higher-performing, more reliable, more ratable, financially stronger and more resilient, better equipped to compete and win. We were previously a high-cost producer; now, we are a low-cost producer.

Our balance sheet is rock-solid with net debt nearly half of what it was 3 years ago, in fact, the lowest level since explicitly 2014, with tremendous flexibility and optionality, like an industrial machine increasingly generating cash with less relative dependence on oil prices. Proof: year on year, WTI was down 15%, our AFFO was down eight, and our free funds flow down six.

In 2025, share buybacks of more than $3 billion were $250 million per month throughout the year, increasing to 275 in December. We were 250 million a month in January of '25 with WTI at $75 a barrel, and we were $275 million in December with WTI at $58 a barrel.

We've previously announced our plan to continue at this 10% higher level in 2026. Buybacks were independent of oil price in 2025 despite low oil price in 2026.

Over the past 3 years, we've repurchased 163 million shares, more than 12% of our float, at an average price of $50 a share. Along with dividends, buybacks are a fundamental tenant of our shareholder value proposition.

Now, what's next? 2026 and beyond, that's the exciting part.

We are far from done yet. We know that you don't make the Hall of Fame with a few good seasons, or in Bill Belichick's case, by deflating footballs before a championship game.

It takes sustained excellence, high performance, exceptional and consistent delivery of results. We will detail a new value improvement plan on March 31st in Toronto, two horizons: short term, the next 3 years; longer term, the next 15 years.

The longer-term horizon will focus on bitumen supply and development options. We know it needs to be bold and ambitious, clear and compelling to keep your interest and support.

Stay tuned. I wouldn't miss it.

I can't wait to hear what we have to say. With that, I'll turn it over to Troy.

Troy Little

Thanks, Rich. I think the strong performance of the quarter and full year have been covered very well, and you can all find the detailed financials in our quarterly disclosure, I won't repeat any of that here.

Instead, as we transition from one year to the next, I would like to focus in on our financial resiliency and how that benefits those who choose to invest in us over the long term. Starting with our balance sheet, as Rich mentioned, our net debt closed the year at a greater than 10-year low of $6.3 billion, well under one times debt-to-cash-flow at $50 per barrel WTI, and even lower at current strip commodity pricing.

Looking behind that number, during the quarter, we renewed our credit facilities with a consortium of Canadian, U.S., and international banks for tenors of 3 and 4 years, providing us with $5.2 billion in available liquidity, not including our cash on hand. In addition, in November, we took the opportunity to refinance $1 billion in Canadian dollar debt in two note tranches of 2 and 5 years, achieving the lowest Canadian energy industry spreads in those tenors in more than 15 years.

When the near-term commodity price environment is uncertain, we believe investors look for companies that tangibly demonstrate their balance sheet resilience. I would like to thank both our banks and our bondholders for the confidence they have shown in our business.

Next, as you would have seen, our year-over-year share buybacks and dividend per share increased by 4% and 5%, respectively, when over the same time period average crude prices decreased by $11 per barrel. This ability to offer stable, predictable shareholder returns is backed up by a WTI breakeven in the low 40s, a uniquely integrated set of assets, the flexible character of our capital expenditure plans, as well as the continuous improvement mindset that is embedded at every operation and with every one of our 15,000-plus employees through our recently implemented operational excellence management system.

At Suncor, our future is not defined by commodity cycles. It is instead defined by how well we perform through them.

There is perhaps no better proof point of that than a comparison of the first and fourth quarters of 2025. Q4 AFFO of $3.2 billion was 6% higher than Q1 even though the average oil price had decreased from $71 to $59 per barrel.

Finally, Rich referred earlier to the stewardship of our shareholders' capital, and I wanted to expand on that a little, specifically as it relates to shareholder returns. I hear many companies refer to returning surplus cash to their shareholders in the form of share buybacks.

Suncor doesn't think of our shareholders' money that way. We don't pay you what is left over; we pay you first.

