Good morning, everyone, and a very warm welcome at this Analyst and Investor Day of 2023. Also, a very warm welcome to everyone that is joining us online and is dialing in, connecting with us. Whether that's in the morning, in the afternoon, or in the evening, we very much appreciate you taking the time and joining us today for this Analyst and Investor Day. The program for the day. Let's see. The program for the day. I will start and share with you the update on our strategic priorities and the progress that we have been making so far on the execution of it. Next to that, and after that, Frits Eulderink, our COO, will share our sustainability ambition and the progress that we are making on this important topic.
Then Michiel Gilsing, our CFO, will take the floor and share with you the financial performance and the capital structure. We will then, the three of us, come to the stage and answer any questions that you, I'm sure will have after the three presentations. We will then shortly break for lunch, and after lunch, we will have Walter Moone, who is our EVP for business development, and he will dive a little bit deeper into the accelerate strategy, when it gets to accelerating towards new energies and sustainable feedstocks. So that's the program for the day. Then in the afternoon, you're all invited to join us on a tour to visit the beautiful Vlaardingen Terminal here in the port of Rotterdam, and the program will continue after that.
Once again, a very warm welcome, and thanks a lot for taking the time to be with us today here in Rotterdam. Let's start, and let's start with our story, the story of Vopak. 'Cause what is it that makes Vopak Vopak? What is it that really makes us unique? What is it that drives our DNA of the company? Well, there's a few things. First and foremost, our people, we, as people from Vopak, are driven to deliver. Driven to deliver safe services to our customers for safe storage and infrastructure of the vital products that society needs. That is what we have been doing for the last centuries, and what we continue to be very focused on. So that drive to deliver is always that is very characteristic of Vopak.
Second, we have that sense, that spirit of entrepreneurship, and that spirit of entrepreneurship over the years has helped us to create the connections, the connections with different partners, with the communities, and we're very proud of it. And that has helped us to build a network of terminals around the globe that is a very strong and attractive network. So that ability to create the right connections is something that also stands out and makes Vopak Vopak. Then last but not least, it's the passion and the excitement that our people have to drive progress, and to drive progress in a world that is changing very fast. And our ability to actually and our capability to work together with a lot of different partners helps us also to create the right infrastructure for the future energy mix.
Hence, that really ability to drive the progress is something that sits very close in the DNA of our people. So all in all, whatever the future holds for the company, Vopak will be around. Vopak has been around for a long term, Vopak will be around. And in a way, the way we look at it is, you could say Vopak will help the world flow forward. So that's the Vopak story. We deliver, we create connections, we drive progress, and in doing so, we help the world flow forward. Now, let's take a look at the delivery of our strategy so far, our Improve, Grow, Accelerate strategy. We launched it a year and a half ago here in Rotterdam, and we want to give you an update today on where we stand.
Three main messages, which you will see on the right of this, of this graph, this slide. First, it's the strength of a really well-diversified portfolio. That well-diversified portfolio has proven its strength, especially in times of a drive for energy security and, an energy transition. So that's the, that's the first main message I wanna leave with you, and I'm gonna dive into it a bit deeper. Second is, we have been able, as a company, we continue to be very committed to create value for all the relevant stakeholders, and I'll show you in more detail what that means and where we have been able to deliver. And last but not least, our network, our partnerships, and our capabilities allow us to be the gas, industrial, and low-carbon infrastructure player.
That's where we really feel that we have the strength, and I hope throughout the presentations of today, you get a much more, a stronger feel and understanding where exactly that distinguishing capacity and capability of the company is, is focused on. But first, let's take a look at the market fundamentals and the pure aspects that drive the demand for our services, and look at what's happening in the world around us. Let's take a look at the bottom left side of this of this picture, and just to mention a few things that are happening in the world around us. First, global energy demand. Global energy demand is growing. Between now and 2030, it's growing with around 8%. Why? Global population is still growing, economic development is happening, and as a result, we need more energy. Now, the mix.
By which that energy is provided is changing, is continuously changing, and will continue to change going forward. What does it mean? Well, you have more lower carbon, products that are gonna fill up the mix of energy products also in the future. Next to that, supply and supply security of energy has become a much more important element, over the past few years. Today, more than ever, it depends who you rely on for your energy supply in the future. It depends, much more today than it did a few years ago. So that element has definitely driven, and is part of some of the fundamentals to the demand growth for our businesses. Last but not least, you know that inflation and interest, has been much more volatile and on the rise in the past year and a half.
So also that has an impact in the end and has impact, obviously, on our business. Now, where does the business impact sit? Well, first and foremost, there's additional storage infrastructure capacity that is required. Simply because of the need for more energy, simply because of the longer distances that products are being shipped, you need more storage. Second, there's new infrastructure requirements for the fact that there is a energy mix that is changing. So simply if the volume would be the same, if the range of products that you need to supply the energy is changing, you need also new and different infrastructure solutions going forward to supply that energy to the world.
And last but not least, what is very clear is there's a lot of companies and a lot of parties, I would say, in our world, you don't wanna do this on your own. So partnerships and the importance of partnerships is increasing evermore. So those are really a few key elements that show you what fundamentally is driving also a very strong market that we see today in our world. Now, how are we positioned? Well, continue to be very well-positioned with a well-diversified portfolio that we have globally. What does it mean? Well, we have the capabilities to deliver because we have 78 terminals, 23 countries, and more than 5,500 professionals worldwide, that work day in, day out, to deliver what our customers expect us to deliver in a safe and efficient manner.
Next to that, we are strong with the partnerships. We have over 1,000 customers worldwide. We have over 35 different joint venture partners in different parts of the world, and actually, that brings me back to one of the points that I said in the beginning, that helps us to create the right connections on a global scale, that helps us drive also the progress. So those connections and the partnerships that we have are really key for to serve a well-diversified portfolio. And last but not least, it's the capabilities.
So it's the set of capabilities that we as an organization hold, which is storing over 250 difficult-to-handle products, managing and operating over 500 industrial connections, pipeline connections between our terminals and the sites of our customers, but also over 400 different jetties and berths that we operate on a global basis. So those capabilities help us, in the end, to have the right experience, also to drive the progress. So again, look at the fundamentals of the market and what you see happening in the world around us and how that affects our business, and then how are we positioned to that? That makes it for a very strong foundation of what we currently see and what we also foresee to be continuing in the period ahead. Now, how have we then delivered on our strategic priorities?
Let's first take a look at the improve side. Improving, when we launched it a year and a half ago, we knew there was a strong importance for us to turn around and to make sure that we solidify our financial performance. At the same time, we also want to continuously improve our sustainability performance. On both counts, I think we've made good progress. Frits and Michiel will go into much more detail explaining where the improvements have taken place, but if I would just highlight a few things on the sustainability side, greenhouse gas emissions, we reduced them, Scope One and Scope Two, around 25%, 2023 compared to 2021. Our safety performance has continued to improve, both personnel safety as well as process safety. We've been able to increase our customer satisfaction to an NPS score that is above 70 today.
We, at the same time, also continue to invest in the communities where we are active. We have a foundation, the Vopak WeConnect Foundation, and we have currently, in the year 2023, been able to start and to execute over 39 different projects in the different locations where as Vopak, we have a presence. So there's a lot of connection, again, between our sites, our local organization, and the communities in which we operate. So on that sustainability side, I think we've made really good progress. If we then look at the second element over here, that is the cash flow improvement. Around EUR 200 million of cash flow improvement because of the passion that we have for cash, that's also how we put it in the organization.
That EUR 200 million is indeed the comparison between where we are in 2023 compared to the same period in 2021. So you see a substantial improvement over there, and you see that also reflected in the operating cash return, which at this moment sits around thirteen percent as an expectation for the year, or above 13% as an expectation to finish this year. And I'll show you a little bit more in the detail.... Last but not least, it's the return to our shareholders. And we said a year and a half ago that we want to commit, and we stay very committed to a progressive dividend policy.
We've delivered this year EUR 1.30 as a dividend, and continue to be very committed to this policy that we, that we set out in, in clarity last year. So that value creation for all the stakeholders that are relevant is something that, we delivered on for the last year and a half, quite strongly. Now, the portfolio, because one of the elements that we said very clearly last year when we launched the focus on improve, was that we said we need to take a very critical look, continued critical look at the portfolio that we have. So it is, yes, that passion for cash that sits in improving, where possible, the existing operations, but there's two elements to add to that.
One, it's the rationalization of our portfolio, and on the right side, you see the repurposing of certain assets in the portfolio. Now, the rationalization of our portfolio, we've been able to make good progress. We sold and divested four oil distribution terminals in Eastern Canada in 2022. We sold. In the beginning of this year, we sold a terminal in in Savannah, East Coast, U.S. We sold our agencies business, and we recently announced that we've reached agreement with a buyer for the three terminals here in the Botlek area, and expected to close that between now and the end of the year. So overall, eight terminals and agencies that over the span of the last eighteen months have been rationalized, if we call it like that. So we made good progress in that area.
If you then take a look at the right side, the repurposing of some of our assets, you hear us talk a lot, and you will see that also in the afternoon, about what the opportunities are over there. And you'll see this afternoon what we've done in Vlaardingen, so there's much more to talk about. We talk quite a bit about Los Angeles, where we have repurposed existing, fossil fuel capacity to more sustainable alternatives, sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel, attractive investments for us with long-term contracts that support it. But let's take a look at Singapore, for example. Maybe a small investment, but it shows you a little bit of what the opportunities are.
Singapore, one of the terminals in Singapore supports the local bunker market, and we've been able to invest together with the customer, with a longer-term contract with the customer, in blending facilities to blend in biofuels into the local bunker pool. You need flexibility for that because you can't do that, inject it so easily, so you need some flexibility in many folds. You need a bit of, of investment over there, and that's the first step to support our customers in that area, where you see that that, in the broader sense, repurposing of existing capacity is a very natural flow of things that is happening, in the portfolio. Now, with all these steps and with all these efforts that we put into, what is it actually, what is it, what did it lead to in terms of financial performance?
Let's take a look at the left, the EBITDA performance, the pure business performance today in 2023, with the outlook that we have for the full year compared to 2021, a roughly 17% increase. In the middle, you see the operating cash return. I was talking about that a little bit earlier, but the operating cash return as a metric to indicate the return of our entire portfolio has gone up from around 10% to above 13% expected for this year. And last but not least, it's a strong balance sheet. 3.16x EBITDA of our net debt in Q3 2021. Today, we sit at 2.27, well below the bracket of 2.5-3.
So a strong balance sheet, good performance of the overall network and the portfolio from a return perspective, as well as a strong EBITDA business performance that supports it all. So that's it on improve and on the bucket and the, and the first part of our strategic priorities that we set a year and a half ago. Now, let's take a look at the second one, and that is grow. We said we want to deploy EUR 1 billion of growth capital between 2022 and the end of this decade on industrial and gas. So what did we do over there? Well, we delivered, and we formed an important joint venture in 2022. That was in India. We used to have 1 terminal, 1 port. We now have, together with Aegis, our partner, 10 terminals, 5 ports, and continue to grow. Why do I mention it over here?
Because there's a big element of gas, LPG investments that are taking place in India, and that's also part of the attractiveness that we find in that joint venture that we have in India. It's 1.3 million cubic meters, so it's sizable in the total portfolio and makes us a big player in India. Second one, LNG. You know that with everything that happened here in Northwest Europe, on the LNG side, the demand for LNG and LNG infrastructure increased quite a bit, and we're happy, very happy, with the partnership that we have over a long period of time with Gasunie, and that we are progressing in further investing in LNG infrastructure in the Netherlands.
Gate Tank Four, we started the construction recently, and we're in the final stages of closing on the acquisition of 50% of the Eemshaven LNG facility. So good progress on the LNG developments over there. Then last but not least, maybe not so much for the number, but just to highlight the importance of industrial brownfield expansions. Once you have the position in a large industrial complex, any opportunity that comes because a customer wants to increase its presence or increase its capacity, gives us the opportunity to automatically add the capacity to our terminal, and that's what is going on currently in China. We're continuously building smaller, bigger parts of the capacity, and this is a smaller, brownfield expansion in China of 110,000 cubic meters in Shanghai.
So in SCIP, which is the location that we have over there in Caojing. Now let's take a look at why we find both LNG and LPG such attractive segments to invest in. Bit of a busy slide, I realize that. Let's start on the left, which shows you a couple of the numbers. I think it's important to realize the expectation of LNG demand is that it will continue to grow between now and 2050 with over 40%. Why is that? Increased demand for energy, continued shift from coal to gas as electricity generation source, and last but not least, depleting natural gas fields. That requires different alternatives, and LNG is a very good alternative for that. So you see continued increased demand for LNG.
Second, on the LPG side, a similar story, maybe a lower number in terms of increase, but still on the same fundamentals of increased global demand for energy, a shift or a switch to cleaner cooking fuels in, for instance, India, but also increased demand as a feedstock for petrochemical production. So you see also over there on the LPG side, strong fundamentals as it is with LNG for future growth opportunities. Now, what is it that we have to offer in this space? Well, we have a network of existing terminals that we support both LNG and LPG movements. That's 25 where we currently store that. Why do we like it? Long-term contracts, dedicated infrastructure, and it has a general contract structure of above 10 years, which makes it attractive for us. Now, what's the plan going forward?
