Suncor Energy, Inc. (NYSE:SU) 2024 Business Update Call May 21, 2024 9:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Troy Little – VP, IR
Rich Kruger – President, CEO & Director
Peter Zebedee – EVP, Oil Sands
Dave Oldreive – EVP, Downstream
Kris Smith – CFO
Shelley Powell – SVP, Operational Improvement & Support Services
Conference Call Participants
Dennis Fong – CIBC Capital Markets
Greg Pardy – RBC Capital Markets
Neil Mehta – Goldman Sachs
Roger Read – Wells Fargo Securities
Menno Hulshof – TD Cowen
John Royall – JPMorgan.
Operator
Good day, and welcome to the Suncor Energy 2024 Business Update Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. Troy Little, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead sir.
Troy Little
Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Suncor Energy’s 2024 business update call. Please note that today’s comments contain forward-looking information. Actual results may differ materially from the expected results because of various risk factors and assumptions that are described in this business update presentation, as well as our first quarter earnings release and our current annual information form, both of which are available on SEDAR+, EDGAR and our website, suncor.com.
Certain financial measures referred to in these comments are not prescribed by Canadian Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. For a description of these financial measures, please see our first quarter earnings release. Following the formal remarks, we’ll open up the call to questions.
Now, I’ll hand it over to Rich Kruger, Suncor’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
Rich Kruger
Good morning. As promised, today we will provide a business update focused on the next two to three years, specifically 2024 through 2026. What we will show you is tangible, credible, challenging and bold. What we will convey to you is an unwavering commitment and determination to deliver.
Here is the agenda. Not a lot of fluff. You’re going to get an early morning serving of meat and potatoes, how we plan to win, where we will add value, and what’s in it for our shareholders. The executive team shown here will tell our story and answer your questions. We, of course, Kris Smith, our CFO; Peter Zebedee, EVP Oil Sands; and Dave Oldreive, EVP, Downstream.
Having led many teams over the last 40 years, this team and the rest of our EL team are as skilled, experienced, collaborative and results-oriented as they come. We’ve worked together for more than a year now and we’ve hit our stride.
Summarized here are the key takeaways for today. First, our plan includes a continued focus on the fundamentals. We’ve made material progress, but the fundamentals are a never ending quest. Free funds flow improvement of an additional $3.3 billion per year by year end 2026. The related effect is a reduction in our WTI breakeven by $10 a barrel.
No significant capital on bitumen replacement in the next five years. In fact, we will show you our capital profile reducing through 2026. A revised net debt target for 100% free funds payout increased to $8 billion. Increase reflects our confidence in the plan and the financial resiliency that results. To that end, we’ve increased share buybacks to 75% of free funds starting in the second quarter. These are the headlines for today in a nutshell.
Some executives see strategy as complex. I’m not one of them. I see strategy as how you compete and win in creating superior value relative to your competitors, superior value for your customers, communities, employees and last but certainly not least your shareholders. I believe strategy should create clarity, simplicity, and focus, a clear description of what winning means, and how it will be achieved.
That said, here is Suncor’s strategy to win. One statement and five objectives. Our winning proposition. We create value through our unparalleled, integrated upstream and downstream asset base, underpinned by large scale, long-life Oil Sands resources. It’s not long. It’s not complex and it certainly doesn’t take a PhD to understand it.
Of course, long term strategy involves making the right decisions at the right time, in the simplest sense, decisions on how to allocate both capital and people’s time. However, it’s important to note that the vast majority of our workforce focus on today’s business; safely and efficiently mining ore, producing wells, upgrading bitumen, running refineries, and selling production and products.
This one page ensures we are crystal clear in exactly what we strive to achieve, how we plan to achieve it, and what we measure to determine winning. This slide depicts our business today and the relative size of each business line. We will communicate plans to add value in essentially all areas shown.
A theme to note. You hear us and others reference our integrated business model and the value it adds, a hedge on crude price volatility, stability of cash flow, etc. However, all integration is not created equal. What we will say today is like George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. Suncor’s integration is more equal. How so?
First, our degree of physical integration is a competitive differentiator. Fort Hills PFT to Base Plant, Firebag Bitumen to base plant, Syncrude base plant interconnectedness and so on. This physical connectivity provides us a unique ability to move molecules to maximize value, increase facility utilization, and ultimately lower costs.
What we then do with the molecules once we optimize their location is a second competitive differentiator. Think back to that old campus bar you went to in university. They served beer, and if it was a high-class joint, maybe some cheap wine out of a box. Now come back to today. While others serve beer, Suncor serves craft cocktails.
If our customers want synthetic sour, we got it. Synthetic sweet, coming up. A little bit on the rocks, here it is. PFT neat, enjoy. You get the point. These are simply a few of our custom crudes, products and logistics that we offer, customization that adds value to our customers and value that is ultimately shared with us. You will hear much more on this differentiating capability and our plans to grow it from Dave.
Going back in recent history, Suncor needed to change. It was evident in our performance, evident to those both internal and external to the company. Some of you have seen a page similar to this before, others have heard me tell the story, and a few of you have even written about it.
The change at Suncor: a comprehensive re-examination and reintegration of strategy, structure, and culture, new leadership, new focus, new priorities, new structure, new improvement plans, new performance expectations and perhaps most importantly, a new attitude. A more focused, competitive, results-oriented team with a winning mindset. Said differently, today’s Suncor is increasingly a new Suncor. But I know what you’re thinking. In the infamous words of Jerry Maguire, show me the money, or in our case, show you the proof points.
Let’s look back at the last 12 months. After years of unacceptable results. 2023 was the safest year in company history, including no one getting seriously hurt for the first time since 2015. After several years of disappointing facility utilization, we moved to the head of the class in both reliability or in reliability, both upstream and downstream. After years of not achieving market guidance, we’re delivering record volumes again upstream and downstream.
After years of being labeled big and bloated, we’ve slashed cost, completing a major streamlining and refocusing of our above field organization. We’ve also played checkers versus chess, strategically upgrading our portfolio, consolidating ownership at Fort Hills, and shedding non-core assets.
And last but not least, we’ve put money, and lots of it in the bank or more accurately on the balance sheet and in our shareholders’ pockets. Trust and credibility in life are earned by delivering on commitments. It’s up to you to decide how much street credit these results have earned the new Suncor.
We’ve talked about our objective to improve performance and add value in the context of lowering our overall WTI-based corporate breakeven by $5 a barrel. Today, we’re sharing a much higher ambition, in fact, double the original $5. Recognizing calculation methodologies vary.
