Good afternoon and a warm welcome to our guests here in the room and online. Thank you for joining our Q1 2025 and Capital Markets Day presentation. Today, we want to take you through Fertiglobe's journey, discuss our strategic objectives for the future, and touch on the exciting opportunities that lie ahead of us. We will begin with an introduction of Fertiglobe by Ahmed El-Hoshy, Fertiglobe's CEO, as well as an overview of Fertiglobe's key investment highlights. This will be followed by a detailed discussion of the Grow 2030 strategy we just announced today by our Chief Operating Officer, Haroon Rahmathulla. We will then take a deeper dive into our Operational Excellence and Manufacturing Improvement program by our VP Manufacturing, Geert De Raedemaecker. Andrew Tait, Fertiglobe's Chief Financial Officer, will then go over our financial performance, Q1 results, and our outlook, followed by closing remarks by our CEO, Ahmed El-Hoshy.
The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session where you will get the chance to ask questions you had throughout the presentation. For online participants, you can add your questions in the relevant Q&A messaging box on the webcast link throughout the presentation. For our guests here, you can also scan the QR code that is here on the bottom left of the screen and add your questions throughout the presentation as well. As always, please be reminded that any forward-looking statements made over the course of this presentation may involve risks and that the actual results may differ materially from those statements. With this, I will hand it over to Ahmed El-Hoshy, CEO of Fertiglobe.
Thank you, Rita. [Foreign language] . Welcome, everyone, to our inaugural Capital Markets Day. I want to start, of course, with safety. You know, at Fertiglobe, on the safety side, we view it as a top priority. Every injury is avoidable. There are no exceptions. People, our people, and our contractors need to go home safe every day to their families. We're building a zero injuries culture, which Geert will go into during his section as well, where we focus on reporting and observations on a preventative basis rather than a reactive basis. We've seen, with the new HSE program launched in 2022, a 93% reduction in incidents by 2024. I'm happy to say that in Q1 2025, we've had 12 months with no reportable incident and actually 10 million safe man-hours in 14 months since the last reportable incident. A great achievement.
We need to continue to focus on not being complacent. We need to be vigilant, and we need to report ahead of time to prevent injuries before they occur. I've always been of the belief that it's a virtuous circle or a vicious circle. A safe plant runs more efficiently and runs better. That's part of our Manufacturing Excellence program, a key focus on safety. One outcome of that will be our plants will run better and more efficiently. We've also aligned our HSE strategy with ADNOC's overall HSE strategy, with a focus on emergency preparedness, as well as using AI and digital tools to support us on the safety side. I want to start with a brief history of Fertiglobe. It started as a joint venture created between ADNOC and OCI Global back in late 2019.
It brought together OCI's Middle Eastern fertilizer business with ADNOC's Middle East fertilizer business that sits here in Ruwais, here in Abu Dhabi. This created the largest seaborne exporter of ammonia and urea globally on both sides of the Suez Canal with production and allowed us to reach over 50 different countries that import our fertilizer. We listed on the ADX in October of 2021 and had a successful listing, returning over 35% to shareholders since IPO, outperforming our peer group. Since that date, late last year, OCI ended up selling its stake to ADNOC, its 50% stake, taking ADNOC's ownership up from 36% - 86%. This signified a new era for Fertiglobe, and I'm going to go into a bit more detail on what that means to consolidate that ownership with one entity that is ADNOC rather than having two different entities.
Today, we're a 6.5 million ton producer, and with our growth, we have FID projects take us to 7.6 million tons per annum with the additional Project Harvest in 2027. We've returned $2.5 billion to shareholders since the IPO. We have just under a $5.5 billion market capitalization, and we employ over 2,700 employees globally. When you look at the marriage between Fertiglobe and ADNOC and why ADNOC went and took a majority stake in the business, it makes a lot of sense. It's an excellent strategic fit. You're bringing together a leading nitrogen fertilizer player that's also a global leader in ammonia with ADNOC, a major energy player that is involved in all aspects of the energy value chain and ecosystem.
ADNOC, being a leader in hydrocarbons historically, with a future ambition to be a leader also in carbon sequestration and hydrogen, is acquiring a majority stake effectively in Fertiglobe, one of the dominant ammonia players globally. It goes hand in hand to be able to future-proof ADNOC, having an incubated Fertiglobe as a subsidiary effectively. This allows for not just the future-proofing of ADNOC, but it also allows it to leverage the customers and the flows of ammonia globally that Fertiglobe currently serves. When you think about the shareholding, what it means, there's also another thing to take into account. Being a 36% JV shareholder is very different than being an 86% shareholder, right? You have 86% now owned by ADNOC, and when you compare that to the whole, the only difference is a 14% minority.
After the closing of the acquisition, ADNOC has made it very clear the importance of the minority and the share price of Fertiglobe. When you think about it, this announcement that we had today with our press release of being able to integrate $15 million-$21 million of cost from the Fertiglobe side into the ADNOC side has not that much leakage and creates a 7%-10% EPS accretion on that amount without us doing anything on the Fertiglobe side. In addition, we've said this earlier, but ADNOC's also offering to warehouse projects during the construction phase, some of the new projects we're looking at, that allows us to pay for projects at operations rather than during the construction period with the construction risk. That also reduces risk and enhances shareholder returns.
I'm also happy to report that in our press release just in the last hour here that's been posted, we've also gotten about a $10 million financing-related benefit just post-October 2024 with the closing. We got a ratings upgrade by two of the three rating agencies, which reduced our interest cost by $3.5 million. We refinanced $300 million of debt in March that reduced our interest cost by another $600,000. Last week, with ADNOC's support, we were able, with external banks, to reprice $1.1 billion of debt with the work of our CFO and his team to also save another $6.5 million. All run rate together, $10 million of savings, and combined with the earlier announcement, you're talking about something in the order of 13%-16% EPS accretion with what was announced today.
I firmly believe as we continue to work with ADNOC, we're going to find more opportunities like this to create arbitrage. When you look at our leadership, we have an excellent board with significant experience not just in the energy space, but also in the petrochemical space, in the industrial sector, and deep fertilizer expertise as well. It's not just production here as an FOB seller, but also distribution and trading capabilities, with some of our board members having significant experience in that space. Lastly, from a location perspective, it's also not just Emirates or Middle Eastern experience. We have global experience across all the major continents that we operate in. At the bottom, you see a core management team. It's only the four of us who are presenting here today, but what you're not seeing is the faces of many other people that contribute to Fertiglobe.
I truly believe we have a very strong set of leaders across all our functional groups, whether it's commercial, projects, those leading our operating companies, our M&A teams as well. We have been able to attract some very strong talent, and we recognize that we might have the best and shiniest assets in the world, but it's about the people who run those assets, the people who work every day to get the best out of those assets that help us achieve our goals on the strategic side. Now I want to discuss our investment highlights. Fertiglobe is a multifaceted investment. It benefits from strong market conditions, a world-class asset base, and as I said earlier, this ADNOC ownership. The market outlook is supported by demand from food security, as well as limited new supply coming to the market.
The assets offer a low-cost production footprint and advantaged logistics, both of which help EBITDA and free cash flow generation and margins. As we'll discuss a little bit further today, and as you saw briefly in the video there, we're looking to go further downstream, not just selling at the factory gate, but we're getting closer to the customer, including the acquisition we announced yesterday of an Australian distribution business with Wengfu that allows us to create and capture more value. We're also looking at new products. We're leveraging our ammonia and urea leadership to get into new products where we can create more value as well, like AdBlue or diesel exhaust fluid.
If you look outside, if you had a chance to look outside, we have a showcase of the diesel exhaust fluid business that our team here in Abu Dhabi has been working on in Fertiglobe, and our team in Egypt has been successfully working on in Egypt at EFC. Another key area, obviously, and it has been one for the last few years of focus, has been the energy transition. Ammonia is very well positioned for that transition. Our approach at Fertiglobe and in discussions with our board is one where we are going to leverage our leadership in ammonia, but we are going to take a phased, value-led approach. ADNOC's support with warehousing projects is very helpful to allow us to do so and give us that flexibility.
We're really going to be focused on the demand side to create value, not building for the sake of building. All in all, the goal here for us is sustainable shareholder returns through strong dividends and selective growth opportunities as part of our strategy 2030. As you see on the left-hand side of the page, and I think it's just been posted, our Q1 results came in strong with $261 million of EBITDA and over $200 million of free cash flow. Andrew's going to go into more detail on that during the finance section. As I said, we announced our 2030, or our Grow 2030 strategy in the market just in the last hour. We're targeting $1 billion of EBITDA by 2030 at 2024 pricing for comparability purposes.
Our ambition is to lead as a global integrated nitrogen champion with the optionality to position ourselves well for the energy transition. It is built on four key strategic pillars. The first one is Operational Excellence. What I mean by that is going for first quartile positioning on the manufacturing side and on the cost side from a KPI perspective. Number two is customer proximity. It is basically trying to get higher net back, higher margins by going closer to the customer, disintermediating middlemen or traders in between where it makes sense. Number three is the nitrogen product expansion, where today we are producing ammonia and urea. We are getting into AdBlue or diesel exhaust fluid, which is a urea derivative. We are also looking at other tangential products where we can have a key advantage and synergies and create value.
Number four is, like I said before, a disciplined approach to low-carbon ammonia growth that is pragmatic and allows for future-proofing of our business. Collectively, these pillars add $340 million-$420 million of EBITDA on that same 2024 pricing perspective. It is enabled by these top-tier assets, our world-class team, digital tools that we are going to be using, and of course, the support that we get from ADNOC. Haroon and Geert will cover this in more detail during their sections. I want to take a step back and talk about these underlying market conditions that I was talking about. We see three growth trends that we expect to propel us into the future and bring our business forward. Number one is a rising global food demand. Number two is a larger reliance on imports into key regions.
Number three is this energy transition where ammonia is best placed to take advantage of it, however fast it comes. Let's explore each of these in more detail here. When looking at food security, we have to remember that nitrogen fertilizer is key to feeding and growing the world population. In fact, the nitrogen fertilizer we produce at plants like Fertil, EFC, Sorfert, this nitrogen fertilizer is responsible for feeding four out of the world's 8 billion people. It's an inelastic demand, and it has to be applied every single year. As you can see in the charts, while agricultural land is capped, the population of the world is expected to grow by another 11% by 2040. That's going to drive a need to have higher crop yields from the same amount of land, adding to more demand for nitrogen fertilizer as we go into the future.
When you look at the second theme, Europe and Pacific, we're seeing a larger reliance on imports of key nitrogen fertilizers. We're seeing that that gap, as you can see on this chart, we're going to a 4 million ton gap on ammonia by 2030 based on consultant estimates. I wouldn't be surprised if it's an even larger gap by then. This is driven by a slight increase in demand within Europe, as well as less supply into Europe. What's driving that lower supply is elevated gas prices, it's labor cost inflation, it's difficult local regulations, and it's just aging, inefficient plants. It's important to note that most plants in Europe are over 40 years old, and there have been very few plants built after the mid-1980s. This is where Fertiglobe can step in as one of the leading producers and actually the leading ammonia urea exporter into Europe.
It can fill that gap with reliable, low-cost supply and be able to create value in that way and replacing those plants that are shutting down. When we look at other key regions, no surprise, Australia there is on the left with the tremendous growth we have seen on nitrogen fertilizer demand into that market. We have seen strong growth, and we expect to see about 4 million tons continue to be imported into Australia for the foreseeable future. What we like about Australia is, one, we can access it quite easily here from Abu Dhabi, and we do, but also it provides counter-seasonal exposure. What I mean by that is it is sitting in the southern hemisphere.
