All right, this is always a highlight of the conference for me to have Phillips 66 here. You got keynoted a couple of years ago at the conference. Gosh, a lot's happened in refining. I don't think any of us in pre-COVID or in the midst of COVID would have thought that refining margins would have ended up being where they are today. We want to talk with the leadership team about how they're seeing the go forward, especially on the back of what I thought was a very effective Analyst Day. We have Mark Lashier here, President and CEO, Kevin Mitchell, the CFO, and Jeff Dietert, Vice President, and knows everything macro. Mr. Lashier, maybe talk about the response from investors on the back of the Analyst Day. What do you think was the most important message?
From an investment community perspective, how we can track your progress and hold the company accountable?
Absolutely. First, Neil, thanks for having us here.
Thank you.
It's great to be here. Happy New Year. We did enjoy our Investor Day. I think we had a good, strong message that we wanted to deliver. Really at a high level, the takeaway is we want to be very focused and very disciplined, and we're gonna be disciplined around returning value to our shareholders in the near term and the long term. In the near term, we committed to returning $10 billion-$12 billion cash returns to shareholders from July of this year through the end of 2024, and that's a combination, of course, of dividends and share repurchases.
Where we are today with the dividend, you can think about a little less than half of that number will come in as dividends and then the balance as share repurchases. We have high degree of confidence that with our outlook on margins, and a conservative view that we'll be able to deliver against that. Then you go beyond that, we had, we talked a lot about our business transformation efforts that are underway, you know, fixing some things in our refining business, reducing our costs and positioning us to compete in any environment. Refining, we're looking at reducing our costs by about $0.75 a barrel.
Also enhancing our ability to capture market what the market gives us by about 5 percentage points, enhance the availability of our assets, create more flexibility. On the bigger picture, our cost restructuring, we're targeting $1 billion in cash reductions by the end of 2024. We've targeted about half of that this year, about half that next year. We're outperforming, so we've got good momentum going into next year on those metrics. When you look at that billion-dollar number, about $800 million is actual cash cost reductions and then about $200 million in sustaining capital. Beyond that, beyond the end of 2024, we'll continue to accrue those sustainable recurring reductions through some modest capital investments.
You'll see some upside to that number beyond 2024. We also talked about our wellhead to market strategy around midstream, particularly NGL midstream. Key part of that is the DCP acquisition. That acquisition will add about $1 billion a year in EBITDA. Of course, there'll be synergies associated with that as well that we'll talk about once that transaction is complete. Other things we've got going on, whether it's in petrochemicals, the cost initiatives, all those things add up to about an incremental $3 billion in EBITDA that we will grow from our current base over the next couple of years. We're gonna cap our capital investments to $2 billion.
We'll be very disciplined, about $1 billion worth of growth, about $1 billion in sustaining. I said we were gonna reduce. We've been historically at about $1 billion. We're gonna reduce $200 million of sustaining capital. When you fold DCP in, their sustaining capital gets us back to about $1 billion. That's really it. We're gonna do things to improve our refining performance, to have a very focused and deliberate growth in specific areas. Nothing, you know, nothing getting out over our skis. We talked a little bit about what we're doing in renewables, mostly renewable fuels, renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel, those kinds of things.
As far as tracking that, we're, we intend to deliver metrics and talk about metrics at the very least at our earnings calls on a quarterly basis, so you can be able to track what we're doing and how we're capturing that. We don't count anything until the CFO says we can count it. We'll see scorecards, that sort of thing coming out around the cost reduction and enhancements that we're driving.
That's great.
We're pretty excited about it. We're moving heavily into execution mode. Last year was a lot about putting all this together.
Mm-hmm
planning. Now it's all about execution and delivery.
Well, that's great. That's a good foundation for our conversation. Let's start on refining. This is a question for all of you, but maybe I'll pick on Jeff first.