We look at our cash flow results, pay our dividends, fund our buybacks, and only then consider our spending on other things. On that note, I'm pleased to say that we have continued share repurchases of $275 million per month into January and February, a level started in December of 2025, which represents an increase of 10% over the average monthly buyback in 2025.

With that, I will turn the call back over to Adam so that we can take some questions.

Adam Albeldawi

Thank you, Troy. I'll turn the call back to the operator to take some questions.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press *11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.

To withdraw your question, press *11 again. Due to time constraints, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question.

Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from the line of Greg Pardy with RBC Capital Markets.

Your line is open.

Greg Pardy

Thanks. Good morning, and an incredible rundown, incredible year.

Rich, the shift in the company's culture, since your arrival and the reconstitution of the team and so forth, has obviously been a huge driving force in underlying performance. When it comes to successorship, in the past, it almost looked as though a lot of those changes had been sort of preordained for years in the future.

How does that change now under your watch?

Rich Kruger

Greg, I think if I step back, I would say leadership development and succession planning—and when I say leadership, that can be technical leadership, operational leadership, and fundamentally, business leadership. To me, great companies have continuous pipelines of leadership development candidates.

More than 2 years ago, we started out with the development of a new leadership development framework. It is now in place, and Suncor is more about what not who you know.

We value functional excellence and expertise versus generalist experience, broad-based experience sets. You need both, but we believe you need to know your business, know it extremely well.

We conceptually target multiple candidates, three, for example, kind of a three-to-one ratio of candidates for higher-level jobs in succession planning because things happen in life. I'd just wrap that up with succession planning and leadership development in the broadest sense are extremely high priorities.

They have been high priorities from day one when I arrived, and quite frankly, it was one of a very short list of material commitments I made to the Board of Directors.

Greg Pardy

Okay. Thanks for that.

Now, I'll shift gears on you a little bit. Just the mining operations performed very well in the fourth quarter.

You had very mixed conditions. Just wondering, have there been changes that you've implemented sort of year over year to drive that performance?

Rich Kruger

I'll make a comment or two, and then I'll ask Peter to expand on that. The unique thing about mining, of course, is we have to operate in a wide range of weather conditions.

When you think of mining, there's really two there's more than this, but two fundamental areas that affect your performance during weather events: the condition of the mine itself and the condition of haul roads. Haul roads are to mining like tracks are to a rail company.

You have to design, operate, and maintain them exceptionally because they're kind of the tracks or the arteries of your ability to sustain. We put a very high priority in that.

Although there were a lot of conditions in the fourth quarter, wet conditions, of course, a cool-off, things like this, our fourth quarter was our best quarter ever. As you would expect, many of the months in that quarter were our best months ever.

Peter, why don't you comment further on what we've done, particularly around the autonomous haul system and the ability to operate in all weather conditions?

Peter Zebedee

No, happy to do that. We have worked really closely, Greg, with our supplier Komatsu, in this case, at Base Plant to implement some technology on the truck.

We call it mud mode, but essentially, it reduces the slippage and stoppage of the autonomous trucks in soft conditions. That was really successful.

We also learned a lot during the implementation of that. In fact, we're working on a mud mode 2.0, if you will, to implement here by the spring of this year, we're excited about kind of the next iteration of that technology.

Really, in reality, it's one it's a combination of multiple improvement activities across our mining operations, both in our autonomous operations, which we're now fully deployed at Base Plant, up to 140 haul trucks running autonomously, and in our staffed operations, where we're continuing to work on the fundamentals, improvement activities such as more increased load factor on our trucks, reduced fueling time for pieces of equipment, optimizing our shift change. Just across the Suncor mining portfolio last year, we moved 1.4 billion tons of material.

It's a 12% increase year over year in total material movement at essentially the same cost base. We're just continuing to drive that efficiency year over year.

We talk to our teams about how little things add up to a lot in the mining business, and that's what the teams are focused on: these little opportunities adding up to a lot over the 1.4 billion tons to drive value.

Rich Kruger

I'd just make one last comment, and then we'll continue. You mentioned the word culture or cultural changes, Greg.