When the European fertilizer season is coming to an end, as we're going to be in the next kind of month or so in Western Europe, we can start exporting during a down season in the summer into the Australian markets and put our fertilizer in place. That is why the Wengfu acquisition announced yesterday is an excellent asset base, a team that we've been selling to for the last five years, that's an established team with over 200 customers, and one that's extremely strategic for us to go ahead and purchase. What helped us do this deal and negotiate it on a bilateral basis is our commercial team. They knew that this asset was for sale. They helped and knew the team. They helped to kind of craft the deal. With our M&A team, we were able to secure a very good acquisition price.
We should have a very smooth integration when this transaction closes later this year. Another key market is India, where we are one of the major suppliers into that market. We expect 6 million tons-7 million tons into that market, as do consultants, over the coming few years. Brazil will continue to be the largest importing market that we sell into from time to time from our North African assets. From a China perspective, because China is always an important question, China has been relatively absent from the export market in the last 18 months. We expect to be probably a 2 million tons-4 million ton exporter over the coming years, even though indications today suggest it might be closer to 2 that we have been hearing this morning.
We expect future government-driven decisions around food security in China and domestic fertilizer prices in China to be more of the drivers rather than having more exports. In addition, when you look at ammonia, as I said, the third key driver is the energy transition. If you look at ammonia as a molecule, on the left-hand side here, you have NH3, so one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. From a fertilizer perspective, we've been using nitrogen fertilizer for the nitrogen, and that's what allows for the higher crop yields. Going forward, we do see a future to use ammonia for the hydrogen because it can provide hydrogen without having a carbon atom in it. When combusted, it does not produce CO2, and hence why that creates a lot of value for it in a low-carbon environment.
Regulations are now focused on putting a price on that CO2, and we're seeing significant potential for demand growth into some key end markets that are new. I mean, the demand today is basically zero for ammonia as a low-carbon fuel, but we see that growing exponentially later this decade and into the 2030s, whether it's into the power generation space in Japan and Korea or into the marine fuel side, where ammonia is considered probably one of the best long-term marine fuels with developments on the marine engine. We've already seen 40 dual-fuel ammonia vessels ordered. We expect many more ammonia fuel vessels to be ordered in the future. We're working with the International Fertilizer Association, the IMO, and other government entities with the support of ADNOC to work on the safety regulations there.
We do believe that it's a matter of when, not if, and we're going to be judicious on when that when is. We also see ammonia as a great hydrogen carrier. Hydrogen has a boiling point of - 260 degrees to refrigerate it, while ammonia is - 30. It is a much easier product to carry over long distances, plus it enjoys a higher energy density and is a much more stable molecule to move. Looking at our production footprint, we have four sites across three countries that have clear logistical and commercial advantages and access into premium markets. We sell from North Africa very easily with a few days sailing into Europe. We can also go into the Americas from time to time, and that allows us to have lower freight, but also we enjoy from North Africa duty-free access into Europe and much of South America.
That gives us a margin advantage on that front. In addition, as I said, we have production on both sides of the Suez Canal. We can avoid Suez Canal fees by using our Abu Dhabi asset to go east and using our Algerian asset to go west and north. Egypt can kind of swing both ways. We can go east or west from Egypt, either going from Dumyat in the north coast on the Mediterranean or at Sokhna on the east coast in the Red Sea. We also have, when you look at us and when you look at our cost altogether, top second quartile positioning with ambitions to get to first quartile with the first strategic pillar that we have on our strategy house.
In terms of the key reasons behind that, obviously long-term low-cost gas supply is one of those main reasons on the feedstock side. One underappreciated one is the non-gas costs, whether it is labor-related, power-related, taxes, or otherwise. These are all benefits outside of gas that give us an advantage that increase our margins on the Fertiglobe side. As I just discussed earlier, freight and logistics costs are also a big advantage that help us stay on the left-hand side of the cost curve to deliver at a cheaper price. I will go into it on the next slide, but the young asset base allows us, with 80% of our assets less than 25 years old, to have other key advantages from a cost perspective. I will go into that in more detail, but it is important to note our ambition is to go back into that first quartile.
As I said, let me pause here to talk about the age of our assets. The average age of our assets is 20 years. When you look at our peer group, they are about a 33-year median. We are 13 years younger, and that is a big benefit because you have these newer technologies that allow for higher general operating rates, better conversion, lower CO2 footprint that is going to be more and more valuable over time as CO2 has a price. It also allows for lower maintenance CapEx. All of what I said earlier were EBITDA-related above the line, but from a free cash flow conversion perspective, we also enjoy much lower maintenance CapEx versus our peers. Andrew and Geert will go into that in more detail, which allows for better free cash flow as well.
In addition, as we think about the future, flexibility for upgrades, the implementation of digital tools, those are all other key attributes that having a young asset base benefits from versus, like I said, some of these European and older assets, even some of the American assets are extremely old as well. I'm not going to go into too much detail here, as Geert will go into more detail on it, but we're really focused in that strategic pillar one on maximizing efficiency and output while minimizing costs and emissions. Today, our plants run into the mid to high 80% utilization rate. That is up from the last few years due to some of the leadership changes we've made and a lot of the focus we've had on the manufacturing and safety side. It's up from kind of like we see 80, 45% up to 87%.
That's a big change, but it's still nowhere close to where our potential could be because of the age of our assets. I'm confident that we can get to this target of being in the mid 90% utilization rate in a non-turnaround year, and that will have a huge EBITDA impact. I like this because it's a challenge, but it's also a huge upside. While we're not doing that great right now, we're on the right path, and we have a lot of upside that we can create and unlock as alpha for us and our shareholders.
I'm confident we can do this with our young tech-enabled asset base, this now solid leadership team we put in place, as well as the support we have from ADNOC, where we're not shy from asking for support, whether it's on the HSE side or operational side from time to time. I want to just discuss where some of our products go. As you can see, most of our products went into Asia-Pacific as well as Europe, which are both high demand, high net back markets over the last few years. Europe is a premium nitrogen market, and over time, it's going to be valuing lower CO2 or green blue products in the future. That's due to its strong regulation and focus. APAC is a reliable buyer, high volume importer with solid fundamentals on the food security side. We also stay very flexible.
We can shift our volumes as global demand shifts and arbitrages exist, whether there's a drought somewhere, if there are tariffs. All of these kind of changes or flows or geopolitical risk, we've been able to change, and we can move products in different ways from a trading perspective, and we've done so in the past. We also see Africa as a strong growth potential with very good dynamics on that front. It is very underutilized on the nitrogen fertilizer side and has a rising demand from its growing population. We are very well positioned to serve that market. Going briefly, and Haroon will go into more detail onto pillar two, which is customer proximity. We are looking selectively to go closer to that customer.
As you can see here in Europe and APAC, we've looked to get into the blending and distribution as well as warehousing markets where we see an opportunity to create value there, whether it's Wengfu in Australia or some of the storage we have in Western Europe, and we'll continue to do so. What we like about it is it allows us to capture higher margins and higher margin value chain parts of the segment. It allows us to de-risk some of our products. It's good to always have a home for products, whether it's our own product or third-party product. If we find that we can bring in third-party product and make a return, we can do that from time to time. It allows us also to time sales better. A lot of the intermediaries, they'll buy product every year. It's like clockwork.
In off season, they buy it cheap, they sit on it for five months, and then they make a return. Utilizing working capital facilities, third-party product, and otherwise, we can take advantage of that temporal arbitrage and be able to sell more in season at that higher price when demand exists. This allows us to deliver on customer commitments and gets us closer to the customers that are ultimate end users, and it creates higher value for shareholders as we do so selectively and in a focused way. As I discussed earlier, we're going to approach the low-carbon ammonia market in a value-led way. Even before discussing that approach, I want to discuss that synergy I was discussing earlier between ADNOC and Fertiglobe.
We firmly believe under this new construct in this new era, 86% owned by ADNOC, we have an unrivaled benefit of having an energy behemoth as a parent with a focus on carbon capture, sequestration, decarbonization, and hydrogen ambitions with a fertilizer player like ourselves. We have the fertilizer customers. We have the industrial chemicals customers on the ammonia and urea side today, but we do also, at the same time, have ADNOC that has its energy customers. They're the ones buying the hydrocarbons today LNG, diesel, refined products, crude, natural gas.
All of these are products where those same customers are the ones that are going to be looking to decarbonize over time, and we're going to be able to utilize that ADNOC relationship with those customers to sell those products, those lower carbon products as part of the menu, whether it's in marine fuels or on the power side. In addition, it can't be overstated, really, the G2G support, the ability to walk into Japan and Korea with Dr. Sultan and ADNOC leadership or into Europe to create G2G deals, because a lot of these deals in energy transition will require a public and private partnership. We are firmly a private sector company. We are a listed entity focusing on the returns of our shareholders, but having the government ownership and involvement allows us to open doors and create deals cross-border.
We have done a little bit of that in the past, but in this new era, we can do a lot more of that over time. That being said, we are going to still take a very much demand-led and focused approach, and Haroon is going to go more in detail on that as we think about capturing value for shareholders. Just to close out here, I want to come back and summarize our GROW 2030 strategy, which is looking to create $340 million-$420 million of EBITDA. There are four key pillars, and we think about it in just two to three words each. First pillar is Operational Excellence. Second pillar, customer proximity. Third pillar, nitrogen product expansion, so leveraging our leadership in nitrogen products to expand into other tangential products. Number four, low carbon ammonia growth in a disciplined manner.
Both Fertiglobe, from management team perspective, and our board believe this is an ambitious yet achievable target, and we look forward to working with ADNOC and our teams within Fertiglobe to make it a reality. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Haroon to talk about our strategy.
Thanks, Ahmed. Good afternoon, everyone. [Foreign language] . As Ahmed mentioned, we have set ourselves a target to hit $1 billion EBITDA by 2030. We believe this is a realistic path. There is a realistic path to hit this number because this ambition builds on a number of existing strengths that Fertiglobe currently possesses. Those strengths were mentioned. It is our leadership position as an incumbent in the space. We are the number one urea and ammonia exporter globally. It is that strong and established commercial and manufacturing capability set. We are backed by a strong shareholder in ADNOC.
That being said, when we step back and look at our platform, look at our portfolio products, we do believe there is potential to extract much more. That really is the thesis driving the majority of this journey towards the billion-dollar target. The set of initiatives that we have identified today are largely self-help measures. We can execute on these initiatives at favorable CapEx numbers, high returns, and this gives us confidence that we can get it done. The first pillar, as Ahmed mentioned, was our mManufacturing and Cost Excellence program. The message to you today is that we have already made investments in people, in the organization, in capabilities that we are well underway to moving and securing that first quartile positioning. Pillar two emphasizes on increasing margins on every ton sold.
We have a plan in place to increase our customer proximity to capture that last mile margin, and this is going to drive increased price realizations across our portfolio. The Wengfu acquisition is a really good example of this strategic pillar in action. Pillar three is focused on nitrogen product expansion opportunities. We see opportunities to upgrade our margins. We see opportunities to enter into premium products, and we see opportunities to reduce the seasonality in our portfolio. Again, to make it specific, the AGU announcement that's included in the press release today is a further example of this approach, and I'll talk about it in a little bit more detail. Finally, pillar four, as Ahmed reiterated, emphasizes our value-led approach to low carbon ammonia.