Mm-hmm.
just your perspective on where we are in the refining cycle, the perspective on cracks. When you actually set out the Analyst Day, which when you kind of do the math implies $13 of long-term EPS, you set it at a pretty conservative crack spread. Does that reflect some conservatism in the way you're thinking about the market? Or just where are we with the potential that we're above mid-cycle?
Yeah. I think one thing that was big that really happened since the pandemic is we've taken about 4.7 MMbpd of refining capacity out of the market. That rationalization has tightened up the market. Last summer, we saw demand back close to 2019 levels and saw margins, frankly, I didn't think we'd see and hadn't seen historically. That has tightened the market. Diesel, in particular, is very tight. Today diesel inventories are 15% below the five-year average. Gasoline inventories are 7% below the five-year average. The market is still tight. We've seen a little bit of softness in demand recently. Gasoline and diesel down relative to 2019 levels, but still a tight market.
When we think about mid-cycle, we use the 2012-2019 period, and the RIN-adjusted crack during that period of time was $12 a barrel. Today we're over $20 a barrel in January, which December and January are usually your weakest months of the year, weak demand period versus the summer driving season. We do have an above-average maintenance period, the industry as a whole does, for the spring, so maintenance is gonna be heavy. For Phillips 66, we have had our heavy maintenance period in 2022 last year, so we'll have something closer to a normal turnaround year this year. Things look to continue to be tight as we are maximizing diesel yield year-round.
As we approach the summer driving season, we expect gasoline and diesel to be tight again this summer.
Yeah. you know, China is an interesting wild card 'cause it can move two ways. Mark, you've spent a lot of time looking at China in your experience running chemicals businesses. What are your thoughts around reopening and what that could mean for global demand, but also the offset potentially of higher product exports?
Yeah, I think that's a great question, Neil. We pay a lot of attention to that, both from refining, re-refined product perspective as well as petrochemical. I think from a petrochemical's perspective, it really could be a catalyst that pulls us away from what we kinda see as the bottom of the trough right now. It's those markets, it doesn't take a lot to catalyze a movement towards restocking and see margins expanding. Refined products, you know, between COVID and China and the sanctions on Russia and crude oil from Russia going to China and India, and very soon maybe refined products. If you're, if you're in the if you're a Chinese producer, do you, do you run Russian crude through your refinery to produce refined products, or do you import refined products?
The Chinese are very good at making buy versus make decisions, so it's gonna be an interesting dynamic to see how that all plays out. I think that is the biggest wild card, I think that we're looking at in 2023, is how that equilibrium gets reestablished.
Yeah. To be clear, even though you use $12 a mid-cycle in the way that you set your long-term guide, you believe we're gonna sustain above mid-cycle?
I believe we will, and I think there's a number of things driving that dynamic. I think the cost structure in the U.S. is competitive globally. I think that Europe, while it's not having the blowout cost and energy that it was, it's still gonna be under pressure. It's gonna put pressure on which crudes Europeans can process. I think that that does create a structural advantage, at least in the near term. It may reset out in the future, but we're bullish for now.
Well, that's a.
Export. Oh, sorry.
Natural gas prices in the U.S., about $4 an MMBtu. In Europe, it's about $24 an MMBtu. For us, that's about a $6 a barrel cash operating cost advantage in today's market.
Yeah. That's real money. And higher European gas prices, even though it has come off cyclical peaks, still will defer a European refiner from running a hydrocracker, but also from processing heavy crudes. I think that is showing up less in locational differentials in Western Canada, but in terms of quality differentials. You guys have the largest Western Canadian crude buying capability of any refiner in America. You talk about how you've been able to take advantage of that, you know, here more recently.
Well, certainly we've got refineries positioned to take advantage of that, both from the pipeline connectivity as well as the kit that they have on the ground. It has been beneficial to our refineries. I think that, Jeff, you wanna comment further?