One of the big things, and it's hard to see from the outside, is our shamelessly embracing industry best practices wherever they exist in mining, whether that's hard rock mining in Canada, outside of Canada, oil sands mining. Increasingly, our leaders, our teams observe, listen, learn, and apply.

That is a looking from the outside in on how we can get better. We have embraced and modified historic practices across the board when we see someone who does something better than us.

That is a cultural aspect of today's Suncor that I believe is quite different than we were not too many years ago.

Greg Pardy

Understood. Thanks very much to both of you.

Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Dennis Fong with CIBC.

Your line is open.

Dennis Fong

Hi. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions.

First off, congrats on obviously another very strong quarter. My first question here, I wanted to follow a little bit along the lines of what Greg was addressing in the second question, but wanted to maybe rewind the clock back to Q1 '25, where you, Rich, highlighted a lot of field-driven optimization.

Can you provide maybe a bit of an update on the backlog of these field-driven optimization opportunities that you see frankly across upstream and the downstream, and obviously how that has really improved cost structure despite headwinds and things like mine plan or some of the mining KPIs?

Rich Kruger

One of the things I'd start with, Dennis, is it's a bit less of a backlog of field-driven optimizations because what we do now, when we see that opportunity, we team-tackle it. We get on and with it, and what you see is again, it ties a little bit to that cultural, is that we continue to replenish our ideas and opportunities.

It's been a huge part of why our refining network is now consistently at or above 100% utilization, because we have been optimizing those asset pots and pans and fundamentally increasing the denominator. Dave, you have an example or two you could maybe share with Dennis?

Dave Oldreive

Sure. Maybe, Dennis, I'll give an example out of Montreal.

Montreal, we've seen some pretty significant increases in our throughput. Two years ago, we were running that plant at about 120,000 barrels a day, but we knew, and the team in Montreal knew, they could do more, and really didn't have a signal to challenge constraints.

We've come up with a new philosophy in our downstream of value and volume. We run our refineries full, and we challenge our sales teams to sell full.

With that signal, Montreal went after a few things. One of the things they went after is, and it's in the theme of small improvements that add up big, and this is field operators challenging constraints and flagging ideas.

We've replaced two control valves, one pump impeller, and a small motor, $100,000 investment gave us 20,000 barrels a day at the Montreal refinery. That's $100 million a year improvement for $100,000 investment.

We have lots of other opportunities like that and lots of improvements in that space that are similar, but that's a good example of what we've seen. It starts with leadership being interested, boots on the ground in the field, listening to people who do the work and understand it better than anyone, and then when they see that opportunity, supporting it, promoting it, and making it happen.

When you start doing that, you engage your workforce, and they come forward with more and more ideas. You've heard us say multiple times we're not done yet.

It's not necessarily because we have this long list of things to do, but we are embedding and engraining a culture of continual improvement and driving. You always, in any facility, you will always have a limiter or the bottleneck.

If you systematically identify what that is and attack it, then something else becomes the bottleneck. I think on this one, in this particular topical area, we will never be done.

Dennis Fong

That's obviously a lot to frankly look forward to. My second question, and maybe staying along the lines of kind of continuous improvement, finding where all the limiters happen to be, I believe it was in the last conference call you highlighted single-train capacity at Fort Hills to be about 110,000 barrels a day.

How have you looked at the actual performance of the facility? Have you been able to identify opportunities to further and consistently run at that high level, and maybe even further optimize beyond the, we'll call it, 220 capacity of the two trains, especially as it in regards to opening up mining availability?

Rich Kruger

One quick comment, and then Peter will expand on it. As we look at this opportunity for continued growth from within, the areas where we see the biggest opportunity set are Fort Hills and Firebag with identified opportunities where we're confident we can continue to increase their overall production level.

Peter, why don't you comment explicitly on Fort Hills and your two Ferraris you have up there?

Peter Zebedee

No, thanks a lot, Dennis. Yes, we have been, as we mentioned the last call, really testing what the stream day production capacity is of the Fort Hills asset.

