All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the ExxonMobil Product Solutions Spotlight. I'm Jennifer Driscoll, Vice President of Investor Relations. Excited to be here at our new corporate campus and headquarters. I'm joined by a number of executives today. I have with me Jack Williams. He's Senior Vice President, ExxonMobil Corporation. He oversees Product Solutions, also Global Projects, and our supply chain organization, among others. We also have Karen McKee, President of ExxonMobil Product Solutions, and then we have Neil Hansen, Mike Zamora, and Loic Vivier, the Senior Vice Presidents for Energy Products, Chemical Products, and Specialty Products, respectively, as well as many of our other executives. All of us are here to share with you today how ExxonMobil Product Solutions is using its industry-advantaged capabilities to nearly triple earnings potential by 2027 versus 2019, as well as grow and deliver value well into the future. I'm also pleased to see a great in-person turnout during this hybrid event. I can see many of our covering analysts and investors in the audience. We thank you for coming, and we look forward to engaging with you and answering your questions. On behalf of ExxonMobil, we appreciate your interest in the company. In fact, it's your interest in Product Solutions that encouraged us to host this spotlight today. 1.5 years after we formed Product Solutions, we wanted you to be able to meet the leaders from this new business and hear their perspectives on the many opportunities for growth that we have through 2027 and beyond that. For those of us joining via audio webcast, you can find our slides on the investor relations section of the ExxonMobil website. During this presentation, as usual, we'll make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. We encourage you to read our cautionary statement to learn more about those. We provide additional information about the risks and uncertainties that apply to any forward-looking statements that we might make in our Forms 10-K and 10-Qs. You can find those on our website for investors, and you'll also find some supplemental information at the end of our spotlight slides. With that, let me turn it over to Jack Williams, Senior Vice President of ExxonMobil. Thank you, Jennifer. Good afternoon. Great to be with you here today. Good to see all your smiling faces, and welcome to our virtual audience as well. I'm excited today to showcase ExxonMobil's Products- Product Solutions business and our leadership team. I'm really proud of this team and the work that they've done and the whole organization's done to significantly improve earnings and cash flow delivery. So today, what we're gonna do is report out our progress to nearly triple earnings versus 2019, which would add $10 billion of annual earnings capacity by 2027. As you can see on the slide, the foundation of our Product Solutions strategy is an industry-leading portfolio of assets and businesses, and we're making the most of it by maintaining strong operating performance, including best-in-class safety, by growing our high-value products, with sales of these on track to double by 2027 versus 2019, by reconfiguring our integrated assets to meet evolving customer demands, and by optimizing our value chains in real time in response to feed and product dynamics. Our investments the last five years have added significant value, and we're continuing to invest in our strategic projects to grow these businesses. We've started up five of these projects that are expected to contribute $1 billion of earnings this year. We've organized the business to maximize value from our assets and ongoing investments. Product Solutions formation has allowed us to capture significant synergies in improving our performance and operating cost, and it's enabled us to better leverage our corporate competitive strengths, which are substantial. These strengths, these advantages of scale and integration, functional excellence, and of course, our people and our technology, are well represented in Product Solutions. So what you can see here, the horizontal scale on this slide goes from least or smallest on the left to most or largest on the right, and ExxonMobil leads in most of the dimensions shown here, and some by a very large margin. So first, we have significant scale. We have more than double the manufacturing capacity versus the next IOC, and it's highly integrated, with 85% of our refining capacity integrated with chemicals, which allows significant optimization today and significant reconfiguration opportunities tomorrow. I would like to spend a minute or two on the technology advantage shown here. So what's shown is the number of patents, and that we use as a proxy, but the real advantage here is the impact this has on our earnings growth. Proprietary technology enabled the Rotterdam Advanced Hydrocracker Project and the Singapore Resid Upgrade Project that's ongoing right now. Both of these were industry firsts, and both completely enabled by proprietary technology. And our 50-plus years of catalysis technology leadership is really the enabler for our performance chemicals, and they are the growth engine of our Chemical Products business. And then we have a new, exciting, sustainable product line in our specialties business that we'll talk about later, that is made possible by brand-new process technology. So in short, our technology leadership provides us the growth opportunities that simply are not available to competition. The functional excellence measure shown here is the track record of delivery by our unique global projects organization. So the example, and we'll talk more about this later, is the Corpus Christi Chemical Complex, that was delivered 25% below U.S. Gulf Coast cost by deploying an upstream modularization strategy for the first time in the chemical industry. These competitive advantages, enabled by our incredible people, are generating superior financial results. Last year, Product Solutions earnings were more than double the next IOC's downstream and chemical businesses, and the first half of 2023 shows a similar trend. The deployment of these advantages is enabled by our corporate organization model. Of course, as you know, last year, we reorganized to create our Product Solutions organization, which is now the world's largest integrated fuels, lubricants, and chemicals business. We further evolved the model to the schematic that's shown on the right. There are two other business lines, the upstream and Low carbon Solutions. All three of these businesses are supported by central organizations that are leveraging the full scale of the corporation to deliver industry-leading capabilities to the entire to each business line, the entire left-hand side. So the Product Solutions results that we discussed today will include the contributions of the entire right half of this organization block, like our technology and engineering organization, like Global Projects, like our global trading organization that's enabling more value capture from our large global footprint. These corporate capabilities are being fully leveraged by the Product Solutions strategic priorities, which begin with a commitment to be the lowest cost supplier, which is vitally important for remaining resilient through the business cycles. Our growth will be focused on high-value products that leverage our technology advantage that I just talked about. High-value products are low-emissions fuels and performance chemicals and high-quality lubricants, so they're higher value and lower emissions. By 2027, we expect these products will be 10% of our sales and 40% of our earnings. We'll grow these products through strategic projects that we anticipate will contribute over $4 billion of earnings annually by 2027, substantially improving the value of the portfolio. Importantly, we intend to lead in sustainability. Product Solutions is playing a material role in the corporate GHG emission reduction plans, which results in a 20%-30% reduction in GHG intensity by 2030. We've developed emission reduction roadmaps for all our operated assets. We're working with Low Carbon Solutions on development of a Baytown Blue Hydrogen project. We're growing production of certified circular polymers through our advanced recycling. We're building a new hydrocracker to produce lower emissions renewable diesel at IOL Strathcona Refinery. Through our relentless focus on energy intensity, our manufacturing assets continue with first quartile GHG intensity delivery. In short, and you've heard us say this before, we're working to solve the "and" equation, meeting the world's energy and product needs and reducing emissions. I'm confident that with these priorities, this leadership team, this organization, and this new corporate structure, we will deliver $10 billion of annual earnings growth by 2027. We're also excited for the prospects beyond 2027. Demand for Chemical Products is expected to grow more rapidly than GDP. Demand for lubricants is expected to remain strong and to grow in industrial and aviation and marine sectors. We're creating new value chains enabled by technologies that upgrade low-value molecules into higher-value products. We have a strong portfolio of lower-emission fuels opportunities at our advantage integrated sites that will meet the growing demand during the energy transition. So before wrapping up, let me just say that I hope that the next four presentations from the Product Solutions leadership team will give you a better appreciation for why we have so much confidence in delivering this earnings growth to 2027 and beyond. In short, ExxonMobil's Product Solutions business is very unique. Our industry leadership is underpinned by corporate competitive advantages that have really been amplified with the recent organization changes. The organization is hitting its stride, and there's growing momentum for an exciting future. So with that, let me hand it over to Product Solutions President Karen McKee to discuss our plans in more detail. Thank you. Well, thank you, Jack, and thanks to all of you for your interest in Product Solutions. As Jack said, I have the honor of leading this new organization of Product Solutions, and I truly believe that it is a game changer for ExxonMobil. In the next few minutes, I'm gonna share with you why I believe that's the case. I'd like to start by referencing the scale of our new organization, and you can see on the top right here that our average reported earnings were $10 billion per year in the six years since the start of our recast period. You can also see the split into our three new reporting segments of that $10 billion. There's no doubt that this is a material business for ExxonMobil. The reason I think this is a game changer is because of the way we have constructed our new organization. We've purposely organized to unlock new synergies and new value for ExxonMobil, and we've organized around three key aspects. The first thing is combining like activities in order to gain scale, and a simple example of that is manufacturing. Prior to the reorganization, we had one manufacturing team that supported our chemical business and another one that supported our downstream business. Those were both world-scale in their own right, but by combining these, we have something truly unique, something that is super scale versus all of our competitors. So that's the first tenet of our organization, super scale. The second one is what I would call is deep integration, and you can see on the left-hand side of this chart that two of our three reporting segments actually include businesses from both our heritage organizations. So we have done this very intentionally in order to identify differences, identify best practices, and rapidly learn from each other and deploy those best practices across the whole of Product Solutions. And that is really bearing a lot of fruit, which I'll bring to life in the next few minutes. The third tenet of our organization has been really focusing on value chains. And a good example of that is that we've now brought all of our lubricant-related businesses together within our Specialty Products segment. We now have our heritage chemical and synthetic base stock business joining our other lubricants business, and this has allowed us to identify and create new value for our customers as well as our shareholders. As Jack said, we're 18 months in. I am delighted to tell you that we're off to a fantastic start, and we've actually captured more synergies in our first year than even my very high ambition for the new organization. We're confident in much more to come, given the suite of ideas and opportunities we've