Fertiglobe, and we'll come back to this theme time and time again, as an incumbent, Fertiglobe has a significant optionality to grow in the low carbon space. We intend to use that optionality, and we're going to develop that low carbon ammonia pipeline in a disciplined and pragmatic manner. The $1 billion target that you see includes delivering on TAZIZ, and we've called it different names in the past. It is TAZIZ or Project Harvest, and our smaller scale Egypt Green Project, where a substantial portion of the volume has been spoken for. You've heard us speaking of the Manufacturing and Cost Improvement program in the past. Phase I of both these programs, we call it MIP One. That's our Manufacturing Improvement Plan One. FIT One is our cost optimization program, are now largely complete.
Today, we will be announcing new targets across both these programs, highlighting management's focus on continuous improvement. These additional targets include $75 million-$80 million for the second phase of MIP, so MIP Two, and a fresh cost optimization target of $35 million. Together with the run rate impact of earlier announced initiatives, these value enhancement initiatives are expected to lead to that $165 million-$175 million number. Geert will talk about the details of the second Manufacturing Improvement plan. We are well underway. Similarly, on the cost side, as Ahmed mentioned, ADNOC's support absorbing $15 million-$21 million of fixed costs means that we are also well underway towards achieving this cost optimization target. Fertiglobe is present across key steps of the nitrogen value chain in different degrees. Our strategy rests on looking to see where we can strengthen each of these verticals further.
On the ammonia side, are there upgrade opportunities to other products? Similarly, on the urea side, are there opportunities to diversify into new markets and earn higher net packs? How do we maximize or enhance our storage infrastructure so we can increase price realizations across all of our portfolio? This is what pillar two and pillar three are about, and it is largely commercial in nature. Let me expand more on our second strategic pillar. The target is to achieve $30 million-$45 million EBITDA uplift through a combination of downstream moves and focus on high value markets and high value customers. This can be achieved with less than $15 million CapEx. By the way, this is a theme that we will come back to time and time again. It is our focus on creating value at CapEx or investment numbers that make a lot of sense.
Back to this target, a large proportion of this target has already been met through the Wengfu acquisition, which was signed yesterday. The deal is expected to close this year, and we will therefore start contributing in 2026 itself. A similarly short timeframe is associated with some of these other levers on this page, and this is driven by the fact that they reflect some old long-standing contracts that are set to expire in the next two years. Once these contracts expire, back to the theme that Ahmed mentioned of disintermediating traders, we will have more control over volumes and therefore more potential to capture some of that margin. Our acquisition of the distribution business of Wengfu is a very good example of this downstream move and the approach that we have taken to it, which has been selective. Wengfu is a leading fertilizer distributor focused in Australia.
They sell to 200 customers, so the customer proximity is significant, and they do this through eight strategically located warehouse locations. For all the reasons mentioned earlier, we like moving downstream. We like that Australian market. We make more than $30 per ton selling in Australia than we do in any other market. We like the growth dynamic. It's 8%. In our space, that's pretty significant. Moving downstream allows us increased customer proximity, capture more of those margins, improve our market timing, improve our product placement opportunities. Back to this theme of doing things in a very capital effective way, this acquisition, and we paid $8 million for it, which reflects a 0.8 x multiple. This $8 million acquisition basically generates an additional $23 million in EBITDA per annum. An illustration of how we approach inorganic growth.
There are a number of opportunities to expand our nitrogen portfolio, which are currently under consideration. This would allow us to increase incremental EBITDA, diversify away from ammonia, urea commodity cycles. Potential derivative fields across the fertilizer and industrial landscape have been highlighted on the page. What I'd like to focus on is on the diesel exhaust fluid and the AdBlue market because they are examples of how we look at nitrogen product expansion opportunities. What is diesel exhaust fluid or DEF? It's basically a urea-based solution that's used in diesel engines and reduces NOx and particulate emissions by up to 90%. This really affects the quality of the air we breathe. It's a good fit. It's an excellent fit, I'd say, with our portfolio because of that urea link. Here in Abu Dhabi, we produce close to 2 million tons of urea.
The DEF market in UAE is one that we like. It's a market that's growing rapidly. Consultants project 25% CAGR over the next five years. It's an opportunity for us to upgrade margins over and above what we make in urea. We can do so because of our existing manufacturing footprint in a very CapEx effective way. We like the seasonality in terms of diversification away from just ag markets beyond fertilizers. We like some of the future growth that will come in the marine and the rail side. By the way, our go-to-market strategy will include leveraging ADNOC Distribution, another example of how we put this ADNOC parent-shareholder relationship to work. This initiative is well underway. We have 55 million liters of capacity already online.
Regulation in the UAE, similar to what's expected in Europe or what's in place in Europe and the U.S., is also expected this year. Our ambition with regards to DEF is to become a market leader in the UAE. We will be the only producer in the UAE leveraging, as I mentioned, our plant in Abu Dhabi. This opportunity provides an EBITDA potential of more than $15 million with only $0.7 million of CapEx. Similar to DEF, automotive-grade urea or AGU also represents an opportunity for expanding into higher margin products. AGU is basically DEF without water. What that does is it allows AGU to be exported across greater distances. We like AGU as well. We like the growth dynamic. It's 4%. A number of those benefits that I talked about on the diesel exhaust fluid side apply to AGU as well.
Similar to DEF, this initiative has also progressed. We, as part of our announcement today, completed a breakthrough trial in Egypt, producing 2,000 tons of on-spec AGU using a new proprietary technology with TKUFT. This positions us at the forefront of AGU production in the region. We are advancing an exclusivity arrangement with TKUFT for distribution across North Africa and the E.U.. From a customer perspective, we also announced today a strategic partnership with DEF Group in Spain to launch AGU in Iberia and to build an integrated DEF supply chain in Europe. Our ambition is to capture a 5%-10% market share in the E.U.. While this initiative is expected to unlock $7 million in annual EBITDA, the CapEx commitment is limited to less than $5 million, again implying a very quick payback and attractive return profile.
Our merchant ammonia capacity, and this is again part of this pillar three product nitrogen product expansion, our merchant ammonia capacity is expected to grow by approximately 1 million tons once TAZIZ or Project Harvest comes online in 2027. We are actively evaluating organic and inorganic opportunities to upgrade that ammonia, right? The benefits are unlock higher EBITDA, manage some of that ammonia length, and enhance diversification. Some of the target derivative products include fertilizer nitrates, phosphates, NPKs. We have set ourselves a target to generate $50 million-$75 million in EBITDA through these organic-inorganic growth initiatives. While this evaluation is ongoing, we would look at all times to use tools to optimize our investing spend, whether that includes warehousing some of these projects in ADNOC using a mix of cash and shares in the financing, but at all times always focused on value and buying smart.
We are very cognizant of the impact on dividends. We have room from a leverage standpoint, and we intend to use this very judiciously. Turning to the low-carbon ammonia market, we are excited by the prospects for growth in that market. We do believe that some of that demand growth may be delayed, and until 2030, most of that demand is focused on existing conventional applications. Towards and leading to the end of this decade, demand is expected to grow, especially as energy transition markets mature and policy like things like CBAM, E.U. ETS impose greater carbon costs. As Ahmed mentioned, we are taking a pragmatic, disciplined approach to entering into the low-carbon space. What does that mean? We'd like offtakes to be secured. We'd look to de-risk our CapEx, focus on proven technologies, and leverage the support network afforded to us by our shareholder.
Project Harvest is a good example of our approach to low carbon ammonia. The project has a commercial operation date of 2027. Construction is well underway, and right now uses hydrogen, and plan would be to use hydrogen from Buruj. The carbon intensity of that hydrogen allows it to produce basically a lower carbon ammonia stream. As the project is only a back-end plant at Harvest, we retain the optionality to switch that hydrogen stream from Buruj with a blue hydrogen stream. We like that optionality. As the market develops, we may exercise that optionality, provided the economics make sense. Until then, Project Harvest on its own remains an attractive opportunity. These include when we look at some of those investment criteria that I mentioned, the project has an attractive IRR. We have offtake agreements with Mitsui and GS.
The project has an attractive CapEx profile, especially when you compare it to what it would cost to build similar projects in the U.S.. We like the fact that it's also focused on supplying the APAC region with optionality to go into Europe. The APAC region, from a growth perspective, from a market expansion standpoint, is an area of core focus for us. Fertiglobe's share in Project Harvest will increase to 54% post-commencement of operations. Until then, our stake remains at 30%. Along with Egypt Green, both projects are expected to generate $70 million-$100 million of EBITDA. You'll see some nice pictures here, basically highlighting the construction progress at Harvest. Construction is progressing according to plan. All site activities for now are mainly civil. We also have first batch of heavy equipment on site. The plant from a construction standpoint is progressing well.
Beyond Project Harvest and Egypt Green, we also have a pipeline of two additional low-carbon ammonia projects approaching a financial investment decision. These are currently ADNOC-led projects. Rabdan is a blue hydrogen and ammonia complex currently being developed by ADNOC. The project has a hydrogen capacity of 0.4 million tons with an optional ammonia capacity of 1 million tons. We intend to use a phased approach if we take FID on this project to that additional ammonia line. It is going to be very dependent on the demand dynamic and the ability to secure through offtakes. FID is expected for Rabdan in early 2026. Baytown is a successful collaboration between ADNOC and Exxon in partnership with other Japanese players.
The project is the world's largest planned low-carbon hydrogen facility on the U.S. Gulf Coast with a hydrogen capacity slightly less than 1 million tons and a merchant ammonia capacity of potentially more than 1 million tons per annum. FID is expected in H2 2025. For both of these projects, we as Fertiglobe have an option to take on ADNOC's stake if the return profile and the economics make sense. ADNOC's stake, and this is a point that we've mentioned in the past and to reiterate, will not be taken on until 2030 once commercial operations begin so as to not burden our balance sheet. As you'll hear from Andrew, we intend to stick to sort of our intent to stick to our investment-grade rating and maintain an attractive dividend profile. With that, I will pass it on to Geert to talk more about our Ooperational Excellence journey.
Thank you, Haroon, for giving this comprehensive overview of our new and ambitious strategy with very clear targets. As Ahmed has explained earlier, I will take a more deep dive in the first pillar of the strategy, which is the manufacturing and the cost Excellence pillar. Before I do so, let me firstly introduce myself as it's the first time that I speak publicly on behalf of Fertiglobe Management. I'm the Vice President of Manufacturing since January 1, 2022. I have, before that, since 1991, been into the fertilizer business, 28 years of that merely in the European production system of Yara. I have been leading the biggest sites of Yara in the Netherlands and in Norway.
I moved to Qatar, and I have been three years the COO of Qatar Fertilizer Company, which was at that moment in time the largest single-site fertilizer complex in the world. I think now it's surpassed by CF in Louisiana, but at that time, it was clearly the biggest. Since 1st of January, I am based in Abu Dhabi, responsible for the production in Algeria, in the UAE, and in Egypt. Let me now take you through the improvement journey in the manufacturing ecospace. As you know, Fertiglobe was established in 2019, and it was bringing assets together from North Africa and here in Abu Dhabi in the Gulf region. Of course, it went into the COVID, and assets were more in a survival mode than in an improvement mode. In 2021, the company went public with the IPO.
