The Suncor refinery in Montreal in June, 2025.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Suncor Energy Inc. SU-T reported another record-breaking year of production, beating profit estimates despite weak oil prices amid a global oversupply.
The Calgary-based company produced 860,000 barrels per day in 2025 – 33,000 more than in 2024, it said in results posted Tuesday evening. It also hit a refining record of 480,000 b/d, which was 15,000 barrels higher than the prior year.
Suncor’s production and refining teams “have not only been breaking records, they have been shattering records at the high end of guidance for two years in a row,” Suncor chief executive officer Rich Kruger told analysts on a call Wednesday morning.
In all, Suncor has boosted its daily oil production by roughly 114,000 barrels a day over the past two years, to 909,000. And refining has increased by about 60,000 barrels over that time, despite no major changes to the company’s asset base, Mr. Kruger said.
“No costly acquisitions, no major capital intensive projects, just growth from within,” he said.
The results are something of a coup for Suncor.
In the spring of 2024, one year after Mr. Kruger took the helm, the company outlined a series of targets it aimed to hit over three years. They included increasing oil production and refining volumes, reducing debt and lowering the cost of producing each barrel.
“Bottom line: We met or exceeded every single target a full year – or more – early,” Mr. Kruger said Wednesday.
Suncor is set to outline its new three-year goals on March 31 in Toronto, along with a new 15-year plan that will focus on long-term bitumen supply and development options.
“We are far from done. We know that you don’t make the Hall of Fame with a few good seasons,” Mr. Kruger said.
On the cash side, Suncor reported net earnings of $1.48-billion for the last three months of 2025, up from $818-million a year earlier. That amounted to a profit of $1.23 per share, versus 65 cents a year earlier.
Adjusted operating earnings, which Suncor considers a better gauge of its underlying performance because it filters out the effects of unusual items, were $1.33-billion, or $1.10 per share.
That’s a drop from the prior-year quarter, when Suncor had adjusted operating earnings of $1.57-billion or $1.25 per share.
Troy Little, Suncor’s chief financial officer, told the investor call Wednesday that he hears many companies saying they return surplus cash to their shareholders.
“Suncor doesn’t think of our shareholders’ money that way. We don’t pay you what is left over. We pay you first, we look at our cash flow results, pay our dividends, fund our buybacks, and only then consider our spending on other things,” he said.
Over the past two years, Suncor has reduced its capital spending to $5.7-billion, one year ahead of schedule, he added.
Suncor, like other companies in Alberta’s oil sands, faced an extremely wet fall; more rain fell over a few days in October than the region usually gets all summer. The resulting quagmire hit some producers harder than others.
Imperial Oil Ltd. IMO-T CEO John Whelan told an investor call last week that the extremely wet conditions temporarily hampered production at the company’s Kearl mine, about 70 kilometres north of Fort McMurray.
“It was a significant event” that affected the mobility of equipment in the mine, he said, delaying access to high-quality ore that Imperial had planned to get to.
The deluge didn’t cause any longer-term issues at Kearl, and December production hit its second-highest monthly production at 298,000 barrels per day.
Still, Mr. Whelan said it has prompted the company to step back to examine the way it designs roads at the site and how they drain.
“It was an extreme event. We will learn from it,” he said.
Over at Suncor, Mr. Kruger said prioritizing the maintenance of its haul roads had helped contribute to the company’s highest-ever production in 2025.
At its Base Plant Mine, for example, technology on its new autonomous trucks includes something that Peter Zebedee, Suncor’s executive vice-president of oil sands, referred to as “mud mode,” which reduces the slippage of the massive vehicles in wet conditions.
“That was really successful. We also learned a lot during the implementation of that. In fact, we’re working on a mud mode 2.0, if you will, to implement here by the spring of this year,” Mr. Zebedee said.
With a report from The Canadian Press