identified. We are confident that we are on track to deliver $500 million in structural cost reductions by 2025, and an additional $500 million of margin improvement and one-time savings over the same time period. Very significant opportunities to improve our businesses. So I view today as close to a halfway checkpoint on our progress between our baseline year of 2019 and our ambition for an improved business in 2027. On this slide, I'd like to set the baseline. I want to show you where we've been and where we are currently. So you can see here that on an average margin basis, we started with $6 billion of earnings in 2019. By 2021, at the same average margin basis, we were delivering $8 billion of earnings. And based on our progress year to date, at the end of this year, which is actually our halfway point, we could be at nearly $12 billion of earnings on an average margin basis. So this is a terrific start and a great track record, and it gives us confidence in delivering on our goal for 2027. So let's talk about that goal. Our goal is to deliver $16 billion on an average margin basis, and that's about $10 billion more than our performance in 2019. And you can see on this slide that we are on track. With nearly $12 billion on an average margin basis this year, we are delivering about 60% of the expected earnings improvement, and we are halfway through the timeline at the end of this year. So that's where we've come so far, but you can see we have broken our opportunities to improve our earnings into three categories over the whole time period, and I'd like to walk you through all three of those. Firstly, at the top of those, of those bars is a green section, which is from our strategic projects. These are very large projects, very large investments. They're focused on improving our competitiveness and serving growing demand for our high-value products. You're going to hear much more about these today. In the light blue, sort of the lowest area of the improvement, is our structural cost improvements. These are from operational efficiencies and other cost-saving measures, and the good news is we expect these to be sustainable going forward. Between these two, let me say, fairly obvious sources of value, we have this orange section, which we would describe as other performance improvement. So what is other performance improvement? Well, we are deeply focused on enhancing all aspects of our business. We embark on hundreds of smaller projects every year that don't rise to the level of our strategic projects, but they do improve our business. We're focused on improving yield, focused on improving reliability. So many opportunities to improve our manufacturing, part of our business, but we're also focused on value chain improvements outside of manufacturing, with value creation in the commercial aspects of our business. For example, by improving our channel to market and growing our trading activity. It's also important to note that we only adjust our historical and future reported operating earnings for margin, taking all of our performance back to a constant margin basis. So any other one-time opportunities that we capture would also be reported here. So we're gonna use this format as we walk you through each of our segments, earning improvements for the balance of our time today. So I'd like to start with a very brief overview of our strategic projects, and each of our senior vice presidents is going to give you much more details on what these projects mean in terms of improvements for their business. But what I would like to stress is that we are committed to profitably growing our business, and we have no shortage of opportunities to do that. We have many great ideas that we could deploy in order to improve our business, and the projects that we've selected are entirely consistent with our strategy. They're focused on extending our market-leading positions in our businesses and improving our strategic site competitiveness, and they will deliver meaningful earnings growth. All the projects are listed in the year after startup, so that's the first year of full beneficial operation. So for example, the Beaumont Crude Distillation Project, which we successfully started up earlier this year, is highlighted here under 2025. Great news is we are on track. We are on track to deliver $1 billion in earnings improvement by the end of this year, but the best is yet to come, because actually, the majority of these projects are scheduled to deliver in the back half of the period. So these projects, as you'll discover during the balance of our time together, are many and varied, but there's one thing that they all have in common. They are all differentiated by our competitive advantages, our proprietary technology that Jack spoke about, our unique integration, because we are the only one of the IOCs that has a very, very large chemical company, a leading lubricants business, and a very large fuels business. Our unmatched scale, our functional excellence in everything we do, including industry-leading execution of our projects. So these projects will materially move us forward, as I mentioned before, to serve the growing markets for our high-value products and enhance the competitiveness of our strategic sites. But importantly to you, they're very attractive. We project an average project return of 30% on a money-forward basis. So I mentioned earlier that there are these many varied aspects of what we're calling other performance improvement. I thought it would be useful to dive into a specific example, and the example I'm gonna take on here today is manufacturing improvement. On the top left of this chart, you can see our industry-leading performance and safety. Clearly, our safety performance is an absolute value in its own right, but it is also a great indicator of the rigor with which we approach all the operational aspects of our business. So you can imagine that our turnarounds were safer than average, and we approached them with a great degree of rigor. But as you can see on the right-hand side of this chart, they were not as competitive as we wanted them to be. In fact, we had opportunities to improve both the duration of our turnarounds and also their cost effectiveness, because we were benchmarking in the third quartile. But you can see by 2022, we had improved both schedule and cost effectiveness to deliver first quartile performance, importantly, without compromising safety. So that improved duration means less downtime, more uptime for equipment, and more throughput through our facilities. So that improved performance and turnarounds, together with other reliability improvements, has resulted in our record refinery throughput last year, which you can see on the lower left of this chart. That extra throughput results in more product that we can sell, and that product value shows up in our other performance improvement, and we value it at our average margins. So this is just one example. As you can imagine, there are many more when we look at how we deploy various sales channels, the work that we're doing to improve our mix of products that we sell, improved utilization and cost effectiveness of raw materials, and the countless smaller projects that we have across our fleet of manufacturing sites. On the bottom right of this chart, you can see our track record thus far and forward performance that we plan on structural cost reductions. It is really important to me that we have efficiencies that more than offset inflation, and we are delivering that, and we are committed to continue to deliver it going forward. One of those efficiencies is the lower cost of our turnarounds, as these are material events that cost a lot of money. Of course, there are many more. So overall, structural cost reductions and these other earnings improvements will deliver more than $5 billion in incremental earnings, and more than half of that is from cost efficiencies. So, this is my last slide. We have made remarkable progress in very short order in Product Solutions, and I am tremendously proud of my team for delivering the progress that we've had thus far. Our progress is already helping us to drive significant outperformance relative to our peers. According to WoodMac, Product Solutions is delivering about two times more cash flow than our IOC competitors. That's an advantage that is expected to be sustained going forward. From a challenged position in 2019, Product Solutions has made dramatic improvements. We have greatly improved our reliability. Our structural cost discipline is already generating earnings improvements of over $2 billion a year. Our project delivery is best in class. The Beaumont project that I mentioned earlier is a prime example. The single largest U.S. refinery expansion in a decade. Well-conceived, well executed from design through to startup, coming online on time and on budget, and operating extremely well. Our streamlined organization has greatly enhanced integration, and we are intensely focused on driving improvements in every facet of our business. In fact, last year, ExxonMobil not only led the IOCs in downstream earnings, we also led the IOCs in dollar per barrel downstream earnings, and we led in chemical earnings. So I really have high confidence in the track record that we've delivered so far. I'm confident that we can build on these gains on our way to delivering our ambition of $10 billion more earnings potential by the end of 2027. With that, let me turn it over to Neil Hansen, who's gonna tell you more about energy products. Thank you. Right, thank you, Karen. Good afternoon to all. My name is Neil Hansen. I'm the Senior Vice President for Energy Products. It is great to be here with you today, and it's great to see some familiar, friendly faces from my days in investor relations. I have the privilege today to talk about the steps that we're taking in energy products to further strengthen our competitiveness, our resiliency to thrive in the energy transition, and our capacity to grow earnings. But let me first start with a brief introduction to the organization. So energy products includes two value chains, transportation, fuels, and aromatics. Now, aromatics are chemicals that are used as starting materials for really a wide range of consumer products, including the synthetic fibers that are found in many of the clothes that we all wear. We're also responsible for licensing our innovative technologies and supporting catalysts to other companies. We run our businesses end-to-end, so we try to maximize the value of the crude and feeds that enter into our manufacturing facilities, increasing the competitiveness of those operations, and optimizing the different channels through which we sell our products. Now, our transportation fuels are sold through a global network of more than 25,000 retail stations in 34 countries under the ExxonMobil and Esso brands. We also sell to commercial customers, including in the airline, marine, and commercial transport sectors. Our fuels value chain includes efforts to lower GHG emissions from our products, and with our global scale and our technology, we're well-positioned to lead in biofuels. We're also leveraging our expanding trading capabilities in crude and finished products to maximize the value that we gain from our world-scale asset portfolio, our equity production, and our industry knowledge. And when we combine that with the advantaged investments that we're making, the efforts that we're undertaking to high-grade our portfolio, we are growing our earnings capacity and energy products. In fact, we've demonstrated significant earnings growth since 2019, importantly, on a margin-neutral basis. If you annualized our first half, 2023 earnings, they are $several billion better than 2019. That improvement is driven by structural cost savings, again, shown here in the light blue on the chart. So we've pulled cost out of the business by capturing efficiency in organization, in process, in our operations, and in our logistics. This has greatly improved our resiliency to market cycles and increased our earnings capacity. In orange, you can see the impact of other performance improvements like operational excellence. You know, we've delivered strong reliability. We had our best-ever turnaround performance in the first half of this year, and as a result, we had our highest throughput in the second quarter in the last 15 years. We're also focused on maximizing the margin we realize in trading and through our sales channels, and as shown here in green, we're delivering projects that meet market demand signals. Now, we've seen that recently, certainly with the very successful startup of the Beaumont expansion, that