Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Valero Energy Corporation's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Homer Bhullar, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Good morning, everyone, welcome to Valero Energy Corporation's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. With me today are Joe Gorder, our Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Donna Titzman, our Executive Vice President and CFO, Lane Riggs, our Executive Vice President and COO, Jason Fraser, our Executive Vice President and General Counsel, and several other members of Valero's senior management team. If you have not received the earnings release and would like a copy, you can find one on our website at valero.com. Attached to the earnings release are tables that provide additional financial information on our business segments. If you have any questions after reviewing these tables, please feel free to contact our investor relations team after the call. I would now like to direct your attention to the forward-looking statement disclaimer contained in the press release.
In summary, it says that statements in the press release and on this conference call that state the company's or management's expectations or predictions of the future are forward-looking statements intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions under federal securities laws. There are many factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations, including those we've described in our filings with the SEC. Now I'll turn the call over to Joe for opening remarks.
Thanks, Homer. Good morning, everyone. We're pleased to report that we delivered solid financial results despite challenging market conditions again this quarter. Although gasoline cracks held steady and diesel cracks improved from the previous quarter, heavy and medium sour crude oil discounts to Brent crude oil remained narrow as supply was constrained by geopolitical events. The startup of new pipelines from the Permian Basin to the Gulf Coast tightened the WTI Midland to Cushing crude oil differential. Despite these headwinds, we generated $1.4 billion in operating cash flow, once again demonstrating the flexibility and strength of our assets to deliver steady earnings and free cash flow. During the quarter, we began to enjoy the benefits of our investments in the new Houston alkylation unit that was commissioned in June and from the recently completed Central Texas Pipelines and Terminals project.
The alkylation unit upgrades lower-value natural gas liquids and refinery olefins to a premium high-octane outlet product. The Central Texas Pipelines and Terminals reduce secondary costs and extends our supply chain from the Gulf Coast to a growing inland market. Other strategic growth projects in execution remain on target. The Pasadena Terminal, St. Charles Alkylation Unit, and Pembroke Cogeneration Unit are expected to be completed next year, with the Diamond Green Diesel expansion expected to be completed in 2021 and the Port Arthur Coker in 2022. In September, our Diamond Green Diesel joint venture initiated an advanced engineering and development cost review for a new renewable diesel plant at our Port Arthur, Texas facility. If the project's approved, construction could begin in 2021, with operations expected to commence in 2024. This would result in Diamond Green Diesel production capacity increasing to over 1.1 billion gallons annually.
The guiding framework underpinning our capital allocation strategy remains unchanged. We continue to expect our annual CapEx for both 2019 and 2020 to be approximately $2.5 billion, with $1 billion allocated for projects with high returns that are focused on market expansion and margin improvement. During the third quarter, we returned $679 million to stockholders, which represents a payout ratio of 61% of adjusted net cash provided by operating activities. We continue to target an annual payout ratio of 40%-50%. Looking forward, we're encouraged. Fourth quarter market conditions are favorable. Distillate and gasoline margins are significantly higher than last quarter and this time last year, supported by strong fundamentals, good demand, and wider medium and heavy sour crude oil discounts.
In closing, our team's simple strategy of striving for operational excellence, investing to drive earnings growth with lower volatility, and maintaining capital discipline with an uncompromising focus on shareholder returns has proven to be successful and positions us well for any market environment. With that, Homer, I'll hand the call back to you.
Thanks, Joe. For the third quarter of 2019, net income attributable to Valero stockholders was $609 million or $1.48 per share, compared to $856 million or $2.01 per share in the third quarter of 2018. Operating income for the refining segment in the third quarter of 2019 was $1.1 billion, compared to $1.4 billion for the third quarter of 2018. The decrease from the third quarter of 2018 is mainly attributed to narrower crude oil discounts to Brent crude oil. Refining throughput volumes averaged 2.95 million barrels per day, which was 146,000 barrels per day lower than the third quarter of 2018. Throughput capacity utilization was 94% in the third quarter of 2019.
Refining cash operating expenses of $4.05 per barrel were $0.33 per barrel higher than the third quarter of 2018, primarily due to higher maintenance activity and lower throughput in the third quarter of 2019. The ethanol segment generated a $43 million operating loss in the third quarter of 2019, compared to $21 million in operating income in the third quarter of 2018. The decrease from the third quarter of 2018 was primarily due to lower margins resulting from higher corn prices. Ethanol production volumes averaged 4 million gallons per day in the third quarter of 2019. Operating income for the renewable diesel segment was $65 million compared to a $5 million operating loss in the third quarter of 2018. Renewable diesel sales volumes averaged 638,000 gallons per day in the third quarter of 2019, an increase of 387,000 gallons per day versus the third quarter of 2018.