I would ask that you not be fussed with the starting and ending points, but rather focus on the targeted improvement of $10 a barrel relative to 2023. Shortly, we will detail building block by building block, how we will achieve this objective, and the stair step buildup to the $10. I’ll remind you, though, that we are well on our way with the first approximately $3 a barrel already achieved and more being captured each month.
Breakeven is our internal language, given it’s a product of cost, capital, production margin, everything and everyone on our team is in this picture. That said, what ultimately matters the most is growth in cash generated or free funds flow. The plans we are about to show you increase free funds flow in all areas, with the single biggest driver shown here, 100,000 plus barrels a day of additional upstream production from 2023 to 2026. But there’s much more.
In total, we will lay out improvement plans to add an incremental $3.3 billion per year of free funds flow by 2026. $3.3 billion per year.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Peter to detail our upstream improvement plans.
Peter Zebedee
Well, thanks very much, Rich. We’re working hard across the company to accelerate on the momentum that’s been building through 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 to deliver operational excellence and exceptional results. Making up on average 70% of Suncor’s total AFFO, upstream will play a significant role in delivering the improvements to our corporate breakeven. Upstream improvements will make up half of the total breakeven reduction for the company.
And to do this, we are focused primarily on these three things. Number one, improving the efficiency of our mining operations to reduce cost. Number two, maximizing the usage of our existing fixed plant assets through improved reliability, utilization and low to no cost to bottlenecking to add barrels. And number three, delivering value through our Oil Sands scale and physical integration both within the region and into the downstream, a lot more of that Suncor integration Rich referred to earlier, right down to the molecule level.
The end result of delivering on our focus areas will be to increase upstream production by over 100,000 barrels a day while holding our controllable costs flat on an absolute basis. This reduces our operating cost per barrel by 8% over the next three years. Now that’s operating leverage and that’s what gets us up in the morning to deliver, free barrels and a bottom line increase and free cash flow that goes along with it.
All assets across the upstream are increasing their production in the next three years. And on OS&G, our goal is to set in place sustainable, structural cost and efficiency improvements that absorb inflation. I’m going to give you a couple of tangible examples to demonstrate how we are bringing these commitments to reality.
And you’ve heard me talk about this before. Given the magnitude and concentration of our mining operations and our total material movements a little bit scale, getting enough of the right size trucks in the right place will deliver $325 million a year in cost savings and contribute a $1 per barrel reduction to our corporate breakeven. The additional capacity provided by these trucks results in the removal of higher dollar, less productive contractor tons and we are seeing a significant dollar-per-ton savings advantage on our bottom line by doing this.
Size matters and the moves we have made to bring on 55 new ultra-class haul trucks not only displace over 100 smaller third-party contracted trucks, it simplifies and declutters our mining operations, improved safety and results in overall mining efficiency improvement. You’re only as fast as your slowest truck. 16 of the trucks are already on the ground and are operating today and the remaining trucks will be arriving through the rest of the year and into the first quarter of 2025 at Base Plant and Fort Hills.
But it’s not only about new and bigger trucks. Getting more out of what we operate today is essential, and to achieve $225 million annualized cost savings, earlier this year we put in place a system that allows us to access and action real-time performance data across all of our operating mines. It’s a common platform with standardized performance metrics and measurement that allows our teams to rapidly identify an action performance opportunities, learn from others, and frankly, drive a little healthy competition across our sites.
We are in the details right from our corporate office to the leaders in the field and taking action on all the little things that add up to a lot in our business. This tool provides performance transparency and enables our industrial engineering approach to improvement that I spoke about in the quarterly call. We can see gaps and take quick action to reduce our queue times, optimize our shift changes, improve our speed and the list goes on.
Our Mine Connect tool has quickly become the most utilized app on the Suncor network. Across our mining sites, we’re spending $1.3 billion per year on maintaining our mobile equipment, and it’s a significant factor of our operating costs in mining. We’ve taken action to standardize our maintenance strategies for common equipment across the region and work together with our OEMs and equipment dealers to improve reliability of our fleet, standardize our preventative maintenance strategies, and extend equipment components benchmarks.
Bottom line, more uptime, less maintenance, less cost. We’ve also been able to negotiate competitive commercial contracts regionally and improve the partnerships that we have with our key suppliers. This has been critical to implement these improvements and reduce costs. All of this adds up to $150 million a year of cost savings.
And now, moving on to one of my more favorite topics. On May 13, we reached a significant milestone in our transition to autonomous mining, with the first autonomous trucks rolling in our base plant Millennium mine, done safely, on time and on budget, I couldn’t ask for more.
The team has really done a tremendous job of making this happen. And I was already showing Rich last week the early performance data coming through from Millennium and it’s been extremely positive as we built on the productivity gains we’ve seen in our North Steepbank autonomous operations.
In addition to the obvious labor cost savings, the increasing speeds, improved load factors and reduced standby time with autonomous trucks, it’s enabled us to free up truck capacity and display six rental trucks at a cost of $4 million per unit. That’s a savings of $24.5 million already in 2024 and a good step forward on the path for us to deliver $175 million per year in cost savings that we commit from these operations.
By year end, 100% of base plant ore will be delivered autonomously and by Q1 2025, we will transition our overburdened material movement as well. Base plant is set to become the single largest autonomous mining site in the world. Autonomous haulage is a key lever for us to deliver a safer, more reliable and more cost-effective operation.
I’m going to shift gears now and move to In Situ. Frankly, I’ve been truly amazed by these assets since they’ve become part of my portfolio in 2023. They are amongst our biggest money makers for our business and Suncor is blessed with an abundance of In Situ resource that forms a significant part of our reserve base.
Our In Situ strategy is simple and that’s to grow low cost barrels with minimal investment. That’s operating leverage defined. You can already see the impact of the improvements the team has delivered, with Firebag coming in at a best ever production of 229,000 barrels per day in the first quarter ’24. This was accomplished by the operating team, improving the base reliability of equipment and identifying and actioning a series of small, practical debottlenecks for very little cost.
Many of these have been completed in 2024 and we have many more in the hopper to execute in the coming years. The sum total of all these smaller improvements moves Firebag stream day rates to 230,000 barrels per day plus outside of turnarounds, and will deliver $200 million a year in margin improvement.
And with that, I’ll hand it over to Dave to talk about the downstream.
Dave Oldreive
Hey. Thanks, Peter. With refineries in profitable locations, advantaged logistics, and true integration all the way to the final customer, our downstream represents about a third of our AFFO and there’s more opportunity out there. We’re focused on cost reduction, but where we can contribute the most is to grow cash returns through generating more value. We will deliver in the range of 25% of the $10 per barrel improvement.