It is only, in fact, around that moment in time that the central manufacturing team and also other teams of the head office started to grow and that we had this real corporate view on how we shall operate the company. The first thing we did, obviously, is did a maturity assessment. How are we doing in our sites? How is the culture? How is the leadership? How is the level of digitization? How was the knowledge sharing? In most of these four areas, we found, in fact, quite many weaknesses or even unmature situations. With that backdrop, we developed a strategy based on four strategic pillars and two enablers. First enabler is, of course, safety. As Ahmed clearly already stated before, it is really our license to operate, and we rather do not do a certain activity than do it unsafe.
That has been a very cultural shift, mainly in the North African sites, where there was more an attitude and a behavior of not reporting because it shows good statistics rather than to report so that we can learn for avoiding incidents in the future. The second enabler is people. There was an underinvestment in the people, both from a leadership perspective, but also from people on the ground, where there was very little exposure to international performance and to see what is the real manufacturing space going forward. It was really an enabler, and I'll come back to that in the next slide. The four pillars are based on Operational Excellence, optimized energy, digitized assets, and sustainable operations. Let me take you through this journey, starting with the people.
What we saw is that when incidents happened or when startups had to happen or turnarounds needed to, that there was very little collaboration across the OPCOs, and the leadership on site did not even stimulate any cross-OPCO knowledge sharing. There was also very little, as I said earlier, very little international experience or business exposure. What we did is, in fact, in the three countries, we changed the leadership. We have now a very highly competent leadership team in all the OPCOs with either very big international exposure from inside our business or even recruited from other sectors like the oil and gas or the polyolefins sector. We constantly share our knowledge now throughout the OPCOs.
We have monthly, for instance, safety calls where we discuss all the incidents that happened, all the best practices that we found within our company or in other companies in order to learn faster and improve faster rather than you can learn and improve alone. We also change people from location to location so that there is really this—we lower the boundaries to collaborate, that we share each other's culture and experience, and it really enables us to collaborate better. Centrally, we have developed a center of Excellence for it being with fairly limited people because we want to have the competence still a lot also decentralized on the sites. More and more enabled by digitization, we see that the center of Excellence really is growing and that we create value of it. Last but not least, of course, we make use of the ADNOC fast experience.
We work with their standards, and we also exchange improvement or reliability improvement plans or also in the AI ecosystem. The strategic pillars themselves, we face them in two parts. We call it MIP One, which started in 2023 and comes to an end towards the end of this year. That is really about what I would call fixing the manufacturing basics. It has a lot to do with improving our internal work processes, getting more efficient, and I will come back to an example of turnaround preparations and what a good turnaround in a plant like ours can do. There was also very little focus on energy consumption, and with costs going up, CO2 emissions becoming more and more important, of course, it had to change.
Last but not least, especially in the North African countries, we were confronted with very severe impacts from external factors, and we had to modify a little bit our improvement journey in order to become much more resilient versus those because they have impacted our performance throughout 2023 and 2024, and I'll show you an example of that. If you represent it graphically, MIP One is really to become more predictable and more reliable in the way we operate our plants. MIP Two will start in 2026 and will come to an end in 2027, and it is mainly based on delivering everything that we embarked on already now, and there are some more projects in the pipeline. I will explain them later. We further work and invest on improving our energy efficiency.
The digitization will, of course, continue and will move more from digitization into making use of AI going forward. Of course, we want to manage our CapEx and make sure that we have a steady state on our maintenance run rate CapEx. Graphically, you can see it on the right-hand side of the slide. Also, the turnaround interval. Today, we have a three-year interval in Algeria and a four-year interval in the other countries. We are working to prolong those intervals so that we get more hours production average each year. Let me take you to an example of what fixing the basics is and how it can impact the performance, the lifetime of the assets, and the emissions, for instance. As you know, more or less every year, there is something like 200 million tons of ammonia produced globally. All being gray ammonia.
Let's say 90% of that is based on natural gas, and then you have 10% in China where it is produced based on coal. But all the plants based on natural gas, they have in fact five chemical reactions to start from natural gas and ending with ammonia. The first two chemical reactions, you just need to produce to make the hydrogen out of the methane. You do that with a steam methane reformer, which you see here on the left top picture. The second two reactions, you need them just to shift the CO, which is a byproduct when you produce the hydrogen, to CO2, which you can then much more easily capture and either make urea out of it, like we do mostly, vent them to the atmosphere or store them, which is then more the CCS, creating more towards the blue ammonia.
The last reaction, obviously, is the hydrogen combining with the nitrogen, making your ammonia. Now, this primary reformer, which you see here on the picture, you have the steam methane reformer. You have the steam and the methane going through catalyst pipes, which you see clearly here on the side here. This is you have more or less 40 bar here. In order to make the reaction happen, you need to heat it constantly. What you do is you burn natural gas, and then you create flames here around 1,000 or 1,100 degrees, and that heats your reaction, and that makes the reforming happening. This is a picture on the left-hand side from our Egyptian site in 2023 before the turnaround. What you see is very clear flames, meaning they have a very high temperature.
You even see that some of the flames or some of the tubes here get much more light color, meaning the flame sometimes even touches the tube. That creates a very big impact on the lifetime of the tube, and it can lead to cracks even. Not only that, it gives you a higher energy consumption, leading to higher costs and more NOx and CO2 emissions. What we did during the last turnaround, we completely, after long assessments before, we completely changed the whole setup of the tube. The tubes are different in size and in diameter. We also, together with the burner supplier, completely optimized the combustion. You see on the right-hand side, a much more stable lower, the blue color here is the lower temperature of the flame.
No touching at all towards the tubes, guaranteeing a much higher energy efficiency, lower CO2 emissions, and lower NOx emissions. Now, in our financial calculations, we only use today the effect of the energy, the gas that we save by having lower costs, of course. What we have not yet calculated in is the advantage we will get throughout these measures in the CBAM timeframe. From 2026 onwards, everybody that wants to deliver product into Europe will have to pay a price depending on your CO2 emissions. The lower your CO2 emissions, the more competitive you are for delivering into Europe.
On the right-hand side, you see a program that we launched in Sorfert in Algeria based on a quite severe process safety incident that we had in 2022 or early 2023, where there was a leaking pipe in the back end of the plant leading to a flame and a leakage, and we had to stop the plant, and we were down for quite some time. The root cause analysis of that incident clearly indicates we have corrosion under insulation. So that is a type of corrosion which you can't see, but you need to be aware of it, and you need to check it. This program to protect and to detect corrosion under insulation was totally not existent at the plant at that time.
We completely had to embark on a corrosion protection program, both visual protection, which is quite easy to see, and you can see the effect afterwards. The most dangerous and the most difficult and the most costly part to work on is the unvisual correction in corrosion, sorry, being the corrosion under insulation. Clearly, you see an example before the corrosion protection where you have, and it was sometimes very big areas in the site where you had to build big scaffolding, take away the insulation, inspect for your corrosion, do painting programs, bring back the insulation, remove the scaffold. That has been a tremendous program launched in 2023 in Sorfert, and it is coming towards the end as we speak now. This, of course, creates CapEx because you need to do all this work. On the other hand, it really prolongs the lifetime of your asset.
Moreover, each year we get reviews from our insurance company, and they clearly reward us for this type of work. The insurance premium for our sites in Algeria has dramatically gone down, almost to half of what we paid in 2022 and 2023. I spoke about how important the turnaround programs are in plants like us, how we operate. You only have the occasion every four or sometimes every five years to do big changes or upgrades or cleaning in your plant. You can't miss that opportunity. That is also why some of these effects, when we say, Look, we are on track, that is more based on the actions and the progress with the action preparation rather than with the action execution because that only happens during the turnaround.
Now, the examples I show here on the slide are examples from Algeria in 2024 and Egypt also in the third quarter in 2024. The first two lines show us before and after the turnaround, the daily production rates. You see that both for urea and ammonia in the two plants that we operate there clearly show a 4%-7% improvement on a daily basis. For illustration matters, we also have given the numbers what it means when you analyze those improvements. On the resource side, we speak about energy and water. The energy, of course, has the biggest cost effect.
Clearly, we see that all the actions we did, like in the reformer, as I showed earlier, but also on the machine trains that we have, on steam traps that we upgrade, you see that we saved 7%-8% of our natural gas per ton of ammonia produced. Those two plants, they clearly deliver, as Ahmed said, also to Europe, also gives us a CBAM advantage. Last but not least, I would like to speak also here about the water consumption. Water is maybe not the most costly product that we buy, but it is fundamental in our sustainability roadmap and also for the reliability of our plants. You see that with the two turnarounds, with all the activities we did, we clearly saved an enormous amount of water on a daily or on an hourly basis.
Financially, if you take 2024 prices, you can see that the whole effect, for instance, of the EFC2 turnaround on an annualized basis gives us an EBITDA increase of $10 million. Now, we have said in earlier communications that towards the end of 2024, that the MIP One was 75% finished. What's the other 25% still to do? It is one of the big elements that we are going to do with the other 25% is a turnaround in EFC1 in Egypt this year, where we more or less copy-paste all the activities that we did in EFC2, and we expect the same type of advantages. Oops. Yeah. Looking back then to the 2024 performance and asset utilization rates, I think the slide that Ahmed showed was a consolidated level of the whole Fertiglobe assets.
Here, I give a snapshot of what happened in Egypt with EFC2 and with Sorfert in Algeria. In Sorfert, Algeria, due to an enormous amount of elements and competency of people was one of them, we have struggled over the years with our asset utilization. In 2024, it stayed more or less equal to 2023, but there was an enormous impact from 10 power outages that we got from the external grid. This plant needs 60 MW of electrical consumption. We used to import 40 MW from this plant, from the external grid. That area in Algeria, it has an extremely unreliable grid.
With the turnaround last year, we did not only the inside better limit modifications for the plant, but we also did a steam boiler project, which came online in first quarter this year, which allows us for producing much more power ourselves and be much less dependent from this very unreliable electrical grid, saving us from all these unreliability effects. If we would compensate for all these power outages, last year, we would have had 85% and 79% asset utilization, including all the turnarounds that we had. We see clearly a 15 percentage point upgrade in Q1 2025 now that we have more reliability. There was even there again an external, more gas-related outage that was coming from the region. Why we need to be down? Because we see going forward in April, the numbers continue to go up.
In Egypt, we used to have very good numbers already in 2023. There we were confronted with a huge water supply issue. We buy like 23,000 cubes of water every day from the grid. That grid is also very unreliable over there. What we had to do is we had to build our own water production units. These units are coming on stream as we speak, and it is part of this last 25% of MIP One that will be executed this year. If you see the performance after the turnaround in Q1 2025, we see that even with ammonia, we run above the design levels and constantly deliver above around 101% average over the quarter. Going into April, we saw the numbers further going up even. We clearly see a huge effect in our performance.
Honestly speaking, in 2024, we had quite a negative element from external factors. The good news is this boiler has been commissioned. The water project is coming to commissioning, is coming to its end, so that we are much more resilient to avoid what happened last year. I spoke a number of times of our sustainability actions and our sustainability commitment. We have internally, we have an ESG framework based on four pillars: the social value, where we clearly speak about safety. I think Ahmed already mentioned that we had achieved an enormous improvement in our statistics. Of course, way more to grow and to improve. The second one is what we call sustainable operations. What I can say is we have not withdrawn from freshwater anymore to produce our products, and we have zero scope two emissions in the UAE and in Egypt.