The third quarter 2018 operating results and sales volumes were impacted by the planned downtime of the Diamond Green Diesel plant as part of completing an expansion project. For the third quarter of 2019, general and administrative expenses were $217 million, and net interest expense was $111 million. Depreciation and amortization expense was $567 million, and income tax expense was $165 million in the third quarter of 2019. The effective tax rate was 21%. With respect to our balance sheet at quarter-end, total debt was $9.6 billion, and cash and cash equivalents were $2.1 billion. Valero's debt-to-capitalization ratio net of $2 billion in cash was 26%. At the end of September, we had $5.4 billion of available liquidity excluding cash.
With regard to investing activities, we made $525 million of capital investments in the third quarter of 2019, of which approximately $305 million was for sustaining the business, including costs for turnarounds, catalysts, and regulatory compliance. Net cash provided by operating activities was $1.4 billion in the third quarter. Excluding the impact from the change in working capital during the quarter, adjusted net cash provided by operating activities was $1.1 billion. Moving to financing activities, we returned $679 million to our stockholders in the third quarter. $372 million was paid as dividends, with the balance used to purchase 3.9 million shares of Valero common stock. The total payout ratio was 61% of adjusted net cash provided by operating activities. This brings our year-to-date return to stockholders to $1.7 billion and the total payout ratio to 54% of adjusted net cash provided by operating activities.
As of September 30, we had approximately $1.7 billion of share repurchase authorization remaining. We continue to expect annual capital investments for both 2019 and 2020 to be approximately $2.5 billion, with approximately 60% allocated to sustaining the business and approximately 40% to growth. The $2.5 billion includes expenditures for turnarounds, catalysts, and joint venture investments. For modeling our fourth-quarter operations, we expect refining throughput volumes to fall within the following ranges: U.S. Gulf Coast at 1.71 million-1.76 million barrels per day, U.S. Midcontinent at 410,000-430,000 barrels per day, U.S. West Coast at 260,000-280,000 barrels per day, and North Atlantic at 475,000-495,000 barrels per day. We expect refining cash operating expenses in the fourth quarter to be approximately $3.95 per barrel. Our ethanol segment is expected to produce a total of 4.3 million gallons per day in the fourth quarter.
Operating expenses should average $0.39 per gallon, which includes $0.06 per gallon for non-cash costs such as depreciation and amortization. With respect to the renewable diesel segment, we still expect sales volumes to be 750,000 gallons per day in 2019. Operating expenses in 2019 should be $0.45 per gallon, which includes $0.16 per gallon for non-cash costs such as depreciation and amortization. For 2019, we expect G&A expenses excluding corporate depreciation to be approximately $840 million. The annual effective tax rate is estimated at 22%. For the fourth quarter, net interest expense should be about $113 million. Total depreciation and amortization expense should be approximately $565 million.
Lastly, we still expect the RINs expense for the year to remain between $300 million and $400 million. That concludes our opening remarks. Before we open the call to questions, we again respectfully request that callers adhere to our protocol of limiting each turn in the Q&A to two questions. If you have more than two questions, please rejoin the queue as time permits. This helps us ensure other callers have time to ask their questions.
As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, you will need to press star then one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Let me start off with the obligatory IMO 2020 question. The cracks obviously are very strong. We're seeing spreads widening out. How much of the strength you see on the screen do you think is a function of just turnaround activity versus something that's the beginning of a more sustainable IMO impact? Maybe the 30,000-foot question here is how do you think IMO plays out, both the sustainability and the depth of impact as we think about your model over the next couple of years?
Good morning, Neil. Okay, Gary, you want to?
Yeah, Neil, I think, the products cracks, it's pretty difficult to be able to determine how much of the strength in the crack is IMO related, how much is just fundamentals and supply. We're certainly seeing a lot of indications in the market of IMO starting to impact it. The things I would point to, the diesel curve has just continued to shift higher the closer we get to the January 2020 date. On the gasoline market, we're seeing indications as well. Our view was that you would see some of these low sulfur feedstocks, the cat crackers being pulled out of the cats and put into the low sulfur bunker market.