Yeah. I think we're experiencing really wide differentials today, $27, $28 a barrel discount to WTI. We do expect that to soften next year. The SPR, you know, a lot of the crude pulled out of the SPR in 2022 was medium sour crudes. Still expect strength there. The forward curve's about $23 a barrel for 2023.
Yeah.
That's still a nice advantage for us.
Yeah. Okay, let's talk about the operational improvement journey and the self-help 'cause that's really important. You spent some time, we saw each other over the summer and we talked about you're doing some diagnosis to try to figure out the root cause of why uptime hasn't been as good as-
Yeah.
... you wanted it to be. What do you think as you look back, and diagnose the initial issues, what they were, and what is the structural fix to ensure that you're operating at first quartile going forward?
Yeah, I think that's, it's a number of things. As, as the head of our refining division, Rich Harbison, talked about on Investor Day, that we have taken our eye off the ball a little bit with respect to refining. Refining, you know, it was kind of the beat-up industry for a couple of years and we're focused on growing midstream. We were focused on developing other opportunities. You know, refining was facing existential questions, frankly, across the globe. That's changed, and now we've got the opportunity to correct those things and to come back and actually make some fairly minor investments to enhance our ability to operate. I think we've come through a very heavy turnaround season post-COVID. The kits are running well. They're running incredibly well.
Even through the winter storm, they showed great resilience. I think that we've turned the corner there from a bit on our ability to operate, but we're gonna continue to focus on enhancing that availability. Now, if the market is there, we wanna be able to run, and we think the market's gonna be there for at least a couple years, and to be able to capture those margins that are out there, and at the same time reduce our cost and enhance our ability to process crude. If the WCS diffs contract-
Yeah
We wanna be able to shift to lighter crudes that are available in North America. We wanna focus our ability on key assets to be able to compete for the very long term. We're talking decades now instead of years. We're in it for the long haul in refining. We've got to make the right moves to make sure those assets are ready to fight in whatever the market environment is.
It strikes me one of the practical implementations of this is shifting from a really a hub and spoke type of a model, where each of the businesses ran as independent refiners to one where it's a lot more centralized.
Mm-hmm.
Is that a fair assessment?
That's a fair assessment. That's a very accurate assessment, frankly. We want to simplify the business. We want to standardize the way we run our refinery business. We want to optimize across the platforms. Technologies that we've put in place will enable that, we really think it's the way to position ourselves competitively, it's being embraced by the organization today.
Okay. Well, we saw you guys ran really well in Q3. We'll keep our eyes open.
All right.
Q4 sounds good.
More to come.
In midstream, let's talk about DCP to the extent you can.
Sure.
Just where are we in terms of bringing that business into the fold? Because you now have a controlling interest-
Mm-hmm.
in the entity.
Yeah.
It sounds like you can already make forward progress on driving the synergies out of the business.
We are making progress. We're already taking action. We are essentially operating the business now. We've identified and we're driving synergies. Now Kevin is actually the Chairman of the DCP board, so maybe I'll let him address the question.
Yeah. Neil, I mean, you're right. We're limited on what we can say.
Yeah.
I think the one thing you can be sure of is when we have something to tell you, we'll, you know, you'll be the first to hear. We'll, we'll be public on that. Just from a perspective in terms of what that means timeline, once we have an agreement, and this whole process is a negotiation with the special committee of the DCP Board. They have a fiduciary responsibility to the LP investors, so they have to go through their process. Obviously, our motivation is to be able to conduct this transaction at the lowest cost, lowest price we can, but they're motivated at the other side of that. We're working through that process, and when we have something to say, we'll certainly be in a position to do that.
Just to kind of think about timeline, once we reach agreement, there's about a probably four-month period before we close because it's still an acquisition of a public entity.
Right.
There's a defined process around that, and it takes a little bit of time. Realistically, if you assume we get something done in the not too distant future, it's still gonna be a second quarter closing. To Mark's earlier point, we already control the entity. We're already executing on integration plans. In fact, the integration planning is done. We're executing on integration, and you saw some of the changes that were announced at the end of the year.