Well, the plan going forward is that with that experience that we have as a company, together with the current position that we have in the partnerships, we have the opportunity to continue to naturally increase our position in this gas, both LNG and LPG side. Now, are we going for big M&A opportunities? Not that much. We're focusing as much as we can on the opportunities to grow this organically through our own origination, because we feel that that's where most of the value sits that we can capture. Now, where geographically would that then happen? Well, here is the world map, and here are just a few locations to mention and to zoom into on what the developments are that are happening in some of these locations.
First, on the LPG side, you know, we are very active in the final stages of our development in Western Canada, Prince Rupert. We hope together with our partner, AltaGas, we're very well in the preparation phase to prepare for an investment decision in 2024. And that is moving ahead because we have a fully permitted site, both to build on land as well as the marine infrastructure. So that is moving well ahead and is a big development for the company. Second, I told you about India already and the opportunities that we continue to see in India for further LPG expansion in the current sites, as well as new sites that are being developed and currently under construction. Last but not least, China.
Petrochemical demand, it will take some time, but you see definitely that there's opportunities for further LPG expansion in a country like China, around the current industrial complexes in which we are active. Then take a look at LNG. I spoke already about the Netherlands, Gate, and Eems, and we have two projects that are in the early phases but look attractive at this stage for us, and that's the potential to develop LNG import into South Africa together in a strong local partnership and LNG imports into the south of Australia. Good to mention them to you over here so that you have a view of what's coming in the funnel.
Still early days, as I said, but it's good at least to know in what areas we are looking when it gets to LNG and LPG. That's on the gas side. So remember, growth was EUR 1 billion in gas as well as industrial. So what's happening on the industrial side? Again, on the left, the market opportunities. You can argue about what the right figures are and how many new crackers or pure capacity is required between now and the end of this decade, but you see there's a continued demand, increasing demand for global chemical production, and that requires continued new investments in production capacity. Why is that attractive for us? Well, because we already have a presence in 18 or in 15 industrial clusters with 18 different terminals that we own and operate. Why do we like it?
Again, dedicated infrastructure, long-term contracts, and the contract term generally is above 15 years in total. So that makes it, for us, attractive. And what is it that kinda like brings us to the next phase, and why do we feel that we can play an important role here? Well, look, we are not the ones that are making the decisions on when a new plant is gonna be built and exactly where the plant is gonna be built. What we do influence and what we can influence is to make sure we are at the right spot, we are there with the right partners, and we have the right capability set to support our customers or any customer that either wants to expand in an existing site, brownfield expansions, or wants to start decarbonization projects in an existing site, one of these 15 industrial clusters.
That makes it, for us, very attractive to continue to be very committed to this industrial segment. I still expect in the coming years, maybe with a different speed, given where the world sits today, but a very natural flow and output of industrial projects in the portfolio... That was it on grow, the EUR 1 billion towards industrial and gas. Here are some of the industrial opportunities and where they would be positioned from a global perspective. I spoke already quite a bit about China. You see opportunities in the Middle East, where a lot of new and additional production capacity is expected to be added. We see opportunities, continue to see opportunities in Southeast Asia, for expansion on the industrial side.
We see it in Western Europe, and we also see it along the U.S. Gulf Coast on the existing sites that we have with Dow in Freeport and in Louisiana, but also on the ship channel in Houston, where there's continued opportunities for us to strengthen our position. So overall, you see maybe with smaller bits and pieces, we can still see a good opportunity to invest in this industrial segment. Now let's take a look at the third and last pillar of our strategy, which is accelerating towards new energies and sustainable feedstocks. We also said we want to invest up to EUR 1 billion between 2022 and the end of the decade into this segment. Where do we stand at this moment? Well, we've invested EUR 30 million so far.
That's mainly on the repurposing for Los Angeles. We see that there's promising leads that we have within our venture portfolio, as well as the total capacity that we've been able to commission on the biofuel side. What is more important to me, and what is less visible for you, is the capabilities that we are investing in, the capabilities of our teams, our people, that are further developing into this space, as well as the quality of the projects that we see and the quality in the pipeline that we see. Is it geographically well-placed? Is it, in terms of maturity, moving in the next levels of maturity? And that's where we have quite some confidence, also because of the role that we as Vopak think that we can play over there. Now, why do I say that?
Let's take a look at this slide to put it a little bit into context, and to put it into context in terms of how a decarbonization journey could look. Let's not go into all the details on this slide, that's not the purpose, but it shows you the different phases of a decarbonization journey over a longer period of time. No matter whether the icons are gonna be inverted in terms of sequence or there's certain geographical areas around the world where maybe steps are being skipped because you move to a next phase faster or slower, the relevance over here for us is that blue bar that sits underneath, and that is the impact and the requirement for infrastructure. Because no matter where you sit in the decarbonization journey and how fast you move through the phases, the infrastructure requirements are there.
Whether that's new gas capacity, whether that's liquid CO2 capacity, whether that's ammonia capacity, whether that's maybe down the line, different carriers of hydrogen, LOHC, those opportunities will be there. And obviously, what is very important is that element of repurposing and, adding capacity, into the existing sites that we already have. So no matter how you look at it, the speed is gonna be different in different parts of the world. Partnerships are definitely required because on all these icons, there's hardly a company that would go in it alone. So people want to hold hands and actually team up with, partners in it that have their own specialty that they can bring to the table. And last but not least, there's gonna be infrastructure opportunities throughout the journey that we expect to, to play a role in.
Now, where is that going to happen? That's the key question. And to share with you at least how I would look at it from a biofuel sustainable feedstock point of view, and the next one is more on the ammonia side. Well, first, on the biofuels, you see that there's a number of sites globally where today we can see that there are opportunities for biofuels or sustainable feedstocks. Again, you will see this afternoon in Vlaardingen. We spoke about Los Angeles. We see opportunities in Brazil. We see opportunities in India. We see opportunities in Southeast Asia. We see them in China, and that is everything from the end products or the sustainable aviation fuels, renewable diesels. You see that from the green methanol side. You see that coming from feedstocks for some of these products that are being exported from locations.
So it's a very natural buildup of capacity and demand for that capacity in the existing sites where we are already have a presence. Ammonia, less dots, because it's much more concentrated, but also on the ammonia side, and Walter will speak about that more in the afternoon. But on the ammonia side, you see that our current experience that we have allows us also to play a role in a place like Houston. We already have ammonia infrastructure. We announced recently that we are moving into a consortium to look for potential blue ammonia production and export from the Houston Ship Channel, and we have a good position there. We have a right set of partners, and it looks like an attractive proposition, potentially, to move that further.
ACE, you know what we're doing here in Rotterdam, a good and a strong consortium to develop a large, big-scale ammonia import facility into the Port of Rotterdam, which requires the hydrogen in the end. But the ammonia that will be used to carry the hydrogen is definitely an attractive product for us to take a look at when it comes to Rotterdam. Middle East for potential exports, Southeast Asia, Singapore for potential imports, and we already have a position there. The same goes for China. We already have an ammonia position. So there's opportunities throughout the network with our current experience and presence that we have, with the capabilities that we have and the right partners that we team up with.... So what's our plan?
Well, our plan is to make maximum use of our existing network, all the locations in the presence that we have in the strategic locations. So build and leverage on those locations to capture those brownfield and greenfield opportunities that will come and we hope to be able to land, as well as by repurposing some of that existing infrastructure. Second, it's the connections that we have and make sure that we leverage sufficiently those connections for the brownfield and greenfield extensions. And last but not least, continue to invest in the capability set and make sure that we have the right people at the right time available to be that partner of choice for our customers and the communities in which we operate. So that brings me to the end.
So in summary and in closing, why do I think that we as Vopak are well positioned for the future of energy? Three reasons: We are capable to deliver. We have a track record, a good track record in execution, able to deliver value for all the relevant stakeholders. Second, our well-diversified portfolio continues to play well with what's happening in the world around us, and we continue to be very committed to make sure that that portfolio stays very well diversified by creating the right connections in the new locations that we have in mind. And last but not least, the energy transition as a whole, I hope to have been able to share with you, it provides a lot of opportunities. It provides opportunities for us throughout the different phases of the transition.
There's gonna be different infrastructure solutions that are required, and we are doing what is required to capture those opportunities, in the energy transition today and tomorrow. Thank you very much for your attention, and with that, I'll gladly hand it over to Frits, our COO.
Thank you very much, Dickk, and, yeah, people present here in the gathering and also viewers of the webcast. I'm really excited to be able to update you a little bit on Vopak's journey in sustainability, and I'm actually very proud of what we have achieved. As some of you may know, personally, I've been on a long ocean voyage earlier this year, and if there's anything that drives home to most people, and certainly also to me, it's the importance of this planet and of eventually becoming sustainable as a society.
What I'd like to convince you of is that we are really contributing to a net zero society, and that actually in the grand scheme of things, that is by far the most important contribution that Vopak can deliver and should deliver to society. We have strong capabilities to support this transition, based on our existing experience and the ventures that we've entered into already. But we also realize that we have to continue to learn, and we're improving on our own sustainability as well at the same time. But like I said, very important to do so, but it's more a table stakes. That's not gonna be where we, I believe we make the big difference. The big difference is our contribution to the infrastructure that society needs.
If I look at what are some of the things that you can already see, Dickk talked about it a little bit already. Obviously, we are very actively repurposing our assets. Now, repurposing our assets, it's a little bit like recycling. It can be done at many different levels. The simplest level is reuse, use the product again. Well, in many cases, these new products are just suitable to go into our tanks as is. So that's, in a way, also the best way of reutilizing the tanks. Sometimes we have to make minor adaptations, for instance, because there is more mixing required, or there's a different temperature control required.
So then with relatively modest additional investments, we can make the tank suitable, and sometimes we have to basically go to what you call basically chemical recycling in plastics. You have to basically make use of the opportunity that a certain tank part is out of date and is end of life, and you just reutilize the land that's available to put new infrastructure on. And the picture that you see is actually a construction picture of Vlaardingen, the terminal that you will visit this afternoon. And there you can see how this project has ended up, but this is the moment that we are placing the tanks for the waste-based biofuels project that we are storing there for our major customer.
Secondly, very importantly, we invest in the transition, also from a fuel that is maybe not ideal, but certainly is on the balance of the economy and the ecology, a very suitable, I would say, intermediate fuel, and that is gas. So, both, Dickk already showed you some LPG examples and LNG, and I will also show you how I really believe that that does contribute in the near term. I realize it's not gonna be the final solution that we can live with for the next hundred years, but I do believe in the coming decades, the role of natural gas is gonna be tremendously important to keep society going and basically keep earning the economy that we need to make the rest of the transition.
Then further on, on our agenda, as Dickk already said, our possible contribution that we really believe we're well-placed to help decarbonize all the plants that are around the port areas in which we are and the industrial parks on which we are. So a very live example of this, today here in Rotterdam is this, what we call the CO2Next project, where basically a lot of infrastructure is coming together to basically capture carbon dioxide of industrial processes... basically ship it to a compressor exit station.
We would be looking at storing some, some liquid carbon dioxide next to it, such that also carbon dioxide from facilities that are not directly close to the existing pipelines could ship their, their carbon dioxide to this place and then get that injected into former gas fields underneath the North Sea. So we believe that this carbon, carbon capture and sequestration, as it's called, even though also that is maybe not seen as the ideal solution, I think from a, from a feasibility and practical point of view, that actually is gonna be one of the most significant contributions towards decarbonizing our society over the coming, coming decades.
And so, for instance, in the plans of the Netherlands, that's gonna take care of some 40% of the total sort of mission that the Netherlands had set for itself. So this is gonna be a key capability, and we feel we've got the technology and the capability and the position and the partnerships to be able to contribute to that, and I hope to convince you a little bit of that as we go through this. Now, as you know, in going forward, we believe that for us, particularly, our focus should be on four areas. One are the lower carbon fuels, that that's obvious, and that's already happening.
The sustainable aviation fuel, the mixing of bio into existing hydrocarbons, and eventually the second generation where you may even ultimately anticipate to get to negative carbon contributions. Secondly, very important, as I said, is carbon dioxide infrastructure, taking care in the transition of the carbon dioxide that still comes of many, many industrial processes, for which often there is not yet a real alternative available, in the near future. Then obviously, the role of hydrogen in all its forms and all the carriers that you may think of.
I also think we realize, as a long-term company, that it's widely expected that as part of the energy transition, the role of electricity as an, in an energy system is gonna increase compared to the role of molecules. We're also preparing for what we call long-duration energy storage, which is mostly geared towards storing energy that comes out of renewable power generation. That's still somewhat further off, but I will show you already in some of our, in our, particularly ventures investments already, we are quite actively involved in building our capabilities and positioning ourselves.
If I talk about what we can do, this is the slide that shows you, and Dickk already showed it also with the opportunities, but this is where we today have certified capability to store biofuels according to all the latest standards, as well as where we already have and have had for many years, actually, in most cases, ammonia storage. So, this is not something that is new to us. This is something where we can really build on our existing capabilities. Now, as you know, these areas, and Dickk alluded to it, are really expected to grow significantly over the coming years, yeah?