If you look today, low sulfur VGO is $5 over gasoline in the Gulf, which is to the point where you'll start to see people pull that out of cat crackers and put it into low sulfur bunkers, which should impact gasoline yield moving forward. The big thing that I think is very visible is on the feedstock side of the business. High sulfur fuel, it traded as high as 95% of Brent earlier this year. This morning, trading at 61% of Brent. The forward curve on high sulfur fuel oil is backward, indicating it's going to get weaker as we go forward. As you would expect, as high sulfur fuel has traded weaker, we're starting to see that in the crude quality discounts. Through most of the year, we've had heavy sour trading inside of a 10% discount to Brent.
It's almost 20% discount to Brent today, Maya and WCS. I think Maya trading at $11.50 discount to Brent today. We're seeing medium sours get weaker as well. I think on the feedstock side of the business, it's pretty clear we're getting an impact, not as clear, but I think we are also seeing it on the product side.
Thank you. Then the follow-up question is around renewable diesel. Maybe, Joe and team, you could just talk about how you see this part of the business fitting into your long-term strategy, and then how you think about the gating factors for adding that new capacity that you talked about on the call, and then anything around blenders tax credit. A lot of pieces to that, but just if you can fill in the gaps as it relates to renewable diesel, because we think it's going to be an important part of the story going forward.
Neil, you took a book out of Paul Cheng, a page out of Paul Cheng's book here. You got those three questions in. I'll speak about part of it. I'll let Martin speak about part of it, and then Jason might want to cover kind of the probabilities for the blenders tax credit. Strategically, we're a company that really makes motor fuels, and we're a company that takes their environmental responsibilities and sustainability very seriously. When we look at the opportunities to produce products where there's going to be growth in the market, and they're going to have sustainably high margins, we look to renewable diesel. We just think it's a really good business. We've got a really good partner in Darling, and it's something that we know how to do.
We know how to run these processes very well, and so it fits right down the middle of our fairway, and so we feel very good about not only the returns, but the overall EBITDA contributions that we're going to get from this product for a very long time to come. Martin, you want to cover P?
Sure, Joe. Thanks. We're bullish on renewable diesel, we expect demand growth to be strong. You've got the Renewable Energy Directive II in Europe now that's been extended to 2030. The California LCFS has been extended out to 2030 and calling for a 20% greenhouse gas reduction in 2030. The recent elections in Canada would tell us we're probably going to see a national standard in Canada, too. You've got New York State. We think the future demand for renewable diesel just looks very strong.
You want to talk about the blenders tax credit?
Yeah, this is Jason. I can give you an update on the blenders tax credit. As you all know, it expired at the end of 2017. Both chambers of Congress have proposed legislation that would extend it. I think the Senate's got it going out for two years, and this is back retroactive to 2018, and the House for three. Negotiations on the BTC and the other tax extenders are now taking place within the context of the appropriations process. We're optimistic it'll get done because the BTC remains one of Senate Finance Chairman Grassley's top priorities, and there's really not a lot of opposition to it. However, this impeachment process is certainly interfering with the bipartisan cooperation that you need to get the package agreed to. That's what's created a little more uncertainty than there was before.
Hey, Neil, one other point.
Thanks for your candor, appreciate it.
One other point I think that we'd like to make on this, and Martin can speak to why aren't we doing like 200,000 barrels a day of this?
Yeah, I think the constraint you look at is in the waste feedstock market. Now we're confident we can source it, and we're not worried about that anytime soon, but that's the ultimate constraint on this is the feedstock. The feedstock supply is tied to global GDP per person, these waste feedstocks, that's increasing. We feel good about being able to source the feedstock. Our partnership with Darling, they're a global leader in this. They process 10% of the world's meat byproducts, we feel we're in a good place on securing the feedstock.
Appreciate all the perspective.
Yes.
Our next question comes from Roger Read with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
Yeah, thank you. Good morning.
Morning, Roger.
Just a couple of things to dig into, a little maybe more on the macro front. Just in terms of product demand, I recognize you can't give us absolute clarity on what's driving what, but we've got good cracks on even the light crude. In spite of IMO, things look better. I was just curious, maybe getting back to Neil's question there on how much of this might be turnarounds versus what we're actually seeing in terms of a solid backdrop on the demand front.
Yeah, Roger. I think to me, if you look at product inventories and you roll back to early August, total light products inventory was 16 million barrels above where we were in 2018 at the same time period. Over the last two months, we've had significant product draws such that the last set of stats, we were 19 million barrels below where we were in 2018. In the period of just a couple of months, you've had a year-over-year change in total light product inventories of 35 million barrels, which is a pretty staggering figure. If you look at that and break it down, we see good demand. Vehicle miles traveled look good. The tonnage index looks good. There's certainly some things that are supply-driven as well.