will help satisfy resilient diesel demand. So we're building on that formula for success, and Energy Products is contributing $5 billion of earnings growth potential. That's about half the product solutions, earnings power improvement from 2019 to 2027, and importantly, we're on track to deliver it. Our strategic projects will deliver about 40% of that earnings growth potential, and then we'll see help from other performance improvements. It will also contribute to our earnings capacity. For example, the earnings contribution from downstream trading activities are expected to grow with the formation of the global trading organization earlier this year, and we're continually focused on improving our operations through smaller projects and optimizations that help drive margin improvement. And lastly, we're pursuing multiple projects in biofuels that will further increase our earnings capacity. Let me talk a little bit more about the portfolio of advantaged investments. Now, these will again increase margins at our strategic sites through proprietary technology and feed advantage. Importantly, these projects are consistently executed with excellence by our industry-leading projects organization. While all of our strategic projects that were shown on the previous pages are advantaged, I'm gonna touch on three examples here. The beforementioned crude expansion project in Beaumont, which added 250,000 barrels a day to our US Gulf Coast portfolio. It leverages integration by taking light crude from our upstream assets in the Permian, again, to produce demand-resilient diesel. Our Singapore project will upgrade bottom-of-the-barrel molecules to the benefit of all three Product Solutions value chains. It's leveraging proprietary, first-in-industry technology to strengthen our fuels, lubes, and chemical businesses. The project at Fawley in the United Kingdom will expand hydroprocessing capability. This will enable us to process challenged molecules into higher-value finished diesel. As you can see on this chart, these projects shift net cash margin competitiveness toward the first quartile for each of these strategic sites. We're also high-grading our portfolio through selective divestments and terminal conversions of non-core, less competitive assets. These have been difficult but critical decisions because they've improved the overall competitiveness, the resiliency, and the profitability of our portfolio. We expect our footprint to be 13 operated refineries by the end of this year, including recently completed or announced divestments. Now, again, importantly, this has strengthened our asset base and gets us close to our desired manufacturing footprint for fuels and aromatics. The resulting portfolio will have a greater percentage of integration with chemicals and lubes, providing us with a robust foundation for earnings delivery across all of our value chains. Now, with our competitive advantages, including our strategic assets, we're well positioned to produce biofuels, and that is supported by strong market fundamentals. We expect industry biofuels demand to grow 50% by 2030 to more than 3 million barrels a day, again, driven by the need for energy-dense, lower-emission fuels for trucking, marine, and aviation. We could see approximately 400% growth to 9 million barrels a day by 2050, and that's gonna be dependent on supportive, well-designed policies. Reconfiguration of existing hydrotreating capacity using vegetable oils or waste oils as feed is an advantaged path to produce biofuels at scale. ExxonMobil has the largest hydrotreating capacity available to reconfigure, and we can do it at an advantage return relative to a greenfield project. This enables us to use existing infrastructure to convert locally sourced biofeed into renewable diesel or renewable jet. And we're pursuing 12 projects globally, including co-processing, bio-blending, and again, asset reconfigurations. We're also progressing a number of technology programs that we think will unlock future potential pathways to produce lower-emission fuels, including things like alcohol to distillate and e-fuels. Now, overall, our portfolio of biofuel opportunities yield potential returns greater than 20%, but again, they'll require the supportive, stable policies that we need. Now, our scale and integration provide us with an advantage versus competition. It allows us to capitalize on the optionality to shift product yields over time as the rate and pace of the energy transition evolves. We're unique in this ability. We are unique in our ability to grow not only in biofuels, as I highlighted, but also in distillates, in chemicals, and in lubes, as we see the demand for other products like fuel oil and mo gas decline over time. We're unique. We're unique because of the sheer scale and competitiveness of our integrated fuels, lubes, and chemicals businesses. This bar on the right shows the future yield potential of our portfolio. It demonstrates an unmatched ability to cost effectively shift to higher-value products as markets evolve. So reconfiguration of our existing assets to shift yields to these higher-value products is cost and return advantaged versus a greenfield investment, and you can see that here in the table on the right. Importantly, this ability to reconfigure our facilities demonstrates the enduring competitiveness of our asset portfolio and the resiliency and the flexibility that we have to respond to evolving demand fundamentals. It also critically highlights the potential longevity of the underlying value of our strategic assets. Finally, as you can see here, we expect the combination of strategic investments, of these performance improvements that we've talked about, cost reductions, and rationalizations of our portfolio result in a winning formula. It's a winning formula that will further strengthen our portfolio competitiveness and expand our earnings capacity. By 2027, ExxonMobil's portfolio, as you can see on this chart, is expected to be solidly in the first quartile on a net cash margin competitiveness. In fact, net cash margin is expected to improve by $2 a barrel. That $2 a barrel equates to more than $2 billion of net cash margin potential per year. To sum up, we're high-grading our portfolio based on market signals, and we're building on our history of competitively doing so. We view our large asset base as a strength as we pursue cost-advantaged reconfigurations, including advantage to biofuels investments. Energy Products has delivered and will deliver strong earnings growth potential as we position our portfolio to succeed through the energy transition. Now, let me invite my colleague, Mike Zamora, to talk about Chemical Products. Thanks. Thanks, Neil. I'm Mike Zamora, Senior Vice President of Chemical Products. Yeah, within this business, we produce products that will grow in demand for years to come. Customers demand our products because they improve the quality of life, and they meet society's evolving needs. I'll give you a few examples to start. Our products can be used to create films that are used by farmers in their greenhouses, with the right permeability to increase crop yields and extend growing seasons. Many of our products are used in packaging that extends food shelf life, helping to decrease food waste. We make raw materials for medical applications like hand sanitizer, masks, gowns. Some of our high-tech polymers reduce the weight of conventional and electric vehicles, making them even more energy efficient. Others can be blended specifically and targeted in, into our customers' formulations to increase our customers' ability to use more recycled material. Overall, we produce a wide range of products that address society, societal challenges and help manufacturers reduce their energy use, their greenhouse gas emissions, and their waste. In terms of business performance, we expect Chemical Products to contribute more than $3 billion of earnings growth by 2027, and we are already delivering now. By year-end of this year, we will have improved earnings by over $1 billion. About half of that comes from cost reductions, as shown in the light blue, and half comes from strategic projects, shown in green. With respect to our strategic projects, both our Corpus Christi Chemical Complex and our Baton Rouge Polypropylene project started up on schedule and quickly demonstrated design rates. I'm really proud of our Corpus Christi team. They found ways to grow additional capacity without any additional investment and have demonstrated rates that are 6% above nameplate capacity. This was done well, at cost well below competitive benchmarks. Chemical products delivered record earnings of $7 billion in 2021. We made the most of what was a very conducive market. Supply chains were disrupted post-COVID, where ExxonMobil was well positioned to meet that demand, and the high margin environment incentivized high utilizations. Those factors and others showed up as performance improvements, seen in orange on the chart, and they contributed to those record earnings in 2021. The orange performance improvement bar is smaller in 2023, reflecting an absence of these factors, as current margins are at bottom of cycle. Looking out to 2027, there is a clear path to growth, and it's driven by the strategic projects. Just yesterday, we announced the startup of our $2 billion Baytown Chemical Expansion project. This facility is really two separate plants. The first is a 400,000 ton per year solution process unit, making high-performance propylene and ethylene plastomers, branded Vistamaxx and Exact. These materials can be used to make better automotive parts, construction materials, personal care products, and now even solar panels. The second is a 350,000 ton per year linear alpha olefins unit. This is a new market entry for ExxonMobil. With this facility, we make a full range of alpha olefin products with a critical competitive advantage that much of the product will be consumed internally in our existing specialty and Chemical Products businesses. As we look out to 2027, in addition to the Singapore project that Neil mentioned, the last bar includes our world-scale China Chemical Complex, focused on producing our unique, high-performance polyethylene and polypropylene products that are for the China market. We are also excited about our suite of advanced recycling projects, which I'll cover in more detail in a few slides. There are two themes that I want you to remember common to these strategic projects. One, they're all underpinned by advantage technology. Second, they're all focused on growing high-performance products. But keep in mind, our path to 2027 is not only an investment story. Cost discipline is key to maintaining resilience in what we all know is a cyclical business, and we have, and we will continue to deliver significant structural cost reductions totaling nearly $1 billion over the period. Example of some of the smaller improvements include mix upgrading from commodities, low-cost de-bottlenecks, optimizations with our refineries, and structural reliability improvements. Now, let's take a look at how these strategic projects build upon our unique competitive advantages. Now, Chemical Products has a global footprint and operates some of the largest units in the industry. Our scale and our customer reach is a competitive advantage. We have feed and energy advantaged assets and superior refinery integration versus competition. Another unique competitive advantage in the chemical business is our project capability that you've heard so much about. We are in a very capital-intensive business. The chemical business, the oil business at large is extremely capital-intensive, and to win, you need to develop and deliver the lowest cost projects. As Jack mentioned, we have a global project organization with tremendous capability, tremendous experience executing multibillion-dollar projects simultaneously all over the world. Leveraging that capability in the chemical business, bringing that capability to bear from the upstream, from the broader corporation to the chemical business, is something that none of our chemical, chemical competitors have. And that is a critical differentiator that, that can help us be more efficient with our capital dollars and deliver industry-leading performance. The three pictures at the bottom of the slide highlights a few examples of this. As I said earlier, the Corpus Christi project and the Baton Rouge polypropylene project were constructed and started up on schedule. And as Jack highlighted, the cost of our Corpus project was 25% lower than similar scale U.S. Gulf Coast projects. This was largely due to that modularization strategy, but it's