So, for instance, the IEA predicts that these low-carbon fuels, so that's anything from the bio level up, will basically have to increase threefold by 2030. And, ammonia, for instance, as a specific, is expected to grow at least by 50% over the coming years. What is at the heart of our capabilities to deliver based on this fantastic footprint that we have? It's our technical capabilities, also very importantly, our IT capabilities, and I think it is in us investing in our own capability to basically learn these new technologies, and that is what we will also talk about a little bit.
I was really struggling to say to my in my preparation, how do I bring across the vast body of knowledge that our professionals have in this company? How do you share that? So, I've really found no real convincing way other than to just basically list some of the key things on the slides, and then I already found out that that was way too much to list. So then I had to summarize it again. And so, you know, there's... I've just broken it up into areas like safety and sustainability, service and operations, asset management, projects, and also, very importantly, sales excellence, and with that also, of course, belongs partnership creation and things like that.
So there is a vast body of work for us to basically progress on. And I think, for instance, if you take our existing experience in LNG, that has brought us into contact with cryogenic technology. This cryogenic technology is gonna be extremely important in, for instance, the ammonia or also the liquid hydrogen solutions that may follow. So you basically see that by staying actively on the ball, investing early into getting to understand new technologies, we feel that we are gonna be able to evolve our capability to what is needed from what is currently, I would say, in our industry, an unrivaled capability that we have in our existing business. I talked about digital.
Now, we all know that digital is whether we like it or not, an ever bigger part of our life. I think we've really made a major upgrade as Vopak over the past years. As you know, we had a legacy system not too long ago, and we've decided to replace it. Right now, I can proudly say that in the areas of HR and finance, we have gone on to world-leading external systems, and that basis, that enabler is there. More importantly, we came to the conclusion that we could not find anywhere on the software market a package that really supports our own operations. So basically, taking an order from a customer, doing all the checks that you need to do, you know, is the vessel legal? Is the product legal? Is the customer registered?
You name it, all the way down to actually executing the operation, you know, informing the customer and the system that the operation has been done. So that whole package of what's basically supporting our core business is what we call MyService. That has been a significant investment of the company over the past years, and I'm really, really, really glad to see that, not only is it working very much to support us, it is actually convincing enough that in a way, it sells itself. So, our joint ventures, who have a real opportunity to just say, "Okay, I take something else off the market," or, "I don't use it at all," they are all saying, "Okay, please give me this system as well." So that to me is a great testimony.
Now, what are some of the key attributes of this new generation of software? And I think to most industries, maybe this has been practiced for more than a decade, but for our industry, it's really new, that we have real-time insight into what's happening in our operations. So if I'm managing a site, it's not like I hear the next morning in the operations meeting that there has been a trouble with the truck loading or whatever. I can see it on my screen as it happens, at a moment that I can still step in and make alternative arrangements. So this is not a after-the-fact system, but it's a real-time system.
Also, very excitingly, and eventually, I think even of bigger influences, that also this enables us to communicate with our customers in real time. So in other words, our customers, and particularly for instance, you can imagine with traders, sometimes really come down to basically the minutes, if not the seconds. For them to have real-life insight into what's happening in the operation, where is the ship? Where is the truck? What is happening? That's gonna be of tremendous value. This system allows us to make those connections, so we really believe that this is a key strategic enabler.
That's also why I say, although indeed we, we've had to invest, in, in making this system, I don't think that once we have the system, done, we will stop investing, because I think there are just too many interesting opportunities to continue to build on this system. And you can imagine, for instance, that if you can bring together data from ourselves as well as port, you can really do a lot about a very expensive problem that our industry has, which is called demurrage, right? But that doesn't-- that's not just our data that needs to get, then take data from various places to really make that work, and that's one of the things that we are also looking at, and I'll come back to that on the, on the next slide, actually.
So I was talking about continuing to invest in capabilities, and this is one of the very interesting ways in which we do it. It's called Vopak Ventures. So we take a small, or sometimes a somewhat larger, but never a majority stake in these ventures. And, you know, we sit with the professionals there. I think as an investor, and I think most ventures would certainly echo that, we really try to support. We don't, we don't try to take over, we don't make them sort of Vopak dependencies or whatever, no. We just interact with them, and I think one of the key things that we can offer in these collaborations is our vast experience of industrial application of things.
So we are involved in things that look at new pathways to basically distribute hydrogen, where you bind it to, for instance, an organic molecule or to something else. So you have examples there. We are looking at in this new hydrogen economy, how do we create the hydrogen? HySiLabs. How do we compress the hydrogen? HyET Hydrogen. How do we recycle plastics? Circularise Xycle. So all of these sort of challenges that the world is facing, we're looking at, okay, what are gonna be interesting technologies? And obviously, we won't get them all right. We accept that from the beginning.
But in the ones that we do, we really learn a lot, and even the ones that fail give us a lot of capability insight as to what is important and where, and what do we need to look out for, next time. So some very exciting, I think, developments there, but all obviously, on the longer, on the longer term. I talked about electricity and our role there, in what we call long-term energy duration, long-duration energy storage. Elestor is an example. They basically create a flow battery and, and one that, that is believed to be, ultimately, from an economic sense, very competitive, but not technically as mature as some of the existing vanadium, alternatives.
Then we also invest in our operational excellence, and I mentioned here, for instance, the Falcker platform, which is a drone-based inspection platform, which basically you program to just every month basically take high-accuracy pictures of the assets. And that basically tells us what corrosion is doing on the roof of tanks, which in the past, you know, used to be quite an operation to go and inspect. Now, in a very systematic way, you can follow things that way. The data all comes into a platform, and the beauty of the platform is that it will therefore be accessible and be combinable with a lot of other data in a very yeah, I would say, sustainable fashion.
Then on the right-hand side, these are some of the platforms that we invest in on what I was just saying earlier. In the entire data ecosystem that, our customers need in order to really, you know, I would say, optimize the logistic, efficiency for them, we need to get all this data together, and that's why we have some investments in these, in these platforms, around basically ship, port. But for instance, data.world is really just a data structuring, investment that we, that we have that is, applicable quite widely, but we think that plays a key role, in this, in this issue as well. Now, I started off by saying that the most important thing is what we can do for society, far more than our own footprint.
This is an illustration, and a bit of, I would say, perspective to illustrate that point. What I'm showing here is, and think of a country like Germany, where they used to do a lot of generation from nuclear and from brown coal. They have gone massively into wind and solar, obviously, but that is not nearly enough, so they are looking, "Okay, how do I replace this with a greener alternative?" So Germany has decided that natural gas really has to be a key part for them in the medium term. Now, let's take the throughput of a Gate-sized terminal, and I'm not talking about Gate after the fourth tank, but just Gate as it is today.
If you look at that throughput, which is some 14 million BCM a year, some, so sorry, 14 BCM a year, the footprint that you can save by switching from coal to natural gas in the electricity generation of Germany is of the order of 25 million tons. And to compare that with the total of Germany, that's 675. So obviously, one Gate size is not gonna, is not gonna do it, but it is certainly a noticeable contribution, and they need to do many of these. Now, compare that with the total worldwide Vopak emissions, which I also have there, which is a half. So you can see that already the positive contribution that you could make with one Gate-sized terminal to the ecosystem far outweighs the total footprint of Vopak.
I'm not saying that to say we shouldn't do anything. All I'm saying is, there is sometimes a bit of a tendency to get very much distracted about, "Okay, what is... You know, what are you doing on your micro bit?" When the reality is, what is really important is what are we able to do jointly, eh? We cannot do it alone, but we certainly can work jointly with our customers on that, on that top bit, which is basically the ecosystem for the new energy infrastructure. Moving then still to our own, 'cause I talked about what we do for that, but moving on onto our own footprint and our own sustainability issues, I would like to also give you an update there because I feel that we're making excellent progress.
In order to combat our own footprint, what do we need to do? Obviously, the best thing you can do is energy efficiency, right? It saves you cost and it saves the environment, so that's very easy all the way around. And there, I think, for instance, in our case, better monitoring our pumps, better monitoring our heating systems, still has some scope to go, and we're working at that. And obviously, when the energy prices were as high as they were, well, more than a year ago, obviously, then you see straight away the tremendous benefit that it has on the financial side. But even if that is less so, we still think this is very important for the environment.
And obviously, as I said, even every little bit there helps also financially. Then I think we wanna look at where possible where we can use renewable energy. Using residual heat, for instance, is a good one, right? We are often near industry. There may be some leftover heat. Well, can we utilize it? Can we do something with solar generation ourselves? We're the owner of a small solar farm in the north of Holland, but also, as you know, we're experimenting with putting solar foil on top of our tanks, and there we're generating some renewable ourselves. If we cannot generate that, or in addition to generating ourselves, obviously, we wanna go for renewable electricity.
That is, is obviously for industry, one of the, one of the easiest ways to decarbonize our so-called Scope Two, right? That's the emissions that comes from the, from the energy that we use. And, and I think we've made... When Dickk says we've made a, we've made a big step, most of it has actually been driven by this conversion to renewable, electricity of our electrical part of our consumption. Next thing is, is that given that it's so much easier to basically decarbonize the electrical side than the molecular side, going forward, as we take decisions on systems, we really want to, tilt towards electrical wherever possible. So that's the so-called electrification.
So one life example, and you're gonna, you're gonna visit Vlaardingen, so I'm gonna mention it, is, whereas in the past, our boilers were basically gas-fired boilers, where we would generate the steam for heating, et cetera, we are now looking very seriously into could we make this an electrical boiler? Now, as you also know, certainly those that are from this area, our electricity grid is also getting to congestion. And the beauty of our type of uses, which, and that's basically the use for heating, is that it's not very time-critical when we use this boiler.
So together with the electricity companies, we are looking at, can we find a win-win, where basically we move to an electrical boiler, which per se is a little bit more expensive, but on the other hand, has the advantage for the grid operator, that, you know, we can. We can have a system where basically, electronically, we decide based on what the grid load is, whether Vopak starts to heat now or starts to heat in six hours or starts to heat two hours earlier. So this opportunity to shift the electrical load is of tremendous interest to a congested network, as I'm sure you realize, and I think in that way, we can actually again try to find, with our partnership, win-wins on electrifying. So also a very important development.
Then obviously, finally, for the bit that we cannot replace and cannot go to electrical, eventually, we have to look at, at utilizing cleaner fuels for that, eh? Now, at this point in time, I would say it's almost a crime to think about burning hydrogen in your flare, 'cause, I mean, the hydrogen is so precious, it's so expensive, it would really not be the best use by any means. But eventually, as we get towards the end of this going to, to zero emissions, I think some of these leftover, hard-to-replace streams will need to, will need to consider, also those sort of solutions. So that's what, what's happening on the greenhouse, greenhouse gas.
Then, with the new CSRD, which I'm sure you've heard about more, I won't say you're familiar with it, because I don't think anybody is really, because it's still changing quite a lot, but at least you've heard the term. So these are the new European requirements for sustainability reporting. We've updated our materiality matrix. With that update, it's now called a double materiality matrix. If you ask me, it's actually not that different from what it was, but we used to have a horizontal axis where you say, "Okay, what's the relevance to stakeholders, huh?" and we had a vertical axis, and that was what's the relevance to Vopak? Now, the relevance to Vopak is replaced by what's the financial relevance?
So, yeah, slightly different, but, but not necessarily a major, a major change. So if you say things are not right in the horizontal, sequence, then that's basically a communication challenge to us, right? That we need to communicate better with our stakeholders to, to influence their, their feedback, but there's nothing I can do about it. I mean, this is just what the stakeholders say. What we obviously can have a lot of discussion about is what's the v- financial relevance for Vopak, and that's basically the vertical word placement of these issues. Now, if you then look at the top issues, then, then I've made them bold, and what I wanted to do, and you, and you can read them yourself, but there are things like emissions to air. There's obviously our greenhouse gas reduction.
There's also business ethics and obviously safety. These are the key items that come out of this analysis as being the most significant and important. So let me give you an update on how we're doing on those. And I have to apologize a little bit to you because for the first two indicators that you see, they're related to safety. Basically, the lower, the better, and for the others, the higher, the better. So it's a little bit hard to read, but yeah, we're obviously you know. On safety, you're never done, but we're very proud of where we are on safety.
Obviously, the tremendous personal hurt to people that accidents can cause, that's basically measured by that first one, and I think this is really a very good KPI that we have. That's the number of recordable incidents we have per 200,000 hours worked, so it's a very nice indicator. The second one, that's basically where the process is not running as it should. So that means either something leaks or there is an unplanned operation of some other sort. Obviously, those are quite often the precursors to what, in very bad cases, can lead to catastrophes on the site.
So the lower this number, again, the more you have basically nipped that issue in the bud, and also there, I'm really proud of how we're doing compared to what we wanted to achieve. Now, moving on then to the bottom ones, which is what I said, the higher, the better. We promised to reduce our greenhouse gas by 30% by 2030. We believe that right now we stand at a 25% reduction. Dickk already mentioned it. The emissions to air, we wanted to reduce that by 30% by 2025. Sorry, by yeah, 30% by 2025. We're getting there. It's currently at some 25-26%.