Shutdown of PES, some planned and unplanned refinery outages have driven that as well and helped support product fundamentals. moving forward, you look and gasoline sitting just a little above the 5-year average range. Diesel is at the lower end of the 5-year average range. On apparent days of supply, both gasoline and diesel below the 5-year average range. the fundamentals look very good for both gasoline and distillate moving forward.
Okay, great. As kind of a follow-up on that, we've obviously seen this issue in the tanker market. Part of that is clearly related to IMO with ships going into the dry docks for retrofitting all the scrubbers. I was curious, as we look at the risk of some of these product tankers on the clean side moving into the crude markets chasing rates, do you think we're at any legit risk of tightness in product tanker markets that could impact your export story as we go forward?
Roger, I think for us, most of our exports are short-haul markets. We're primarily going to Mexico and South America, and as freight rates spike, it actually gives us a competitive advantage for other people trying to get to those markets. I don't really know that it's much of a risk to us.
All right. Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Manav Gupta with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open.
Hi, guys. I had a quick macro question first. Can you talk a little bit about the limitations of very low sulfur fuel oil at this stage? I'm trying to understand, would shippers be more comfortable with sticking to the tried and tested marine gas oil, or would they actually be looking at the very low sulfur fuel oil as a cheaper substitute in the initial stages of IMO?
Yeah. We have a compliant blend that we are offering in the Corpus Christi market. We're also proceeding with the project where we'll be able to have a low sulfur blend in Pembroke. We also have seen that there's a lot of challenges on being able to blend this 0.5 material, especially with a lot of the low sulfur paraffinic crudes. I think there is a good chance that initially ships will run marine gas oil, and then gradually transition to the lower sulfur bunker material.
As I understand, that would be good for the U.S. diesel demand, right, if they continue to use marine gas oil in the initial stages?
Yes, it will. I think even with the blends we're seeing on the low sulfur bunker material, those blends still contain a fairly significant percentage of distillate in the blend. So even if they're burning the low sulfur bunker, we'll still see a step change in diesel demand.
A quick follow-up is you are running a lot of light sweet crude on the Gulf Coast, almost 770,000 barrels a day, up about 25% versus last year. I'm trying to understand now that we are finally seeing sour discounts widen out. Should we think that in 4Q and going ahead, there's a little bit of a switch back to medium and heavies, which would also solve some of the naphtha issues you had in 2Q?
Yeah. That's exactly what we see. We set another record for light sweet crude processing in the third quarter. The economic signals were strongly in favor of light sweet crude. We've been saying that we've got 1.6 million barrels a day of overall capacity, and we pretty much fully utilized that in the third quarter. Certainly with the widening of the quality discounts, especially the heavy sour crude are favored, and we're starting to see medium sour crudes become economic as well.
Thank you for taking my questions, and congrats on another good quarter. Thank you.
Thanks, Manav. Take care.
Our next question comes from Phil Gresh with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning. A bit of a follow-up to Manav's question here, just in terms of your slate on the Gulf Coast. How do you think about your ability to run high sulfur fuel oil as a feedstock? I think residuals have been about 200,000 barrels a day or so each of the past two quarters. How much of that is high sulfur fuel oil, and what kind of flexibility do you have to run more as a feedstock?
We have a lot of flexibility to do that, and we have been doing some of it, backing out heavy sour crude. We haven't really been running high sulfur fuel, but we've been running blend components that are going into the high sulfur fuel oil market. We've run some of those, and we expect to do more as we move forward.
Okay. Second question, obviously, there was a change to the Maya formula. Obviously, Maya has to be competitive regardless of what the formula is. I'm just curious how you think about how these heavy barrels on the Gulf Coast need to price. Especially, you have WCS, which seems to be discounting more as more barrels are coming via rail. Also, you have the Middle Eastern barrels, you have the medium sour. How do you think about how these should all price relative to each other?
Yeah. We believe heavy Canadian and Maya should trade at approximately the same value. Obviously, in September, PMI expected high sulfur fuel oil to trade much weaker, and the formula had Maya really priced out of the market. They made the correction in October, and if you look at where both WCS and Maya are trading today, they're almost on top of each other, which is where we expect those to trade moving forward.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thanks, Phil.