Let’s start with a large opportunity for both the upstream and the downstream turnarounds. As we discussed in previous calls, I’m co-leading a company-wide initiative to improve our turnarounds. I’ve been involved in turnarounds my whole career. In fact, my very first role after graduating university was as an inspector on a crude unit turnaround back in ’95, that’s dating me a little bit.
I feel confident we can achieve a substantial improvement and we’re going after this with urgency. There’s no secret to successful turnarounds. You need to select the right work and then execute that work efficiently. Each turnaround will start with benchmarking to select a work scope aligned with competitive costs and durations.
Risk-based work selection processes will become more focused, following industry best practices to ensure the minimum work scope is selected to reliably achieve the run to the next planned outage. This is not only about doing less work, it’s about doing the right work.
With the workplace locked in, we’ll be following a disciplined approach to detailed planning milestones, and we’ll be completing that planning early to give us time to optimize the plans to execute efficiently in the field. I’m confident we can deliver between $225 million and $250 million per year in turnaround savings by 2026.
Pivoting specifically to downstream improvements, we will grow our refining throughput by increasing the availability of our assets. Each refinery is focused on reliability roadmaps with targeted improvements including equipment-specific plans to eliminate historic bad actors and to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime.
Our new leadership team at the Commerce City Refinery have been driving reliability improvements focused on engaging the organization to address winterization, asset integrity, and maintenance backlog. We are already seeing improved results with 96% utilization over the last three quarters.
The turnaround improvements I spoke of earlier are not just about cost reduction, we are delivering shorter outage durations and longer intervals between turnarounds. Our Sarnia refinery is currently wrapping up their spring turnaround ahead of schedule. We recently delivered our turnaround in Montreal 13 days ahead of schedule with safe one-time startup and we’re now running 8,000 barrels a day more throughput than prior to the event.
Edmonton, our most profitable refinery, has already begun executing their reliability improvement roadmap, breaking throughput records and have delivered over 105% utilization so far this year.
Our reliability improvements are backed by our OEMS processes underpinned by risk-informed equipment strategies, risk-based inspection programs, and new simple processes that will help each asset keep the small event small. Our near-term operational availability improvements will increase our throughput and deliver over $100 million per year in margin.
Now I’d like to talk about how we will continue to differentiate ourselves and capture more value. We’ve grown the contribution of our supply, trading and optimization business significantly over the past few years to support our integrated model. You can think of our trading business as about $1 per barrel increase netback to our upstream barrels, and another $2 per barrel on our downstream margin versus what we would have earned had we bought and sold an index as many of our competitors choose to do.
To be clear, we are relative value or spread traders. This is asset-backed trading. I know some of you like baseball analogies. We hit singles and we steal bases around our assets. This is not large spec trading or swinging for the fences. We will continue to grow our contribution with specific opportunities such as and as I mentioned before, capturing the value from the Trans Mountain pipeline into the West Coast and Asian markets, growing our refined product book by removing the middleman, moving our clean fuels compliance obligations from a compliance activity to a commercial one and further capitalizing on our power portfolio.
We are also actively evaluating all of our logistics contracts to challenge if they continue to serve us well. We are looking at leased assets, tanks, pipeline and marine commitments and our rail fleets to ensure they are all generating maximum value. We expect to capture north of $250 million per year in the supply, trading and optimization space.
We are also excited to grow our power generation capacity as we grow our coke or as we complete our coke boiler replacement, an 800-megawatt cogen project at Peter’s Base plant. This project strengthens our base plant steam reliability and improves our carbon intensity. These cogen units also materially increase our power generation capabilities.
With this additional 800 megawatts of capacity, Suncor will be the third largest power producer in the province, contributing reliable capacity to the Alberta grid and of course, generating an incremental $200 million per year in benefits.
Let’s move further downstream to our retail business. Per our retail growth plans, we are high-grading our controlled Petro-Canada retail network and are on track to deliver $200 million in margin growth by 2026 and secure high-margin domestic outlets for our refined products. Over 20% of our network will be transformed between ’24 and ’26. We are also rationalizing underperforming locations.
We continue to adapt our retail growth plans, enhancing our quick-serve restaurant offering with an additional 100 A&W sites, including a new express format concepts. We officially launched our partnership with Canadian Tire in March, linking triangle rewards with Petro-Points to deliver stackable loyalty incentives, offering more options for customers to collect and redeem points. We will rebrand over 200 Canadian Tire retail sites to Petro-Canada with integrated fuel supply of 1.3 billion liters per year.
We have the best locations to achieve top-tier returns. The pictures show how we are capturing previously untapped potential at a location in Toronto. This previously underutilized asset reopened in December with strong customer response and growth in both fuel sales and nonpetroleum revenues. This is a great illustration of the potential of our network.
And now I’ll pass things over to Kris Smith.
Kris Smith
Great. Thanks, Dave. Well, in addition to our upstream and downstream-specific improvements, we’re also driving improvement in our corporate group which supports those businesses. As you can see from this slide, the improvements in our corporate group are a material contributor to our breakeven reduction and free fund flow improvement.
So let’s move to the next slide which shows some more detail. You will see that we’ve already executed a significant part of the improvement and continue to drive for more. Last year, we made significant reductions in our above the field costs, resulting in about $450 million in cost reductions.
With a mantra of clarify, simplify, focus, we not only reduced our above field staff by 22% and our contingent workers by 50%, but we also simplified the organization by reducing layers and increasing spans of control, which also supported focusing our leadership, fewer leaders with more focused accountability.
At the same time, with our ERP integration behind us, we took a hard look at our IT spend, refocusing it and ensuring we are not only spend — or we are only spending what we need to support our business strategies and objectives. This resulted in cost savings of $280 million and a more focused portfolio of high-value investments such as the Mine Connect digital tool that Peter just highlighted. And we’re not stopping there.
While you could say we took a bit of a chainsaw to our above the field cost last year to affect the major reset that we needed, we continued to drive further reductions in efficiencies and see at least another $150 million of improvement available. But instead of a chainsaw, we’re now being more surgical, continuing to drive efficiency across all above field functions.
Now, all that improvement is impressive and fun to hear about, but let’s talk about what it means for the bottom line. As you can see from this slide, the sum of these actions to improve our WTI breakeven through cost reduction, margin improvement, and production growth delivers 10% compound annual growth in AFFO from 2023, which has been normalized for price and the one-time Fort Hills tax benefit in that year.