An area where we feel we still have our work cut out for ourselves is women in senior management. We have really increased over the past years, and we're now at 20%. We set ourselves earlier a target to be at 20% this year, but straight away, no sooner did we reach it or did we say, "Okay, now we have to set the next target and go to 25% by 2025." This is, yeah, I think something that both the port and the, well, the industry that we're in is facing as a common issue. But since we're leaders in our area, we also want to be leaders in this area. So work to be done there.
Very importantly from a human rights perspective is obviously not just paying the minimum wage, but paying the minimum living wage, so that's slightly higher, and there you look at the local economic conditions for a family to survive, basically, off the pay. That's something that we adopted early and already for many years. I'm very proud to report that we do a systematic check there on all the wages, and we're 100% above that throughout the world for everybody working at Vopak. And then obviously not of the least importance, our customer satisfaction with, you know, is still at a very high level. And we consider this obviously a key indicator.
As soon as there's any significant pressure on that anywhere, that's obviously a key sign that our customers are not getting what they were expecting, so how do we make sure that we actively manage that? More on the formal side, 'cause I know that some of you have to look for your investments also at some of these wider rankings. So, MSCI, ISS, Sustainalytics, you can find our rankings here. By and large, I would say, given the sort of business we are, I'm proud of what we score. I would also say that if we really, really focused on it, we could probably get some extra points, 'cause often it is, you know, do you write a sentence about something in your annual report when...
So there are, I think, still ways for us to increase this, but I feel proud of what we're doing in this area. Not so well right now is going our discussions with SBTi, and let me explain a little bit of that background. We basically submitted our carbon, or our greenhouse gas reduction targets to them, and we're really looking forward to working with them on well, jointly looking at pathways to do this. Well, first issue is that it, since we're the first in our industry, they don't really have a pathway to compare us with.
But the more fundamental issue that came up is that they feel that for our basically classical liquids business, the way we look at our greenhouse gas footprint is fine, and they say that, "You know, look at what you do as Vopak, not... Don't look at the footprint that belongs to the product that goes through your tanks." But they say we see that differently for natural gas. They say, natural gas, there's often a situation where there are not that many import facilities, so in a way, theoretically speaking, you could control the amount of natural gas that society uses by your terminals. So they don't make that claim on things like gasoline or diesel, but they do feel that the natural gas situation is slightly different.
Now, that basically leads for us to, I would say, a very hard to face situation, where we would then have to commit that society would reduce effectively 30% less natural gas by 2030. Which, first of all, we don't feel is our decision, and secondly, from a practical point of view, we are in no position to influence that or to make that happen. So this is where we want to continue the debate with SBTi. And, and I think, yeah, obviously, as I said, our role is to make sure that if there is any movement towards this, that we enable it with infrastructure, but it's not for us to be the ones that really force society this way.
So summarizing then, I think I, I've shown you a little bit, and I hope you are a little bit more, more still convinced of our, proven track record, of execution and, and ability to deliver. We have these connectivities. We, we have these, the technical capabilities, and obviously there's still a lot to learn, but we're actively trying to learn that, and it's not like, like other people, already have the capability and know exactly what, what's gonna happen. So that's just something that we get, that we stay active on. And finally, our most important contribution is infrastructure that gets us to a net zero, society. With that, I'd like to thank you very much for your attention to me and, and pass it over to our, our CFO, Mr. Michiel Gilsing.
Thanks, Frits. A warm welcome also from my side, here in Rotterdam, and for people who are virtually connected. Great to have the ability to connect today with all of you. You're all very important partners for us, whether you're from an analyst point of view, an investor point of view, a banking point of view, private placement point of view. Obviously, it is very key to have you on board in our journey. For today, I will focus on a few topics and try to bring the story of Frits and Dickk together, more from a financial point of view, and I will cover it in five different sections. First of all, I will go a bit into the strong fundamentals we have to create value, and give you a bit of highlights on that.
Then I will elaborate on our strong, stable, and long-term cash flows because our portfolio is changing over time. Then we'll focus a bit on the investment opportunities. So how do we come from the vision which is explained and where we have the capabilities for, to execution, and how would that work from a financial point of view? After that, I will focus on the capital allocation strategy we have as a company, just to reconfirm what we have, but it's important for you, obviously, to know what our strategy is there. And then last but not least, I would like to also highlight the strong long-term fundamentals we have as a company. Let me start on the value creation side. Why are the fundamentals strong?
Well, first of all, on the left-hand side, you see the EBITDA performance, so 17% increase in the last two years, with an outlook of around EUR 970 million for the year. In connection with the EBITDA is obviously the EBITDA margin. We'd like to protect, maintain, and preferably improve our EBITDA margin going forward, and I will tell a bit on that later during the presentation, but we are increasing our EBITDA margin. Obviously, this financial performance is very strongly driven by our occupancy rate, which went up 3%, proportional occupancy, if you take all the economical interests we have in all our different companies, and we're now running at 91% occupancy.
We always give a sort of guidance to the market that somewhere between 85%-95%, that's where you may find our occupancy, and obviously, 85% is at the very lower end, and 95% is the, is the full potential of the company. On operating cash return, which we introduced 1.5 year ago during the Capital Markets Day, we are improving. As Dickk already highlighted, the passion for cash is really there in the company, and we have increased to 14.4% year to date, which is a 3% increase over the last two years. Our long-term target is to be above 12%, also in circumstances which are maybe less favorable for us, and we have an outlook for this year to at least reach 13% cash return.
Our total net debt to EBITDA, which was at the higher end one and a half years ago or two years ago, was 3.16x EBITDA. We have reduced it to 2.27, so quite a significant reduction in our debt, and it's below our ambition, between 2.5 and 3 times. If we look at the outlook for the year, we expect to land somewhere around 2.1, and if we do the Botlek transaction before the year end, we will probably drop below the 2x EBITDA, which is historically quite a low number. So healthy from a value creation point of view. How does it look from a cash flow generation point of view across the portfolio?
If I start again, on the left-hand side, you see the proportional EBITDA, so all the EBITDAs we generate with all the activities we have, and we have broken it up for joint ventures and associates versus subsidiaries. You see quite an increase from 2021 to 2023, so EUR 749 million proportional EBITDA in 2021, now up to EUR 872 million, with an outlook of around EUR 1,160 million for the full year. You see the breakdown between joint ventures and subsidiaries. So 41% of our proportional EBITDA comes out of joint ventures, and 59% is subsidiary-driven. If I then look at the middle graph, the proportional operating cash flow, which obviously is very important, has increased from EUR 438 million to EUR 615 million.
As Dickk already mentioned, we have generated quite a bit more cash flow, and this obviously is one of the key drivers. There you see a different breakdown in terms of joint ventures and subsidiaries. So close to 50% for each, which effectively means that operating CapEx in our subsidiaries is relatively higher compared to the EBITDA we generate in those companies versus what we see in joint ventures. And the real result of that is, effectively, that these joint venture companies are relatively more new than the subsidiaries we have as a company. So this is a difference in cash flow generation. And then on the third element, on the right-hand side, obviously, with so many joint ventures, it's very important to make sure that we have a healthy dividend upstreaming.
You see that it increased quite a bit over the last years, 107% last year. Year to date, 103% of our net profit in joint ventures. Why is it even above the 100%? Because our ambition is to at least distribute 90% of the profits of our joint ventures to the holding company. We also sometimes have refinancings. So we did a refinancing last year in Fujairah. This year, we did one refinancing in Pengerang, and it gives us the opportunity with these refinancings effectively to take some extra dividend out of the joint ventures. So in terms of cash flow generation, improving proportional EBITDA, improving operating cash flow, and improving dividend upstreaming.
I would like to highlight a bit more on how does our cash flow generation look like versus, let's say, the ambitions we have, and also versus, let's say, the stakeholder distributions we have. And why is it relevant? It's relevant because I would like to show that we are actually quite self-sufficient in funding our ambitions. If you go to the left-hand side of this graph, you see that our cash flow from operations is EUR 680 million, which is a split between joint venture dividends as well as group companies. Then obviously, we need to pay taxes. We have cash flow from investments, financing, and we have also derivative movements, which can be quite significant. But if you deduct that from our CFFO, then you come to effectively the CFFO, which is available for certain activities.
The CFFO of EUR 578 million, so the second gray bar, effectively can be used, first of all, to make sure that we maintain our assets in a proper manner. So approximately 27% year to date has gone into maintaining our assets, and for us, it's vital to make sure that we have high integrity of our assets, because the biggest risk for us as a company is that there will be a major accident at one of the facilities, and we would, for example, put something on fire. So we want to make sure that our asset integrity is world-class. Then on the dividend distributions, you see that 28% of our cash flow has gone into dividend distributions, and this is the full year dividend. So this is only year to date, cash flow versus full year dividend.
So naturally, this percentage should drop if we bring in the fourth quarter cash into this overview. And then on growth CapEx, 22%, which is half of our ambition, the EUR 150 million growth CapEx. We have set EUR 2 billion for, let's say, a period 2022-2030, so which is almost close to EUR 300 million. So there is sufficient cash generated by the business to fund our growth CapEx as well. We had some divestments because of the portfolio rationalization, which so far has brought in EUR 200 million. More to come with the Botlek sale. But that means effectively our changes in net debt means a reduction in debt and an improvement in our cash position.
So going forward, obviously, it is very important for us to maintain this healthy cash flow overview to make sure that we are, to a large extent, self-sufficient and are not rapidly increasing our leverage as a company. If we break down the business performance into the different segments we have as a company, let me start first on the gas side. So what you see here is the proportional EBITDA year to date compared to the performance of last year. So a 10% increase on proportional EBITDA for the gas business. So the gas business was EUR 166 million EBITDA for 2023 year to date. While the gas market is still favorable for us, the Gate terminal in Rotterdam runs in a very nice manner, driven by the energy security drive, an opportunity to also expand that facility.
The contract structure of our LNG portfolio is quite nice, with 10+ years of contracts. The second segment is on the industrial side. EUR 175 million proportional EBITDA, -3% versus last year. Although throughputs are relatively stable, despite that the chemical market is maybe not very favorable at this moment in time, the real reason that this has dropped were some currency translation effects, and also we reduced our shareholding in Thai Tank Terminal, which is the industrial terminal we have in Thailand. We dropped from 49% to 35%. Contract structure for the industrial terminal portfolio is also quite long, 20+ years contract, so it gives us very stable performance. On the chemical side, the green bar, EUR 272 million of proportional EBITDA, 17% increase over last year.
Although the market is maybe not very favorable, last year, we saw quite a bit of an uptick in the chemicals business. It's stabilizing at the moment, but where you still see quite a good performance is in Europe, because the European production centers are in a low utilization, and a lot of chemicals are effectively being imported into this market. Contract structures are more between 2-5 years. Then on the oil side, a 12% increase year-on-year, EUR 338 million proportional EBITDA, while the oil markets are very much dominated, you can read it every day, by volatility, quite some geopolitical pressure. People are rebalancing trade flows, but there is also security supply concerns.
With what's going on in the Middle East, these supply concerns may even accelerate going forward, but that overall supports the storage demand. Contract structures can be either very short-term can run up to two years or maybe even beyond two years, but then we're more talking about fuel distribution terminals we have in different countries. Then the overhead seventy-nine million headquarter cost, global IT, and some other overhead costs we have worldwide, EUR 79 million, which leads in total to a year-to-date proportional EBITDA of EUR 872 million. Then some highlights on the stable, strong, and long-term cash flows. As already mentioned, the EUR 200 million improvement in cash flow really helps us from a return point of view, but it also helps us from a leverage point of view, and mainly driven by our business performance.
We have not compromised on operating CapEx, for example. We have made sure that we are focused on healthy dividend distributions, so more than 90% of our joint ventures. That is, as I said, our ambitions to upstream our dividends, and we have so far during the year, reached more than 100%. Our growth CapEx to really invest it in attractive projects, and I will elaborate on a bit on it later. Since June last year, we have invested EUR 345 million in terms of accretive investments, and we have rationalized our portfolio with selling eight activities in the last two years, which are bringing in quite some proceeds for the company as well. How well diversified is our contract portfolio and how well protected is our EBITDA margin?
If you look at the EBITDA margin on the left-hand side, you see that compared to last year, we increased our EBITDA margin from 55% to 57%, and that's driven by good cost management, but also making sure that we have solid contracts with our customers. In the middle, you see the shift in contract duration, and it's taken over a longer period to see what the impact is. But the major impact which you should take away from this middle graph is the shift from shorter term contracts, the one-year contracts, to the long-term contracts, which is more than 10 years. So in 2015, we had a quarter of our portfolio was effectively contracts less than a year.
Now, we have halved that to 12%, less than a year, and if you look at the ten-year contracts, we're now at 34% versus 23%. So quite a shift, and it's all measured by proportional revenue, which is relevant for us as a company. And then on the right-hand side, which actions do we actually take to protect our EBITDA margin? Well, first of all, it starts with the customer contracts. So where can we factor in inflation correction clauses? And we have in more than 70% of our revenues can be corrected for inflation in different ways. So there is not one sort of golden rule on how we do it. It's different market by market. But if you wanna have a bit of understanding, most of the gas and industrial business have quite good indexation clauses.