Yeah.
We're marching quickly down that road. The only downside is, at this point in time, any synergies, we only capture the 43% benefit net to us. Once the roll-up's complete, it's 87% to us. We'll continue to progress down that path.
It's understandable. It's hard to provide what those synergies numbers are until you've closed the transaction.
That's right. That's right.
What does DCP provide to Phillips 66? How has the weakness in the NGL market changed your thinking around the investment, or has it not at all?
Well, we've got a long-term view on the strength of the NGL markets and, you know, the resource base in the Permian, the DJ, where we can access is going to be around for a very long time, and it fits well, it integrates well into our view of petrochemical markets. They're going to drive demand long term for NGL products as well as gas. Gas is becoming more important. Natural gas is becoming more and more important. The DCP acquisition and the roll-up of the public units is key to our strategy to have a wellhead to market strategy. We can be a one-stop provider for producers in the Permian, for instance.
They know that they can have their molecules, that their NGL molecules or gas molecules can be taken to market without going through multiple parties where they've got to have somebody that does the G&P, somebody does the transportation, somebody does the fractionation. We've got the whole value chain now. We see that as where we wanna be to drive future growth.
Yeah. Neil, if I could add just on a macro perspective, NGL and petrochemical feedstocks have grown at a pace faster than overall GDP, as opposed to crude demand, which grows at, you know, a fraction of GDP. The growth there has been sustained for quite a while, and we expect that to continue. NGL production in the U.S. has outperformed.
Yeah.
... crude and natural gas for many years. In 2022, NGLs grew 8%-9%. Crude was up 4%, and natural gas was up 3%. It continues to grow at a faster pace than the other products.
Yeah.
I would just, to add further, you look through the pandemic, DCP held up extremely well during the pandemic period, which was a little bit of a surprise to us, to be honest. It really did, which speaks to the resilience of those molecules. The other factor is their business is about 70%-75% fee-based.
Yeah.
It's not 100% commodity exposure. There is some residual commodity exposure there. Honestly, for us in our portfolio, we're okay with that, because as you know, we have significant commodity exposure anyway.
Yeah.
that works for us.
As you talk to ratings agencies, they're okay with you taking on a little bit more leverage because of the higher fee-based contribution.
Yeah.
That's actually a great pivot over to chemicals. Mark, I'll turn this one over to you. We went from euphoria to depression in this market in a matter of a couple of months. I thought refining was volatile.
Yeah.
What the heck happened, and how do we get out of it?
I guess the cure for high prices is high prices. What you're seeing is really when chemicals demand was strong, polyethylene demand was strong across COVID for a number of reasons that included weather disruptions and just strong demand. Demand continues to be strong, but there's been quite a few capacity additions in North America, and those are kind of running their course now over the next year. Demand continues to increase globally, though, you know, there could be an impact of recessionary influences and what happens in China. The fact is, we're kind of running our course on the near-term demand or the supply additions, and you're seeing the demand continue to increase. We believe margins have pretty well bottomed out.
If you look at the data, they've flatlined, and they're starting to show some life again, and should just season low typically in towards the end of the year. We see things starting to improve probably maybe the second half of this year and then continuing to 2024.
You always do a good job of putting this in terms of cents per margin on an integrated basis.
Mm-hmm.
I think your mid-cycle over the years has been about $0.30.
Correct.
We peaked out at what, $0.50?
Approaching $0.60.
Yeah, it was in the 60s.
Yeah.
Where did we drop out?
It's about.
Between seven and eight.
$0.078, yeah.
... the last four months or so it's bottomed out.
About.
Now we're flattening out.
Yeah. Yeah.
Your view is by 2024, we can start to get back towards mid-cycle.
I think you would start moving toward mid-cycle. Yeah.
Yeah.
Correct.
We still have to digest some new capacity.
Correct
... that's coming in, including North America.