This translates into a 15% growth rate on a per share basis as we will be buying back shares through this period, which I will cover in more detail in a few minutes. This is the bottom line. We expect to deliver more than $40 billion of adjusted funds from operations from 2024 to ’26, in a $75 WTI business environment.
Now, before going into more detail on the numbers and our financial framework, it is important to be clear that our allocation of that cash flow will be guided by five very clear principles. First, we will continue to ensure we have a strong resilience balance sheet. Second, we will ensure that we sustain our integrated and profitable asset base.
Third, we will pay a reliable and growing dividend to our shareholders. Fourth, we will return free funds flow after CapEx and dividends to shareholders via share buybacks. And fifth, we will selectively invest in high-value growth opportunities to our shareholders — for our shareholders. Our capital allocation decisions will be guided by these principles. And I’ll talk about them in more detail.
Let me start first with our balance sheet. We are fully committed to ensuring a strong balance sheet that is resilient through the cycle. As you can see from this chart, we’ve paid down a significant amount of debt in the last three years, almost $8 billion, reducing our annual interest payments by almost $340 million. This has resulted in an investment grade balance sheet that has a long average debt tenure with a very manageable maturity profile and in addition, we have very strong liquidity at over $7 billion.
In the current price environment, our net debt to AFFO is well under 1 times. And you should take note that in this presentation going forward, we will be referring to net debt excluding capitalized leases when talking about our targets. In the past we’ve talked about net debt targets including those leases, but going forward we will exclude them which allows for better comparability to our peers.
That said, rest assured we will continue to be focused on managing not just our debt, but also our capital lease portfolio along with all aspects of our business. The bottom line is that our focus on ensuring a strong investment grade balance sheet along with our strong liquidity positions this company very well going forward.
Just as we are committed to a strong balance sheet, we’re also committed to capital discipline. Over the ’24 to ’26 period, annual capital is expected to decline as we continue to invest prudently in sustaining the business while also selectively investing in high-value economic opportunities. There are a number of large economic investments that are in flight and which will be completed in this window, and you can see them listed there on the slide.
A few points I want to draw to your attention. First, capital as a percentage of AFFO declines over time, providing more free funds flow for other uses. Second, there is reduced spend in ’26 on the larger projects listed on the slide as they’re being completed. We do have a number of high-value economic investment opportunities in the queue that would start to come into the 2026 window, but they will be subject to a high bar if they are approved to proceed.
Third, this profile excludes the capital associated with emissions reduction related to carbon capture and sequestration. We are fully committed to our GHG reduction targets and the Pathways Alliance but we need to have an appropriate financial framework including capital support in place with governments before we move forward with material capital commitments related to those projects.
And finally, and to be crystal clear, there is no significant base mine bitumen replacement investment in the next five years. Some early development spending will be starting in this timeframe, but any significant spend will not be until toward the back end of the decade.
After capital we see substantial free funds flow at $75 WTI, including $3.3 billion of incremental free funds flow versus 2023. This is 18% compound growth versus 23% on a normalized basis and 24% on a per share basis when taking into account expected share buybacks. So the question is, what are we going to do with all this refunds?
So let’s talk about our capital allocation framework. One thing that is not changing with our capital allocation framework is our unwavering commitment to a reliable and growing dividend that is sustainable for the long-term and through the cycles, and which grows over time at an expected annual rate of 3% to 5%.
As outlined earlier, we are also committed to ensuring a strong resilient balance sheet and we will continue to reduce our debt, targeting 1 times net debt to AFFO at $50 WTI. This means working down our net debt from where it sits currently at just under $9 billion to add or near $8 billion.
Given the current position of our balance sheet, the demonstrated planned improvements in our business, the expected business environment, and the distance to our net debt target, we are in a position to return substantial free funds flow to our shareholders.
Starting now, we have increased share buybacks from free funds flow to 75%. Once our debt is at or near $8 billion, we will increase those buybacks to be at or near 100%. This net debt target is higher than our previous target and reflects our confidence in the business and the improvements we’ve laid out today.
One other thing to be clear, this free funds flow allocation framework does not include the impacts of any potential future asset sales or acquisitions. If there are any future changes to the portfolio, they will be assessed at the time independently of this framework.
In summary, we believe that this framework ensures we maintain a strong balance sheet while at the same time providing strong cash returns to our shareholders.
Rich Kruger
Kris, let me add a comment here. For those of you with models, let me save you some time. The plans that we’ve outlined today with the price environment we’ve assumed would have us hit $8 billion in net debt sometime mid-next year, a year from now. That’s just the math, but we’re committed to do better.
We intend to evaluate every option and pull every lever to accelerate that date and to accelerate the resulting increase to 100% share buybacks. In fact, I can think of no better Christmas present for our shareholders than to get to our targeted net debt level by year end this year. That’s not an unconditional promise, but hear me clearly, it’s a priority of this management team.
I’ll leave it at that for now. Sorry, Kris. Go ahead.
Kris Smith
No. Great. Thanks, Rich. Well, I just have one more slide before I hand it back over to Rich. And putting this all together, this means substantial returns to our shareholders as we strengthen this company and continue to increase the cash flow generation of the business. Specifically, in a $75 WTI business environment, we expect to see a substantial increase in free funds flow, which in turn will lead to growing share buybacks.
We will deliver $18.5 billion in total cash returns to shareholders between dividends and buybacks over the ’24 to ’26 period, being about 27% of the current market cap of the company. We believe this to be a compelling proposition for our shareholders as we drive our plans to improve the performance of the company, ensure the strength and resiliency of our balance sheet, and continue to wisely invest in the future, all while generating substantial returns for our shareholders.
And with that, Rich, I’ll turn it back to you.
Rich Kruger
Thank you. Let me just make a few final comments before we open it up to your question. In a nutshell, our commitment to you is to continue to drive positive change within this company. Along the way, we will provide the proof points to show you, to prove to you that we’re proceeding consistently with our plans.
We’ve talked about and we’ll continue to maximize the value of what we believe is an unparalleled integrated asset base. We will execute on the improvement plans that we’ve described today as well as others that we haven’t, all for the ultimate goal of growing our free cash flow per share and significantly increase shareholder returns.
Now, although I won’t go through it, the last page in the deck, Page 37, is simply a rack-up of you take the whether they’re operating costs, capital costs, margin improvements that we’ve talked about throughout the deck, and if you put them in terms of their free funds flow contribution over this time, this saves you a bit of time and shows how they would stack up.