Where it's much harder, for example, is in the hub oil market, to have proper indexation clauses, because it's a much faster market and the contracts are much shorter. On the energy cost, we have quite an active hedging strategy for energy cost. So for the Netherlands and the US, we have hedged already 2024, 50%. The other 50% is effectively what we pass on to our customers. And in Singapore, we have hedged already for 100%. So we wanna make sure that we protect our margin there as well.
Then, obviously, we have simplified our organization structure, which you may have seen, de-layered it, took the division layer out of the organization, have reduced the number of FTEs in the organization with 50, and there will be a continuous focus on making sure that we run a very efficient and effective organizational structure to support our business. How is the portfolio moving over time? Also, this is a bit of a longer journey from 2017 to 2023, but also a bit looking forward to 2030, so to give you an impression on what you may expect. Here we measure it for our proportional capital employed. Where have we really invested our capital in? If you go 5, 6 years back, you see that 10%-15% was effectively invested in gas and new energy.
Well, new energy, maybe at that time, didn't even exist. Fifteen to twenty percent was industrial, and the biggest chunks were chemicals, with twenty-five, thirty percent, and oil, forty-five, fifty percent. If we go to today's portfolio, the major shift you see is effectively, is that we reduced oil quite a bit from a capital employed point of view. We increased on the industrial side, and we increased on the gas side. And that journey, especially on the gas and new energy, will continue in the coming 7 years. That's what we expect. That will mean that oil will further reduce to fifteen, twenty percent. It will mean that gas and new energy will grow to thirty-five, forty percent....
Industrial terminals in terms of capital employed relative will stay approximately the same, but overall, our capital employed will grow due to the investments, and chemicals will be lower at 15%-20%. So that's the trend you may expect. The investment we made over the last 18 months, as I said, have been EUR 315 million in terms of equity contributions. But if you take our proportional CapEx, and that makes it a bit harder with all the joint ventures, we have invested over EUR 560 million. Then the cash returns. Obviously, this is, we look at a lot in the company. If you go to the right-hand side, you see the overall cash return, which I just presented a few slides ago.
If we break it up into the different terminal types, you see that on the industrial side, we increased in the last year from 16% return to 17.8% return. Quite a nice step up. Similar for gas, due to the improved performance, as I mentioned on the proportional EBITDA, we moved from 11.5 to 14.5. Oil has come up from 15% to over 20%, and chemicals, we have made quite a recovery. Last year, we presented in Capital Markets Day that chemicals was at the lower end of the portfolio, and now it has increased from 10% last year to 16% this year, so quite a nice step up.
What you don't see here, because if you would take the average of all these activities, you would not come to the 14.4, is obviously the impact of the overhead cost, which is approximately 1.5%. Our operating cash return for this year, ambition is above 13%. Long term, it's above 12%, which means that if the market is less favorable for us, we still wanna make that 12%, return. Then how are we gonna allocate capital to growth CapEx, and how interesting is it for us to invest in certain activities? If I could start at the left-hand side again on the return, what we've tried to do here is to show you the multiples, the EBITDA multiples of our investment portfolio.
The growth pillar, which is really driving gas and industrial investments, we think that we can deliver that between 5 and 7 times EBITDA. So once it comes on stream, that should be the sort of EBITDA target we have in our portfolio. On new energy, so more related to the accelerate part of our portfolio, if it's really greenfield, we think that because of starting up these positions, because of growing these positions over time, it probably will come at one notch less EBITDA multiples, so between 6 and 8. That's what we expect, and that's what we see today in the portfolio. But still a lot of proof has to happen, of course, on whether we can land it within these multiples.
Then repurposing our existing sites for whether it's for biofuels or any other products, we think that we can deliver that between 4-6 times. So that makes these kind of repurposing exercises quite attractive, although you need to realize that once you repurpose a site, it will also temporarily lose, let's say, certain of the revenues. So the transition is not going without any impact for the company. That's for sure. In the middle, the allocation of the EUR 1 billion in terms of the accelerate, so the new energies and the sustainable feedstocks, 80%-90% will go into infra-like investments, so effectively, the activities we already do today, so expanding our terminal network.
And 10%-20%, as also Frits highlighted with the venture investments, will be invested in those activities, where we aim for a return of 2x money multiple, making sure that at least we have a few companies which hopefully are gonna outperform, but certainly, there will be failures in this portfolio as well. But our overall ambition is to really make our money twice in that portfolio. And then on the timing, we get a lot of questions, "Okay, what is the timing of all these investments? It's nice to announce 2x EUR 1 billion, but when is it gonna happen?" Well, most of the investments in gas and industrial will definitely take place between 2024 and 2026. That's what we expect.
It's a bit unclear what will happen after 2026, but it may have longer legs going forward, especially if you look at the chemicals demand in the world. And that would trigger then some industrial terminal investments. If you look at the acceleration, the new energy, where we really expect that that is gonna take off between 25 and 30, so a little bit more time has to be taken. But what we see already today is that there is quite strong momentum in the portfolio. On the other hand, what we also see today is that to realize these projects, people are quite optimistic in the beginning, but the reality is that it takes a bit more time than people may think.
Our disciplined capital allocation strategy, which we highlighted last year during Capital Markets Day, definitely on the first priority, we will focus on a strong balance sheet, with a healthy leverage ratio between 2.5x and 3x. We realize that we are dropping, potentially below 2x. Looking at our growth portfolio, obviously, that will have some uptick, but with our strong cash flow generation, if that continues, as I said, we are quite self-sufficient. So we will look at opportunities to see, how could we potentially distribute some additional money to our shareholders, but it's too early to conclude on this, so don't hold me on this, on this comment, but we definitely go through a process to, to assess it. Second priority is to remain, active with our progressive dividend policy.
EUR 1.30 we had last year, so definitely you will have a higher dividend next year. And obviously, we wanna grow the dividend over time. And then last but not least, and we see good opportunities, as I mentioned, to really invest in accretive growth projects between 4-8x EBITDA multiple. And given the fact that, let's say, the leverage has come down quite a bit, there is more room to grow the company going forward without compromising on the balance sheet and without compromising on our progressive dividend policy. Maybe to recap on this slide, so there are strong long-term fundamentals for us as a company. We think that we are well-positioned also from a financial point of view and from a financial performance point of view, to capture the growth opportunities.
First of all, obviously, we would like to deliver on our financial results. We have an asset portfolio which generates strong, stable, and long-term cash flows. We will continue to actively look at our portfolio. That's what we do as an executive board. Every quarter, we go through our portfolio: Where is the performance improving? Where are we satisfied? Where are we not satisfied? We will always do this active portfolio management. We will create connections in the world with a well-diversified global portfolio, making sure that we have solid long-term contracts with our customers in place, with the right clauses, and we will continuously looking at repurposing and expanding our current footprint. Last but not least, we obviously like to drive the progress, unlocking new opportunities.
A lot as mentioned already, but to really allocate growth capital towards new opportunities at attractive multiples, and making sure that at the same time we return value to our shareholders. That is where we stand for as a company. So that, in a nutshell, brings me to the end of, I think the three presentations, and I would like to invite Dickk and Frits to join me here on stage and give you the opportunity to ask questions to any of us.
Very good. Lampros?
Hi. Well, first of all, thank you for the presentation. Got a few questions. So first, where do you see, you know, in terms of growth opportunities, where, you know, if you can share some more color, which segments do you see the, let's say, best opportunities? Number two, on the capital allocation, you mentioned potential shareholder remuneration. Could that involve both, share buybacks and dividend increase? Or, you know, maybe how do you think about that? Then third question on the biofuels, I wanna ask, do you see more demand in the feedstock, service or in the end product? Those are three questions from my side.
Okay, let me maybe start with the growth opportunities, where we see them the most. If you take a look at the industrial and the gas segment, I think we're very clear on what we see on the LNG side. That's well in sight and expected over the next 12-18 months. Second, LPG with Western Canada, as well as developments in India, we're continuously investing in. I think on the industrial side, as I mentioned in my presentation, good confidence over the longer term, but given where the chemical industry is or what the chemical industry is facing today, we see some delays in some of the investment decisions that our customers are making. So the prospect over the decade is positive, but probably for the next 12-18 months, a little bit more reduced from that element.
I think on the new energy side, we spoke already quite a bit, and Walter will talk more about that, but that will come probably later in the second half of this decade. Maybe on your last question before I hand it over to Michiel on the shareholder reward. On the biofuel side, I think, Lampros, it's a bit of a mix on all counts. Yes, we do see it in end products, which is what you see in a place like Los Angeles. This afternoon, you will see it on the feedstock side. You see different countries moving into, or at least our locations, serving both of those markets.
It's probably where you see the bigger growth happening is in the locations where the end product is gonna be blended in or used in the end market. So that's on the bunker fuel example that I gave for Singapore. That's where we see probably over time, the bigger potential. But that's not to say that with some of our distribution facilities, whether that's India, whether that's Brazil, whether... I mean, that's also areas where a lot of the feedstock is being sourced and shipped to other places, so maybe to a lesser extent on that side and slightly more on the finished products.
Yeah, and on the shareholder distributions, what we're doing today and will do in the coming months is just run our scenarios. Look at, let's say, what kind of scenarios we project, what are the potential downside risks of taking certain decisions? We haven't made up our mind whether it will be share buyback or whether it will be dividend or whether we will not do anything at all, which could also be an outcome of this process. So we have an open mind, but we wanna make sure that we look at it in a decent manner. Obviously, if you look at the situation in the Netherlands, the share buyback looks a little bit less attractive than some time ago. Although there is still a window of opportunity till the first of January.
Leave it with us for the moment. We will definitely come back at a certain moment in time.
David, maybe you wait for the microphone, because then the people at home can also-
Hi, it's David Kerstens from Jefferies. Three questions from my side, please. First of all, on the segment reporting, Michiel, you showed us the breakdown in proportionate EBITDA and operating cash return by market, gas, oil, chemicals, to explain the different dynamics within those markets, which makes a lot of sense. However, your segment reporting is still on a geographic basis.
Yeah.
Is it possible to get more color on that on a quarterly basis to support our forecasting? That's the first question. Then, maybe on the investment in new energies, there's a lot of talk recently that there are some temporary bumps in the road due to high supply chain costs and higher interest rates. Is that also affecting your investment in new energies? You've so far invested EUR 30 million out of the EUR 1 billion. You indicated that will come more past 2025. Maybe some comment on that. And then maybe a comment on M&A transaction multiples. I think pre-COVID, you sold mainly oil terminals for 10-15 times EBITDA.
Earlier this year, you sold, Savannah, which is a chemicals terminal, for 12x EBITDA, and now Botlek, I think, 9x EBITDA, but that business is now performing much better than expected, and it would bring the multiple down to 6x EBITDA. Can you comment on these M&A transaction multiples? What explains the big difference compared to your greenfield multiples that you highlighted in your presentation, Michiel? Thank you very much.
Yeah, a lot of questions at the same time. Let me start first with the reporting. Well, that's... yeah, we are obliged to do geographical reporting from an IFRS point of view. So we will give some color on the different business segments, but whether we are gonna do that on a quarterly basis, that looks unlikely. But we'll try to give as much insight as possible, because otherwise we will end up in dual reporting cycle, and that's probably not very attractive. But I hope that at least it gives color on where the different segments go.
I also realize that from an investor point of view, most investors or analysts like to really look at these different segments much more than from a geographical point of view, because then you have all the mixed activities in one geography. So we will try to be as transparent as possible. That's to the first question. The second question is on the interest rate. Yeah, definitely, we look at it. Good news is, at least from our holding point of view, a lot of the interest is fixed, so we are protected from a holding point of view. But with new investments, indeed, the financing capabilities and also looking at the interest rate development, we factor that into account.
We wanna make sure that we're not ending at the wrong end, if for whatever reason, interest rates will further increase, and we all don't know where this is going at the moment. People are a bit more positive today that it may stabilize, but yeah, maybe that's too early to see a downward trend already. So this is definitely a key item. And also with debt, we need to continuously look at our cash return, which we generate, because the cost of debt versus our overall cash return, that still has to balance in the right manner. So that is important. And to your third question, on the EBITDA multiples, yeah, I'm not a big fan of the EBITDA multiples, to be honest. We look at it much more from a free cash flow point of view.
So you can have a fantastic EBITDA multiple and a quite weak free cash flow. It could also be the other way around. If you look at Botlek terminal, for example, yeah, you can measure it at an EBITDA multiple. I like to look at it from a free cash flow multiple, because a lot of the EBITDA we generate has to go back into the facility to maintain it. Savannah was relatively, I would think, relatively modest in terms of operating CapEx. But for example, Canada, almost all EBITDA was used for operating CapEx. So if you then take all these EBITDA multiples, then you may not get the right picture. I much rather look at the free cash flow, because that's ultimately what people discount and will pay for.
Maybe to your second question, maybe good for Frits to highlight some of the... Because your question-
Yeah
... was also related to the increase that we see in maybe material cost, technology development over time, so that would be good, too.
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's obviously a very relevant development, the cost of the supply chain and the interest rate. On the other hand, of course, ultimately, the climate doesn't wait, and we need to basically get stuff done. So I think what you will see if the interest rates are high, that obviously that disadvantages the very capital-intensive part of the energy transition. So for instance, if you look at electrolyzers, they are for the ultimate cost, the cost of electricity is much more dominant than the upfront cost of the electrolyzer. So those parts are gonna be less influenced than expensive factories, basically, where you make the investment. So I do think there will be some effect.