Yeah. I think, you know, when we look at, CP Chem's US Gulf Coast II, potentially RLPP, those coming on in 2026 and 2027, that turns out to look like a pretty fortuitous time to bring assets on because there's not a lot. You look at everyone pulled back hard through COVID, looking at capital investments. If you, if you wake up tomorrow and say, "Gee, I wanna build a petrochemical complex," it's about a 10-year horizon. So I think that the things that you would see come on in 2026 and 2027 have to be pretty well-baked at this point in time, and there's not much going on.
I would think.
Yeah.
As we talk to the majors, and we'll hear from Aramco and others over the course of this conference, I think a number of them are looking at the demand profile, exactly what Jeff said. Gasoline looks tough.
Yeah.
It looks pretty good in chemicals, there's a tendency to move towards building out.
Mm-hmm.
... in areas where growth is more significant. Your point is, it's different to do the work on an analysis around project versus getting to FID.
Correct. It's a long process to develop these. There's a handful of companies that have the wherewithal to do it. There's been a fair amount of discipline over the years.
at your mid-cycle margin, how should we think about the returns on your recent Gulf Coast FID? Why are you excited about that project?
Yeah. The Gulf Coast FID, it's gonna be, you know, mid-teens, and we've always seen upside to those kinds of projects. There's always debottleneck opportunities. I think that's consistent with what CP Chem's done over the last 20 years. That we won't. We take a very conservative front view. The capital looks good. We worked hard to get it to where it is. The construction is gonna happen at a good window. There's not a lot of other competing construction projects. We've got line of sight on labor, so we're comfortable with that. Inflationary pressures, I think, have been taken into account in that number, and we see those starting to ease by the time we really hit the heavy construction.
We're feeling pretty good about it.
If I can just-
Yeah, please.
add a little bit on the returns.
Yeah.
That mid-teens is a project-level return.
Correct.
Right.
That project is being financed at a sort of 50/50 level. One, in terms of the effective returns to CPChem and to us is greater than that because of the benefit of the leverage.
Mm-hmm.
That also plays out in terms of the capital funding commitments...
Yeah.
...to it. You've got it's a 51%, 49% joint venture, and then 50% financing. When you do the math and you then figure that's a spend profile over about a four-year period-
Yeah.
the capital commitments to CPChem really are very manageable. In fact, less than quite a bit less than the original Gulf Coast project, which did not have financing and was 100% CPChem level.
Yeah. CPChem will also be the marketer, to the offtake, and so there'll be an uplift for them there as well. They're also, because it is located and will tap into existing CPChem infrastructure, that they'll see additional return benefit there that'll be incremental above what the project will see.
Okay. That is helpful. The question is the composition of the business. It's really been balanced across these four different pillars. If you look at our sum of the parts, equal weighted marketing, in chemicals, refining, and midstream. Is there a conscious effort or decision here to say, "All right, refining, because we're worried about this on a long-dated basis, we're gonna start investing a little bit more in chemicals," one was gonna make up for the other?
Yeah, I think that it really is all about what you believe about growth and how you can position yourself to take advantage of growth and secure those returns that our investors expect, and that will drive it. We see the growth in NGL, we see the growth in chemicals. We see modest opportunities. I like what John said about, you know, bullets versus cannons in renewables.
Mm-hmm.
'Cause that's exactly what our strategy's been. We've put our toe in the water of several places. You know, renewable diesel is a lot closer to home. We've got assets that are very amenable to that, so that's been a bigger step for us. The other renewables are longer term. We're continuing to press down that path, but we're gonna be cautious on some of the more long-term, more exotic opportunities. You're gonna see that balance. Some of those things may show up in refining, like Rodeo, or if we do anything in sustainable aviation fuel. You're gonna see chemicals obviously attracting more capital, NGL attracting more capital. Marketing has been low capital, high return.
Yeah.