really the expertise that's used on large upstream projects that was brought to bear on the chemical business for the first time. Again, that delivered on time and above nameplate capacity. We expect our world-scale China chemical complex to continue this trend of industry-leading project delivery, and that team is doing a fantastic job. They're consistently delivering on, on their milestones. Construction is progressing per plan, even through a very difficult COVID environment. Earlier this year, we achieved a major milestone when we lifted the major towers into place, and we've become market leaders in our businesses by leveraging these competitive advantages. The chart on the right shows our polyethylene market position. We are number one in the polyethylene industry, and all of our IOC competitors are well behind. These competitive advantages that I've spoken about, scale, integration, technology, combined with project delivery, provide us a strong foundation to continue to profitably grow this business. And as we grow, our focus will be on performance products. While margins are currently at bottom of cycle, long-term chemical demand is expected to grow at 20% above GDP, making Chemical Products resilient to a wide range of energy transition scenarios. Furthermore, our performance chemicals, which today represent about a third of our portfolio, are expected to grow at a rate twice that of commodities, so about 7% per year. This growth rate is due to the superior performance of these products versus their commodity counterparts, and this performance is underpinned by proprietary technology. The best example in my business of the technology advantage is our metallocene catalyst technology. This technology enables us to specifically design materials that create more value for our end cut, for our customers and end consumers. They can use our materials to make products that are stronger, that are lighter, that use less material, that are more recyclable, and that are easier to process. The right-hand chart shows how this translates to earnings. Our technology and know-how, combined with our strategic investments, results in a 2.5-time increase in the earnings potential of our high-value Chemical Products, and those performance products are a key profitability driver for the chemical segment. Now, I'd like to tell you about some of the really exciting work we have and that we're doing on plastic sustainability. Our new advanced recycling facility in Baytown, just miles away from here, leveraging proprietary ExxonMobil technology, is fully operational and delivering positive results, and it's helping our customers achieve their circularity goals. There is a market for certified circular polymers that we make out of the Baytown facility that come from plastic waste. Our technology significantly widens the range of plastic that can be recycled. It allows us to process mixed plastic waste and harder to recycle plastics, like potato chip bags, like AstroTurf, and it turns it into raw materials that can then be used to make valuable products with the same properties as virgin materials. The facility in Baytown is North America's largest, with capacity to process up to 80 million pounds per year of waste plastic that would otherwise go to a landfill... and it leverages our existing facilities to scale up quickly. We have plans underway to scale this tech, the technology at other sites across the world to up to 1 billion pounds per year of waste plastic processing capability, and that's by year-end 2026. All this assumes supportive policy. We need regulatory support all along the value chain, and at ExxonMobil, we're working together with policymakers, the rest of industry, with our customers and the, and the value chain, waste management operators, to address society's plastic waste challenge. So in summary, I feel really good about the long-term fundamentals of the Chemical Products business based on three factors. First, the demand is growing because our products improve the standard of living, and they enable a lower emission economy. Second, we have a large, integrated, industry-leading business that's underpinned by competitive advantages in scale and technology, and we have a robust strategic project portfolio. Finally, we are leading in profitable circularity solutions through our own technology and by designing products that allow our customers and everyday consumers to help meet their own sustainability goals. Now Loic will tell you about our specialty products. Thank you, Mike. My name is Loic Vivier, Senior Vice President of Specialty Products, and I would like to welcome you in my world of the specialty product, and I will explain what it is in a very, very short. So you can see here, the specialty product is a portfolio of businesses that tend to hold very strong product differentiation, underpinned by technology, marketing, and very strong brands. Actually, in the specialty product, 70% of our sales are high-value products, as earlier defined by Jack. We tend to have businesses with very high market positions. On financially, specialty product is typically has a more ratable cash flow than other businesses, less subject to market cycles. It's very steady. To define the portfolio, you can see on the pictures here, on the left, you have the vertical of what we call the lubes value chain. You are likely most familiar with the overall finished lube business through our Mobil 1 brand, the world's leading synthetics motor oil. Our base stock and waxes, our synthetics, are actually the raw materials that goes to blending to make finished lubes, and we use it also internally for own finished lubes. Elastomers and resins creates high-end product like butyl, butyl rubber that you have in your tires, where we hold a 50% market position. I will spend a bit more time on the back end of this presentation on new market development, but in essence, to describe the portfolio, new market development is a business for hub of innovation, disruptive innovation, poised to deliver changes in the marketplace, and I will share much more with one specific example of the back end of this presentation. Let's dive in on the specialty product, similar format to what you heard from Karen McKee earlier, and we have our commitment to grow our earnings by $1.5 billion per year in growth to up to 2027. Today, similar to the point made earlier, if you take the first half 2023, halfway through the timeline of this commitment, we are actually ahead of more than half of this earnings improvement, mainly because of two things. Number one is what you can see into the green strategic projects with the Rotterdam Hydrocracker Project startup, and also a continued focused, relentless cost management throughout the overall portfolio. And you will see that it continues. So key point here, we are already ahead, actually close to 60% of the overall earnings improvement in 2023, annualized. In green, we expect more contribution from strategic projects. The new one you can see here, Singapore, for the base stock business. I will cover that in more detail later. In light blue, continued focus on structural cost reduction, and in orange, you see other performance improvement. For my businesses, the other performance improvements are what? Think marketing initiatives, leveraging the strong brands we have worldwide, and digital investment. A lot of value coming from our data. Optimization of the base business from raw materials, supply chain, pretty complex supply chain in the specialty businesses, high grading of portfolio, all this will drive to the $1.5 billion improvement by 2027. Let's look at the collective power of the integration of the lube value chain as a performance improvement. The Product Solutions manages the largest integrated lube value chain among our IOCs competitors. You can see on the graph on the left, Y-axis is volumes, base stocks. The X-axis is the finished lubes, the blenders, finished lubes, and you can see our map versus our key competitors. You can see that no competitors matches our integration between base stocks, synthetics, the PAO business, polyalpha olefin, the additives, and the finished lubes. We are the clear leader across the entire lube value chain in terms of scale, technology, and brands worldwide. As a result, we deliver the highest earnings among our IOC peers. On the right, you can see the synthetic lubricant sales growth trend, where you can see that we are projected to continue to grow strongly, way above GDP, because of the superior attributes of the synthetic lubricants. One way to grow that fast, I would say, how do we do that without compromising the premium? It's all about the strength of our brands. Today, Mobil 1 continues to be the world's leading synthetic motor oil, with number one brand equity position in the U.S., in China, which are two strategic market for us. Number one, brand equity, U.S. and China. Let me move to the next slide around the strategic investment that we talked a bit earlier around Rotterdam and Singapore, but I'd like to zoom in what it means for the lube value chain. It's all about technology in play. ExxonMobil technology, the differentiation with proprietary technology, in order to monetize superior product performance. Our Rotterdam project is at the core of the basestock strategy. We started up in 2019, first full year of operation, 2020, and this project, in a nutshell, is leveraging our catalyst strategy on catalyst, I would say, technology on the hydrocracking, delivered improved quality basestocks, better quality performance, better yields. When you hear better yield, you should think lower cost of production, and then lower energy intensity, which is so important for the production cost of our basestocks. Overall, the project is already paid off. $1 billion of contribution through 2022, only three years after startup. That's very important to remember. After three years, we have already paid for this project in Rotterdam, which was the first time to introduce a lube value chain into our refinery in Rotterdam. Next to come, actually, even more exciting, is Singapore. Singapore Resid Upgrade, which is expected to transform the whole site competitiveness. First application, I think Neil mentioned it earlier, first application in industry, leveraging our technology to upgrade resid molecules to high-value basestocks. You take the bottom of the barrel, the resid, you upgrade with your technology, you have basestock materials going to finished lubes. All this is a spread of about $60 a barrel from the resid to the basestocks, and that's the value of our technology here on our project excellence. Both projects you can see on the curve on the right. This is an industry net cash margin curve, and you can see that both projects are on the far left of the industry net cash margin, indicating their long-term profitability potential, but also the weight for the overall portfolio. If you look at the blue dots, ExxonMobil 2019, ExxonMobil 2027, the overall portfolio has improved by $10 a barrel. This is significant. Changing gears, I'd like to take you to, back to new market development. I'd like to tell you something exciting that we are promoting. So new market development, what is that? That's a very weird name for a new group. New market development is essentially a hub for innovation, disruptive innovation and incubation of emerging businesses. Here, we are building new specialty businesses that transform, the framing is very important, transform low-value fuels product coming from our refinery systems into high-value, high-growth materials through technology. These materials provide performance and sustainability benefits in EVs, electrical vehicles, infrastructures, applications. So think material, like composites, think high-performance, carbon-based materials. That's the overall framing of this new market development. Let me dive in in one example, which I have on this slide. In 2021, we have acquired a company called Materia, based in California. This company pioneered the development of a Nobel Prize-winning technology catalyst for manufacturing of a new class of structural materials. After applying ExxonMobil technology, in addition to the Materia technology, combined with our marketing strength and our scale, we have been able to take these materials to the next level, I would say, of performance and potential. We call this product, the brand of the name is Proxima. You will hear about the Proxima brand. These are thermoset resins, and in a nutshell, they cure faster, they are stronger, more durable, and lighter than existing product in the marketplace. I strongly believe that no other companies has the ability to