So with that, I will stop and I’ll turn it back to Troy.
Troy Little
Thank you, Rich. I’ll turn the call back to the Operator to take some questions.
Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question will come from the line of Dennis Fong with CIBC. Your line is open.
Dennis Fong
Hi. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions and also appreciate the color and context associated with this business update this morning. My first question derives maybe from the 2022 Investor Day. I know prior to your time here at Suncor there Rich, but there was a discussion around some of the headwinds to cost improvements, including increased haul distance and waste movement. I think this was syncretic specifically.
Can you talk towards maybe how some of these cost improvements that you’ve outlined today help offset again some of those headwinds that maybe are a little bit more intrinsic with respect to some of the assets, as well as this inflation piece that you showcase here on Slide 37? Thanks.
Rich Kruger
Yeah. Let me comment, Dennis, even step back just a little bit further on the kind of generation of this. The plan you’ve seen today are not a series of numbers that the folks on this call have pulled out of the year. We have been working for more than six months deep in the organization with the leadership team engaged at multiple levels on starting with what’s possible, what’s possible, and what’s preventing us from capturing it.
And then we work backwards to eliminate those barriers to put this plan together. So there is a great deal of clarity, alignment, and accountability behind this. So what we’ve said is if we achieve an improvement but we have a headwind that eats it up or evaporates it, that’s not good enough. So what you’re seeing today are net, the net improvements.
So we’ve looked at — on the Page 37, we’ve got a little bar that represents assumed inflation. But in all of Peter’s numbers, for example, as well as Dave’s, anything that would be considered, the headwinds, the age of mine extensions or progression of mines, haul distances, they are all in here in terms of having been offset by the improvement plans. You’re looking at net numbers here.
Dennis Fong
Great. I appreciate that. And then my second question dovetails into Firebag a little bit more. Peter, you addressed this a little bit at the Q1 conference call, but I was hoping to dig a little bit further in here. So you’ve seen a fair number of improvements just from some of these small opportunities again, fee-driven, productivity improvements. Can you talk towards what you feel is the production capacity at Firebag, especially given the excess steam capacity and some of this discussion around infill drilling, that you’re focusing on that asset?
Rich Kruger
Dennis, let me start, but then I’ll turn it over to Peter. And of course, Shelley is here with us, too. He’s got some good history of this. Any of the facilities you look at it — in it is just kind of industrial engineering. You look at what’s the constraint at any point in time. In conventional operations, it typically is well-capacity with facility, but it’s a bit different here.
We work to ensure that with our well pads, we’ve had the ability to fill facilities, but now we’re taking a very different approach. We’re looking at each individual component, whether that’s water handling, steam management, and we’re taking each bottleneck and saying, okay, well, what can we do to lift that? And so I don’t look at, and I don’t think Peter and Shelley do look at Firebag as having a fixed capacity.
It’s just what’s the incremental cost and timeline to keep ratcheting it up. We have a wealth of resource that we can continue to feed these facilities for a long time profitable, high-quality resource. So it’s literally looking at each component part. Peter and his team have done some just simple — some simple but magical things on water handling lately that have unlocked 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 barrels a day of additional production at essentially no cost.
We’re continuing to do that. So Peter, I — it’s like, you said, you get excited about Firebag and In Situ. I’m sorry. I do too. Do you have anything else you’d add to that?
Peter Zebedee
I think you took most of my examples, Rich.
Rich Kruger
That’s the benefit of being the CEO.
Peter Zebedee
I think at the end of the day, we have a full hopper of these kinds of low to no cost debottlenecking opportunities. I wouldn’t call them technically complex by any means. And so the ability of the team to be nimble, to execute these in the field with very little complexity and almost no cost, we’ve been successful in the first couple. We got a few more queued up between now and the end of the year.
But it’s — as Rich said, we’re in the enviable position of being well long at Firebag. And we’re just working on the fixed plant debottlenecking opportunities to unlock those barrels and deliver them into the production ecosystem. So I would say between removing bottlenecks in our own stripping, improving our non-condensable gas injection, etc., we’ve got a whole bunch of these queued up. And I’m pretty excited about what the…
Rich Kruger
And Shelley, just to add, you and your team months back showed me kind of our inventory of well pads. So we’re approaching this. We’re not resource-limited. We’re looking at, what’s the right time to bring on new well pads. But is that a fair description today? It’s not the resource that’s holding us back, it’s the facility to process greater volume.
Shelley Powell
Yeah, absolutely. We have decades of resource in front of us and one of the real magic elements in In Situ is bringing that subsurface element and marrying it up with the optimization of the surface equipment. So right now, we do have the ability to optimize on a well-by-well basis, hour-by-hour, so that we do optimize water return, we do optimize steam usage. And I think back to that focus and that win mindset within our teams has really allowed us to unlock a lot here.
Rich Kruger
And this is our lowest cost upstream asset with large long life resources underneath it. And the other thing, and it’s not for today’s conversation, but we continue to look at new technologies that can further unlock both resource, lower carbon emissions, reduce steam, look at synergies with the other assets. So, you’re going to hear a lot more over time about our In Situ, Firebag and all the adjacent resource to it. A lot of opportunities set here for the short term, but also for the long term.
Dennis Fong
Great. Really appreciate those answers. Thanks, Rich and team. I’ll turn it back.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Greg Pardy with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Greg Pardy
Yeah. Thanks. Good morning. Thanks for the detailed rundown and the speed with which you delivered that. I just want to clarify, because I think that Dennis was asking what I was, which is where some of the growth coming from on the In Situ side. So just to be clear, then you’ve moved to a 75% payout effectively as of April 1. And then with any luck, as Rich says, you want to be at $8 billion, so effectively at 100% payout come December 31, hopefully.
Kris Smith
Yeah, Greg. Sorry. Hey, Greg, thanks for the question. It’s Kris here. Yeah, we’ve moved to the 75% payout effective this quarter. It’s underway. As we move get at near $8 billion we’re going to go to that 100%. As Rich said right now, we can do all sorts of math on assumptions of the business environment and that sort of thing. And some math might tell people it will be towards the mid of next year or in the first half of next year.
Our focus as Rich laid out is to drive that as soon as we can. So pulling every lever we can. So the team is focused on actually working to hit that target towards the end of the year. As Rich said, it’s not an unconditional promise, but I’ll tell you, it — Rich has been very clear with us and with the teams that’s what we’re driving for. But at the end of the day, we’re not going to be able to control the business environment, obviously, but that’s the framework.