On the other hand, it cannot be too large, 'cause as you know, we're already under pressure to even make the target. So, too much of a postponement, we cannot, we cannot afford ourselves. So for us in Vopak, I think when you talk about the biofuels situation, it may delay some biorefineries temporarily a little bit, but I think most of those changes to us will continue, 'cause they're simply driven by regulations, and they're, and they're gonna, they're gonna go. I think, as I said, electrolyzers is gonna, is gonna suffer only from the fact that higher capital means less wind at sea, and therefore less power available, and therefore, the, you know, the, the, the right point in time to start there might be, might be a little bit influenced....
But ultimately, of course, we're looking at developments that you do for 30 years. So it is, it's not something that I think will make a huge difference. It's just that obviously some timings of FIDs may be a little bit impacted by it.
Thijs, and then to the next. Thijs was first. You go second. Yeah?
Thijs Bergelder, ABN AMRO ODDO BHF. First question, Michiel, on slide 46, the operating cash returns per segment. You have a diverse terminal portfolio, so probably still there are terminals not meeting your 12% hurdle and ex corporate cost, I would say, the hurdle is probably more like 14%. So, can you maybe explain what from now on will happen with these non-performing or underperforming terminals? Whether you're looking at further divestments and/or restructuring actions there. Also, on corporate costs, you, Dickk, you sliced, I think, 50 people in the, let's say, the overhead of the company, sliced the management layer out. Meanwhile, I think more costs now will be labeled as corporate costs, corporate headquarter costs.
Can we expect further cost reduction actions on these corporate costs in the coming 12 months? Maybe for Frits, the third question is on your management system. Do you have any idea what kind of financial benefits you so far reached on an annual basis by implementing this system on these 28 terminals? You operate, what is it, 75? Could you also reach that on the other 50?
Let me start with your second question, and to correct you, that slicing, I would not use that word, but, because that's not what we did. We removed a layer in the organization structure as we have it. The goal was to make sure that the company becomes more effective and also more efficient, but the drive was not to eliminate 50 jobs. Unfortunately, the consequence was that 50 FTEs were made redundant, and we did not have an opportunity to place them elsewhere in the company. The goal, again, was to make sure that we have an effective structure and actually eliminate or reduce a little bit the distance between our head office and our global team here, and the individual units out in the field, in the different countries where we are.
That is what we now have achieved, at least on paper. We're now in the middle of executing it, making it work. So on your question, are there any other plans for additional cost measures? As you can see them, I would say for now, short term, next 12 months, we have to make sure that this structure is going to work, that we get this effective and efficient. And I'm sure there's gonna be smaller incremental steps, but not a bigger development, as I was just explaining that we did in the course of this year.
Yeah, and then to the question about the portfolio. Yeah, you're right. So, from a terminal point of view, you need to look at approximately 13%-14% instead of the 12%. So what we do is effectively go through the portfolio on a quarterly basis to really see where are the different returns, how are they progressing over time. Do we see an improving return? Do we see a declining return? Obviously, as long as we see good movement on the returns, that these are improving, we would like to continue the journey. If we see declining returns, then we need to take action. We want to make sure that we have a decent plan to get it up to a certain level again. If that doesn't work, then we can take other actions.
That's not what we foresee. We have a still a few smaller disposals we're looking at, but relatively small, very small, compared to what we have seen in the Botlek terminal. So no big things are on the horizon at this moment in time. And it's also not per se that each and every terminal needs to be at 14% plus. That is not the idea. So we have a portfolio, a mixed portfolio. It gives us a certain diversification, but there's always a bit of a range, and there might be... There always will be terminals which are below, and there will always be terminals which are above the 14, 14% from a terminal point of view, and then the portfolio, yeah, is a nice mix. So that's how we look at it, Thijs.
Okay. And on the software, so if I just focus on our own proprietary system, then of course, it was not like we didn't have a system before. So we had a system, and we upgraded that to a new one. So if you look at the incremental investment for the new software, and you compare that with the benefits, and I say the benefits are in two broad buckets. One is cost reduction, the other is actually that we have clear indications that there are customers choosing for us and being prepared to pay a little bit more for us because of this new software.
If we just couple those, I would say, revenue streams, where we have a clear indication that it was, that software played a key role, and we look at the cost that we've reduced, then overall, I can say you're looking at an investment which is, north of, 14%-15%, on that software.
Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Nash Tsui from Barclays, sales analyst. I also have 3 questions, if that's okay? Focusing more on longer-term new energy infrastructure. The first question is on slide 46, when I look at the cash return by terminal type. Just wonder, what should we expect for the new energy cash return in the longer term? Do you expect 10% or 12% by the end of the decade? So that was my first question. My second question is on slide 47. So I just wonder exactly why the new energy infrastructure is a bit more expensive, since it suggests lower return. Is that right? My third question is actually combining that chart with the chart on slide 45.
So by the end of the decade, you are going to have a bigger proportion of CapEx allocated to gas and new energy, but your new energy infrastructure is low return, so it suggests to me it's earning dilutive. Is that because it's low carbon, so you are okay with that? Just want to hear your thoughts on that. That will be good. Thank you.
Yeah, more than happy. So on the, as I said, on the new energy, we expect indeed... and it's very early days still, but, to be somewhere between 6 and 8 times for new developments. If you take greenfield activities into account, you have to mix it with also the fact that we will do repurposing. And so repurposing comes at lower multiples, 4-6 times. If you would work that back to, a cash return, and if we-- even if we invest at around 8 times, EBITDA, we would still make around 11%-12% cash return. So we're not gonna change our cash return outlook, as a result of more new energy investment. It should be, as we said, accretive to our portfolio, and that's how we look at these investments.
So over time, you may expect that we deliver on those returns, and that's also the guidance we give to our teams. Because ultimately, whether we build for gas or we build for industrial or we build for new energies, and that's a similar type of infrastructure. Why is it one notch higher? Because on these new energy, it still is a more immature market maybe, but it also provides other growth opportunities on top of that. So we probably have to start it up first and then expand it over time. So that may take a bit more start-up investments than you would otherwise see for more mature markets. So go take, for example, a CO2 infrastructure. It will come at a certain throughput.
It will grow over time because more CO2 will be captured and then liquefied in our terminal, but that will take time before those volumes will grow. So you may expect that once you do incremental investments on the side for new energy, that those incremental investments then may come maybe later on at more attractive EBITDA multiples. Did that answer...? Because you had a few questions.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Okay, thanks.
Andre?
Hi, Quirijn Mulder, Kepler Cheuvreux. Three questions. First, looking at your terminal network of 78 terminals, you mentioned 18 industrial terminals, 25 biofuels, 25 gas, 6 ammonia. Of course, there are multiple functions per terminal, but how many terminals do not fit these types, and what will you do with them?
Well, I wouldn't say that if they don't fit those particular types, that they're not interested. There's potential to still develop terminals into a certain market. I think there's a combination. There's not one terminal that is fully dedicated to one of those functions. I think what the main message is is we have that what we like about the portfolio is the diversification, not only from a contract point of view or from a geographical point of view, but also from the type of functions that they can play. So there's different terminals that we could also, over time, still develop for some of the markets that we are focusing on.
It's not that if they today don't have a specific role that we highlight on some of the maps, that they could never get to that situation in the future. I think we're happy with the network as we have it today. We see for the strategy that we want to execute, as Michiel also indicated before, not an immediate long list of terminals where we say, "Those are not part of the network," and we feel it helps us with the scale to actually continue to develop the capabilities. It's not as black and white, that if you're not in the bucket today, where you can do ammonia, biofuels or gas or industrial, that you're out of the portfolio. There's plenty of opportunity still to develop into any of those segments.
Okay, and second question on oil, oil and gas. Oil is, of course, called dirty, but gas is also a fossil fuel. To what extent do you feel that that could also become a victim of energy transition?
I think that's probably for Frits. You had the-
Yeah
... already the indication earlier.
Yeah, I think, I tried to say as well, Andre, that I see gas, and we see gas as a temporary refuge, right? But it is still an improvement compared to a lot of what's currently happening, and it is very feasible in a lot of cases to make gas. That's why I think a country like Germany, for instance, is so big on gas. It's something that you can do quite in the near term, and yet already makes a big contribution to reduction. But obviously, we cannot stop with natural gas because there is still too much of a footprint also from natural gas....
What I do think is that also in the area of natural gas, eventually there are opportunities to further green where the world is working on bio-LNG, for instance. There are ways to reutilize some of that infrastructure for other streams, like well, ammonia would be actually I would say LNG is I would say too high quality infrastructure for ammonia to be precise, but it could be utilized that way. But certainly, when you look into the realm of hydrogen, you know, I think there are ways to make that transition.
For instance, in Eemshaven, that's one of the things that we are really actively studying now, is how can we from, first of all, of course, providing energy security, and that, after the Russian invasion, over the past winter to the Netherlands, when you urgently had to get that Eemshaven terminal on the map. Netherlands, of course, as you know, wants to make that transition, so we are already actively looking at, okay, how do we shift now from LNG over time? And I'm not saying that's gonna be in three years, no idea how quickly it is, but we are preparing. Okay, how do we shift there to get it more hydrogen-based in that system?
So, I do think, though, that your question is relevant when you go into new ground-based infrastructure, right? When we have floating infrastructure, basically, our commitment is as long as the lease with the ship. When you put a tank like Gate there, you're basically talking about a tank that can live for 30, 40 years, and then you have to think very seriously. So I think, in a way, in that intermediate period, it drives you again more towards a floating infrastructure, where you can just reutilize assets across the world. And our commitment is a lease commitment rather than an ownership.
Yeah. Then last question, and numbers question. Related to this EUR 2 billion, you mentioned EUR 30 million has been invested. Shows to me quite small. I also see this EUR 149 million spent in the first nine months. That should turn into EUR 300 million for the year. And the EUR 345 million was also mentioned as being allocated. Can you add a bit more comments to those numbers?
Yeah, if you look at the 2 times 1 billion, then on growth, so the gas and industrial, we're making good progress. So that's, off the top of my head, I think we're around EUR 300 million there, and we expect to reach 60%-70% by the year-end if the Canada project goes ahead. And so that's where we make progress. If indeed, on the new energy side, we have spent so far EUR 30 million, but the pipeline is filling up. It will take time. And yeah, the 1 billion is till 2030, so we still have some time. But yeah, the major chunks of investments you may expect by 2025, 2030. In that period, it will take place.
Maybe good to still say that this is all consolidated CapEx? So this is 2 times 1 billion means effectively, if it's a joint venture for us, it is the equity investment we do in a joint venture. So for example, we have one of the industrial expansions in Caojing, Shanghai, in China. Effectively, from a equity point of view, it's zero, but from a proportional CapEx point of view, it's a EUR 50 million project for us. Because in total, it's a EUR 100 million project, we take half of it, but due to the very good cash flow of that company, we don't need to put equity in. So that's why you see there is a difference between the EUR 1 billion consolidated CapEx versus the proportional CapEx.
The proportional CapEx will always be higher than EUR 1 billion for both growth and accelerate.
Yeah, good morning, and welcome back, Frits. So I would like to concentrate my questions for you. My first-
We missed you.
Yeah. So my first question is about your story about the IT, MyService. You say, "So we are proud we have already rolled out 28 terminals are using it, and we are expecting another 10 in 2024, 2025 combined." So that means, in my view, if you are reaching all your terminals, that means that you will finish that in 2033. Is that your idea or not? That's my first question on the IT rollout.
Yeah, I think, we have to realize that whereas I would say 80% of the software that we have is really common and we can use everywhere in the world, there is always also a local component. The customs regulations are different, and that's interweaved with this system in many places in the world. The local trucking, well, regulations and practices vary. So what... It is not the case where we develop the software centrally, and we just basically press buttons, like you can do with a finance or largely with an HR system. You know, you need to have always a little bit of a customization.
All the physical assets are obviously different everywhere in the world, so there's always a little bit of a customization effort required. So that means that we have, in the first instance, concentrated on those terminals which were running on our old system, which was getting to end of life. So the first focus, and the 10 that we mentioned, is really those where we've helped on a greenfield, and they had no system whatsoever, and therefore, you know, we gave them the new system, obviously, and the terminals that were on the, I would say, on the critical path for, for replacement. But I certainly foresee that what we have done and with the, what I say, the 80% common, we're in a great position to also start expanding this.
Now, that obviously, given that we have our current development and implementation, hence more than full with what we have on the plate, we've not been very actively actually marketing this system towards those other terminals yet. But, I can already say that there are many terminals actually approaching us and saying: "When can I please have it?" So I certainly foresee that we will continue. I also think that the pace is then a matter of, I would say, economic optimization, right?
So yes, they get benefits, but we then also have to pull forward the investment of implementing it, and there we try to basically therefore look a little bit at load-leveling the teams that we have to do this, to just spread it out over time a little bit. But I don't foresee we will ever get to 100%, yes. Let's take Gate is another good example. As part of the development of Gate, we have built a customized service at the time, a system at the time, which still, to all intents and purposes, is good enough for Gate, you know? So, there's not really much of a push from our side to do that.