scale these technology breakthroughs into products society needs. In addition to that, Proxima has less than half the greenhouse gases emissions of traditional thermoset resins on a life cycle basis. We are currently assessing the Proxima as an addressable market of about 4-5 million tons per annum, growing faster than GDP. GDP. I'd like to just explain our four target segments that you can see on this slide. First one is rebar, steel rebar replacement. Steel replacement, our Proxima solution is 4 times lighter, weight reduction, corrosion resistance, and twice stronger than steel. Try to think what it means in the workplace and the work site with having this rebar so much lighter on better properties, better attributes. That could be a significant game changer for this. Coating for corrosion protection. Proxima formulation cure within minutes versus hours for traditional epoxy systems. It's a time saving, cost savings, and we are also using 25% less materials with the Proxima solutions. Let me give you a live example here. You have some pipeline coating. You can see a pipeline coating on the bottom left here, not the one we use for, for our project, by the way. In pipeline coating, customer can use a single coat of Proxima that dries in five minutes instead of needing two or three coats of epoxy, where we need to have eight hours between each of the coats, assuming it doesn't rain. If it rains, we start again. Automotive. New lightweighting and steel replacement opportunities, critical for fuel economy and also improving EV ranges. We are working with many of the OEM on this, on this solution, on using the Proxima solution, essentially driven by lightweighting, the same theme of lightweighting on fast curing. Wind turbine blades or Proxima resins help make stronger, lighter wind turbine blades, enabling more power generation. That's four target segments we are focusing here. We may have one or two others. If you step back, this Proxima venture is transforming lower-value gasoline molecules into high-value end products with superior properties to address a growing million tons kind of size market, growing faster than GDP worldwide. We have already FID'd, our first project, in order to meet the emerging demand, and our aspiration is to steadily grow Proxima venture to $1 billion of annual earnings by 2040, with an average return on all the investment on the asset of 15%, 1-5, 15%+ on return of investment. Key numbers, disruptive innovation, $1 billion of earnings potential, 2040, at an average return of 15%+. This is just one example of the new market development venture we have in the making. To conclude my presentation, our specialty product segment is one that we are very excited about. I hope you share my excitement here, and with our current and future portfolio. We expect specialty products to continue to deliver strong market position, solid earnings growth, and innovative solutions to address sustainability trends. It's a different share for ExxonMobil versus our competitors through our technology, our scale, our marketing capabilities, and the brands we have worldwide. With this, let me conclude and hand it over to Karen to wrap up this presentation. Thank you. Well, thank you, Loic. I've just got one slide to wrap up this section of this afternoon. I hope you share my extremely high confidence that we can meet our objective to nearly triple earnings potential by 2027. The good news is we are ahead of a reliable schedule, with close to 60% of our improvements by year-end this year, and we're going to build on that momentum. Going forward, we're really focused on building on our unique competitive advantages that the team have brought to life here this afternoon, and to deliver those competitive advantages in our growing markets, to expand upon what is already our market-leading positions. Proxima is just a sneak peek of our confidence of our business beyond 2027. Given the diversity of our business, we are confident that we can continue to deliver growth and strong returns for the long term, right through the energy transition. So I started out this afternoon by saying that I believe Product Solutions is a game changer for ExxonMobil. We really have something unique here. We are much more capable of leveraging ExxonMobil's scale and integration in the new construct, and we're uniquely advantaged to help deliver on society's current and future evolving needs. So let me leave you with that thought. I think we've all earned a short break. We will take a 10-minute break and come back very promptly for our Q&A session. Thank you for your attention. Okay, welcome back. Thanks, everyone. We've got our speakers back on stage for our question and answer session. As a reminder, we ask that you pose a single question, one-part question, as a courtesy to others. With that, let's get started. Raise your hand if you have a question. We are bringing mics, and we'd like you to provide your name and firm for the webcast audience. Got one here in the front row, Katrina. Doug Leggett, Bank of America. ... I have one question, and I hope I heard this similarly, maybe for Karen. Karen, you made a comment that you were about halfway through the building, $12 billion in funding, et cetera, this year. So I think you said it's 60% more. The bulk of the projects are in the back half of the period. That sounds like you're ahead of schedule. It sounds like the target has upside risk to it. So I just wonder if you could clarify. Looks like Beaumont's done, Baytown is partly done. Should we be looking at upside risk to your current expectations? Thanks. I would say we're on track, but we have really good confidence in delivery. So you are quite right that we are just approaching the 50% through the timeline, and we are approaching 60% of the benefit at an average margin basis. The mix of our benefits varies throughout time, so you're right that a minority of the project benefits have manifested thus far. But we have made a very big step, for example, in our structural cost reduction already. So we have more structural cost reduction to go, but we are ahead of track on that. So it's a little bit of a mixed bag, but I'm really pleased with the progress we've made. As I said, we were very focused on improving all aspects of our business, and you heard from the three SVPs here that we're improving across each of our business cycles. I'm really pleased with the progress. Doug, when we first came up with this, this view, and we added everything up, and it looked very ratable across the whole period, and we all looked at it and said, "That, that looks... That's too ratable." So, you know, there's no way we're gonna get it, you know, just right. And so, but I think, I think we found it is indeed fairly ratable, and we're pretty close to 50%, maybe a little bit above. I'd rather be on that side of it as we get to the halfway point. So we feel pretty good. Next question is Neil Mehta, Goldman Sachs. Thanks, Marina. Question about where we are in the refining cycle. We're obviously in a very strong margin environment right now. How do you think about the sustainability of that as we weigh capacity rationalization versus new ads, versus an uncertain demand environment? In addition to talking about product, could you also talk about the crude markets, where there's a lot of volatility there, and it's an important part of sustaining your profitability? Yeah, thanks. Look, in terms of refining first, obviously, things are pretty tight right now. Inventories are low, and when inventories are low, obviously, any little bobbles kinda have a ripple through the market, and you can feel them. And the reason why inventories are low, you have to go all the way back to COVID, really. I mean, when you had COVID, we had a very difficult time for the refining industry, as I'm sure you all well aware. And we had 3 million barrels a day of rationalization of refining. And unlike previous periods of rationalization, a good bit of that was actually in the U.S. And so coming out of that COVID, we had a surge in demand, and so inventories started coming off very, very quickly. Then a little later on, Russia invaded Ukraine, and then with that, we had a lot of trade flows moving and a lot of disoptimization in the market. So we had... I would say, the capacity that we had available feels like a little less because you had ships on the water longer and so forth. And so, as long as demand has been good and strong, we've been unable to claw back on that inventory. And so inventories remain low, well below the five-year average, below the five-year band. And as long as that's the case, I think things are gonna remain a little tight. Seasonally, you know, things should come off a little bit later on, but I don't see anything on the horizon that would say anything near term is gonna, you know, gonna change things other than some event, one way or the other. Now, what's driving that growth? You mentioned the crude markets, and, you know, as you think about 2023, the growth estimates for liquids demand is somewhere 2-2.5 million barrels a day. And despite what you hear a lot about the, the Chinese resurgent after COVID being a bit disappointing, most of that growth is China. You look at the, what's, what's coming online from a crude perspective that's, that's meeting that demand, there has been actually some pretty good non-OPEC growth coming out of the US and Canada, Guyana. But of course, OPEC has reduced volume, so on balance, the liquid supply is not meeting that growth. And that growth, you know, last year was over 2 million barrels a day as well. This year is 2 million barrels a day. Next year should be something more moderate, more in line with historical norms of 1-1.5. But, I mean, that's gonna keep things relatively tight, absent some different views on OPEC and what they decide to do. Hey, Jack, maybe just to add to that, it has been a very unusual refining margin environment for the last 18 months. And when we think about that, we're really pleased with how the organization has responded to that, to take advantage of that market environment. You think about when the Russia-Ukraine conflict occurred and the impact that had on trade flows, on crude and feed and products. And our ability to react to that using our knowledge of the energy system, our knowledge of the physical flows, and to keep our refineries running, to continue to supply products, and again, take advantage of those margins, was exceptional for the organization. And we talked about it in the presentation, and we had our highest throughput last year in 2022. Again, to respond to that market, I think we had our highest distillate yield ever last year. Again, recognizing where distillate cracks were last year, our ability to take advantage of those margins in that market, again, we're really pleased with how the organization responded. In terms of the organization also, Neil, let me just add, and Neil had said this earlier in his presentation, but the other thing we did is, obviously, we brought on 250,000 barrels a day refining capacity with our Beaumont project, which the market needed, and it was a nice time to bring on a project. The other thing is we had made the difficult decision to divest of three refineries, two of which are done, and one which is still working, but should get closed before year-end, which are less strategic and upgrade the whole portfolio. I think I feel good about not only what we did, Neil talked about to react to market, but also from a macro perspective, how we responded and were able to come out of this with a higher graded portfolio. Next question is from Devin McDermott, Morgan Stanley. Hey, thanks for taking my question and thanks for the- You got it. Very helpful presentation. So I wanted to ask about the other performance improvement bucket that you have across the different business units, and it seems like a bit of a catch-all for different opportunities. Some of them are very quantifiable, like the shortening of maintenance cycle times and trading, kind of quantify as well. And then others, like improving brand equity, I think are a little bit harder from us sitting in our seats to understand. So I was wondering if you could break down for us maybe the few biggest, from a financial standpoint, drivers of that orange bar across the business unit, like all the business units, which two or three are most significant? And also discuss just the confidence in achieving that orange bar on the uplift over the next few years. Karen, why don't you? Yeah, so they are honestly many and varied and mostly relatively small. There's not one thing that is a silver bullet to this, and I think it really speaks to how