Canadian integrated oil company Suncor Energy Inc. (NYSE: SU) has revealed that extreme weather including multiple fires have forced the company to shut down its Colorado refinery, adding that it will remain offline till March 2023.
The company says the 98,000-barrel-a-day Commerce City refinery was damaged by the record-setting weather that swept across large parts of the continent, with the company initiating a shutdown of the refinery on Dec. 24. Luckily, no injuries were reported while the air quality posed no "acute" public health concerns.
On a brighter note, earlier in the month, Suncor Energy revealed that it will aim for an early 2023 resumption of production in the Terra Nova oilfield off the coast of Newfoundland, with work on the revamped floating production, storage and offloading vessel having taken longer than planned.
The Terra Nova FPSO has a capacity to store nearly 1M barrels and remains at the Navantia shipyard in Spain after undergoing an extensive life extension overhaul. The platform is scheduled to return to Canadian waters by the end of this month, Suncor. The renovations are expected to extend the production life of the platform by ~10 years, providing an additional 70M barrels of oil. The Terra Nova has not produced oil since late 2019, with a scheduled overhaul in 2020 canceled due to the pandemic.
Although Suncor shares have underperformed the energy sector after returning 22.1% in the year-to-date vs. 51.5% by the the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEARCA: XLE), analysts at Jeffries have tapped Suncor as one of the 20 companies expected to be cash gushers in 2023. The analysts have predicted that SU shares will have a dividend yield of 4.58% in the coming year and free cash flow per share of $6.83. Last quarter,Suncor Energy declared CAD 0.52/share quarterly dividend, good for a 10.6% increase from prior dividend of CAD 0.47.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
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Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com. More