If we open a new LNG terminal, and Dickk, for instance, talked about Australia, I would be very keen to be able to offer as part of that service offering, to say, "Okay, we can also put you on this system." So I don't think we'll ever get to 100%, but we are certainly, but, you know, committed to, to at least we're there where it makes business sense, which in our opinion, is in a lot of places to, to start to implement this.
Then a completely different question. If I look at your GHG emissions, you're already, let me say, 25% less than it was, and your target for 2030 is only 30%. When are you going to raise that, that target? Because it looks to me that 5% in seven years is not very ambitious.
No. No, and that's, again, an excellent question, and thank you for giving me that opportunity to clarify it. What we have said is our 30% is a net reduction for the entire company, which is not on a like for like basis of, okay, we have this portfolio, now let's reduce it. Now, that is taken into account that we also are ambitious to have quite a bit of growth in between now and 2030. And already, since basically the start year for us, 2021, we have had some growth.
Actually, when we calculate it, it does mean that our existing portfolio has to come down by 45%-60% in order to accommodate enough carbon space for the growth that we have planned in sometimes, you know, still for us, relatively carbon-intensive projects, huh? And a floating LNG, to give you an example, normally generates its own power by combusting the boil-off gas from that comes from that. So that is, in our world, just a boil-off gas is a huge part of our footprint. If I now look at the top emitting terminals of Vopak, they are basically all in the LNG space.
So one of the challenges that Walter and his team are working on, and that we hold very, very, very dear, is can we go to a zero-based emission? Now, in the case of Gate, we've been able to do that because we are using warmth from the rest of the environment, and we're onshore, so we can use the power that comes from the grid, and we can use the warmth from the industry next to us, and therefore, we don't need to consume. If you are out in the middle of nowhere on a ship and you have to take care of everything, then that becomes much more challenging.
Still, in Australia, we're currently doing a huge study to say, "Okay, could we do this on a zero-carbon basis or a near zero-carbon basis?" So I think it is a combination of how much can we further reduce the footprint that belongs to the growth that we wanna make, as well as what can we do with our own portfolio, and then I certainly hope that we will be in a position to increase that target. But don't be mistaken to say that what we have done now is what I would call is capture the low-hanging fruit, which is basically, as I said, mostly transition to renewable electricity in those places where it's available.
The challenge that's ahead of us to go further is significantly steeper, and there is this offset of the growth to come, which we have included in the -30. But certainly, I would be more than delighted to say in a few years' time, or maybe even sooner, as soon as we feel... You know, as a company, we don't commit to something unless we see a realistic way to get there, right? I mean, it's very easy for us to say we're gonna do -50, but it is, it doesn't belong to our professional honor, I would say, if we don't feel that we have a credible pathway to actually do that.
Now, as soon as we feel that we have a credible pathway to go to go deeper, we'll be excited actually to increase that target.
We have room for one more question, probably.
Question-
I know, David, you have a sort of follow-up.
My third question is the most important. It's about new energies.
Yeah.
So if I look at all your plans and also plans of your partners like Hydrogenious and, what is it? Xcycle and other names, I see a myriad of names all coming up, like Sweden, Portugal, ACE Terminal, CO2next, and you're not part of Porthos, for example, for the CCS project, which I think is a miss, but, that's, that maybe you can comment on that as well. But I see a myriad of lots of activities, projects, but let me say, it's not very concrete. And when are you going to make further steps and to say, "Okay, we are going forward with this or that"? And it's also not only in products, it's also on, are you part of the import part or are you part of the export, et cetera?
There are many opportunities, I understand, but there are also new locations, completely greenfields in my view. Maybe you can elaborate on that somewhat more, when you're going to make... Let me say, when you're going to take off or when you're going to say, "We are not going further with this project.
Yep... Shall I, yeah?
Yeah, go ahead.
I think let's start with the CO2, eh? Because that's very nearby. Actually, way before anybody else was studying this, and really talking 2010 and earlier, we were looking at a carbon capture system for the Port of Rotterdam. Then, when push came to shove and society was ready to do it, it was basically the government entities that said, "Okay, this has to be common infrastructure, so we wanna do this with government companies." So Port of Rotterdam, Gasunie, ABN, and the like, and not involving a private company like Vopak. We have, from the very beginning, then said: "Well, you know, we do believe that ultimately you're gonna need...
In this whole system, you need some buffer, you need some storage." And initially, it was thought that that was not necessary. I think then, with closer study, indeed, that need for a buffer storage was identified. And so in the CO2next project, we, together with our Gasunie partner, government-based partner, and possibly some other private enterprise companies, we will actually, we believe, be part of that project and take an FID. So is it a miss? Yes. But did we have much chance, given that it had to be government-owned? Well, not directly, I would say. And I have also a lot of understanding why that was basically the position of the government.
Don't get me wrong, it is a, it is a heavily subsidized project, and it is common infrastructure, so there is a, there is a lot of reasonableness in it. But I wouldn't say that we've therefore missed the Porthos project. I do think. So one of these early FIDs that we really expect is COnnect, yeah. Now, on the other projects, you're right, that it is a mixed bag of some things which are very nearby. Take the example of the biorefinery of Shell. They've taken FID, we've got the storage, and there are stuff that is really long out.
Another, you mentioned Portugal. Well, there was the so-called H2 Sines project, where, yeah, doing all the sums and the calculations again, the total supply chain was such that people said: "Ooh, that's, you know, still a little bit of a costly affair at this stage." So, you know, that project then goes a little bit further to the back. So, it's not for us, therefore, to basically set the timeline, and we just have to do all we can to be as cost-efficient as can be to pull this forward. But ultimately, the whole supply chain obviously has to be able to commit. So, I think bio you will see happening, and it's happening all the time around us.
Ammonia, where, you know, it is very likely to be some sort of, a hydrogen infrastructure, but still, for society, unfortunately, on the expensive side. There's... It's hard to see any way around it. Luckily, the U.S. is heavily subsidizing the production, and Europe is, is looking at also finding the right, I would say, subsidizing regimes to get this going, and therefore the projects may, may happen. Liquid hydrogen is still, somewhat further off, in terms of, in terms of its cost and technology. So, yeah, it's not, it, it... I wish we could tell you that, that we have this in hand, but that's just what, the state of the energy transition is.
I think, I think maybe one other comment I need to add to it, it's we need to position now for the right partnerships, which is a lot of the announcements that you see, to position ourselves well. And as Frits already indicated, our investment in the majority of the cases doesn't sit on the critical path, so it's not up to us to define whether that supply chain in the end will get, fully delivered. Now, that doesn't mean that we sit backwards and just wait until the phone rings. We are actively forming those partnerships, developing the project, yeah, and then the final investment decision will take place at the right time, with the right speed.
So obviously, we would like to take those investment decisions, the sooner the better, but at the same time, we wanna make sure we make the right decisions over there. So, I think in that balance, we are comfortable with where we are now, because we're not in a hurry to kinda like spend it on projects that we simply don't like at the moment. One final question. Final question, David Lampros. You can have it maybe over lunch or after that, because then we break. I also wanna be respectful to the people that are joining us online.
Thank you very much. Maybe a question on the AltaGas project in Canada. Can you give an indication, what is the scope of the project? You already have an initial terminal there. I think at that time it was CAD 450 million.
Yep.
This one seems much, much larger. It is a joint venture, of course, but maybe could get an indication on the enterprise value. And this is land-based, and Gate is land-based, but Eemshaven is an FSRU. What drives the decision to invest in floating versus land? And the-
Yeah, so maybe on Canada, and then combine it also with the... So Eems Gate is LNG. What we're doing in Canada is LPG exports, so that's land-based. There's no floating type of LPG equivalent solution. So what you basically look at for Canada with AltaGas is a marine infrastructure, so a jetty in the water, which was not part of the first phase, and more or less double the capacity that we had in the first phase, including an expansion of the rail. So the model over there is it comes in by rail cars, it's gonna be offloaded in the tanks, and by there, it's gonna be exported to Asia, to the northern part of Asia. That's the scope of the project. I wish I can tell you exactly what the amount is.
We're currently still going through the final phases of the scope and making sure we get the right numbers in, so that we can take FID together with our partner, AltaGas. It's big for us, and it's, and it's certainly above the RIPET, which is the current investment that we do. Yeah?... We leave it at that for now.
Sure.
So, we're gonna break for lunch, and gonna be back here in the room, and also for the people that are joining us online, in half an hour. So that's ten past the hour we will start, and then we will start with the presentation from Walter. Thank you a lot, and enjoy lunch, which is gonna be served outside of the room here.
So good afternoon again, and hope everyone online is ready to join us. For the afternoon program, we will move to Walter Moone, and Walter is our EVP for Global Business Development in Vopak. He will share some of the details on our accelerate strategy, so the acceleration towards new energies and sustainable feedstocks. Walter will take it over. Maybe just from a process point of view, at the end of Walter's presentation, we wanna, first of all, give room to some of the questions that were asked this morning related to new energies, actually, through the site, so from the people that are watching and joining us virtually. Then given time, we probably have time for one more question, just to clarify, here in the room.
If there are any further questions, please use it this afternoon during the visit or this evening during the dinner. That would be the process. So Walter, floor is yours.
Yeah. Thank you, Dickk. Nice to see you all here in Rotterdam and also overseas and at home, maybe, on the webcast. My name is Walter Moone. Maybe a new face for many of you. I've been with the company for over 25 years already in many different capacities all across the globe, working in various operating companies in Vopak, and currently the Executive Vice President for Global Business Development. Global Business Development is a new team that's been established also after the restructuring that was discussed also this morning. Global Business Development is really the growth engine of Vopak.
We support business units in really the new type of businesses that we want to develop globally, new energies, but also, very much still LNG as well, because a lot of these capabilities in LNG are quite unique also to the business units, overseas, where we want to develop new projects. So part of the Global Business Development team consists of commercial people helping with deal-making, developing concepts, but also a very large engineering team that can make the first estimates and concepts from an engineering point of view. What I'd like to do in the coming half an hour is take you through a number of the more imminent opportunities that we're working on.
Rest assured, the anxiety and the impatience that is within this room also exists within my team, because we also like to move forward with projects in this, in this new energy space and, and sustainable feedstocks. But like Dickk, I think, rightfully so explained, we are also very much, dependent on the partners we're working with and also market developments. Yet, I think there are still quite a few opportunities where we can already play today, can already play in the near future, let's say from 2025, 2026, and of course, position ourselves well for new markets being developed towards, let's say, the, the second part of this decade. So what I will be focused on now, is, is the renewable fuels and feedstocks, because that's happening already today.
Development of liquid CO2 infrastructure, I think that's the next, the next avenue that we will be pursuing. And hydrogen, specifically, as there's so much interest and, and mainly around ammonia as a, as a hydrogen carrier, because that's we see, we see, as the most viable alternative for, transporting ammonia in the near future. What I will do, I will focus on the drivers, the market drivers, behind these opportunities and projects. We'll tell you a little bit more about our role in the supply chain, because that's quite specific, and I think for many of you, also quite interesting to understand where do we want to play. And lastly, I will elaborate a little bit more on where we play in the market and, and use specific showcases to, to demonstrate our capabilities. So let's start with low-carbon, fuels and feedstocks.
Like I said, the transition from, let's say, fossil fuels into lower-carbon alternatives is already happening today. At our terminals, it was already addressed in the, in the morning. It is mainly driven by directives and mandates from governments like the Renewable Energy Directive of the EU, but also, let's say, international, transport organizations like the IMO for the maritime sector. They set specific targets for that, that sector, like the 40% greenhouse gas reduction that the IMO put forward to, to their branch, organization, in 2023. This is really driving, shipping companies and, let's say, airlines to, to look into alternatives for the current single-fuel solutions.
Now, what we see there is that, let's say, we go from a situation today where we use mostly fossil fuels to many different alternatives in the energy mix, and obviously, that also drives the need for additional infrastructure. So that's one reason why I think we can play an important role in providing that infrastructure. Secondly, we see a much lower energy density of these new alternative fuels, which also means more capacity required. And lastly, you see whole new value chains emerging with the emergence of new products. Now, on the multiple products, I think I can name a few examples. On land transportation, I think we're already quite used to the blending of ethanol into gasoline and of biofuels into diesel. That is already fairly common to us, but you now also see that happening in marine and aviation.
So the market, which is currently really picking up, is the drop-in fuels or biofuels into fuel oil or marine diesel. That's really happening in the, in the main energy hubs already. But also new project products come into play, like methanol, LNG, and maybe in the future as well, ammonia as a fuel for the maritime sector. And what you also see, there's a lot of technology development also in the engine producers, that they can run on on dual fuels to also make this possible. So I think many inflection points that really drive towards, let's say, fuels with much wider range of products, and that also means for us, much, much more different products at our, at our terminals.
On the aviation side, of course, we see much more sustainable aviation fuels now being produced and being dropped in the conventional jet fuel, also happening at our terminals. These type of drop-ins typically happen at seaports and not so much at the end destination of the fuel, for instance, at the airports, because they need to be tested and certified before they're being shipped to the final destination. And that, I think, creates a tremendous opportunity for us to offer services to the transportation sectors. On the volumetric energy density, I included the example of fuel oil, which is today still the main fuel for the maritime sector, and I took the example of methanol.