The third part of our framework is responsible business practices. All our plants have four ISO certificates for safety, environment, quality, and energy. The last one is product stewardship. As you probably have seen in earlier announcements, we are the first company in the world that won the H2 Global Pilot Auction to supply renewable ammonia in the E.U.. I think Haroon spoke to you and gave explanations on what the project is called Egypt Green, that shall realize this product supply into E.U.. We have done a first shipment of ISCC Plus certified renewable ammonia. Nobody else in the world managed to do that. We have a commitment that by 2035, we will sell more than 1 million tons of enhanced efficiency fertilizer. All these efforts have not been unseen by the external world.
In the middle of the right-hand on the slide, you see that AFA, the African Arabian Fertilizer Association, has given us the major award in sustainability from all the fertilizer companies in the MENA region. IFA, the International Fertilizer Association, recognizes us as an industry steward champion. Last but not least, the CDP, which is the Carbon Disclosure Project, which is internationally used to measure the sustainability performance of the companies, has given us both for climate change and for water a B rating. Not too many companies in the fertilizer world realize that in both climate change and water, you get a B rating. This was more or less about MIP One. What is MIP Two about? What will it bring us? By when will we see the effect? All the examples so far I have been given about Egypt and Algeria.
The reason for that is twofold. The first reason is that we did not have big turnarounds in Fertil to realize these major improvements because you can only do them when the plant is down and when you can change the vessels and upgrade the vessels. On the other hand, Fertil was already on quite good asset utilization rates. There are things in the pipeline, projects in the pipeline with very measurable and tangible results going forward. Once we will have those turnarounds in those plants, we will see the results. Three of the four projects that will impact Fertil is advanced process control, where we really will optimize the controllers in the control room. The second one is an upgrade of a waste heat boiler in Fertil Two, where we today have some limitations in the back end of the ammonia plant.
We will make use of some CO2, which is today still vented in Fertil One and connected via a pipe to Fertil Two to have more upgrades of CO2 towards urea. Last but not least, we're going to do a major energy improvement project in the plant in Fertil One once the turnaround is happening there. This energy project, together with the changeout of the new converter in EBIC, will each reduce the energy efficiency with 2 MMBTU per ton ammonia produced. You see the numbers, what it will mean on an annual basis. Besides that, I spoke earlier that we are really aiming to prolong the turnaround interval. If you take then the annualized days of downtime due to turnaround, you can spread your 35 days that you do your turnaround, not over four years, but over five years.
The number of downtime days per year decreases, leading to an annualized extra production, both in ammonia and urea. In total, we expect 300,000 tons extra production, split by 115,000 tons of urea and another 185,000 tons of ammonia. Of course, not all this product is sellable because if you produce more urea, you need 0.6 tons of ammonia to get this urea produced. These are all very measurable, tangible projects. Most of them are in the pipeline. POs are out. Equipment is being manufactured and on our way to our sites. Once the turnaround is there, we will implement them. This is the advantages we expect. Less tangible, but equally important is our journey on AI. We are embarking right now because we had to catch up a bit in our digitization of our plants, but we work in four focus areas.
Area one is what we call the intelligent asset, focusing on predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. Area two is the digital workforce of the future, where shift handovers, operator rounds, all will be digitized. We make use of 3D visualizations to train our people, mainly in the HSE ecosystem, but also to train process operators for new projects like we are doing with Harvest. The third focus area is AI-powered optimization, where we are creating chatbots to make sure that our people can faster find the answers to the questions they have. We will make much more use today of our digital twins, and we will implement digital sensors in the site.
A digital sensor is a replacement based on AI and machine learning of an expensive analyzer that you need to maintain very well in the plant, and you can replace it more and more with digital sensors, avoiding all the costs and the maintenance you have to do on these analyzers. Last but not least, as I said, we are implementing advanced process control. Together with the vendor, there are some AI features in these control systems that we expect to unleash once the project is up and running. After that, we expect to do real-time optimization, another layer on top of the control system in the control room. On the right-hand side of the slide, I just want to give you a flavor of what this all means and what it is about and how it can create value for the company.
What you see there is a graph with a lot of spikes. At the end of the graph, you see it was in May 2024, sorry, the spike went dramatically up. It reached a trip level and it completely tripped the plant for the operators without any signal in advance. However, when we deep dived and did a full root cause analysis of the outage, we found out that already months before in the same signal, there were spikes happening. However, the spikes did not reach the alarm level in the control room because you also do not want to flood your control room with too many alarms because the operator will not know anymore which is a critical one and which not. In this case, it did not reach the alarm level in the control room.
For the operator, everything was fine, while in reality, there was a trip. Embarking. What will machine learning and AI help us to do? They will monitor all the data that we have in the DCS systems online, and they will see if there is an anomaly in one of the data or a combination of anomalies in more of the data that do not reach the alarm level, but are clearly not normal. We do this with a company called ControlRoom.ai. This is the way then you have to see the data. We will send them all the data. They will follow us online. It is with people that worked for NASA and are still working for NASA. It is a very agile company, and we want clearly to see if this proof of concept can create value.
If yes, we will, of course, roll it out through all our assets. This project is about to kick off in our Fertil Two assets. The digital team, together with the plant people, are preparing for all of this. To summarize all the actions and to put it in a financial bridge, what does all this mean from an EBITDA perspective and what can you still expect starting from the $629 million EBITDA we reported for the full year 2024? It is a combination of volume improvements leading to extra sales and extra contribution margin and energy savings, which you see in the blue part here due to the type of projects that I mentioned here.
The biggest bars you see are in Egypt based on these turnarounds still to come and the optimization we further see, and in Fertil based on the actions that are in the pipeline in the turnarounds ahead of us. Together, we expect if we combine the remainder of MIP One plus the new target as also announced with Haroon for MIP Two, an EBITDA increase of $110 million-$120 million per year on a run rate basis, with split like $80 million coming from the production system, really the tons, and the remainder being the energy efficiency improvement. This number does not include any advantage we might see from the AI journey, as I just explained, as we are still in the kind of proof of concept status. It does not include any CBAM advantages that we will see when reducing the energy efficiency, selling our product into Europe.
With this, I'd like to end my presentation. I'm super excited and super ambitious and motivated together with the teams in the plants, both in Algeria, Egypt, and in the UAE, and with the central team under the leadership of Ahmed to deliver on these ambitious goals. With this, I give the word to Andrew, who will give some more insights on the financials. Thank you.
Thank you, Geert. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this room and for those of you online. [Foreign language] . I'm going to take you on the closing leg here as we go down to a conclusion with Ahmed.
In this section, I want to present our Q1 results and deep dive into the shareholder value creation, which include the distributions, talk about the disciplined capital allocation, and the financial benefits coming in from the ADNOC backing to dial in a little bit more than you've heard earlier. If I get this slide up, here it comes. I'm going to start off by highlighting the core financial messages I want to take you through today. Actually, I'm not. Where has this slide gone? There it is. Firstly, there's a strong traction and upside ahead, and our robust Q1 2025 results confirm our strong financial foundation. We have a focused investment approach and remain committed to our increased shareholder value through disciplined capital allocation and attractive distributions.
On top of this, you've heard about our clear plans to unlock a further $165 million-$175 million in EBITDA through our cost and operational optimization initiatives by 2030. With ADNOC support, we also benefit from a strong balance sheet, as Ahmed was talking about, the warehousing of development assets and the reduction in interest costs through our credit rating upgrades and debt revisions. Finally, and crucially, we are committed to creating value for you, our shareholders, and we have an attractive dividend capacity and policy with a solid free cash flow generation and balance sheet. Let's look at the first quarter of Q1 2025. The revenue and EBITDA have grown, with revenues increasing 26% year -on -year, and adjusted EBITDA growing 45% over the same period. That is on the back of the improved urea pricing in Q1.
For those of you who listened in to our Q4 results, we made a strategic decision to defer shipments from the end of Q4 and capitalize on the higher prices we saw coming through in Q1. Taking that together, our adjusted EBITDA is $261 million. That's 65% up quarter -on -quarter and 45% up year -on -year. Our adjusted net income is $73 million up, which is 74% quarter on quarter. It is down 24% year -on -year, but this last year was actually influenced by a one-off $79 million foreign exchange revaluation benefit in EFC, Egypt, as a result of the one-off Egypt revaluation, which you may recall. If you normalize for this, the net income has actually increased by a factor of four. As mentioned in the operational section, sales volumes have risen for both urea and ammonia.
Notably, ammonia sales are nearly up 34% from Q1 2024. Urea volumes have reached 1.1 million tons in Q1 2025. We have also seen a significant increase year -on -year for urea prices. That is standing around $425 a ton, while ammonia prices are remaining relatively stable, around about $346 a ton. Now, as an update, and I am sure some of you may ask, so I will mention it now, there is no change on the Sorfert gas contract conclusion. The retroactive provision basis we have made in the last two quarters remains the same. Now, let's look at free cash flow for Q1. We delivered $213 million of free cash flow, which represents 80% of EBITDA and our consolidated free cash flow.
The major items there between EBITDA and free cash flow include $30 million in net interest paid, $20 million in tax, and approximately $17 million in maintenance CapEx, with $16 million in working capital. This is reflecting our efficient cash conversion after necessary expenses. Now, what I'd like to take you through is a journey. We've talked about the 80% EBITDA to FCF conversion. I want to take you on this journey from that EBITDA conversion to capital allocation and then ultimately to shareholder return. Our EBITDA margins, starting with that, are roughly eight percentage points higher than our peer average. This outperformance is underpinned by our core advantages, including strategic access to the premium markets, which Ahmed was talking about, Europe and APAC.
You remember he really dived deep onto those particular areas, a lean cost structure at our Egyptian and Algerian operations, and advantaged feedstock access across all of our production footprint. The announced initiatives and the manufacturing improvement plans, MIP One, Two, and the FIT One and Two cost transformation plans further bolster our EBITDA. I'm aware we've peppered you with acronyms on the MIPs and the FITs. Stay with us, but they actually do generate some very good EBITDA upside, as you saw with Geert earlier. From this EBITDA to cash conversion, at the bottom of the table here, you can see that our EBITDA to free cash flow conversion is about 17 percentage points higher than the peer average. That's highlighting our strong cash generation efficiency.
This is primarily due to lower cash taxes giving a 4 percentage point benefit, lower maintenance CapEx from our younger asset fleet providing a 13 percentage point benefit relative to peers, and underscoring our efficient operations, tax, and CapEx management. Now, one area we've been lagging was interest costs. I'll announce some improvements on that in a few moments. How much of our cash generated is being held back for CapEx? Our capital expenditure strategy for maintenance remains disciplined and focused on maximizing volumes. You've heard from Geert about MIP One, announced at the end of 2023. That was a $100 million improvement to EBITDA on a 2023 baseline. That extra CapEx is seen in 2024, and we plan a further temporary CapEx increase in 2025 and 2026 to close out MIP One and fund MIP Two projects that unlock that additional volume.
After peaking in 2026, that maintenance CapEx tapers down and is expected to decrease to a $105 million-$125 million range from 2027 once those MIP projects are completed. Now, we look closely at our capital allocation, and we believe we're very disciplined on this. Quite simply, the returns identified from MIP One and Two make the greatest shareholder value choice, as I think you've seen. Geert does some good examples as he drove into basically the upside from those investments. The efficiency gains from these projects and the adoption of predictive maintenance, which Geert was talking about, will help us sustain lower ongoing CapEx needs while still maximizing the asset performance going forward. Now, let's look here at, we previously announced these transformation targets over the last two years, FIT and MIP. Let's drill down into these ones and bring it all together for you.