we've focused on really looking at every aspect of our balance sheet, every aspect of our income statement, and find a way to make improvements. So I can give you many anecdotal examples of things that I can quantify, but none of them are material within our results. It's the aggregation of all of those improvements, I would say that, you know, really driving us forward. And maybe, Mike, to talk about, you know, the upgrading of our product mix is a good one. Yeah, I was gonna highlight two things. The one that Karen referenced, mix upgrading in terms of moving from within our existing facilities, within the existing manufacturing capability, moving to products that have higher value, more premium in the marketplace, is a significant driver of that orange for my business. Again, that's based on proprietary technology, so that's a competitive advantage. The second one, which again, it's small, but it's a lot of money in terms of how it generates value, is our ability to get the most out of our assets. I mentioned our Corpus facility that's already demonstrated 6% above nameplate. I go back to our investments in the Baytown area, or North America growth investment that came up in 2017 and 2018. That facility is delivering kind of almost 20% above what we appropriated that project for kind of back, back in time. And that's, that's our tech-- that's our manufacturing expertise. It's our technology. It's also scale, because we have steam crackers across the world that are similar, where you can leverage a learning in one and apply it to the other. But I wanna shout out to the technology, our EMTEC, our global technology organization. That capability, it's not just proprietary technology, it's also the - our people and their knowledge and their ability to get the most out of the assets that we have. In my business, those are the two biggest. Just to add one or two comments to your point, outside of the fence of our manufacturing assets, by taking both the heritage of chemical and the F&L organization, we have now streamlined our data infrastructure. We have streamlined our processes on many of our tools, which allows us to fully leverage digital capabilities with some machine learning in order to improve some of the way we procure some of our materials, also the supply chain, to improve supply chain visibility, and we have also some of the top line as well. My business, top line growth, go where the market is. We are focusing on expanding some of our markets, either geographies like India, Indonesia, you might have seen some of our announcement here, but also in term of new sectors. The data centers need some immersion coolant. This is right for our product. We bring technology, we bring special solution for all these emerging data centers. It's a, it's a very significant market for us, which is part of our other improvements. Maybe I'll just mention a few for fuels. I mentioned the crude and feed and the ongoing effort to test constraints at our sites to expand the envelope of what crude and feed we can run. I think last year we ran more than 40 new crude and feeds into our refineries. Again, the operational excellence would fall into that bucket. And then, you know, in fuels on the retail side, the brand is really important to us. That retail channel is a ratable high-value channel for us. And we've done well to continue to expand that in strategic markets that support our strategic assets. So I think the U.S. Gulf Coast and the market entry we did into Mexico about 5 years ago, we're now the second largest, the second-largest retailer in Mexico in terms of site count. So again, that brand is really important to us as well as we move outside the gate and place products in the highest value channels and markets. Next question comes from John Royal from J.P. Morgan. ... Hi, thanks. Good afternoon. So my question's on the M&A side. You talked about high grading on the refining side, and going down to 13 refineries. Can you talk about what makes a refinery a candidate for divestiture, and are there others beyond the 13, or do you feel like you're kind of sufficiently high graded at this point? And then maybe conversely, on acquisitions, could that be a source of growth outside of the organic growth that you've laid out? Let me start, and I'll tell you what. I'll answer the second part, the acquisition piece, and I'll let Neil talk about the divestments and how we think about that. From an acquisition piece, you know, that kind of comes up from time to time on the quarterly calls, and I'll just, you know, repeat the line that I think says it well, that Kathy says frequently, which is, you know, we're looking for one plus one equals three. We're very much looking for assets where we can bring our competitive strengths we talked about. You know, our technology, our scale, our integration. We can bring those strengths to that set of assets, that business that we acquire, and get more value out of it than the current owners can. I think Materia was a great example of that, where Materia had a really, really good technology, but were not able to really get the market use out of that. Whereas with... combine that with our technology, we could scale it and get a lot more value than they could have gotten otherwise. Those kinds of things, we're always looking for. We are, you know, we are gonna be picky, and I, you know, there's, you know, we're gonna continue to look and surveil, but I'm not, you know, I think the activity level, you know, we're gonna be, we're gonna be very picky. With that, Neal, you want to talk about the divestment? Yeah. You know, when we think about our refining portfolio and what we want to keep in our portfolio, one of the things that we've talked about certainly is the importance of integration. You know, site is typically very strategic to us if we have a significant scale presence of fuels, lubes, and chemicals, so that is one aspect that we consider strategic. But it's not just integration. I mean, we have sites that have other advantages, feed advantage, for example, access to very advantaged, discounted crudes, or there's an advantage in the market that we participate in. So integration certainly is a priority, but it could be more than that, right? It could be some other market element that would allow it to be strategic to us. I think the important thing is, once we consider it strategic, is the opportunity we have to invest to make it more competitive, more profitable. Then, as I talked about in my remarks, is the ability to reconfigure as the market evolves, right? As we get signals to produce other higher value products, can we do that from those sites that we have in our portfolio? I'm not gonna comment on how many more sites left may not be strategic to us, but that's how we think about it. When we think about what we want in our portfolio, is, does it have that recipe for us? Can we take advantage of the site and continue to accrete value over time? I would say that we're very close to our desired- Very close. We've made, as you can, as you've heard, you know, good progress this year- Yeah. in terms of executing our portfolio strategy. I think one of the key points, if you add, is when you think about it on your portfolio, there's also integration with LCS and decarbonization of the asset for the future. This is another dimension of integration. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yes. Next question is from Roger Read, Wells Fargo. Thank you. It kind of follows on with the integration question. What is the right way for us on the outside to think about the value of the integration, right? Is it gonna come through as a margin improvement? Is it a bottom-line net income? Is it, you know, should we see it in return on capital employed? I mean, it's great to hear it. I believe that it's there. I believe that it's a distinct advantage for Exxon, but how can I, in a sense, make it tangible? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, You know, it really has, by definition, has to flow down to the bottom line. You have to see it in earnings and ROCE and cash flow, and so on. And where we get it, though, is it's deep. And where we should get it is like the, like, like Neil Hansen was talking about, the extra $2 a barrel. When you see a market, and we're getting a little bit higher margin because we're optimizing those flow streams. You see, you look at a complex like Baytown, where you have literally over 100 streams going back and forth between refinery. You know, and where non-integrated refineries would be selling a product that we can take into our chemical plant, vice versa, and utilize that. So what you ought to see is a little uplift as we get that better opportunity for optimization. Yeah, I think a couple of other things. I mean, you should see it in lower cost of projects. I mean, Mike cited an example today. I mean, if you think about it, we're one of the largest chemical companies in the world. Actually, even though chemicals is very capitally intense, it's a small amount of this corporation's CapEx. We have the opportunity to learn from all the corporation's projects and improve from those, and deliver much better capital efficiency for all of our businesses. That's an obvious one. I think the other place that it'll show up in the fullness of time is longevity for our refining footprint. So if you think of our refineries, where they're integrated, where we have these performance products that are associated with those facilities, and we can more naturally pivot our production from the fuels that people need today to being the molecule managers we need to be in the future to serve chemicals, whether it's data center cooling requirement for a lubricant-type material, et cetera, you know, any number of other things. I think that allows us to have a competitive advantage, you know, even as the demand for some fuels changes. So I think it's multifaceted. Lower costs, lower cost projects, somewhat higher margin here and there, where we can combine the benefits of our various businesses, but also in the longevity of our business. Yeah, when you look at that chart that Neil showed around how the yields shift over time, don't mistake the fact that we haven't done it yet, meaning we're not re-prepared to do it. But the market for the products for that that we're producing today is still there. The market for gasoline is still strong, so we're gonna continue to produce gasoline for our customers. But we are prepared to make some significant changes as the market dictates for those, for that yield pattern. And as Neil said, it's unique. It's unique. You only have that at integrated sites, large integrated sites, where you have that flexibility. Maybe just to add really quickly. I mean, we talk about the changes in long-term fundamentals and our ability to take advantage of that. I think it's underappreciated how much of that's done on a daily basis, that optimization. Real time, to determine, is the market signaling to us to produce more diesel, more mogas, more polyethylene, more lubes? The ability for those sites to respond to those market signals in real time, to optimize the value that we get out of the sites, I think is underappreciated. Mike, look, I don't care if we make more money in fuels, chemicals, or specialty. We care about making the most money for product solutions, and we can do that every day. I think there's one more to try to bring it to life. We talked about, or somebody mentioned earlier, low carbon solutions. If you think about what we're doing in the Baytown blue hydrogen project, the scale that the chemical plant in that, in that integrated facility can bring to delivery of that, of that hydrogen facility, that blue hydrogen facility. If that was a standalone low carbon solutions business, you wouldn't have the scale. And that scale allows this business to decarbonize at a lower cost versus competition. So that's a new area with low carbon solutions that I think is a really important area of integration that we're gonna take advantage of and monetize in years to come. Yeah, you can think about Product Solutions as like an inbuilt anchor tenant to give you confidence in a large, Low Carbon Solutions investment. Okay, Ryan Todd? Please. Thanks. Ryan Todd of Piper Sandler. Maybe a question on the biofuel side. You have some—you've had some fairly large targets, either a couple of years ago at the Analyst Day or last year at the Analyst Day presentation, and some here on in terms of the potential contributions, either volumetrically or earnings-wise, of the biofuels business. You haven't given us much detail at the project level outside of Strathcona. So you mentioned there are 12 other