Our next question comes from Prashant Rao with Citigroup. Your line is now open.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question.
Morning, Prashant.
Morning, Joe. Following up on Phil's question there, price on Maya and WCS is one factor and sort of relatively how those are on top of each other, but market access and barrels that are moving down to the Gulf is another. Canada's talking about rail above curtailment. We're starting to see curtailment, NGV curtailment start to roll off a little bit, looks like we could be getting more barrels of Canadian into the Gulf Coast market. Just wanted to get a sense of what you're seeing out there and maybe give us a sense of what you can get on sort of a firm versus delivered basis for barrels, how does that play in further into that Maya versus WCS dynamic where pricing at the coast?
We're in ongoing negotiations with several producers in Western Canada on delivered rail volume. We have our Lucas rail facility that feeds the Port Arthur refinery and a lot of capacity to run heavy Canadian there. We anticipate as we move to the fourth quarter, you'll see rail volumes ramp up. We anticipate we'll buy those barrels delivered on something equivalent to the WCS or Maya quote in the Gulf.
Okay, great. Another question is just a follow-up on ethanol. It's a smaller segment, but just wanted to get a sense of how you see the next couple of quarters playing out. When we could start to see potentially, EBIT going back into the black on ethanol. What do we need to see to sort of give us the first signpost that swings to the positive? Obviously there could be incremental upside there too in the quarters ahead if factors play out right.
This is Martin. I think, near term, October's looking a lot better than the third quarter did. What you've seen is the recent DOE data. What the issue's been is oversupply in the U.S., right? Inventory's just too low, which is pressuring margins. The production's trending lower. Ethanol inventory now on the weekly data is 2.5 million barrels lower than this time last year. Long term, we're still bullish. Ethanol's gonna be in the U.S. gasoline mix for the long run. We expect to see some small incremental demand in the U.S. from higher octane and fuel efficiency standards and some small incremental demand from year-round E15 sales. Really the big thing we expect is a rebound in the export growth due to favorable blend economics, just the economics of blending ethanol and these global renewable fuel mandates.
We still feel very constructive in the long term and think that's gonna be around the corner.
All right. Thank you very much for the time. Appreciate it.
Our next question comes from Paul Cheng with Scotiabank Howard Weil. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Good morning.
Hey.
Hi, Paul.
I think I have two questions. One maybe is for Gary.
Sorry.
I will try to stick to just two, not more. Gary, you mentioned that you haven't really fed the high sulfur resid directly to the coker. Is that something that you guys believe technically, given the right economics you can do, and does it matter whether it's a delayed coker or it's a fluid coker?
Hi, Paul Cheng. I'll talk. What Gary was talking about was we run a lot of, I would say, blend stocks that go in a 3.5 weight % fuel oil, and we've always done that, and it's a part of the market that we feel like we understand technically maybe better than a lot of the people in the industry.
One of the critical strategies going into this, towards going into IMO, is to make sure you keep connectivity between these feedstocks and the heavy crude. We've worked really hard at doing that. There are technical challenges. They are around desalting and some of the other things, but we are very focused on increasing the amount of heavy sour resid that we run.
Lane, so you're saying that you run the heavy sour, the crude, or you run the heavy sour with SIP? I'm sorry.
We do both. Your question was around resid.
Right
The earlier question was, are you running more fuel oil? We don't really run fuel oil per se. What we run is we run the blend stocks that go into 3.5 weight %. As you see that, as people unwind that as a fuel, you're going to see more of these components around the world become available. The key is going out there and understanding them technically and fitting them into our system, which we're working very aggressively to do that.
How about the second part of my question, that whether that make any difference that, whether it's a fluid coker or delayed coker in your ability to run those?
Not really.
Not really? Okay.
No.
That, Joe, you have strong cash flow and continue to do so. Your balance sheet is in good shape, but given the uncertainty in the economy, would that make sense to move part of the free cash to pay down debt to really drive down the debt to a much lower level at some point that we may get hit by recession? We don't know when, but at some point it may.
Yeah, that's a good question, Paul. We'll let Donna speak to that.
I actually think our balance sheet is in good shape. We do have additional debt capacity to go. I don't think our ratings are in jeopardy. We have good liquidity today. Again, I don't believe that paying down debt right now is necessary.
Yeah, there's really nothing to call.
It's very expensive, you're right. Our next maturity is in 2025. To try to get that called early would be expensive and uneconomical to us.
I see. Thank you.
Thanks, Paul.