We continue to look. We've got a very specific strategy, targeted strategy there that we like and that's been successful across COVID, across a number of different, market conditions. We're gonna continue to make modest investments there as well.
Yeah. Let's talk about marketing. That has been a consistent surprise-
Mm-hmm.
...relative to our model. You did raise your mid-cycle view of that business. What's going on to drive higher cents per gallon effectively?
Yeah. Higher cents per gallon because we're getting more exposure in targeted markets to retail margin. We're focused on markets where there is a retail margin to capture. We've partnered with entities that know more about running the convenience store part of it than we do, and we bring a strength to complement that. You've got an evolution going on in the marketing where we used to supply gasoline and diesel to literally moms and pops that were out there running these stores. They've grown to, you know, these mom and pop 50, 60, 100 stations. Maybe the third generation's not interested in it. We know the business really well.
We know the assets, we know the environment really well. We're partnering with those that know how to run convenience stores, but we can then participate. We do it in a very in that we know what we're looking for in specific markets to take advantage of that.
What are you seeing in terms of real-time demand through your marketin.g system?
Don, do you wanna-
Yeah. We're seeing gasoline demand down about 5% relative to 2019 levels.
Yeah.
Diesel, down about 4%, recently. We've seen, demand soften a little bit relative to last summer we were approaching 2019 levels.
Yeah. That's published government numbers across the industry, not us specifically, so.
As you've done the analysis and you kinda tried to ascertain why we're trending lower than pre-COVID levels, despite the economy being bigger than where we were back then, is it the remnants of COVID? Is it work from home dynamics? Is it the consumer wallet being impacted by inflationary forces? How do you think about that?
Yeah. There's some of all of that. I think we've seen it hit on the East Coast and the West Coast more significantly than the central part of the country. We've not seen commuters go back to that 33% that was pre-pandemic component of overall US gasoline demand. There's been more in the press about.
You know, Gavin Newsom trying to take ICE vehicles out by 2035, the concern over inventories on the East Coast. It's been in the news a lot more. We know that when it's in the news, it tends to impact consumer behavior where it's been not as much in the news in the Central Corridor and the Gulf Coast. It hadn't had as big an impact. I think all those are variables.
Yeah, I think that you, the airlines were perhaps hit hardest during COVID. Just their demand destruction, the industry was able to ratchet back and make jet fuel go away in different ways. I think the rapid recovery in travel, I think the airline industry has struggled to keep up with that. I think it's still limiting the growth in jet demand. It's just the capacity of the airline industry to keep planes moving, to keep everybody happy. It looked like it's getting better and then maybe, you know, two steps forward, one step back kind of thing.
Well, jet's actually the tightest market today. Jet cracks are the highest in diesel-
Yeah.
... and gasoline's lagging.
Yeah, that's been interesting to see the difference between the distillate complex and the gasoline complex. Gasoline's basically at the five-year this time of year. Diesel and jet trading very strong. You have a disty-heavy refining kit. Are you running max diesel right now? How do you think about that spread between these two products, especially in an environment where European gas is still elevated, but it's not, you know, it's not $12 a barrel elevated, it's $6 a barrel elevated.
Right. Right. Right. I think. Hit me with the first question again. I'm drawing a zero.
How do you think about the spread between.
Yeah. Yeah.
... diesel and jet?
Diesel, we maxed diesel all year last year. I think the industry did as well. There was incentive to historically, we maxed gasoline yield in the summer months. We ran hard through the summer. There was a heavy turnaround season in late September, October, the industry ran hard November and December. We looked up early December, the industry was running 95% utilization. Typically in December, we're running 88%-89% utilization. Gasoline inventory's recovered somewhat, but they're still 7% below the five-year average. We see heavy maintenance this spring, likely to go in with pretty tight inventory situation into the summer driving season. Again, even, we're expecting to max diesel throughout the year.