We're pleased to see rates up over 220,000 barrels a day from both trains. We are looking to ensure that we can deliver that reliably day in and day out.

That is really going to come down to ensuring that we've got the right material movements from the mine in front of us, that we're able to deliver the production volumes into the plant and do that sustainably while maintaining a healthy mine inventory. That is all really dependent on making sure that we're opening up our North Pit, which is the last and final pit at Fort Hills, in the right manner and sequencing the material into the plant in a way that is sustainable, along with enhancements, I would say, to the front end of the plant where we look to kind of metal up and protect against some of that erosion that comes with the higher material throughput that we're running.

I know the team is really highly focused on doing this. We've seen some success, and you've seen the calendar day rates come up through the fourth quarter.

We look forward to more of that here as we go along.

Rich Kruger

Dennis, I'm a lot like you. I don't remember all the numbers or get involved in a lot of the details on that stuff, but for example, why are you guys smiling?

One of the things, we've had the nameplate at Fort Hills is 194,000 barrels a day and had a target of 175 on a production level. Kind of a 90% level.

Our belief is with a bigger denominator that 220 or something, a production level in the order of 200,000 barrels a day should be the more near-term ambition. You want to save a few things for Investor Day, but I think I've just established, Peter, what the minimum there might be for Fort Hills.

Peter Zebedee

Yeah.

Dennis Fong

Great. Really appreciate that color, everyone.

I'll turn it back.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question.

That will come from the line of Menno Hulshof with TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Menno Hulshof

Thanks, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with the question on buyback guidance, $275 million per month.

You mentioned that the 250 million per month in 2025 was fairly oil price agnostic, and that you've repurchased 275 in January and February, and that buybacks are quite senior within the capital stack. Presumably, there are conditions where you would reconsider your $275 million guide, or maybe not.

Any thoughts there would be helpful.

Rich Kruger

I'll make just an opening comment, and then obviously we'll turn it to Troy on this. A real key enabler in our ability to do this and make this commitment has been to reduce our overall net debt materially over a relatively short period of time and this really dramatic reduction in our breakeven.

What we've said, we wanted to buy back shares at a rate at least consistent with dividend growth so that our overall dividend burden doesn't grow and increase our breakeven. We've found we've achieved all of those.

Troy, you want to talk more explicitly about the buyback? Manav, my sense is you might be suggesting what if we were in a lower oil price world, what might that mean?

Troy, you want to comment further?

Troy Little

Sure. I would say to answer that question, I would look at the makeup of our business, because I think when you do, you will see something unique and how we're going about this.

Our level of integration, and I don't just mean between the upstream and the downstream, I mean within the upstream itself, allows us to capture margin opportunities over the short term that others can't. It also drives greater utilization of the assets, both under normal conditions and also when any one asset experiences planned downtime.

Both of these allow us to maximize and make more predictable and stable our profitability. I would also point to this attitude that I think we've conveyed about paying our shareholders first.

Ultimately, though, rather than count on my own words, much as you pointed out, Menno, look at our 2025 track record, and just watch what we're going to do in 2026.

Menno Hulshof

Terrific. Thanks to you both for that.

Maybe I'll follow up with a follow-up question to Greg's on Q4 production, which was clearly very strong. Do you think production would have been even higher in the absence of wet weather in October and extremely cold December, or was there no weather impact at all given the mitigation work that's been undertaken?

Rich Kruger

We run an outdoor business. We mine come hell or high water, wet, dry, cold, hot.

We've got to design and operate for that and maintain our assets. When it rains, we put on raincoats; when it's cold, we put on mittens.

No, we delivered throughout the entire quarter.

Menno Hulshof

Great. Thanks, Rich.

I'll turn it back.

Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs.

Your line is open.

Neil Mehta

Good morning, Rich, and good morning, Troy and team. I guess, Rich, just want your perspective on the refining market, particularly in Canada.

You ran well, but you also captured very well, and the margin premium relative to the U.S. has kind of been sustained.

For those of us who probably have less visibility into the Canadian refining market in particular, just how do you think about the sustainability of the Canadian refining premium relative to the U.S.?