Our next question comes from Doug Leggate with Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Morning, Joe.
How are you, Doug?
I should probably thank Paul for making room for the rest of us, so I'll thank him as well.
Doug.
I just got two quick questions, Joe. Obviously, IMO is the focus for the whole market right now. My question is really more about just your perspective on duration of any perceived benefit. To explain my question a little further, our view is that the industry can react to the product side of it with things like your VGO reallocation, things of that nature.
Yeah.
The stickier side of it seems to be on the sour feedstock. I just want to get your perspective for us. Do you think that the product side of it is more sticky as well? In which case, what does it mean for that gasoline balance, given what you described in your prepared remarks about VGO? Maybe explain your experience of what you've done with VGO and how you expect to operate going forward. I've got a quick follow-up, please.
Okay. Gary and Lane can speak to this. Paul, I mean, Doug, excuse me. If you recall, probably for 18 months or something, we've been talking about the prospects from IMO, and it's shaping up the way that we had anticipated. The one issue, and the guys can speak to this, in addition to your question, is how do you solve the circumstances that IMO creates in the market, okay? Who comes in and solves the problem around the 3.5% weight fuel oil? You guys want to just speak to it in general, and then
Yeah. I'll start, and then, of course, Gary can always tune me up a little bit later here. As Joe alluded to, this has sort of played out the way that we thought. I think ultimately, early on, you're going to have this demand for diesel. It'll be interesting to see how long that goes. It could go on for quite some time, depending on the technical difficulty of making those fuels. We have seen some of that, like Gary alluded to it. It is not an easy task to create, to make all these fuels work from a compatibility perspective. Longer term, the 3.5 weight %, unmaking that and not having a home for it is a much more capital-intensive thing to try to work through. Somebody was asking the question earlier about valuations of crude.
What'll be interesting is right now, I would say these crudes are to the extent that heavy sour and medium sour are running, they're not being valued based on an open coaster, but they're being valued based on 3.5 weight %. You're going to see that disconnect even get greater. I don't know that we know you can think about all the paths to try to close that gap, but it all takes quite a bit of capital.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of uncertainty. We certainly anticipated you'd see scrubbers come online, but it appears there's a lot of technical issues around the scrubbers that maybe they don't come on as fast as what we thought. The other area here with uncertainty is when does some of this production that's offline, some of these medium and heavy sour crudes, when do they come back on the market? Very difficult to give you a timeline.
I think you're trying to answer it, guys. Go on, Joe. Sorry. Go on.
No, no. It's not a problem that's gonna get resolved very quickly. I think again, we've always kind of played down the whole product side of this. I think we've expected more on the VGO side. We're seeing it in both right now. It's just going to take a while to solve.
Thanks for attempting to answer, guys. I know it's a really tough one, but obviously constructive for you guys in particular. My follow-up, either Joe or Donna, whoever wants to take this, the balance between buybacks and dividends specific to Valero, you're operating better than any other refiner in the industry, frankly, in terms of your execution, your reliability in terms of markets, consistency of delivering to the market. Your buyback and dividend is still pretty skewed, I guess. What is the right level for that, especially as your share price goes up, Joe? I know you've always been pretty sensitive to buying back stock. When you get these kind of periodic strengthening in margins and obviously the industry, do we see a step-up in the dividend or maybe a rebalancing of how you return cash? I'll leave it there. Thanks.
Yeah, no, we'll let Donna talk to this because, Doug, obviously there's not a formulaic approach to how you do this, right? You've got to have your outlook for the market going forward. Obviously, we felt it's been pretty good. That's why we've had the significant dividend increases we have had. You want to be competitive from a yield perspective, not only with your peers but with the broader market. All those things get taken into consideration. Donna, as far as the mix.
Yeah. We do view that dividend as a very important part of the total shareholder return. It's also important to us that it be sustainable. We want to be very competitive in the market generally and specifically against our peers. We also want to be able to sustain that dividend through the earnings cycle. We always continue to look at that mix, and we always continue to review it.
Yeah. You notice that we did more on the buyback side this quarter than we did the previous quarter, and we haven't altered our approach. We say we look at ratability plus, we look at buying on dips, and frankly, we had a situation where looking into a strong fourth quarter with the prospects for IMO. We said, it's a good time to buy back more shares. That's what we did in the third quarter. We took advantage of an opportunity, and we'll do that going forward.
Would we expect the buyback to slow, let's say you were 20% higher, would you still be buying back your shares?
If we were 20% higher? It all goes to.