Greg Pardy
Okay.
Rich Kruger
Suncor wants to be a team that beats expectations and that not by setting soft expectations, but challenging expectations, bringing our collective focus to a goal and over delivering. That’s the company we want to be.
Greg Pardy
Okay. Thanks, Rich. Second question is kind of the elephant in the room, but I’m going to ask in an indirect manner, which is what is your plan? Where is your perspective in terms of Reserve Life Index? So is the plan that even with all the growth that you have coming, that you would sort of maintain a very similar Reserve Life Index over the coming years, or is there area for optimization there as well?
Rich Kruger
One, Greg, we don’t target to a number, a specific number, but we look at what we have. We consider we’ve got a high-quality resource base, certainly long life. And we have, with the adjacency of all of our operations, there’s incremental resources that are not in the 2P numbers.
And so the work we have going on now, I would say that would be a bit more of the storyline that you would hear as we would give a longer-term update to the market. But I feel quite comfortable, as we roll up our sleeves and dig in, that we have an abundance of high-quality long-life resources that we can continue to add that will benefit from the existing infrastructure and the proximity of all our facilities in the Wood Buffalo region.
And we’ll have — as I said, well — that’ll kind of get into the long life bitumen replacement thoughts and plans, but we’ve got an abundance of opportunities and that to me, is really encouraging. We don’t target to a number, but I think, Kris’, point on, there’s no base, no material bitumen replacement capital in the next five years. That’s because we have options and we’ve got flexibility to determine what’s the highest value to plan it, execute it, do it right, and continue to deliver in this organization.
Greg Pardy
Very good. Thanks very much.
Rich Kruger
Yeah. You’re welcome, Greg.
Peter Zebedee
Thanks, Greg.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Neil Mehta
Yeah. Good morning, team, and congrats on this update. I guess the first question is just around Fort Hills, a big part of getting the upstream improvements also going to be driving progress at that asset and recognize we’ll get a little bit more color later this year. But, Rich, what are you prepared to talk about there in terms of how you want to attack this over the next couple of years to get back to optimal performance?
Rich Kruger
Yes. Let me turn it to Peter. Peter, talk about what you and your team are doing to maximize the value of that asset.
Peter Zebedee
Yeah. Thanks very much, Neil. Firstly, I’d just like to say this plant really is a Ferrari and we fully intend to run it pretty hard. We are right on target with respect to our three-year improvement plan, and we expect to continue that, of course, in the years to come. We’ve had a lot of learnings on how we mine this resource with respect to managing the risks that we’ve experienced historically. The Devonian water inflow as an example, the high wall failures. And we believe we have a very good control and understanding of that.
So I would say as we transition from mining in the South Pit into the North Pit and that’s the key focus of our teams right now, is to make that transition successfully in the next couple of years. We’ve built those learnings in and we’re looking to squeeze out every barrel out of this plant that we possibly can in the coming years. I would also say Fort Hills is a big focus area for improving the efficiency of our mining business that I talked about at the start of the presentation.
And that’s really where you’ll see us deploying a large amount of these ultra-class haul trucks that we purchased and displacing more expensive third-party contractors. Fort Hills is really one of the nexus points of doing that. And so it’s about transitioning to the North Pit successfully, continuing to fill the plant, and really driving efficiency in our mining business. And we think that’s the winning formula for Fort Hills.
Neil Mehta
Thanks, Peter. The follow-up is, if we were doing this call a couple of years ago, we just spend 75% of it talking about safety. And I know you guys put a lot of processes in place, and it’s been terrific to see material improvement on that metric. But again, Rich, just love your perspective on has the culture really turned? Do you feel like you’ve mitigated a lot of the risks around this? Do you have a winning setup here on safety as we look out over the next year?
Rich Kruger
Well, first of all, I’d start out with safety as a never ending venture, never ending journey. But I think it starts with, do you care about people? And I think this organization, as I’ve went top to bottom, whether I’m in control rooms or walking pipelines and things, this organization, we care about people. And when you care about people, you — then you put the right priorities in place.
And safety is not just about a message from the top or, saying — a pat on the back and saying, everybody works safe. It’s looking at, do you have the right leadership. Do you have the right training? Do you have procedures and procedural compliance? Have you applied the appropriate technologies? It’s a series of efforts, activities that fit together to create a safe workplace.
It starts with the belief and the commitment, but then it goes much deeper than that, and all these are areas that we have continued to work on to strengthen them in concert. I mentioned on the last earnings call, I talked about our Operational Excellence Management System. And a part of that is not only ensuring that we’re more productive about how we go about our work, but we’re safer with how we go about work. And I’ll end the whole conversation with, not only does it start with caring about people, but it continues with listening to people.
The people on the front lines who are doing the work, they are in the best position to determine the hazards and what they encounter. And so our entire processes are geared toward ensuring that we have input from the people doing the work, then that leadership listens and responds to put the safest workplace in sight. So I never declare victory on safety. Am I pleased? Yes. Am I satisfied? I’m never satisfied. We’ve more work to do, but it is front and center on everything we do.
Neil Mehta
Thanks.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Roger Read with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.
Roger Read
Yeah. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for hosting the event. I’d like to maybe talk a little bit about some of the specific savings that you’re targeting and the upstream and the downstream. Just get a feel what did you benchmark against to come up with some of these targets? And what creates the, let’s say, degree of confidence you have in these numbers, or what are the risks to undershooting or the possibilities of doing a little bit better?
Rich Kruger
Roger, let me start out, but then I’m going to really turn it over to both Dave and Peter again, I think you used a really keyword, benchmarking because our operations facilities are not identical to anybody else’s. But there’s so many similarities. And I’ve seen organizations in the past where they rationalize differences away. They — well, we’re different because we have red trucks and they have yellow trucks or whatever.
We’re not rationalizing anything away. We are increasingly looking outside our fence line to see who does something better than us. How can we learn, improve, and not achieve their level of performance, but go beyond it? So, for example, in Peter’s world, he has very rigorously looked at best-in-class benchmarking. Yes, largely in the Oil Sands, but for a lot of our ideas on autonomous and others, outside of the Oil Sands, in hard rock mining through our OEMs, where we — where they can provide us a wealth of data to look at it.
So we’re looking at everything. We went through it, whether it’s operation of autonomous vehicles or whether it’s maintenance schedules. I think this Mine Connect application is a game changer for us. And we look long and hard at our peers in the Oil Sands, and we don’t rationalize anything away. If we see anything where we think someone is better, we want to know why and what can we do. And similarly, in the downstream, Dave and his team have a bit of a longer history because they participated in the Solomon Survey.