Rich Kruger

Neil, if you look back, and you can look back over quite a long time, 15 years or so, if you were choosing to be a refiner anywhere in the world and profitability was at the top of your list, I think you'd pick Canada. Then when you say, "Well, why is that?"

We've got product pricing based on import parity. We have locally advantaged crude prices.

We've got a lot of structural things that contribute to an advantage. Then what you've seen here for this company now for 2.5, 3 years is an advantaged structural setting with high-quality asset base, but increasingly run and operated better and better and better, more opportunistic for the market.

I think that's part of the commentary that Troy had a little bit, the integrated nature, how we manage and maximize the value of molecules. As cracks go up and down, I think the majority of those fundamental advantages we will retain those here.

Dave, you have anything else, particularly around margin capture or whatever, to add?

Dave Oldreive

Rich, what I'd add to that, and I think you characterized it well, I mentioned earlier, we have our signal of value and volume. Really, we run our refineries full, we have a signal to sell full, and then over time, we improve our yields in our sales channel mix.

Over the last year, we had record crude throughput, but we also had record gasoline production, record diesel production, and record jet fuel production. We're translating that throughput into valuable products.

We've also increased our percent branded channel mix as well by growing our retail mostly and a little bit on our wholesale side of our business. We're selling that through our most profitable tiers.

That's probably the biggest thing we've been doing is making sure the yields are strong with the additional throughput and selling through the optimal channels to keep our margin capture.

Rich Kruger

One other thing I'd add to it, Dave, I think what your teams have done in the collaboration between the operations, the supply and trading, and the marketers, those are three functional areas of expertise, but how they work together: increasing jet fuel production in the East, optimizing diesel in the West, things to really target the market and to fine-tune or moderate our facilities to meet the market demand. I've been a part of seeing that evolve.

I think that is stellar. Every molecule and every dollar matters.

The last time I checked, your teams aren't dropping too many on the ground.

Dave Oldreive

No, they're not. Tune in for Investor Day.

We have some really great stories to tell on yield improvements as well.

Neil Mehta

Oh, that's great. That's great color.

Rich, as a follow-up, as Suncor earned the license to do M&A at this point, your mouse trap seems to be working really well. For a long time, it was about fixing the business organically and getting the multiple up, and a lot of that's happened.

To the extent that there are other companies that could benefit from the way that you are running your business, are you a natural consolidator? Is the story you're going to tell at the end of March is one of organic and more of stay the course?

Just your perspective on that would be helpful.

Rich Kruger

I'd start out with what our goal is to be a value creator for our shareholders. That largely starts on a per-share basis, whether that's free funds flow or whatever.

In terms of earning our credibility, trust, we talked about that, it's based on delivering on commitments. I think we're past the "Wow, these guys had a good quarter or two."

I think we've passed that. I hope there's probably others listening that can answer this better than I, that we've earned the trust and credibility that any and all actions we do, internal or organic or inorganic, would be in the shareholders' best interest to increase their ultimate value.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question.

That will come from the line of Doug Leggate with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Doug Leggate

Thank you. Good morning, everybody.

Thanks for having me on. Rich, I know you don't want to get in front any more than you already have perhaps of March 31st, but I wonder if I could ask you to maybe put some gating items around your spending levels beyond 2026.

Should we expect the 5.6, 5.8 to be a cap, or how do you think about it in terms of the proportion of cash that goes back to shareholders? Now, if I may just do an add-on to this, some of your peers talk about a percentage of cash flow, some talk about a percentage of free cash flow.

You've obviously talked about 100% going back to shareholders because of where your debt is, but that's free cash flow, which is discretionary on your level of spending. What's the gating item on CapEx?

Rich Kruger

Doug, I think it's a really relevant question and things. As we look at this, our view is competing and winning in today's oil and gas world, there's a whole bunch of components, obviously your size and scale, the quality and longevity of your resource base, on and on.

When it's in capital, we're increasingly talking about it's not only return on capital, but return of capital. I think Troy's introductory comments were aimed at amplifying what we believe is important to the majority of our shareholders and what we strive to provide.