You know it's a cyclical business, obviously. You buy back, you know at some point it's going to drop again, probably.
I do.
How do you respond to continued strengthening?
Well, we are going to adhere to our 40%-50% payout ratio. Doug, it doesn't make sense in this business to jostle things around on an ongoing basis. You set your targets, and you work to achieve them, and it gives you consistency, not only with what the financial markets can expect from you, but operationally, what you can afford to invest in and how you can grow the business. That's why we set this capital allocation framework in place several years ago, and we've adhered to it totally since then, and it seems to work out. Don't make me forecast dividend increases and all that, but just rely on the fact that we have told you what we're going to do, and we're going to do it.
Great answer. Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it.
You bet.
Our next question comes from Sam Margolin with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.
Morning, everybody. Hi.
Hi, Sam.
I have a follow-up on renewable diesel, actually. The location of the project you're evaluating at Port Arthur, in the context of the comment around feedstock constraints, can you just talk a little bit about why that location is a good one? It seems like you operate in places that might have more local biomass. Are you importing, or is it a marketing thing where you're exporting? I'm asking because, as this business scales, it'd be good to know just sort of the factors that you look at for performance.
Yeah, this is Martin. The thing that helps renewable diesel is being co-located with the refinery. That's probably the primary thing we're looking at and a place where we can hit all the markets. That really drives you to the Gulf Coast. We're driven to the United States just because of the feedstock supply in the U.S. per installed base of renewable diesel is better than anywhere else in the world. That's why we're heading to reviewing Port Arthur and doing the engineering analysis on it.
Okay, thanks. It's a combination of placement and feedstock. Thanks. That's helpful. We're like six weeks since the Abqaiq stabilizer went down in Saudi, and people who count the ships coming out of the Gulf see stable exports. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing as far as high sulfur or sour crude supply, if there's been any change in mix from the Middle East as far as feedstock quality or crude quality that you're seeing in the interim here as that facility gets repaired?
Yeah, Sam, this is Gary. We haven't really purchased any Saudi volume in quite some time, and so I can't really give you a comment. We're running some Iraqi and Kuwait primarily to the West Coast, which has been unaffected. We don't see any Saudi volume coming into our system at all.
All right. Thanks so much.
Our next question comes from Brad Heffern with RBC. Your line is now open.
Hey, everyone. Question on When I was looking at the numbers for last year for the third quarter, I think you guys exported over 400,000 barrels a day. This year was just a little over 300. Is that demand pull into the U.S., is that export weakness, or is there some other factor that I'm not thinking of?
Yeah, Brad, I think you hit on it. The only thing I would tell you is Port Arthur is one of our large export locations, and we were doing some dredging work on the dock there, which did limit us a little bit. The big driver was what you pointed to. That's an optimization for us, and it is demand pull. With the large light product inventory draws we saw in the U.S., we had a better netback going into the domestic markets, and that's what drove it, rather than lack of demand into the export markets.
Okay. Got it. A question on refining OpEx. This quarter, just the nominal number was $1.1 billion. When I think back a couple of years ago, it used to be in the 900s or even the high 800s sometimes. Is there any underlying factor that's driven that higher OpEx number?
It's easier for me to sort of compare it to year-over-year to volume, by the way, Lane Riggs. Our volumes were down in the third quarter. Largely, we had three external power failures, then we had the storm to deal with. It went through and affected our Port Arthur operations. Our volumes weren't as high as they would be. Part of that is just on a per barrel basis, it's a little bit higher. We've changed what is in and out of our operations. We did have the MLP out, now it's back in. We have Diamond Green Diesel, which used to be in, it's out. There are some changes like that that occurred over time as well.
Nothing structural?
No, nothing structural.
Thanks.
Our next question comes from Jason Gabelman with Cowen. Your line is now open.
Yeah. Hey, thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to follow up on something Roger Read asked around the higher shipping rates. Obviously, there's some near-term volatility in those rates, I think the market is expecting shipping rates both on the crude and product side to be structurally higher than they were in the first half of this year. Can you just talk from a totality perspective for Valero how those higher rates impact the company's earnings, I guess, both on the product side and maybe lifting global refining margins, and then also on the feedstock side in higher landed feedstock costs? Thanks.
