Darren Woods
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer at Exxon Mobil
Good morning, and thanks for joining us. I want to start with the theme of the quarter, which frankly, has been a theme of the year, excellence in execution. Whether it's operating our facilities, building projects, deploying technologies, trading, marketing, sales, supply chain, or any of our other activities, the men and women of ExxonMobil are setting and holding themselves to very high standards as they execute their responsibilities. Their hard work and commitment drove the strong results we reported today and are the foundation of our success. At the end of the day, it's all about our people. They make the difference and are delivering industry-leading results.
And nothing is more important than the safety of our people. Keeping them safe requires intense focus and relentless discipline, 24 hours a day, every single day. For many years we've outperformed industry benchmarks for workplace safety. Over the last several years we've been implementing improved systems for managing both personnel and process safety, leveraging best practices from across our company and industry, our own and others'. These efforts are paying off with continued improvements in the number and severity of incidents.
The discipline needed to consistently deliver industry-leading safety performance manifests itself in all our work. We see it in our project teams, who are delivering large capital projects at top-quintile performance on cost and schedule. We see it in the reliability of our operations, where we achieved record performance in both the upstream and refining. We see it in our environmental performance, where we set several new records. And we see it in the successful management of the transformational reorganizations we've made over the last several years.
Results are clear. By any measure, 2023 was an outstanding year. We delivered $36 billion of earnings, strong cash flows, and a 15% return on capital employed. Our strategy, introduced in 2018, coupled with consistently strong execution, is delivering results that lead industry across a range of metrics, including earnings and cash flow growth, total shareholder distributions, and total shareholder returns since 2019, the baseline year of our plans.
On a constant-price basis, we more than doubled earnings in 2023 versus 2019, demonstrating the improved earnings power of the company. The growth in profitability reflects significant progress in high-grading our portfolio of assets through advantaged projects, divestment of less strategic operations, and significant cost reductions. During the year, our divestments generated more than $4 billion of cash proceeds. And we also announced two value-accretive acquisitions. Denbury, which closed in November, provides opportunities to profitably accelerate our Low Carbon Solutions business with a compelling, end-to-end, customer decarbonization offer. Pioneer, which is expected to close in the second quarter, will further differentiate our advantaged Upstream portfolio. The synergies will create significant shareholder value and accelerate Pioneer's net-zero ambitions by 15 years to 2035.
In 2023, we made significant advances in a number of innovative solutions. We entered the lithium business, where we see an opportunity to supply approximately 1 million electric vehicles per year by 2030, with economically advantaged production that has a much smaller environmental impact than today's supply. In the carbon capture and storage space, we recently completed the construction of a pilot plant to further develop a unique, proprietary technology, which has the potential to significantly lower the cost of direct air capture. We also launched Proxxima, a thermoset resin with a high-value-in-use for coatings, infrastructure, automotive parts, and wind power, made from low-value components used in gasoline.
We also took a further step in reducing cost, leveraging scale and improving effectiveness with the formation of three new centralized organizations: Global Supply, Trading, and Global Business Solutions. This change provides additional opportunities to grow deep expertise across a broad portfolio of critical business capabilities. Today, we're convinced that no other company can match the depth and breadth of development opportunities that ExxonMobil offers. It's no surprise that for the 11th year in a row, we were recognized as the most attractive U.S. employer in the industry for engineering students. This is another key competitive advantage.
Our plan for 2024 remains anchored in our existing strategy, building on world-class execution and the performance we delivered last year. We set a high bar for ourselves across all aspects of the business, from safety to operational excellence to financial performance, and have confidence in our team's ability to consistently deliver. For 2024, we expect to invest $23 billion to $25 billion to grow our portfolio of advantaged, low-cost-of supply assets, further shift our product mix toward higher-value, higher-margin performance products, and reduce emissions, both our own and others'. Our plan also continues to structurally reduce cost to achieve $15 billion in structural cost savings through 2027. We have opportunities to enhance supply chain efficiency, further improve maintenance and turnarounds, modernize data management, and simplify business processes.
In Low Carbon Solutions, we'll continue the integration of Denbury and look to add additional customers to our U.S. Gulf Coast network. As we noted during the Corporate Plan update in December, we're now pursuing more than $20 billion of lower emissions opportunities, evenly split between reducing our own emissions and reducing third-party emissions. Overall, our portfolio of low carbon investments is expected to generate returns of approximately 15%. Our Upstream portfolio will be further transformed when we close on the transaction with Pioneer. By combining the capabilities of our two companies and leveraging the advances we've made in technology, we expect to recover more resource, more efficiently, with lower emissions. We'll provide more detail about this compelling combination at our Spotlight event following the close.
Our results in 2023 once again demonstrated the strength of our strategy. As I reflect on the past year, I have tremendous pride in what our people accomplished and a strong level of confidence in our continued ability to lead in the years ahead. Finally, I want to thank our shareholders for their continued confidence and support.
Now I'll turn it back to Jennifer.