Okay. That makes a ton of sense. Let's spend some time on low-carbon, and we'll finish off on the fun stuff, the how we think about your mid-cycle cash flow. 'Cause I think that's gonna be really important for investors to think about how to value your businesses. What is the low-carbon strategy? Help us. I think it was at this conference, Jeff, right, three years ago, that you guys announced that you were starting to develop, two years ago, that low-carbon platform.
Yeah.
What's your EBITDA expectation from that business and target, and how should we think about your strategy there?
Yeah. We've talked about a $2 billion EBITDA by the end of the decade. I think that, you know, we're not going to move heaven and earth to realize that. We really are focused on how do we get the kinds of returns that we expect, that our shareholders expect from emerging energy opportunities, from energy transition opportunities. That landscape's evolving. You know, really from a lower carbon perspective, it starts with our existing hydrocarbon business. How do we lower the hydrocarbon or the carbon footprint of our hydrocarbon business? We've got goals in mind there. We've published our Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3 emission targets there. Our next nearest neighbor to that is our aspirations around renewable fuels.
Primarily the first move is renewable diesel, taking used cooking oil, the vegetable oils, animal fats, converting those to renewable diesel. We've got an asset in California that's being converted today, our Rodeo facility.
Mm-hmm.
It's got hydrotreating capacity that's perfect. It's almost as if it was just put there for this purpose. We can put new catalyst in there, put a front end on that to clean up all these different cats and dogs that we'll bring in to process there. It's in a great market, great logistics location. We've got access to feedstocks, and there's a unit running today.
Right.
Unit 250 that's proving the concept. We've got great comfort there. It's gonna be a high return project. The next nearest neighbor to that is sustainable aviation fuel. There's strong market demand for sustainable aviation fuel. Every airline has made net zero commitments. Really the only opportunity for them out there today would be sustainable aviation fuel, and there's not enough to go around. There's a market pull, there's government support. That's starting to look interesting as well. I think the key there is to not compete for the same feedstocks that renewable diesel consumes into sustainable aviation fuel. We do produce a small amount of sustainable aviation fuel, co-processed in Rodeo. We do produce a small amount in our Humber facility in the U.K.
Longer term, I think it's gonna have to be on purpose production of sustainable aviation fuel. You start looking at things like hydrogen and carbon capture. I personally believe that carbon capture is gonna be very important because it's gonna be hard to get away from the high energy density of liquid hydrocarbons for a very long period of time. The only way to mitigate that carbon, that Scope 3 emission is carbon capture. We believe that carbon capture is gonna be important. We're not doing fundamental research in carbon capture, but we believe that the technologies are out there, and they're going to become very important and necessary. Hydrogen. We know a lot about hydrogen. We know a lot about the cost of hydrogen, how hydrogen's produced.
I think hydrogen is over the horizon a bit from a cost perspective. Moving to an entire hydrogen economy is, I think it's gonna require nuclear fusion or something like that. It's gonna be long before that happens. We are shooting bullets in that direction. No cannonballs yet, but we're tracking that, and we've got technologies that we're looking at around hydrogen. We've got our battery opportunities. We could believe both EV batteries, lithium-ion batteries for EVs, as well as storage batteries to facilitate the use of wind and solar power are important.
We aren't investing in wind, we're not investing in solar, but we certainly are looking at helping others invest in wind and solar around our facilities so we can, again, lower our carbon footprint of what we do today.
Yeah. I'm not even I'm not sure if I'm even allowed to ask you about needle coke, given all the sensitivities around how much of the market you're involved in. Just talk about the contribution from that business. It does seem to us that, you know, pricing has firmed up a little bit there.
Yeah, pricing has firmed up. I think that you look at, the scarcity of materials to meet the world's aspiration around lithium-ion batteries, one of those that are challenged most is graphite, synthetic graphite. Our needle coke goes into synthetic graphite production. It's a very good precursor to synthetic graphite. That's why we are looking at that value chain, to find out where can we capture the most value. Is it at the needle coke, or is it at synthetic graphite? Is it somewhere further down the battery value chain? Again, we're walking before we run.
