CVR Energy has agreed to acquire two refineries and a marketing platform from Marathon Petroleum for a purchase price of $4.2 billion, Icahn Enterprises said on November 3 in its third quarter results release. Icahn Enterprises is CVR’s controlling shareholder, and it described the transaction as transformative for the refiner.
The price represents less than 3.5 times management’s estimate of the acquired business’s 2026 EBITDA, according to the release. On the company’s own pro forma figures, the acquisition lifts CVR’s EBITDA for the nine months ended September 30, 2026 from about $900 million on a stand alone basis to about $2.0 billion, and earnings per share from $3.73 to $7.80, an accretion of more than 105 percent. Those figures exclude $75 million of expected annual run rate synergies, which the company attributes mainly to selling, general and administrative savings and commercial and operational opportunities.
The Wall Street Journal had reported earlier on November 3 that the two sides were nearing a deal worth about $4 billion, with an announcement expected the same day. CVR, about 71 percent owned by Carl Icahn, is the seventh largest publicly traded refiner in the United States, with a market value of about $6 billion against Marathon’s roughly $125 billion, and its existing plants are in Kansas and Oklahoma.
The timing is the strategic point. United States Gulf Coast refining margins reached a record $72 a barrel in September, according to the Journal’s reporting, as the wars in the Persian Gulf and between Russia and Ukraine took fuel making capacity out of service and tightened global product supply. CVR is buying refining capacity at the top of that margin cycle, at a multiple that assumes a large part of the windfall persists. Marathon, for its part, is selling non core capacity into the strongest buyer’s market refiners have had in years.