projects, I think, going on around the world and the hydrotreating capacity that you have. Any more granularity in terms of what types of projects? Are we looking more at conversions? Are you thinking of co-processing? Any detail on maybe some other things outside of Strathcona that you may be doing? And then you also talked about the flexibility your system provides. So how much does the environment that we see over the next couple of years dictate the pace at which you proceed on the biofuel side? If refining is stronger for longer, does that push back the pace at which you may convert or adapt facilities? You want to say, Neil? Okay. Yeah, I think you're probably referencing the ambitions that we've stated around producing 40,000 barrels a day of lower emission fuels by 2025, and then 200,000 by 2030, I think was the ambition that we stated. You're absolutely right, Strathcona is the one that's clear and front and center. That project is progressing. It is a world-scale renewable diesel facility at 20,000 barrels a day. That project is well underway. There are at least two or three others that are progressing through the gated process that we have here. Again, very similar in terms of being able to reconfigure an existing asset, taking locally sourced biofeed to produce either renewable diesel or renewable jet. Those significant reconfigurations are underway. But you mentioned the other ones, where we are actively today bio-blending. We're also co-processing in the countries and regions where it's supported by policy. So France is a good example, Canada is a good example. So the policy supports co-processing. That's another very capital efficient way to produce lower emission fuels, right? Because you can use your existing, your existing assets. So it's really all the above. Now, in terms of rate and pace, that will be greatly dictated by whether or not the policy exists to support the investment to produce lower emission fuels. And for us, that is making sure you have a well-designed policy, right? A policy that's focused on lowering the lifecycle emissions, right? Making sure that you're putting a price or a cost on that carbon, and making sure that it's technology neutral. If you have that recipe in place, if you're focused on lifecycle emissions, if you're technology neutral, if there's a cost to carbon, that will drive innovation. You'll move to a market-driven approach to lower emission fuels. So the one thing we do recognize is policy, and the right policy, will greatly dictate the pace at which we bring on renewable diesel, renewable jet, and other lower emission fuels. I think I got all your questions. I would just add that, there's a reason why our first project, large project- Yes. - is in Canada. Yeah. The Clean Fuel Regulations that Canada put in place is carbon intensity-based, technology neutral, meets the criteria Neil, Neil just pointed out, and is a good, sound policy for us to invest in. And so we're continuing to advocate for other countries where we have operations to have, to have something similar. And in contrast, although the IRA has many good parts of the policy, it does preclude the co-processing at existing sites. Our next question is from Biraj, from RBC. Hi there. Thanks for the presentation. Neil, you mentioned or you name-checked trading a few times. So I was wondering if you could talk about the progress and the journey there in building the trading business. There's been some press reports around some of the challenges there, but I'm just interested to know how that's going, and maybe if you could provide, you know, some kind of reference to the contribution to the $5 billion earnings or energy products by 2027. Thank you. Before you talk, let me frame the trading a little bit, and then I'll turn it over to Neil, let him provide some color and some examples. But, you know, we started trading in earnest back in 2018. And, so we've, you know, didn't exactly rush into this, and we've had some time to get comfortable with the impact that's having on our business. And, what I would say is that, you know, a couple of things observations I'd make is, one, we do see value there. We clearly see value in our trading activities. And the risk is manageable. You know, with appropriate risk management steps, we think the risk is very manageable. And the other thing I would say, other observation, we've discovered something that some might say is rather obvious. Our large global footprint is a huge advantage. You know, it's a huge advantage in the space, number one, for, you know, optimization opportunities, to be able to, you know, those small optimizations that you do hundreds and thousands of those, and combined, they make a difference, and then also some market insights. And so this large global footprint, we think that it makes sense for us to be in this area. And so, you know, setting up this Global Trading organization like we did earlier in the year, we're optimistic about the contributions it's gonna make. Clearly, there are synergies between taking your crude and your products, and your power, and your gas and kind of putting them together. Lots of synergies there. We're optimistic about how that's gonna go going forward. Neil, any color or commentary? I wouldn't believe everything you read in the press, Biraj. I mean, there has been, I think, tremendous progress in trading, as Jack mentioned. Their first job, and they do it really well, is to make sure that we're optimizing the large base that we have. But beyond that, really what we're after, for the most part, is capturing arbitrage opportunities, whether those are time, geographic, or quality. One of the things that we've done since 2018 that's been a significant benefit to us, is establishing a network of blend hubs. Okay, so these are an extension of our manufacturing base. And what allows us to do is to take, for example, low-cost components and then blend them up into finished products where there's higher value. Last year's a great example where naphtha was trading at a significant discount to finished gasoline. Our ability to go get that naphtha, either from our sites or from the industry, and blend it into a finished product and get it to a high-value market, that's a significant arbitrage. Another one would be a gasoline spec, for example. We know there's a market that we wanna access, and our refinery doesn't produce that spec of gasoline, does not prevent us from accessing that market. We can go get the components that are needed, again, to blend, to get to that finished product into that market. That's really, for the most part, what we're trying to do, and we're doing it really well with trading. The other one on the system side, I would, I kind of referenced earlier is, you know, with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, our ability to keep our refineries running and full by responding to those trade flows and still getting access to the crude and feed that we needed, was an outcome of that trading organization. I think we're excited about the new organization, bringing all that together, centralized, leveraging the expertise across the corporation and continuing to grow it, and certainly a part of that ability to achieve the growth potential that we see. Jeff Zekauskas, J.P. Morgan. Thanks very much. I have a question about your hydrogen strategy. Not your ammonia strategy, your hydrogen strategy. So you, you're going to make 1 billion standard cubic feet a day of hydrogen, and you're going to get benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, Exxon is a net buyer of hydrogen in the United States. You source from third parties. Over a longer period of time, do you expect that shortness to diminish? That is, because of your hydrogen activities, you can better vertically integrate, and is it the case that because of the tax credits you might be able to get, it makes sense to sell merchant hydrogen in some size or to build a hydrogen business? Yeah, look, I think the way we think about it is, where do we have good opportunities to invest in blue hydrogen to leverage our advantages, and where that can supply our operations, like in Baytown. So as Karen said earlier, you know, we're kind of the anchor tenant for that project, so we have some hydrogen we use for ourselves. We're gonna be, you know, decarbonizing part of the Baytown complex, and then we have some third-party hydrogen for others.... But where if it was a remote small operation, and someone else had a scaled blue hydrogen opportunity, we might still be a buyer of hydrogen. But where we have the advantage, you know, we would be in that business. Clearly, with the acquisition we made recently, with CO2 infrastructure, with the CCS deals we've already done, and of course, you know, blue hydrogen is a big ATR with a big, big CCS project attached to it. We're very capable of doing the big projects, and we're very capable of doing the CCS aspect. So I think we will be big in the blue hydrogen business. But I don't think, I think we're a little agnostic as in terms of whether or not we're buying and selling, depending on where the best supply options are. Just like taking crudes into our refineries today. Sometimes it's equity crude, sometimes it's others' crude. We take the best crude we need to run the refineries. We'll take the lowest cost hydrogen we have, and some of that will be our own, some, some of that may be somebody else's. But, but I think we'll definitely be in that business, in the blue hydrogen business, because, again, I think we're fairly uniquely equipped to do the big blue hydrogen steps that require the big projects. Next question is from Bob Brackett, Bernstein Research. Thank you. You gave us a ratable guidance on earnings, and you gave us the contribution from strategic projects, and you gave us a seriatim of those strategic projects. Should we think about those projects as being implicitly funded, and those are very deterministic in driving that outlook? And how do we think about the ratability of the CapEx behind that? Well, all the others chime in in terms of their businesses, but I mean, I think all these projects are of very different sizes, so the CapEx is gonna go on with the size of the project. You have a... You know, Mike talked about a $2 billion Baytown chemical project, and there's others that are, you know, hundreds of millions, if not less. So there's different sizes. The Corpus Christi project, obviously, a enormous chemical complex. So it's gonna follow those projects, and I wouldn't- I would not say it's ratable per se, but I would say it's not that, not far off that, quite frankly, when you look at the total combination. Any other? I would say, if you talk about the projects that were specifically mentioned there, that kind of deliver by 2027, they're funded. When those are projects that are under construction. So there's not a question of whether that project will, you know, will come to fruition. Of course, there's lots of, you know, as Karen mentioned, lots of smaller projects with shorter time windows that are built into the other improvements that we have confidence in those delivering. But the big projects, those projects are real, they're developed, and they're funded. Next question comes from Jason Gabelman of Cowen. Yeah, thanks. It's Jason Gabelman from TD Cowen. I'm gonna ask another question on CapEx, which is that it looks like the past few years, about a third of your budget has been in the product solutions business, $7 billion-$8 billion. So in the near term, is that kind of what you need to execute on the plan that you've laid out? And then looking beyond the near term, as some of these large projects roll off, it seems like you'll have some space in your budget, and it sounds like a lot of your future growth is dependent on these reconfiguration projects. If the market is such that the demand for your refinery products is still really high, and you don't see a compelling need to reconfigure in the near term, can you see a period where CapEx dips lower, and your product solutions business is in somewhat of a cash harvest mode, where it's throwing off an above average amount of cash that you would expect over the long term? Thanks. Yeah. I think the short answer to that is, is yes. You know, we're gonna have periods of time where we're gonna be a little more capital intense, intensive, where you have some projects like anytime we're doing a major steam cracker complex, like the Corpus project or like the China project, you're gonna have the CapEx be a little bit higher. And then other than that, it'll be smaller projects. And so I think it will be a bit cyclical, and you'll have periods of time where our CapEx will be