I've kind of hit on this at some investor meetings and broadly on calls, we have been constructing a longer-term plan where we can have our cake and eat it, too, where we can develop incremental resources over time and we can continue to return capital to shareholders while we're doing that. We won't have to stop the presses for a multiple-year period while our capital expenditures blows out.

Key in doing that is having the optionality within the resource base, which will be a big part of our conversation on March 31st. What is our resource base, not only our 2P reserves, but our contingent resources, what we believe we have there, the advantages we believe those have in terms of capitally efficient development, Lewis, Firebag South, Firebag phase five, as we call it.

How we think we can do all that and do it within a capital construct that stays kind of at or below about that round numbers, about that $6 billion level. Then in a $60, $65 a barrel world, we can continue to grow dividends, we can invest and replace production decline, perhaps even grow it, and we can continue, and this was not in a priority order, to return cash to shareholders via buybacks.

We are carefully assembling this orchestra in such a way that we think we can offer the most value not only long term, but each and every quarter, each and every year to shareholders. Troy, you have anything you'd add to that?

Troy Little

Doug, I'll just add, I think if you look at the model of the company that we've built here, a lot of it is around stability and predictability. You've seen that the last 3 years with respect to our OpEx, which is roughly remained in the same range even though we've significantly increased both our production and our refining utilization.

I think you're going to see that in CapEx, and I think we've demonstrated that so far, and it's certainly our plans for the long term. You've also already seen it in shareholder returns.

We really want to be a company that investors can count on, largely regardless of what's going on in the external environment.

Rich Kruger

I'll just add one comment to that. It's not like we operate, perform, and then see, okay, what can we do?

We have had a very conscious, focused vision of what we want this company to be and where the unique space in investors' portfolio we believe we could occupy if we achieve that. All of our efforts have been geared toward creating that company.

I think you're seeing that more and more: predictable, ratable, reliable, industrial machine-like, the ability to return on and return of capital. All of this has been part of a very deliberate vision or plan for several years running, and we've been putting the building blocks in place, and you're starting to see it now.

We're having fun with it, and we're not done yet.

Doug Leggate

I appreciate those answers, guys. Rich, I wonder if I could do a quick follow-up, and I know it does not affect you because your model is uniquely integrated, but obviously there's a lot of focus on what's happening to crude spreads in Canada.

I just wonder if I could ask you to just reiterate your immunity to any weakness that we see in WCS, and perhaps offer any color as to what you see as a dynamic beyond the normal seasonality. Are you seeing anything materially different?

Because your colleagues over at Imperial didn't seem to think there was anything materially changing. I'd love to hear your opinion on that.

Rich Kruger

I I think, Doug, you you accurately flag one of the really fundamental attributes that makes us difference different. It it is this immunity or the the lack of any material movement in our economic performance with WCS differentials, things.

That gets back to, again, this this integrated aspect all the way from our upstream to our downstream, our ability to to upgrade bitumen or heavy crudes to light crudes, things. It, there there is a unique asset base that is different for us.

When we look at like world events and things, you just look back over the last decade or so what differentials have done here. They've been tight of late, they've widened here a little bit.

They bobble around when there's news on Venezuela and other things and/or tariffs. I don't mean to dismiss it at all, but much of that outside noise from a Suncor perspective is kind of much to do about nothing because of, again, what we are, who we are, and how we're how we're constructed.

Now, we look for opportunities in that, and there may be opportunities for us when when others, when others, catch COVID or catch flu, we might sneeze and have a little bit of a sniffles. There's there's opportunities in that for us when when others have more volatility than we have.

We think we think the creation of shareholder value often occurs under weaker or distressed market conditions more so than it does under strong and growing market conditions. Our vision for for a number of years now has been to strengthen ourselves, to build that resiliency, that flexi flexibility and optionality, when we see something we like or we want to do something that makes sense, we can do it confidently and without of hesitation.