Once again, we have the acronyms. We implemented our FIT $50 million run rate saving by the end of 2024. This is something we announced back in 2023. $30 million of that you will have seen in the 2024 results, and you'll now see $20 million of that coming through in 2025 results, because these are projects that were implemented towards the end of 2024. MIP was announced in 2023, delivered the $100 million on the 2023 baseline by the end of 2025. As Geert just announced, progress is going well and is 75% complete. You'll see the remaining $43 million contribution to EBITDA by the end of 2025, as I mentioned here, and that totals $56 million in total on a 2024 baseline, which is what we are basically referencing for you for the EBITDA growth to our billion dollars.
Now, the sequel that Geert and the team have announced today, which is MIP Two, is an initiative targeting $75 million-$80 million run rate in EBITDA improvements by the end of 2027. We are also announcing FIT Two, the initiative to deliver $35 million run rate savings by the end of 2026. This builds further on the success of FIT One and uses the same cost-saving levers, but goes in harder. These levers have delivered transformational cost savings from the creation of shared service centers function in Cairo, optimized logistics where we really try to get much tighter on the assets and the capacity we use on logistics, OpEx through procurement savings and a real focus on where we spend, together with administrative efficiencies supported by ADNOC and the integration of $15 million-$20 million, which was highlighted earlier.
All told, this generates an expected additional $165 million-$175 million uplift from the end of 2027. These are contributing directly to that 2030 EBITDA target you have seen Ahmed actually present on. I have talked about the levers for FIT just now, and I want to expand on that. Looking at our business structure, at IPO, Fertiglobe operated in quite a decentralized model. Whilst the design was to allow considerable devolved autonomy to focus on agility and individually localized optimization, it also led to fragmented IT systems, sub-optimal performance insights, and a focus on country-specific procurement strategies.
On the back of a fully integrated enterprise resource planning system, ERP, being implemented across the group, this is now allowing us to build standardized operations, which is the springboard for greater cost efficiencies through this creation of a shared service center in Cairo, creation of group centers of Excellence, where we centralize this to give the support and the insight to the whole of the group, and centralized strategic procurement as well. Let me just pepper that with a few simple examples to add a context. Through ERP and the shared service center, the cost of processing invoice is reduced from $283 an invoice to $14, and that'll be $3 next year. That's essentially a 99% reduction in the cost of doing something like this. We're also driving out $750,000 a year from customer interface and billing.
Our centralized procurement strategy is driving down costs in various categories like catalysts and valves as we apply more group purchasing power across our whole group. These transformations also enable better data-driven decision-making, better value insights at a group level, and also a better platform for AI, be it in manufacturing, as Geert was just mentioning, or also procurement optimizations or even agentic AI integration during our standardized processes. The important point here is that these are transformations. These are not just cost reductions. These are decisions made to keep costs down year -on -year through the efficiencies we design. It is not about stopping something and then seeing it bounce up a couple of years later. A very important point for us, ADNOC continues to strengthen the balance sheet. Ahmed spoke earlier about the support that our new parent, ADNOC, is bringing.
Let me shine a light into the support in finance and our balance sheet. ADNOC and Fertiglobe earlier announced that projects may be warehoused with ADNOC during the development phase and transferred into operation post-COD at cost. This obviously reduces the development phase, that financial risk from us is the exposure there, but also protects Fertiglobe's balance sheet by transferring assets when they are cash generating. They are enabling us to continue to deploy our funds to best use beforehand, whether that's in growth or dividends. Additionally, by transferring at cost, Fertiglobe effectively is taking on the asset at a lower value established during the development phase than a transfer at post-COD. As an example there, if we look at Harvest, our TASEES project, this was essentially a lot of those costs were locked in around about 2022.
As that project is coming up to COD, that is somewhat sort of four-plus years later. You are essentially avoiding almost 4%—four years of inflation there, which is a very key element as well, which is often not fully understood. All of this adds further to protecting our balance sheet, where we aim to target two times leverage through the cycle. This ADNOC halo effect is also delivering $10 million annual savings in interest costs. The credit upgrade we had in December following the ADNOC parentage delivered a $3.6 million saving, which you will have seen come through during Q1. That halo has also allowed us further to bring down interest costs, as yet unannounced until today, where at the end of Q1 into Q2, we refinanced our $300 million term loan, which reduced 20 basis points with an ADNOC in-house bank.
Also, just literally the last week, we've engaged with our lenders for a repricing of our $1.1 billion of external loans, and that's reduced 40 basis point-50 basis points down to 95 basis points, 90 basis points, as you can see there on the slide. This has delivered a further $6.7 million annual bottom line savings. From higher EBITDA margins than our peers, the conversion to free cash flow, of which it was 80% in Q1, and the focused disciplined approach to maintenance CapEx. Our goal is to lead the sector in total shareholder return through the cycle. Now, this goal is a function of three pillars that you can see here: leverage, balance leverage supported, as we have mentioned, by ADNOC backing and to maintain our investment grade rating. Capital investment.
We're very disciplined in what we're basically looking at there, but our double-digit IRR as a minimum for investments that align with our pillars is something we find important for us and for yourselves. In terms of shareholder returns, we continue, we will continue to pay attractive dividends. As you've seen, we announced a buyback activity the last few weeks, and we will buy back our shares when we believe we see the price advantage for ourselves and therefore for yourselves as well. Bringing this together, I confirm Fertiglobe will retain our current dividend policy, which we consider the best fit for the strategy ahead to return substantially all our cash after providing for the growth, which you've seen indicated here, and maintaining investment grade.
I would like to thank you for your time to hear me today, and I am now handing over to Ahmed for closing remarks. Thank you.
All right, thanks, Andrew. Thanks all for paying attention, nice and being attentive audience members here and those on the webcast. I promised this is the final page. As you heard today, we had strong Q1 results, building a nice foundation for future profitable growth. The future growth is driven by some of the key dynamics and growth metrics that we said are going to support us in the future, including food security, tight supply, and over time, the energy transition. We have an incredibly strong foundation and a clear strategy built upon these four pillars to get to over $1 billion of EBITDA by 2030 at 2024 pricing.
As Geert walked you through and spent a good amount of time walking you through, we have the Operational Excellence pillar, which is the biggest one and deserves the most attention because sometimes it's easy for us to forget, but the vast majority of our people sit on our sites. They produce the products that we need to sell every day to generate our free cash flow. Hence, the big focus from our perspective on safety, operations, and manufacturing and efficiency and why it requires dedicated time, we wanted to give you a glimpse of here today with Geert's discussion. The first strategic investment announced yesterday, and Haroon discussed it in more detail on Wengfu on the distribution side. Small investment, but it gives you a flavor of the kind of opportunism we'd be looking at as we want to expand our EBITDA and free cash flow generation.
We also discussed, and Haroon spent some time on AdBlue and diesel exhaust fluid. This is something that actually in my prior role when I was at OCI, I spent a lot of time in this sector. We built a business out in the United States and grew it significantly. We like that it goes not necessarily in the fertilizer chain, but actually into the automotive end markets. It's a wonder product because not only does it remove NOx and particulate emissions, it needs to be used every day, and it actually improves diesel fuel economy. We are going to continue to push on these investment opportunities organically when it comes to AGU in Egypt or AdBlue here in the Fertiglobe plant. We want to continue to grow that business in other nitrogen-related products.
When you couple that with the Wengfu, we're looking at kind of high return investments. If you were to look at the funnel of investments and opportunities, both internally and externally, the team has been through tens and tens and tens of opportunities over the last few years. That high level of selectivity, trying to get things cheaply, being very value-focused, is going to continue to be where we want to play. Similarly, when it comes to low carbon ammonia and that opportunity, it's that same disciplined approach we'll take. Hence why Haroon spent some time talking about the importance of offtake, the importance of economics before kind of taking a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. As you see, and I've said many times here, I don't shy away from utilizing our parent ADNOC to support us in reaching our ambitions.
We have a great, under this new ownership, great support from ADNOC and the leadership of ADNOC and several board members here that gives us an advantage. We want to utilize that advantage in our GROW 2030 strategy, as well as our focus on the energy transition. With that, I want to thank you again for your time. I'm going to hand it over to Rita, and we'll do some questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Ahmed. Thank you, everyone. As a reminder, you can scan the QR code here on the screen to submit your questions. Also, same for our webcast participants. Thank you for your attention today. We will get ready for the Q&A shortly.
Today, Fertiglobe enters a new chapter of growth as the world's leading exporter of nitrogen fertilizers and ammonia. With a young and low-cost, strategically positioned production platform, we are proud to launch our GROW 2030 strategy, a roadmap to becoming a $1 billion-plus EBITDA company by 2030, and a fully integrated global downstream nitrogen champion. Our growth is driven by four strategic pillars achieving first quartile Manufacturing and Cost Excellence, maximize net back and increase customer proximity, expand nitrogen product portfolio to capture more value, and pursue a disciplined approach to low-carbon ammonia growth. With the strategic support of our majority shareholder ADNOC, its strong financial backing, vote of confidence, and support in optimizing costs, we are able to warehouse and incubate promising projects, thereby opening new horizons for disciplined growth.
We are strongly positioned for the energy transition and fully committed to creating long-term sustainable value for all our stakeholders.
Where do you go?
Yeah.
All right. Take your time.
Okay, I think we got a lot of questions on the webcast. Let me start with the first one from Muhammad Afaq from International Securities. Does the $1 billion EBITDA target include the consolidation of new projects which were previously announced from under ADNOC? If so, what is the impact of those on an annual basis?
Sure. As Haroon walked through on the pillars there, it includes two projects. One, which is Project Harvest, which is under construction to start in 2027. We have that $70 million-$100 million of EBITDA that we have in the target, that fourth pillar. It includes Project Harvest, which is that project that we've already started spending on. It also includes the Egypt Green project, which should be FID in the second half of this year. What it does not include, that $70 million-$100 million in that bridge, is Rabdan, the one that Haroon was talking about, which is the Blue Hydrogen Production and other ammonia plant. It does not include the Exxon Baytown 1 BCF a day hydrogen plant in Texas and the 1 million ton ammonia line there. That is not accounted for at all in those numbers and would be additional upside.
It would also include some more spending, but as Haroon mentioned and as Andrew mentioned and I mentioned, we would look at kind of structures that allow for warehousing of the capital cost and other such structures with ADNOC to ensure shareholder value creation.
Thanks, Ahmed. Has there been any update on the gas pricing agreement in Sorfert? Also a question from International Securities.
I think Andrew previewed that in his section, but there's no further update. We've continued to reflect on the results for Q1, the same gas pricing that we shared with the market late last year. We continue to anticipate that will be where the finalization of firm documentation ends up.
Thank you. Another question is, are there any plans to increase ownership directly in the plants which Fertiglobe does not fully own currently?
We have in the past done so. And as Haroon mentioned, we take an opportunistic approach to it. When you think about the plants that we do not have full ownership in right now, there are really two. Our Algerian plant we own 51% of and Sonatrach, our government partner, owns 49% of. The EBIC, our Egyptian ammonia plant, we own 75% of that plant. Then we have 15% owned by EGAS, which is the Egyptian gas company, and 10% owned by a private individual. When it comes to Algeria, I would say that most likely we will stick with the 51-49 structure as it is owned by Sonatrach and their partner and our gas supplier. I do not anticipate that that number would increase from the 51% we are at now.