lower. From a-- we really think about that as part of the overall corporate capital allocation process. So, so we really think about that, think about the $20-$25 billion we talked about, and we look across the whole corporation, and we look at it at a minimum every year and really, really look into where should we be putting these, these precious capital dollars. And so the Product Solutions opportunities have to compete against Low-Carbon Solutions opportunities and Upstream opportunities for capital. And until we FID it, we're, you know, we're continuing to make sure that we're putting the very best project forward for the corporation to consider funding. And it is. There are gonna be periods of time where there's a lot of harvesting from our business. There'll be periods of time where we'll be more capital intensive. In general, I mean, I mean, the product solutions business is throwing off cash, for sure. I would say we did spend most of our time talking about those known projects out to 2027. We feel really good about the portfolio that we have post-2027. We didn't spend a lot of time talking about those, but in my business, we're developing projects and developing option, kind of optionality in our portfolio for those next advantage growth steps that are based on proprietary technology, and I know much of Loic's- Yeah. Portfolio is about what we're doing in the future. So, if you extend your question to the new market development group we have, we know that we're gonna have a lot of investment to come on this innovation. But we haven't talked too much about it because it's just focused on 2027. But we are pipeline rich beyond 2027, which is a wonderful opportunity to upgrade the portfolio and be very selective on the one we want to pursue. ... I would just echo that comment. We're not short opportunities. No. We have a lot of opportunities. We're gonna stay very selective and execute the very best ones. Just to be clear, some of the projects that we talked about today have not been FIDed, but they are all in our plan, so they're all firmly planned. The next question's from Will Su, from BlackRock. Thank you. You guys have wrapped up the product solutions portion of the Growing the Gulf initiative. So I'm curious if you can share some of the positive learnings, some of the unexpected challenges, clearly, you executed through COVID, of investing such a large amount in a concentrated geography. And in the medium and long term, do you see the scope to, perhaps again pursue such a large, investment program within a certain geography, whether it's in the Gulf Coast or elsewhere? Yeah, great, great question. Look, I'm gonna hand it over to the folks to talk about the projects, but I'll just make one comment, is we did what we said we'd do. We delivered a big, big investment program that I think there was a lot of skepticism about. We did what we said we'd do. We delivered those. Yeah, and I mean, one thing I would say is we delivered them well because we have our global projects organization. You know, as a former president of our chemical company, our chemical company could not have delivered these projects in isolation without the scale of the corporation. So the fact that we've had the global projects organization to kinda stack these projects past each other, and to really understand what the labor markets were gonna be like, and come up with the right strategies for them, is fundamental to the overarching success of the projects. But I'll hand over to the team in case there's comments you wanna make on any of the individual projects. I mean, the Corpus project is the best example. That was delivered at 25% below cost, below industry average cost, and there were a lot of, kind of, significant industry projects that went well above, kind of, well above that average. And I think that that's- During COVID. During, during... we did that during COVID. Yeah. We talk about an organization, but it's actually about the capability and the experiences of the people. We had dozens of people on that project in Corpus that had done multi-billion dollar projects throughout their career. That's just something that another chemical business, another chemical company, or chemical competitors just don't have and can't do. I think that was, to me, that was tremendous in terms of leveraging that upstream capability. We used a lot of methods, we used a lot of that expertise to bring that project to bear at a super, super competitive cost. We've talked about the Beaumont expansion a few times already today. I mean, it started up earlier this year, and again, as you know, it started up in a very nice margin environment for diesel. It does take, again, it takes advantage of our position in the upstream, so it highlights the integration that we have across the corporation. Maybe one last thing. You know, not all of these projects started up in the marvelous margin environment that our, our Beaumont expansion did, but they're all cash positive. And that's important to us because we want to invest in projects that are resilient through the cycle and generate cash even in an adverse part of the cycle. So, you know, I think that's a really important differentiator to all of these projects. Okay. Our next question is from Paul Sankey, Sankey Research. Thank you. I'm a bit unclear, actually, Jack, further to what you were saying in the long-term overview of the company, as to whether this was a surge of CapEx and performance improvement, or whether it's sort of an ongoing process where you're gonna maintain these levels of CapEx? Mm. The follow-up is, how do you now think about the cost of capital between upstream, Low Carbon- Mm ... product solutions within the corporation? And then finally, and this is a tough one: How do you think about your competitors' cost of capital? Mm. Because, for example, we're aware that Aramco is very long upstream and investing heavily in downstream. You're kind of the opposite. You know, the competitive environment is tough insofar as some of these guys, whether they be in China or India, may have a different cost of capital and a different way of looking at investment. I hope that makes some sense, but if you could give us a perspective. Yeah. Thank you. I would describe our future CapEx as we think about 2027, and, you know, as Mike indicated, we're modeling out well in advance of that, into the 2030s and the 2040s. We're assuming the CapEx is in line with where we are now. My only point earlier was, there's gonna be some year or two- Yeah ... that's $1 billion or $2 billion lower, 1 year or 2 years that's $1 billion or $2 billion higher, but it's so it's not gonna be, you know, exactly flat line. Mm. We're not assuming in our plans to go to 2027 and, and beyond, any increase in CapEx. No. We do see the similar type opportunities, and of course, as I said before, we have to earn the right to spend the corporation's dollars with the very best projects that we can come up with. In terms of, you know, cost of capital, we really think about that in terms of the corporate-wide, you know, cost of capital. And we, of course, overlay risk of individual projects, and you could have an upstream project that's really, really low risk and Yeah ... product solutions project that's a little higher risk, or clearly, you could have vice versa. We have kind of a cost of capital that we look at for the corporation, and then we apply that judgment. Of course, as we look at these individual project opportunities, we're testing them. At the bottom of the cycle, we're testing them. You know, what's the upside opportunity? We kind of put them through the paces in terms of everything we look at. I wouldn't say we have, you know, we get too specific on a cost of capital with the different parts of the business. ... And then the international competition? Yeah. Yeah, so I, for the reasons we've talked about and our competitive advantages we have, I feel really good about how we're gonna be competing against others. They may look at it differently. Like we talk about from time to time on the lubricants side, do all these refiners really understand what the actual margins are on the lubricants versus the fuels? So they may look at it differently, but we have very competitive assets, and we have very competitive projects because of the global projects organization we talked about earlier, because of the technology we bring, because this global footprint, it gives us a base to work off of. And I feel really good about us being able to compete against anybody out there in terms of the quality of our projects going forward. Yeah. I think we have time for one more one-part question. The last question we have comes from Paul Cheng, Scotiabank. Thank you. Jack and Karen, I think throughout the presentation, that low cost is a really key for your success. If we look at Europe over the past several years, has become pretty high cost, both in energy as well as cost of doing business, and their energy transition plan probably is more aggressive than most of the other regions you operate. From that standpoint, how your chemical refining and retail service station asset in Europe, I mean, how should we look at that? Do you think that you need to dramatically transform that business over the next five or seven years? Thank you. It's a good question, Paul. Yeah. Let me let the European take the- Hey, I'm American. But I, I, you know, I- we have to win in every market that we choose to compete in. Actually, we've got some really great assets in Europe, and it's a very good market for some of our businesses. You know, I would say that we continue to focus on our strengths in that market. We, we understand the challenges of the high energy costs in Europe, and of course, you know, during the energy crisis, after the Ukraine invasion, we focused on reducing the need for natural gas consumption at our industrial facilities, and our manufacturing team did a fantastic job- Mm ... of reducing dramatically the natural gas in order to manage what was very high energy costs there. So, you know, for me, I look at us as advantaged versus our competition with some of the strongest assets that exist in Europe, and we continue to focus on winning in every market that we participate in. Paul, I would just add, you know, we have found some policy elements challenging. Yeah. We're advocating for good, sound policy, where we can. And we'll do what we can in that area. Any closing remarks, Jack? Look, I really appreciate all the good questions and the dialogue and certainly appreciate you all coming out here and for those tuning in, for you taking the time to spend with us today. Let me just leave with a couple of closing comments. Number one, I hope you found today that this product solutions business is advantage versus competition. With the scale we have, with twice the next closest IOC, with the technology advantages we bring, which I think we talked quite a bit about, and with that tight integration of our businesses. Hopefully, you share our confidence in growing our earnings by $10 billion by 2027. I think we showed you the reasons why we feel confident that we're gonna deliver that. Finally, you know, we're very confident beyond 2027. I, I've made that point a few times, but I wanna drive that home that we see a lot of good growth for this business well out in the future. We're, we focused a lot of time on 2027 because that's where we set that target, but we're planning for well beyond that. Loic mentioned a new business that we're looking at targeting the earnings threshold by 2040, so we're planning well, well, well out there. You know, when you look at the chemicals future and the lubricants future and the biofuels future, all these high-value products we're focused on, we feel really good about that. Again, appreciate your time. Thanks for spending the time with us, and we really enjoyed. On behalf of the team, we really enjoyed spending time with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'll echo that. Thank you, everyone, for your questions. And thank you for those listening via our audio webcast. We hope you found this spotlight to be helpful. As soon as it's available, we will post a transcript on the investor relations section of the IR website, as well as an audio replay of this session. Before we conclude, I have one calendar announcement. Please mark your calendar for our third quarter earnings call. It will be on Friday, October twenty-seventh. Darren Woods, our Chairman and CEO, will host that call, along with Kathy Mikells, Senior Vice President and CFO for Q&A. Appreciate you joining, and as always, appreciate your interest in ExxonMobil. And with that, we conclude our call.