Sure. I'll start on the feedstock side. With the diet we've been running, we're running a lot of pipeline-delivered crudes, and then a lot of the barrels we're getting over the water are short-haul barrels. We don't see a big impact on our feedstock cost. Similarly, on the products, the barrels are going in the domestic markets or we export to fairly short-haul locations in Mexico and South America. Not a material impact. Some of the long-haul barrels that we do run, we do have some freight protection on those as well, which helps. The big thing that we've seen has been positive to the business as freight rates have spiked. Joe mentioned in his opening comments that the Brent-WTI spread had come in with the pipeline capacity coming online.
With the freight rates spiking, we've seen Brent-WTI blow back out some, and back over $5, which obviously gives U.S. refining a significant advantage on running light sweet crudes. As I mentioned previously into our export location, when you're going to Mexico, the higher freight rates actually give us a competitive advantage over some of our global refining competitors trying to import to those markets.
All right. Thanks for that. I appreciate that color. If I could ask just on the syn crude market and the northern crude market, because I know you guys run a decent amount of syn crude to Quebec. It seems like there's going to be some changes in the balances in terms of an operator maybe using less syn crude for diluent, and then the Northwest refinery up there switching from running syn crude to WCS. Do you see a shift in the pricing paradigm for syn crude and maybe that bleeding into Bakken emerging over the next few months into 2020?
Well, it's interesting. Syn crude, obviously, in an IMO environment could be a premium price crude. We have a lot of optimization opportunities on what we send through Line 9. I think our view would probably see we see a little bit more Bakken than we see syn going to Quebec as we move forward in an IMO environment.
All right. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Jason.
Our next question comes from Patrick Flam with Simmons Energy. Your line is now open.
Morning. Thanks for taking the question. My first question is basically, I was hoping you guys could frame up your thoughts around the recent proposed changes to the RFS program. Obviously, you guys are partially hedged to any changes by way of your ethanol and biodiesel operations, but it seems like any reallocation of volumes lost to small refinery exemptions would come back on you as a larger operator. I was hoping you could give some context to those changes politically.
All right. Jason's on.
Sure, yeah. This is Jason. You're right. On October 15th, the EPA released their supplemental RVO asking for public comment on including in the formula the prior three years average of SREs that the DOE recommended be granted. I know that's a lot of words there. That'd be about 580 million gallons or 770 million gallons, depending on which prior three years you use, they asked for comments on both.
These obligations will be re-obligated on the other non-exempt refiners in addition to your normal share. You'd get what you'd already get, and then you'd get this on top. Our industry and many members of Congress have been clear that reallocating the SREs onto the other obligated parties like this is unworkable, and we view it as a violation of fundamental fairness to those of us who are already bearing our burden under the program, and it may also be illegal. It's especially frustrating because it's been shown time and again by the EIA's own data that granting the SREs in the past, as they've done it with no reallocation, has had no negative effect on ethanol blending on the actual liquid volume that got moved. This is simply no real ethanol demand destruction.
The reallocation he was asking about, the impact of the reallocation on us and the SREs. It obviously is going to cost more for us to comply with a larger volume obligation. I wouldn't call it material, but if it was $0.01, we wouldn't like it. Anyway, we're going to do what we can to help deal with this.
Okay, great. That's very helpful. Thank you. My second question is a more detailed question back on the Diamond Green Diesel segment. It appears that in the third quarter, sales volume came in pretty low. In order to meet that 750,000 gallon a day full year target, it seems like the fourth quarter will have to step up pretty materially. Is there any context you can give around why that might be the case?
We had guidance for the full year of 750, and we still expect to make that. We expect a strong fourth quarter. We had a scheduled catalyst change in the third quarter, and that's why we guided the 750,000 gallons a day for the year to begin with. We feel pretty good about the numbers.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thanks, Patrick.
Our next question comes from the line of Matthew Blair with Tudor, Pickering Holt. Your line is now open.
Hey, good morning, everyone.
Hello.
Thanks. I was hoping you could give a sense of how your 2020 turnaround schedule compares to 2019.
Hi, Matthew, this is Lane. We don't give any real forward guidance to our turnaround schedule as a policy.
Okay. West Coast cracks got off to a great start in Q4, have come down a little bit here. How have your two California refineries run so far this quarter, and would you expect to capture all of this upside?
Yeah, this is Lane again. We ran well, and we've continued to run well. We had one small blip on our San Francisco area refinery, but other than that, it wasn't that meaningful to the performance they're in. They've been running pretty well through all this.
Sounds good. Thanks.
You bet.
I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Bhullar for closing remarks.
Thanks, Liz. We appreciate everyone joining us today. Obviously, please feel free to reach out to the IR team if you have any further questions. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.