When it comes to Egypt also, just as a reminder for those of you that may be new to Fertiglobe, we actually used to only own 60% of that business until 2021, right before the IPO. We bought 15% from third parties, actually some Japanese investors and KBR, to go from 60% - 75%. We did so, I think, with a little over $40 million investment, and it ended up being about a three-times EBITDA purchase. Over a 30% IRR, if I remember, on that investment back in 2021. That is one of the other kind of ways we will continue to look at opportunities. For now, I think we stick with the minorities in places we have today.
Thank you. A few questions from Sashank Lanka at Bank of America. First one, when you mentioned the EBITDA target of $1 billion plus by 2030, how should we look at run rate each year between 2025 and 2030? What is the Algerian price assumption you have for this?
What we did is we've given a bridge through 2030, obviously five years out. To the last part of that question, you can assume that we're using the same Algerian gas price that I just talked about in the first question, which is the one we've announced since November when we announced our Q3 results. Same Algerian gas price there, which is the higher price reflected there. We're not giving year-by-year bridges. I've been in this industry long enough to know not to give guidance one quarter away, but rather what we've been focusing on is looking at these four different pillars, the different initiatives we have there, picking a price. We've picked 2024 so that we can run it for you at the 2024 price and showing with each one how we can grow that EBITDA into that billion dollars.
When you look and you think about those four pillars, the first pillar, when you think about Cost Excellence and Manufacturing Excellence, there you saw in the presentation, we're trying to have that all complete by end of 2027. That is reflected in 2028, for example. When it comes to the fourth pillar, low carbon ammonia, that is also kind of a 2028 figure when you have Project Harvest and Egypt Green operational. For pillars two and three, which are the ones that involve some growth both organically and inorganically, going either downstream or into new products, that is where there is a little bit of dependency on what we end up doing. We could end up doing something in 2029 or it could happen in 2027. That could affect how our EBITDA stacks up.
Obviously, the whole way through, we're going to be focusing on that balance that I said at the beginning on sustainable shareholder creation, which is continue to have strong dividends, maintain that investment-grade profile, and try to find pockets of value where we can create them. As you can see with pillars two and three, Wengfu is going to hit us later this year. I just was speaking to my—yeah, Wengfu is going to hit us later this year. The AdBlue and DEF will ramp up over time with both the AdBlue here in Abu Dhabi and the TGUs that we're doing in Egypt now that we've announced both of those today.
Thank you. For all the self-help measures you announced today, which ones would you classify as the easiest to implement and which ones could prove more challenging?
I mean, we could go pillar by pillar, but maybe I'll throw that one over to Geert with the first pillar.
I would not say the first pillar is easy, and I have respect for all the hard work that people in Fertiglobe are doing, people in Egypt are doing, and people in Algeria obviously are doing. It is quite realistic that we reach it. As I said, even some potential uplift from AI is not even in. Yes, it is hard work. The numbers we gave you are expected to have a run rate effect from 2028 onwards, and we are quite confident that the tons and the energy figures I showed that we were going to realize them. That I can confirm.
Yeah, maybe Haroon on the second and third pillar.
Yeah. I think on the second pillar, as I mentioned, a large portion of that is already spoken for with this Wengfu acquisition. The remaining part of that second pillar is all within our control with contracts that just expire in the normal course. I think that's, if I'm allowed to say, in the bag. Pillar three and pillar four, AGU and DEF, I think, as I mentioned, initiatives well underway. As Ahmed just highlighted, for the balance, we're going to adopt a very value-oriented approach if we look at organic and inorganic expansion. I think that element of pillar three is hard to predict. Pillar four, Harvest construction is proceeding well, and that's the biggest contributor of that component.
Thank you, Haroon. The next question comes from Ahmed Kamel from Azimuth. What is the CapEx needed to reach the $1 billion plus EBITDA target by 2030? How will it be financed, and what is the maximum allowed leverage?
Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question. I think we tried to give some color here with the strategic pillars on how we would think about financing those. I think on the first pillar, we talked about some elevated maintenance CapEx that we started spending last year, right? And a bit of higher CapEx that we're seeing with some replacement of these equipments to get Manufacturing Improvement Plan One complete and Manufacturing Improvement Plan Two. That should be complete by end of next year on the manufacturing side based on what we can see. The numbers we're talking about are roughly $50 million -$80 million. Yeah, for the first pillar. For the second pillar, I think Haroon talked about the $8 million premium we're paying for Wengfu, obviously allowing us to get a lot of that second pillar already with that acquisition alone.
I will say that despite getting a good big bite of it with what we ended up signing up this weekend, this last weekend with the Wengfu, we are continuing to look at other opportunities. To give you a sense, something like doing a little bit of trading, right? Where we do some back-to-back distribution for Egyptian producers or Arab Gulf producers going into some of the same markets we go into, that can create value. As we are further downstream in Europe, as we are further downstream in Australia, we can actually buy in third-party product and be able to create some value that way. Like I said, I do not see big spending there post what we are at with Wengfu on pillar two.
On pillar three, of the $75 million-$100 million, about $22 million comes from the two DEF-related initiatives, whether it's AGU in Egypt or DEF here in Abu Dhabi. I have to thank, I'm seeing Nelson right here, getting us a great expansion here in Abu Dhabi to do 50,000 tons-100,000 tons of DEF locally at under $1 million, which has basically been spent and done. In Egypt, we're going to spend $5 million to get the hopefully TGU upside of $7 million by going into Europe. That leaves a balance of, I'll call it $50 million-$78 million, $50 something to $78 million of EBITDA that's part of that bridge. The question is going to be kind of how much is that? When we think about that, we didn't put a number on it specifically.
It can depend on what type of multiple, if it's an M&A-related deal you go in with. It could depend on potentially you could use shares if we're comfortable with the share price at the time. You could use partially shares, so that could be a little bit different than actually spending cash to do so. Also the ability to warehouse things within ADNOC can also affect what that number looks like. From our perspective, as you can tell, we're quite cheap. We don't like to spend a lot on the investments. Really, we're looking both inorganically, potential M&A opportunities, you can put a multiple on that to get some of that EBITDA, but also organically. For example, adding sulfur to urea or ammonia is a way we can create incremental value doing nitrification inhibitors.
Some of these types of organic, very highly synergistic investments can create value and we can do them piece by piece. I'd say that it's going to be a combination of all of the above that can allow us to have what we think is a very digestible figure over the next five years to continue to maintain a strong dividend while growing that business. As Haroon said, moving on to the fourth pillar, that is the $150 million for Harvest for the 30% stake plus another $120 million for the extra 24% stake that ADNOC is financing in the warehousing. That's $270 million total. We've spent $50 million of it already, and that's something that we'd be spending over the next few years comfortably. We sit today at a 1.1 times net leverage level in the LTM period.
As the previous question asked, this does not include any of the ADNOC other projects, whether it's Rabdan or Exxon Baytown yet.
Next question from Yousef Husseini , EFGRMS. How much did gas supply cuts in Egypt impact utilization rates at EFC and EBIC in 2024? Is there anything you can do from an operational perspective to mitigate to some extent these gas supply risks in Egypt?
I think we can come back on that number, give the number for 2024.
It's around 30%-40% from the losses I showed are related to gas, and the rest was the water losses.
Sure. Yeah, let's say you saw the numbers that were in the presentation. We were not unscathed last year of it, but I think that there's a couple of things that our team in Egypt's done, which is to reduce gas consumption per unit ton, gas consumption per unit ton of production, also scheduling turnarounds during the summer period, during the hot months. I know we do not do that here as much because it gets extremely hot here, but in Egypt, it's manageable to do a turnaround, for example, in the July-August period safely. That allows us to say to the Egyptian government, we have three lines here. We are going to take one of them down for the turnaround on a prescheduled basis. Our peers are doing the same thing too.
When people talk about that, other peers in Egypt are doing the same thing, taking turnarounds during the summer months, which happen to be the lower demand months in the northern hemisphere as well, as I said earlier. Do you have anything further to comment on that?
Yeah, I think I would like to add that there is not only the downtime related to a gas curtailment or the tons you lost. What we faced last year, unfortunately, is that also one of our main equipment in the EBIC plant called the converter, which I showed you in MIP Two earlier, that we're going to replace next year during the turnaround. With every stop and start, you cool down that equipment internally from, let's say, 450 degrees to ambient conditions, and then you have to heat it up. What happens during such a transition, you have your full shrinkage of the steel and your expansion of the steel. Unfortunately, when we restarted after a gas curtailment in June last year, the plant runs like 2%-3% lower after the curtailment than before the curtailment.
There is not only the purely downtime because there is no gas. It has some collateral effect. The good news is that this equipment is under order. It will be delivered on site, let's say, in May, June 2026. That is why I'm quite confident that with this equipment in place, we will reach the 100,000 extra tons of ammonia after the turnaround being executed because the equipment will be robust for these kinds of changes.
Yeah, and obviously, something that we monitor for Egypt, last summer, there were quite a few curtailments and affected our results in 2024. I know with the new Minister of Energy in Egypt, he's been heavily focused with the Prime Minister's office on making sure that there's enough supplies to the extent possible, trying to encourage more exploration in Egypt. This is another benefit of being part of the ADNOC ecosystem. ADNOC and BP, as part of XRG, have a joint venture operating on the upstream side in Egypt. They recognize in Egypt that we're one of the large dollar exporters.
I think 60 LNG cargoes were secured between Shell and Total, and a new regasification facility with HUGS has been secured as well because last summer, you went into it with a bit of a surprise in Egypt, a huge amount of increase in demand and a big shortfall in supply from the Zohr field, the gas field last summer. Now I think there is a bit more of an equipped approach from the Egyptian government, but it is something obviously we continue to monitor and are mitigating against.
Thank you. Another question from EFG, and that actually we got from several people is, what is the price base of this $1 billion plus 2030 guidance? And what is the sensitivity to these prices?
The price base we mentioned is the 2024 Benchmark pricing for ammonia and urea. It is exactly what, if you could look up what that Benchmark is on average for the year for both of those commodities, that is the exact same price base we are using for 2030 and coming up with those numbers. On the second part, the sensitivity, do we have some high level?
We've got a high level. I think we sort of feather it a little bit according to where those pillars are going to be and what particular time. I think if you could look at maybe like a $50 a ton increase, we'd probably give you so much we're in $250-$350, that kind of range in terms of the EBITDA.
Thank you. Another question from Bank of America is, it seems like 2024 had some issues operationally in Egypt and Algeria due to the one-offs mentioned in the presentation. If we assume normalized operations in both countries, what would this incremental EBITDA impact be, assuming prices remain the same as 2024?
Yeah, so let me first take it price as 2023 because that is how we calculated the MIP One and communicated about MIP One. It was quite a tremendous impact financially. Actually, in the 2024 numbers, we have $16 million that we can really say in the EBITDA is a result of the MIP One issues. If we would not have had all the external factors, this would have been around $70 million-$80 million. There has been quite a significant impact in the 2024 numbers. As I said, the good news is that we have worked hard to build assets that will make us much more resilient versus these elements. We do not expect them to come back in 2024 and beyond, in 2025 and beyond. Again, the question was based on 2024 prices.