Yeah.
We've made our investment in NOVONIX. We're learning a lot about that business today. There's gonna be ecosystems built up around lithium-ion batteries in North America and in Europe. We're well-positioned from Lake Charles and from Humber in the U.K. to supply those ecosystems or participate in them if it looks like the right thing for us to do.
Yeah.
You know, from a demand perspective, we're optimistic as well. Obviously, electric vehicle market is growing, and we serve that. Also the steel manufacturing electric arc furnace has a smaller carbon footprint than traditional steel manufacturing. We are seeing the addition of new electric arc furnaces into the market. Both aspects of demand look positive.
Great. We only have a couple more minutes, and we wanna make sure people get food for lunch as well. I thought, Kevin, I'll finish with you on just the numbers, right? You always do a good job of helping bridge from mid-cycle cash flow to thinking about how you're gonna use the cash. Walk us through the numbers.
What we laid out at Investor Day, mid-cycle cash flow on a 2022 basis of $7 billion. Obviously 2022 actual cash generation, significantly stronger than that. On a mid-cycle basis, $7 billion growing to $10 billion by 2025. That's a $3 billion increment, and it comes from a combination of the midstream growth that is driven primarily by the acquisition and integration of DCP. There are some other components to the midstream growth, that's a large piece of the $3 billion in cash flow growth. We also see Rodeo Renewed coming online in 2024, that's another approximately $700 million of EBITDA, which is gonna translate into about the same from a cash standpoint.
The third major element to that is the business transformation efforts. The business transformation, by that point in time, it's a billion-dollar run rate, of which there's $200 million of sustaining capital, $800 million on the cost side of it. When you put all that together, you're at this approximate $3 billion growth in cash generation. I think what's really important when you measure that against our commitment to returning cash to shareholders, we actually can deliver on that commitment based on the 2022 mid-cycle. That $7 billion, the dividend's just under $2 billion, and we're committed to competitive, secure, and growing. You can continue to expect to see an increase in the dividend on an annual basis.
Effectively, that will get funded, that increase will be offset by the impact of share repurchases. Two billion on the dividend. The capital program at a $2 billion level, approximately $1 billion of sustaining and $1 billion of growth. You saw the capital budget that we laid out for this year, very consistent with what we said on that. That's $4 billion that's consumed. That leaves $3 billion for share repurchases, any incremental work we wanna do around the balance sheet. It gives us a lot of flexibility, especially when you consider that we're actually in an above mid-cycle environment.
Yeah.
We were significantly above mid-cycle last year. We will go into 2023 with a strong cash position. Yes, we've got the DCP buy-in to fund, but the DCP buy-in also funds a sizable component of that cash generation growth. That will start accruing to us pretty soon once we're able to get that transaction completed and announced. Just one other comment from a balance sheet standpoint. You may have noticed in December, we paid off half a billion dollars of debt at the Phillips 66 level. That was debt that was maturing anyway early this year. At the DCP level, we also redeemed $500 million of preferred equity. That became callable in December.
At that point, it also went from a fixed coupon structure to a variable rate structure, which would have put it at about a 10% cost of funding. That was a very straightforward financial transaction that also goes to continue help clean up the balance sheet. I think we can do all of that and stay within our stated objectives of a 25%-30% net debt to capital level, which we feel very comfortable given that that will include and we already have consolidated the DCP debt and the funding associated with that.
Neil, just to put that in perspective, $10 billion-$12 billion for a company with a $45 billion-$50 billion returning 20%-24% to shareholders over 2.5 years. 10 quarters.
Yeah. That's great. Well, thank you. The story's very, very clear post the Investor Day. Well done. I wish you guys a wonderful 2023, and thank you for coming to Miami.
Thanks for having us, Neil.
Thanks, Neil.
We got food outside, and then we've got Cheniere coming up onto the stage. Thank you so much, everyone.