I think, I'm kind of getting off the track your question a little bit, but I think that's where we are. The market conditions, we're largely market takers, but I think our unique construct gives us a, we don't overreact or panic as as things change.

Our view right now is there's things going on around the world, but I don't think any of them are going to be fundamentally material to how we continue to deliver value.

Doug Leggate

Thanks for the answers, guys. Appreciate it.

Rich Kruger

You're welcome, Doug.

Operator

One moment for our next question. That will come from the line of Manav Gupta with UBS.

Your line is open.

Manav Gupta

Morning. I actually wanted to follow up a little bit on the refining macro.

If you look at last year, there was a very bearish sentiment on refining, but as the year progressed, bears were proven completely wrong, and you guys generated almost $4 billion in your cash from operations from refining. We started this year with pretty much the same sentiment on refining, which was pretty negative.

We look at the fundamentals, the cracks Jan to Jan are actually up, and the capacity additions are more limited. I'm just trying to understand from where you are sitting in terms of refining macro if you can make some comments in terms of diesel and gasoline.

Do you expect 2026 to be somewhat of a similar year for 2025, which was a very strong year? If you could just talk a little bit about that.

Rich Kruger

I'm going to ask Dave to comment explicitly in a minute, but I'll tell you, as a large miner and a big upstream company and understanding the geopolitical uncertainties and the importance of breakevens and stuff, when I go to bed at night and say my prayers, I thank God for the downstream because the level of integration we have, it provides this natural hedge and support. Sometimes upstream goes up, downstream goes down, and vice versa.

It is a really fundamental part of this value proposition and what we deliver. Dave, other than that philosophy, do you want to offer some specifics on the

Dave Oldreive

Yeah, for sure. Specifically, you look even at today's cracks, Manav, and as you're aware, gasoline's pretty soft in the Mid-Continent, LA market is strong across the board, New York Harbor is strong on diesel, particularly with recent cold weather, and reasonably good on gas cracks.

Distillate margins through '25 were strong, and they really peaked in October-November. I would expect diesel to continue to remain strong through the first quarter, and we've seen that trend over the last few years where diesel has been a bit above gasoline.

That plays to Suncor's strengths. We have a pretty low G-to-D ratio.

We also have pretty good G-to-D flexibility, and we can win in any environment, but we really like good diesel cracks. In the fourth quarter, we achieved not only record refinery utilization, but record diesel production.

How do we do that? I'll give you an example out of Edmonton, this is a little sneak preview of maybe some things we'll share at Investor Day.

The first half of the story, the second half of the story, stay tuned. In the Edmonton refinery, we made a few simple routing changes that took advantage of some improved catalyst that we put in during our turnarounds and structurally increased diesel yield by 8,000 barrels a day.

That resulted in a correspondingly lower diluent production, so much higher-value product on the diesel side. We did that for a $140,000 investment, and that delivers about $45 million a year in incremental value.

Then we were able to move that through our We did that when, Dave?

Rich Kruger

We did that through the third and fourth quarter of last year.

Troy Little

Fourth quarter. It really had minimal impact on 2025, and it's all

Rich Kruger

You'll

Dave Oldreive

see this into '26. We think there's opportunity to grow that even further in 2026.

Then we sold that through our domestic channels as well as we have export capacity on the West Coast. We're not done yet.

Tune in for more on that story in March.

Troy Little

Thanks, Dave.

Manav Gupta

Perfect. My quick follow-up is, and maybe you'll again talk more about that Analyst Day, but you took over the operations of Syncrude.

We are seeing some improvements. Help us understand the changes you've brought about once you kind of started operating that asset on your own versus the JV entity that existed in between, if you could talk a little bit about that.

Dave Oldreive

I think some of the key things is, Syncrude is fully part of the Suncor family. What that means is best practices, central support, and just the scale and efficiency that come with, as opposed to being a joint venture and kind of an island, you're now part of a continent.

We have brought the best to bear. We have also, whether it's best practices or people, we've moved people into Syncrude, moved Syncrude individuals out to other operations.