I said on one of our early calls that we had skipped a cycle or two for a whole host of reasons. That’s not us anymore. We — in fact, we’ve accelerated a cycle working with Solomon to get in there. We want to know what the best of the best are doing and then have a definitive plan to close that gap and then to excel beyond it. So, as I said here, our numbers here are not pulled out of the air, and they’re not something that we’ve sat in a boardroom and said, well, we’re going to sign the organization up for this.
We’ve engaged the leadership teams, looking at the gaps, looking at the data, and saying, okay, what resources, people, money, time, is it going to take for you to close that gap? And then we look each other in the whites of our eyes and say, all right, are you committed? Can you do it? I think this is another example where I’m not leaving much room for Dave and Peter to talk. But, gentlemen, do you have anything to add to it? Dave?
Dave Oldreive
Yeah. I can add a few examples, maybe specifically around turnarounds. So, turnarounds? Yes. We use Solomon benchmarking. In fact, our $225 million to $250 million a year of savings that we know we’re going to capture is really from getting from where we are today, which is somewhere between the third and the fourth quartile up to the midpoint of North America.
You saw on the chart that we presented that our ultimate goal is to get into the first quartile, but the money that we show on this page is to get us to the midpoint of North America. We know we can achieve that by 2026, and we think there’s some upside. We also think we can do our turnarounds faster, and we really think we can get to first quartile turnaround performance from a schedule standpoint.
I’ll use some examples. At our Montreal refinery, which I mentioned we finished that quite a bit early, our recent turnaround there. That turnaround was well into the planning phase when we started this initiative. But we started to look at it through a competitive lens, and when we did that, we saw, hey, we were pretty good on cost, but our duration was way too long compared to the benchmarks. And this turnaround included a bunch of scope around crude furnaces and fractionators to support more Western Canadian crude.
And with that competitive mindset in mind, the team challenged themselves to look at new ways to do the work scope. So we started preassembling our furnace components and doing some pre work on the support structure of the furnace, so we could essentially just plug and play or bolt up the new furnace components versus doing all that work during the turnaround. And that fundamental change in thinking as we challenged ourselves with competitive targets really resulted in changes in the duration of the turnaround. And, oh, by the way, we’re running. We’re running safely and well above nameplate.
Similarly in Sarnia, we had — we took a similar approach with some heat exchanger work. Normally, we take our heat exchangers all apart in the field and reassemble them. We had some pretty high pressure complex heat exchangers. We chose to take them out as a single unit, take them to a local shop in Sarnia, do that under much more controlled conditions where we could do the work faster and more cost effective.
So here is some of the examples that we’re doing as we challenge ourselves with the competitive targets. It gets the creative juices all the way through the organization to come up with new ways of doing things. So that’s some of the reasons why I think we’re going to exceed those targets.
Rich Kruger
So, Roger, you asked about confidence. The words I used at the beginning, I think I described, what you’re going to hear, is tangible, credible, challenging and bold. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but that’s why we get paid. And the — there is a high confidence. There’s even a higher determination in this thing. We don’t come up with these plans lightly. They represent our commitments to it. And we went through a series of the bigger, more tangible examples with you.
But what we have is the question on culture was asked by Neil, what we have is an entire organization that’s focused-in on big and small, in contributing to this, breakeven into this improvement. And it’s the long, long list of many other things that will add to this. But when you create that level of clarity, alignment and focus with it within an organization on a goal, or I’ve used the words what winning means, you can accomplish amazing things. So our confidence is quite, quite high.
Now, if I said down to the penny each of the activities, are they going to, we’re not looking at it like that. Those were indicative of the big prizes and the targets, and we’re committed to that. But I would ask that you not steward us on item by item in that. It’s not how this game is going to be won. It’s going to be the aggregate of all of the things we do, big and small, and the determination of the organization to deliver on it. So confidence, I’ve never lacked for confidence in my life. And I’m not lacking for it right now either.
Roger Read
Appreciate that. I’m thinking you mentioned yellow or red trucks, but I’m guessing they’ll be red at Fort Hills — Ferrari asset.
Rich Kruger
Well, don’t blink, because they’re moving fast and they’re going to be full to the brim.
Roger Read
All right. The other follow-up question I had, somewhat unrelated. But getting back to the baseline spend, as you said, no significant spin in the next five years. In terms of the life of that resource, is it one of these situations where you don’t have to spin in five years, but it’ll have to ramp aggressively thereafter or do you feel that ultimately there’s going to be a number of possible solutions to future resource? In other words, you could acquire something, you don’t necessarily have to build it. Maybe just a little bit of clarity as to why you’re comfortable saying you don’t have to spend over the next five years.
Rich Kruger
Sure. I’m going to turn it to Peter, but I think it’s more the later. We believe we will have a number of options and internal, we’ve mentioned some of the things today, but that’s exactly what the work. Kent Ferguson is in the room with us and his team, his development team, they’re going through this work right now, looking at the range of options, whether they’re In Situ, whether they’re related to our mining operation in some way. So I think, the ultimate answer, we think is going to be a series of things timed accordingly based on value. Peter, but you want to comment anything additional on the Base Plant? We’ve got another decade of life left. So we think we have time.
Peter Zebedee
Yes. No. Exactly right, Rich. And we certainly do have time. I think the Fort Hills interconnected at Base Plant is one of our key leverage points for that. And Kent and I are looking at ways to debottleneck that even more one of those low-cost, high opportunities that we’re going to be pursuing here in the next couple of years.
But our ability to flex bitumen and really leverage the physical interconnects that we have in the region whether that be Firebag to Base Plant, Fort Hills to base plant, really offsets the short-term pressures that we have on a Base Plant bitumen supply where we can take our time. We’ll evaluate the most competitive option and we’ll move forward with that. So, yeah, that’s kind of where we’re sitting right now.
Kris Smith
Maybe I’ll just add one thing, Peter. It’s Kris here, Roger. And we’ve talked about this before and it plays on what Peter just described. We’re in a position with our regional bitumen supply that we don’t need to replace the baseline to keep the upgraders full. And that’s a really important point.
Our base mine is hardwired to our Base Plant upgrader. But once that base mine depletes, which is — which Peter says is going to be well into the next decade, we’re covered on upgrading supply. This is really about the incremental bitumen replacement, and so it’s not replacing the entire mine. And we have the time and the seriatum of options that we can run through, and we’ve got — and we’re debottlenecking and growing production as we go, as you saw on the chart.