In the actual result of 2024, the $629 million EBITDA we communicated, $16 million we allocate purely to MIP. If we continue to use 2024 prices, this would have been around $45 million higher. That was the impact in the results last year.
Thank you. Question from Giuseppe at Morgan Stanley. Should we expect more downstream integration in the next few years?
Potentially. Yeah, I mean, I'd say that's definitely one of the pillars, but we will take a selective approach there on the downstream side, very much not just focusing on the returns from an EBITDA or EPS accretion perspective, but definitely free cash flow. If we're tying up capital for this, it's very important that it doesn't do something that materially affects our leverage, our ability to continue to pay dividends. It's going to continue to be highly selective as we look to go further downstream.
Another question. What are the most important ways through which you can leverage the relationship with your majority shareholder ADNOC in the future?
We gave a couple today with the ADNOC halo helping on the financing side and also on the cost side. As I said, there is more to come. We are exploring a few other opportunities with ADNOC as well. We have some ideas. If you have other ideas, please share them with us as well. We are always looking to see where there can be win-wins. We have a very supportive set of board members, asset management teams that are focusing and looking on what is available. Nothing further really to say at this point.
Thank you. There is another question from Barclays. Is there a regulatory support system to create or build a DEF market in the UAE?
There is support. I think Haroon mentioned AdBlue or DEF has been a requirement for road transport, I think in Europe since 2007 and in the United States with the Clean Air Act since 2013. We are sitting in Abu Dhabi in 2025. Currently, when you operate a diesel engine, you are not required to use diesel exhaust fluid, even though it has been over a decade in these two other economies. It is actually a requirement in India. It is a requirement in China. It is a requirement in Brazil, but it is still not enacted here. I think there is a lot of support because, as Haroon said, this is not about Greenhouse Gases. This is not about your children or your grandchildren in the ozone layer. This is about local emissions, nitrous oxide emissions, particulates emissions. That affects local air quality in Abu Dhabi. It affects local air quality in Dubai.
It's a no-brainer to use a product like DEF where you're consuming diesel. It gets sprayed into the exhaust, and it neutralizes around 90% of the NOx and particulate emissions. It makes a lot of sense. I think, if I may say, in the United Arab Emirates, we're just needing to catch up to make it a requirement. A lot of diesel consumers here do use DEF, but it's not a requirement. We see the marine sector being another big one as well. I would not be surprised if we see something in legislation here in the next 12 months. Obviously, that'll be supportive for our business, but also for the environment, for local air quality, asthma, all these types of potential downside risks with consuming diesel but not having this requirement, as you see in other economies.
How do you see the market developing for low-carbon ammonia? Do you see CBAM incentivizing and making low-carbon ammonia more competitive?
Yeah, I mean, as Haroon mentioned and I mentioned, we do think that it's a matter of when, not if. Ammonia has those key elements. I'm not going to go over them again, that make it a very attractive vehicle to move hydrogen, but also something that can be combusted as a fuel. We're quite excited about its ability to, particularly into Europe with CBAM, to start pricing that CO2. Until you have proper pricing of CO2, you're going to look at LNG. In some cases, people continue to look at coal and looking at other hydrocarbons to supply the energy requirements.
What we need to focus on is how we can produce a low-carbon ammonia in an efficient way, in a cost-effective way, taking advantage of, for example, what Haroon mentioned, the advantages of Project Harvest, $500,000,000 project versus in the United States, it could be a $2,000,000,000 project. Taking advantage of the cost structure here for CapEx, taking advantage of the low-cost feedstock, whether it is natural gas or in the future renewable electricity to make green hydrogen and green ammonia. I think a lot of the elements are there for the supply side, but you need a bit more of that demand-side pull. We want to see more of that demand-side pull and have offtakes before we sanction these products because it is a more expensive product to produce.
To make a blue or a green hydrogen is more expensive than an LNG on its own. It needs either the stick of something like carbon border tax, adding a CO2 price, or a carrot of incentivization to incentivize someone to buy it, like you have, for example, in Japan and Korea, part of the programs we are participating in, which provide a contract for difference and pay the higher price for that ammonia to decarbonize the power sector. As we mentioned earlier, and last year, we secured the only green ammonia offtake globally with the German government with H2 Global, which buys that ammonia at EUR 1,000 a ton, which is 3x the current Arab Gulf price of ammonia. That is the only way we would do Egypt Green. If we did not have that offtake, we would not do Egypt Green.
That's the approach that we're going to be taking when it comes to not just green, but blue ammonia. We do think the demand really materializes towards the end of this decade. We're going to position ourselves to capitalize upon that with line of sight on that demand.
Question from Arqaam Capital from Soha Saniour . You've discussed Project Harvest or the Taziz low-carbon ammonia project today as one of the pillars. Any updates you can provide on the other projects in the US and in the UAE?
Maybe Haroon, when it comes to the fourth pillar in terms of Rabdan versus the Exxon Baytown project, can we give a bit more color than what you provided today?
You know, I think the focus is just coming back to how we look at low-carbon projects, and we need certain criteria to be met, whether that's offtakes spoken for, CapEx that makes sense, and how we stack up compared to other projects that might be competing for that same supply. I do not think there's much more to add. We will be looking at FID decisions in the case of Rabdan in the second half of, sorry, early 2026 and Exxon Baytown in the second half of 2025. It is something that we're tracking quite closely as regulatory developments change and offtake demand. We get a clearer picture in the coming months.
I mean, to summarize, it's just firming up that CapEx and firming up the offtake to make sure that it's there because it is an elevated cash cost to make it. We believe we're advantaged in making it both in Exxon Baytown with the support of the Inflation Reduction Act and the low-cost gas there and also here in Rabdan. Obviously, making sure it fits within our return thresholds and capital structure. We can use different project levers, including the warehousing with ADNOC, to help make that work.
Thank you. A question from CI Capital on expectations for the gas and electricity situation in Egypt and Algeria that impacted operations last year. I think we touched on Egypt, but maybe more on Algeria.
Yeah, I mean, Algeria, I think here it covered it pretty well. We had 10 power outages last year because we were consuming over 40 MW from the grid. That number has now come down significantly to the single-digit level. We have the ability, if there is a grid outage in Algeria, to continue to run our site and not have a hard stop. That's been the big focus area from our leadership in Algeria. We feel like the worst is behind us there. Hopefully, we should be, I think, in a very good position to deal with external shocks. We're really focusing on being in island mode there when it comes to electricity in Algeria.
Thank you. Another question we got from EFG is, are these IRR you mentioned today, the double-digit IRR targets on a project level or on the company level?
They're at the project level. We look at the project returns and on an unlevered basis is what we're looking at.
On the share buyback program, could you share the timeline within which you aim to reach the 2.5% buyback?
I don't think it's appropriate to share the timeline, but we've gotten the approval to go forward with it. We're going to continue to look to buy in shares when it's attractive for us to do so. It's an ongoing program where we think there's value uplift when we can buy those shares at those attractive valuations. Not much more to add.
A question on the market outlook with regards to China. How probable and material would you think urea export resumption could be for this year?
I mean, urea export, it's been a lot of start-stop. Urea export from China being the big question. Maybe not as much as the other discussions with China have been in the market the last few days. When it comes to urea export, we've seen very little export the last 18 months, as I've said. I got an update last week and another one yesterday, then another one today, suggesting that the Chinese government may only want to do 2 million tons of urea export by 2026, which would, I think, the market would receive very well on the fertilizer side. It's just rumored. We continue to think, as I said, that the government will focus on food security.
There's been a big increase in demand for urea in the fertilizer space and also in the AdBlue and industrial urea space in China that's kept basically more of that Chinese urea domestically. There is going to be that focus to not see too much of a price increase in China if they allow for exports. We continue to think it's more of a kind of a 2 million-4 million ton exporter that actually the market needs.
Thank you. Question from Citi on pillar 3. Can you provide more details, particularly around the potential margin uplift to move ammonia into higher value derivatives?
I mean, look, it's hard to put definite numbers. Obviously, when we look at the waterfall of contribution margins, you make higher contribution margins on nitrates than you do on urea. You make higher contributions on urea than you make on ammonia. I'm not giving any specific guidance in terms of products. As we look at those uplift opportunities, it's a combination of two things. What's the incremental margin that we get from this product expansion and what do we pay for it? It takes both of those elements to jive together to make sure that any move makes sense. That, of course, is within the boundaries of what Ahmed and Andrew had mentioned, which is we want to make sure that investment-grade rating as well as our ability to pay dividends stays. Hard to give definite numbers, a few moving parts over there.
One thing I could say is that we also value is when that uplift is a bit more kind of detached from necessarily maybe seasonality or where we are in the market. If you do something like an AdBlue or a DEF or, for example, the automotive-grade urea that we have now entered, we are entering into exclusivity on in Egypt, that is one where the margin uplift is above urea. There is an FOB Egypt price for urea. Here, what the returns are going to be plus some premium. FOB Egypt goes from $400-$600 to $300. As that moves up, that premium is staying fixed. It is some predictability on that margin uplift, whether it is there on the AdBlue side or if we add some sulfur where we can get utilizing ADNOC's sulfur sourcing capabilities.
It'd be the same kind of thing where we're trying to get double-digit or triple-digit dollar per ton kind of uplift that has a bit more predictability around it, so we can have this more predictable uplift. The other thing to mention is you're taking potentially ammonia tons or urea tons out of the fertilizer space and putting it into a new market potentially. That's the other area that you're saying, okay, if I now had to sell 100,000 tons of ammonia in a two-week period, now I might have urea, maybe I'll sell 70,000, and then 30,000 now is going into a car or into some other application. That's another kind of diversification and the seasonality we talked about as well.
We saw some news today that 45V credit benefits in the U.S. may be scrapped. How important is this legislation support for your potential U.S. growth?
Sometimes we have to be really real-time here because there's some proposed legislation in the U.S. and the Inflation Reduction Act that obviously we've been monitoring. We continue to feel strong despite what's been proposed around our project with Exxon and Baytown. There are certain characteristics of the project that Exxon and ADNOC today have that I think are advantageous. You continue to feel pretty confident on that side. As we said earlier, that project, and as Exxon has said earlier, that project is dependent on regulatory support from both a supply perspective and the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as on a demand side for the offtake of that project. We continue to feel pretty good about it. As Haroon said, we're still anticipating an H2 2025 FID.
We got a question also from HSBC from Sriharsha Pappu. Would it be fair to say you've been disappointed by the rate of demand offtake for blue ammonia?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think we would have liked to see more of it earlier on. At the same time, I think what I'm happy about is that we didn't overextend ourselves and go building new production at a higher cash cost without having a home for it. I think we'll take a more pragmatic approach. We continue to be, if we thought about those three growth pillars, we still believe food security and more demand for imports of ammonia and urea and related products are going to continue to be solid growth drivers. As I said, it's just going to take a bit longer. What our view is, is that we want to be ready for any scenario in terms of regulatory environment. Sometimes the governments will be swinging to the right. Sometimes they'll be swinging to the left.
We're just going to stay the course. We focus on being low cost. We focus on being nimble. We focus on creating value where we have visibility on it. We are not going to go blindly into a project of low carbon without having appropriate offtaker line of sight on that so that we properly and judiciously use our shareholder capital.
I think with that, we've covered all questions. We remain available for any other questions. Please do reach out should you have anything additional. Thank you for your attention and your participation today.