Shell sells L.A. refinery to Tesoro
Royal Dutch Shell Plc said on Monday it was selling its Los Angeles refinery and related assets to Tesoro Corp., as the oil major further reduces its exposure to the refining industry.
Separately, Tesoro said the purchase price was $1.63 billion, plus the value of oil inventory at closing. Chief Executive Bruce Smith said the purchase will give the company earnings growth even as it faces flatter gasoline margins.
The deal also includes 250 service stations in and around Los Angeles and San Diego as well as supply agreements. Tesoro expects to complete the deal in the second quarter of 2007.
The sale follows Shell’s decision to put its three French refineries and a refinery in the Dominican Republic up for sale.
The market for refineries has been strong in the past two years — after two tough decades for the industry — as refining margins firmed.
Other oil majors, including BP Plc and Chevron Corp., are also shedding refineries, a move analysts interpret as a sign they think the “golden age of refining” of the past two years is coming to an end.
Even with the recent refining resurgence, oil companies make much more money from extracting oil than processing it.
Shell’s Wilmington refinery, located south of Los Angeles, is a 100,000-barrel-per-day heavy, sour crude refinery. Heavy, sour crude is denser and has more sulfur than benchmark light, sweet crude oil.
Tesoro has been acquiring refineries on the U.S. West Coast since 1998. The purchase basically completes the company’s long-running strategy of building up its refining presence in the region, Tesoro CEO Smith said in an interview.
“We think it’s probably (going to be) a flatter margin environment, but this positions our shareholders to benefit from something besides pure commodity upside,” he said.
“What’s really attractive from this is we get immediate earnings growth from the synergies and then we get future earnings growth from a couple of projects” at the refinery, he said.
Tesoro expects to generate $100 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the first year from the refinery.
It plans to spend $325 million to $350 million over the next five years to improve reliability at Wilmington, a process that is projected to boost annual EBITDA by $125 million to $150 million, Smith said.
Lehman Brothers served as Tesoro’s financial adviser for the transaction.
Tesoro also said on Monday that it would buy 140 retail sites located primarily in California, a terminal located in New Mexico and select sites in other states from independent marketer USA Petroleum for $277 million, plus the value of inventory.