They're just getting the full benefit of this storyline we've told, how we're systematically reducing variation asset to asset, and while we're doing that, we're elevating the overall performance across the enterprise. Syncrude being fully-fledged part of the family has been a big part of that.

Everything we're doing applies to them equally as it would to any other asset, and that makes a difference.

Manav Gupta

Thank you. Congrats on the great result.

Again, once loved the choice of the song that's played before the call starts, thank you for that.

Rich Kruger

Thanks, Manav.

Operator

Thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, please press *11.

Our next question will come from the line of Patrick O'Rourke with ATB. Your line is open.

Patrick O'Rourke

Great. Good morning, guys.

Congratulations on a strong quarter. I was going to ask on Syncrude, but that was a very comprehensive answer there.

Maybe I'll talk about sort of the refinery, the throughput levels that you've had here, being able to achieve over 100%. You spoke to raising the denominator earlier on the call.

At what point do you think about sort of formalizing those levels here?

Rich Kruger

I'll give you a little bit of a peek behind the curtain. With what we have been doing to systematically across the entire network debottleneck and add capacity, we now run two sets of books.

Externally, the nameplate of our system is 466,000 barrels a day. It's been that way for a long time.

As we continue to report to you, that's the denominator. What you're seeing as we're getting north of 100%, what you really know is the denominator is bigger than that.

The second set of books is the internal books, the drive to be the best we can be. This team in this room sits down weekly, monthly, and Dave literally daily, and looks at performance.

We compare performance to our internal books with a bigger denominator. Instead of looking at 103, 105%, we might be looking at something that's 95, 96%.

Then as opposed to patting ourselves on the back for being north of 100, we're saying, "Huh, at 95, 96, where's that last 4, 5%?" That's the philosophy of how we're doing things.

We need to think about when we go externally and say, "Okay, the new denominator is X," because we don't want anybody to miss the memo when we do that, and a year from now say, "Well, how they were 103% in 2025, and now they're only 97%? Man, their performance went down."

You got to look at the barrels and the percentages. We know as we continue to be north of 100%, at some point in time, we have to come clean on what is the real capacity of this network, and it's well above 466.

Patrick O'Rourke

Great. Then maybe just on the return of capital, thinking about the debt position of the company here, $6.3 billion versus the $8 billion target, I know there's been a bit of working capital impact in the fourth quarter, and, historically, a bit of a reversal of that in the first.

Let's say we get towards the end of the year, and the commodity conditions have been such that you're still sitting well below that $8 billion. How do you think about the signals for releasing that to shareholders, and sort of what's the preferred vehicle if you do make that decision?

Maybe I'll add this sort of in, since you touched on inorganic, is there any potential that you would see that as dry powder where you can create per-share accretion?

Rich Kruger

Troy, you want to comment a bit?

Troy Little

I don't think we look at dry powder for, and I think you're suggesting acquisitions, in terms of where the balance sheet is. I think we let the opportunities define whether we want to do something like that.

I think we have an excellent track record of it, both from a disposition perspective as well as an acquisition perspective. When we think of return on capital, we do look at it over a longer time period than 1 month.

We look at it over a full year. You are right that the normal trend is for us to have a working capital release in Q4 and then actually usage in Q1.

I don't expect that to be any different this year. It's important to go back to what I said about the order in which we pay things, as people think about the balance sheet and how it's used around share buybacks or capital.

Ultimately, there's some clarity in the order we're paying out our cash flow, because we actually look at it as though we're looking at the benefits of what our capital spending is versus the costs of any leverage that are associated with it. It's not so much funding the buybacks themselves off the balance sheet, it's actually funding what's at the end of the line.

Stay tuned. If operations continue to improve on the path they have, that gives us more direction to increase those buybacks, but it's not so much related to where our debt levels are.

Patrick O'Rourke

Okay. Thank you.

Troy Little

Okay.

Operator

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time.

I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. Adam El-Beldawi for closing remarks.

Your line is open.

Adam Albeldawi

Thank you, everyone, for joining our call this morning. If you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to our team.

Operator, you can end the call.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating.

You may now disconnect.