Roger Read
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question, and that will come from the line of Menno Hulshof with TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Menno Hulshof
Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Like everyone else, I do appreciate the rundown. The first question is on Slide 31. You talked about opportunities within the other economic projects bucket, I believe, potentially making their way into the Q1 2026 and beyond. Can you just elaborate on what those opportunities are and when you’ll be in a position to talk about them in more detail?
Kris Smith
Yeah. Sure. Menno, thanks. So to give you a sense, I mean, in addition to lots of — it can be lots of small things as well, things like our E&P capital, sales and marketing, economic program, as well as some of the spending in In Situ. Some of the larger ones, though, that we’re looking at are things like our Firebag debottleneck program post 2026, our MLX East Mine extension at Syncrude.
We’re looking at our upgrader two, unit two. It’s coming into a place where we’re starting to look at investment for life extension, and then there’ll be some dollars potentially for some of this early bitumen supply development that we’re talking about. So that’s sort of the nature of the types of things. And as I said in my remarks, a good number of those. I mean, they’re not — they’re at a place where the assessment is happening now, and they’ll go through a very detailed, I use the word high bar, but they’ll go through a very detailed assessment here over the next 12 months to 24 months to see if they actually make the cut and get into the queue.
Rich Kruger
And just to add to that, with a high bar, its capital. So we’ve got — we’ve talked about today a capital allocation. So as we look at it, we will look at where the highest and best use for capital is. And Kris went through kind of five criteria in a framework, and we’ll look across that framework where’s the best use of capital? It doesn’t automatically go to, okay, we’ve got a new project, so do it. It — there — on that list of five, there may be other areas where it’s more valuable.
Menno Hulshof
Terrific. And then my second question is on retail. I thought I heard you talk about rationalizing underperforming locations. Can you just give us a sense of the potential scope of that exercise and timing? And should we be expecting bits and pieces here, or could we see something a little bit more substantial?
Rich Kruger
Dave?
Dave Oldreive
Yes. Thanks. Menno, great question. We’re on track for our retail growth plans which includes a 30% margin growth from 22 to 27. We’ve been expanding our retail offering. In ’23, we added — we updated 23 existing sites and added four new sites already in ’24. We’ve added two new sites and expanded our offerings at 10 locations. And the program continues to grow through ’24 with nine new sites and 62 enhancements.
Our divestment program will be somewhat smaller compared to that part of the program, but we’ve already divested nine sites in 2023, and we’ll continue along that type of — that kind of range through the next few years, probably 10 to 15 sites a year, depending on when they come up for renewal for capital spend. We’ll optimize around that. And really we’re looking at sites that maybe don’t have the right location, the right real estate, the right size to take the proper full offering, and to really be able to deliver the kind of returns we expect from our network.
Rich Kruger
So retail is a business line overall, but because of the number of sites, there’s an opportunity in there to continue to optimize or maximize the value, whether it’s selective and high quality growth in the high value markets, or whether it’s rationalizing sites that are in less valuable locations. So there’s a lot of churn that goes on in that even though the overall retail is a business line, we want to be sure that the component parts are of the highest value they possibly can be.
Menno Hulshof
Thanks again. I’ll turn it back.
Rich Kruger
Thanks, Menno.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of John Royall with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.
John Royall
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the presentation today. So my first question is on capital allocation. Good to see the increase of $3 billion to your net debt floor. And I realize you haven’t given hard guidance, but since it appears to be kind of a medium to short-term event, can you just remind us how you think about returns once you get to the 100% level? I assume a steady growth rate in the base dividend. But beyond that, should we think about the share buyback as being the primary method of return or any thoughts to a variable dividend?
Kris Smith
Yeah. Hey, John. Thanks for the question. It’s Kris here. You’re exactly right. I mean, as we head to that net debt floor, or that net debt target of $8 billion, and we move the share buybacks to that 100% zone, we will steadily grow the dividend as I laid out, but our primary method of returning capital to shareholders beyond the dividend will be share buybacks.
We’re not looking at variable or special dividends as a vehicle for that right now. I think looking at where we view the value of our shares, the intrinsic value, and the prop — value proposition that represents for our shareholders. That’s really the vehicle for us to return capital to shareholders.
And at the same time, it helps our share count, as you know, which then translates over back into that dividend. And so that we’re managing that total dividend obligation as well and continuing to grow that for shareholders. So right now, we do not have special or variable dividends in mind. We’re going to be really levering share buybacks.
Rich Kruger
And just to comment on dividend yield, I don’t have any big driving motivation to have the highest yield in the market. I’d rather have share price appreciation and growth. And you guys will know better than I. But I think over the last several years, we’ve had to have kind of a higher yield to keep people interested in our story.
Well, we want people to be interested in our story not because of we have the highest dividend yield, because we have the strongest and highest growth rate, total shareholder return in our share price and stuff. So we want to have a reliable and growing and competitive dividend, but we want to keep driving that share price for shareholder value. And I think I just reiterate what Kris said as we look at it today, special dividends don’t necessarily give us much enthusiasm. Share buybacks is where you can expect our focus to be.
John Royall
Great. Thank you. And then my follow-up is on the offshore E&P business, which hasn’t really come up today. You aren’t the operator in most of those businesses, so it’s hard for Suncor to drive improvement in that segment the way you can in the Oil Sands. But that brings up the question of whether or not E&P is core to your portfolio. And how do you view E&P and how it fits into your larger portfolio? Is it more of a source of cash flows that funds capital returns and investment in the Oil Sands, or are there pieces that could shake out of that business if the opportunity already get?
Rich Kruger
So let me — I’m going to let you in on a secret. What is core? What’s core for us? What’s core are assets that make money and that they deliver free cash flow. So if they meet that criteria, you’re invited to the family reunion. And so as we look at them — and John, I’m being a little facetious there, but we look at the E&P and there’s four primary assets off the East Coast. They are a little bit different. Two of them are non-operated by the same operator, international operator. They’re similar kinds of operation Hebron and Hibernia.
The other two are floaters we operate one. One of our competitors operates the other. So we look at them like we look at everything. What are the sources and uses of funds, and what’s the long term value that they provide? So it’s really not any different than any other asset or asset class in terms of how we look at them.
John Royall
Thank you.
Rich Kruger
You’re welcome.
Operator
Thank you. I’m showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Troy Little for any closing remarks.
Troy Little
Thank you, everyone for joining our call this morning. If you have any follow-up questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. You can end the call, operator.
Operator
This concludes today’s program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.
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