The same energy density that is contained in one cubic meter of fuel oil, you need an equivalent of 2.4 times the amount of methanol. This already shows the sheer size of additional volume that is required to bring the same energy to the sector. And with this large demand in all these sectors, and this is the same for renewable diesels and other alternatives, yeah, this drives, of course, the demand for a lot more steel and storage and handling infrastructure. On the supply chains and the new value chains, I think you will see a really good example this afternoon, and you will be visiting Vlaardingen, which is one of the big hubs we have nowadays for the storage of bio-feedstocks.
We've seen the volume of bio-feedstock grow 4.5 times in the last few years, really on the back of expansions that we see in the Port of Rotterdam, the Neste factory, for instance, the Maasvlakte, but also now the construction of the biorefinery of Shell in Pernis. That really drives the need for more bio-feedstock storage in our terminals and then being shipped to the production facilities. So Vlaardingen is an example where the feedstock is being shipped to the refinery. There's also many opportunities where we can actually connect pipelines to our industrial terminals across the globe. I'll come back to that later.
If we then have a look at the biofuel supply chain, I have an image here on the screen, with on the left side, the collection of the local feedstocks. This usually happens in densely populated areas: India, Brazil, Asia. Then there's a feedstock aggregation, and that typically is being shipped to the refinery centers. As with the fossil fuels, you can see the refinery assets are really concentrated in the bigger hubs. So the feedstock needs to be shipped to the bigger hubs. There, the feedstock is being received and then transported to the factories, to the plants. Why is that? You could question, why do not let's say, producers store their own feedstocks in their own sites?
That is typically because lack of space or because they just want to outsource the offsite handling of feedstocks. Because very often, for feedstock, also some blending and consolidation with other flows is required, and producers typically do not want to interfere that type of logistics activity on their refinery site. This opens a business model for us to play in. The biofuel is being produced at a biorefinery. These are typically refurbished old refineries or totally new assets, like Pernis in Rotterdam, and then the biofuel is produced. It's HVO, sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel. That can either be shipped by pipeline to a receiving terminal, or it is being shipped to a seaport, where it can further be distributed across continents to other fuel distribution or hub terminals.
Now, I think this already clearly indicates in which areas we can play around the globe. Yep, so the feedstock aggregation typically happens in our terminals in India, in Brazil, Southeast Asia, China even. The feedstock storage typically happens close to the refinery centers. I think Vlaardingen is a good example of that, but Singapore could also be an example, or Malaysia in the future. There will also be biorefineries being constructed there. And then, of course, we have the rundown product in our industrial terminals again and the storage of biofuels and blending into the fossil fuels at our distribution and hub terminals. So yeah, I already mentioned where we'll be active then. You can see the dots on the map here as well.
It's Brazil, India, and Asia for feedstock imports of feedstock in the ARA and Singapore, and the import of finished products in the big hubs in Rotterdam, Singapore, even Fujairah, which is also a large bunkering market and import terminals. I think California was already addressed earlier. That's a really nice showcase, I think, of what we try to achieve in this market and where we'd like to do much more. And that is a project we did for a global customer that we have, Neste, a Finnish company that has been quite active in the last few years in producing renewable fuels, also with novel technology. Big market player. We have a global presence with them in a number of continents.
They have a big renewable biofuel factory in Singapore, and that product is being shipped all over the world. So they have a few hubs, and from that they, they supply the rest of the world. In Los Angeles, Neste signed a long-term contract for the storage of sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel, and for that purpose, we repurposed 22 existing fuel oil tanks. You see them here on the right side of the picture. A total of 148,000 cubic meters really serving these new renewable markets. And I think the interesting thing to know is that this SAF and renewable diesel reduces the lifetime cycle carbon emissions of these type of products by 80%.
With this product, we support the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in their 2030 net zero emission targets, and the state of California in their low carbon fuel standard targets, which are also mandatory mandates from the government. There's still much opportunity to grow, especially in the area of California, but also across the globe, where you see that the drop in fuels and the conversion to lower carbon fuels and feedstock is really mandated by governments. A bit on CO2, which is a fairly new product to us, a new commodity, I would always say, but at the same time, it's a product that doesn't have any value at the moment. People just want to get rid of it.
Hence, it's even more important that we come up with really, really good and efficient supply chains and cheap supply chains to handle this type of products. I think Frits already alluded to the fact that CO2 capture and storage is one of the key instruments that we have at our disposal today to decarbonize. It's I wouldn't say it's cheap, but at least it's a technology that we have available now to make first strides in the net zero climate goals that we have. And in order to achieve these COP 26 commitments on a net zero economy in 2030, we need to capture 1,300 million tons per annum.
If we look at the announced projects today, we come to around 400 million metric tons or per annum globally today. If we look in 2030, if you look at the announcement of the projects today. So we're nearly close to the amount of volume that we need to capture to meet these climate goals. At the same time, this 400 million tons is already nine times more than the amount of CO2 that we capture today. You can see there's quite a big market to play in, and we want to play in that market by offering liquid CO2 services. So why liquid CO2?
Well, I think, Frits already briefly mentioned it, but a large part of the emitters are not close to the underground storage facilities, where in the end, the CO2 needs to end up. So there needs to be another solution for that. And I think initially, especially in the early stages, where the pipeline infrastructure is not that well developed yet for CO2, liquid CO2 is really a market that will grow initially in the coming years. So yes, it helps very much that the Porthos Project will be launched. There's been FID taken here in the, in the Netherlands to, to construct this pipeline system in the Port of Rotterdam and to the sinks in the North Sea.
But there will still be many flows from the rest of Europe, and we're serving many industrial centers, emitters, power plants in areas of Germany, much further away that require, let's say, the shipment of liquid CO2 to these things. So what do we want to offer as a service? We're actively working on concepts for that and talking to partners and emitters and let's say the operators of the sinks. We want to offer export facilities where we can liquefy and store the liquid CO2 and import facilities close to these underground storage facilities. I think the view of a liquid CO2 market is also supported by Clarksons, a large maritime consultancy firm, that estimated in 2030, around 100 carriers are underwater in 2030 shipping liquid CO2.
So why can we win in this new market that's coming up? I think many of the aspects that were already addressed earlier, I think we have the ability to offer open access, common infrastructure that creates economy of scale, and that's extremely important in a waste product that CO2 still today is. So we can, we can offer these, these economies of scale. The proximity of our assets to both the emissions, the emission points and the sinks helps a lot. And I think also our strong operational capabilities in cryogenic storage, because also CO2 needs to be liquefied by bringing it to minus 53 degrees. It is cryogenic storage, similar to ammonia, LNG, and also LPG. So we can use those capabilities, those standards and operating capabilities that we have.
Also, I think very important, we can utilize the existing partnerships that we have with our customers and partners. Because many of the emitters are our customers today in our oil, LNG and gas terminals, and many of the partners that are developing, let's say, liquid CO₂ or CO₂ pipelines, are very often the TSOs that we also operate and own LNG terminals with. So I think really strong position, both from a geographical point of view, but also capability and partnership point of view. So what will be our core play for these markets? The supply chain that you see here on the screen is the liquid CO₂ flow. So this is not the pipelines, it's the piped CO₂ process. So what typically happens, I already explained it a little bit, the CO₂ is captured.
We're not involved in that. It's transported by pipeline to an export terminal, where it's being liquefied and purified. We'd like to play that role. It's a fairly straightforward process that we can do at our terminals. Subsequently, the CO₂ is shipped to the sink locations. There, the CO₂ needs to be heated up again, needs to be pressurized, so it is the right pressure to be injected into the underground storage facilities. So where do we play? The temporary storage and handling of the product, the pressurization of the liquid CO₂ close to the sinks, and the liquefaction in exporting terminals. Adjacencies that we can operate like we do also nowadays in industrial terminals are, let's say, pipeline infrastructure. I think important to mention an area where we will not play is the underground storage.
It was mentioned before, you missed out on Porthos. You know, there might be many reasons why we didn't step in. One of the reasons also why we do not feel we should play in underground storage of CO₂ is the specific capabilities of the underground sinks. So we do have some underground storage facilities around the globe. Maybe in Singapore, we had... We have one. We had one in Sweden in the past. But really, injecting CO₂ and maintaining and keeping it there, also with the liability to keep that for many, many years ahead, is not something that we are comfortable with, and I think there are many, many parties in the world that can do that in a much better way than we can.
So the underground storage of CO₂ is not part of the scope and also not the carbon capture itself. So typical markets, where do we play? Industrial clusters in Europe, Antwerp, Flushing, Eemshaven, where we can, we can export, but also Asia is coming up. Singapore, especially the countries that have clear legislation on CO₂ reductions and also see carbon capture as a as an important instrument in that. A few countries like Singapore, Japan, and Korea are really ahead of the curve in that sense in Asia, so these are also interesting export markets. Import locations, that's usually where the big sinks are, where the oil and gas fields, depleted oil and gas fields or nearly depleted fields.
These are typically in the North Sea, so Rotterdam is a really good location, but also in Asia, close to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia. There's a lot of opportunities and parties being active in developing underground storage facilities for CO2, and they really seek our participation in these projects to supply, let's say, the liquid CO2 volumes. Because in the end, also for an operator of an underground sink, it is good to build volume, so you can create more economies of scale by combining, let's say, the piped CO2 flows with the liquid CO2 flows that come from further ashore. Really interesting and really live project we're currently working on is CO2 Next. The CO2 Next project is developed in conjunction with the Aramis underground CO2 storage facility. Aramis is a joint venture with Total, Shell, and Gasunie.
Gasunie is also one of our partners in Gate and also in Eemshaven, and we developed this project together with our partner, Gasunie. The idea of the terminal is indeed what I just explained: to receive liquid CO2 flows from European industrial clusters, from emitters, and then feed that into the Aramis pipeline system. The question just came up, why are the EBITDA multiples higher for the new energies projects? I think this is a really typical example where you have a launch capacity of the asset of around 5.5 million tons per annum, but with a growth capacity up to 15 million tons.
So in the initial first phase, in the launch phase of this project, we already built in some extra capacity, so we can cater for more capacity in the future, which of course has an implication on the return on the shorter term. However, when we expand, we can do that with lower incremental investments, and the returns of the projects will go up over the years when we expand. It's a model that we've been using as well in other sides of the business of Vopak. And I think another explanation of the maybe slightly lower returns initially on these projects is that typically also projects like this are heavily subsidized. You can imagine that a government will not be extremely excited if you make double-digit returns on a project that are really also serving a common interest.
So by using these subsidies, there might also initially be some pressure on the returns of the projects. That doesn't make them less interesting because there's a lot of growth opportunity. I've shown you, let's say, the amount of CO₂ that needs to be captured in order to become net zero. And the CO₂ Next terminal is really well-positioned to fulfill that role, at least for the Northwestern Europe industries. Then hydrogen. Yeah, it was already addressed in the morning. I don't think I have to tell many of you that the hydrogen is a really key component in decarbonizing the industry, specifically the industry, because we feel industry will be the first mover, especially in the demand for hydrogen.
There's a, there's many different, let's say, instruments at the disposal of industry. Carbon capture, which I mentioned, large-scale electrification, it was also on the, on the slide that, the trajectory that Dickk showed earlier. But one of the, yeah, the key instruments as well is replacing gray feedstock by a blue or green alternatives. And hydrogen is a much-used feedstock in, in industry in many different sectors, so this is really one of the first, yeah, I would say, the, the one of, one of the first products that can be replaced to help decarbonize industry.... and you see that also in the, in the demand projections that are being made, of a, of a, of a demand of 90 million tons of, of hydrogen today.
We will see it grow to 140 million tons in 2030, growing even further to 450-650 million tons in 2040, depending on the speed of the energy transition, obviously. What you also see, in order to fulfill this demand, a lot will be done by, let's say, wind, solar, electrolysis close to the industry parks, but it will nearly not be enough to fulfill the total demand. So we foresee around 13% of these hydrogen flows need to be shipped across continents in 2030, and that's specifically the market that we, of course, are focusing on.
So the volumes will grow, the import need will be there, and the terminals will be established once the industries will get their act together and actually will start changing the feedstocks of the terminals. And, yes, I agree with the fact that the pace might not be to go as fast as we wish, and not only from a growth perspective of our company, but also to make the world a better place. But we really see the inflection point heading in the right direction. To name a few examples, the construction of hydrogen facilities in Saudi Arabia with the NEOM project, it's actually happening, and we already see the producers active in the European market, looking for landing points to import that hydrogen.
We see also governments being really active with the larger emitters and the larger industries to come up with plans, specific plans, for those industries to decarbonize. These are really important drivers in the end for new value chains and new supply chains, like the one for ammonia. Like I said, we feel that ammonia is the most versatile, commercially viable attract alternative to ship hydrogen. We do invest in other carriers like LOHC and liquid hydrogen, but we see them, let's say, materialize only later, towards more towards the end of the decade, rather than, let's say, the second part of this decade. It really has everything to do with the maturity of the technology. But yet we're there. We're participating in it.
We're doing pilots, so we're really ready when it takes off to scale those technologies up and really make it infrastructure solutions for the future. Also, for hydrogen, the issue of volumetric density is at stake. I named the example here. In order to transport one ton of hydrogen, seven ton of ammonia is required. So also here, way more infrastructure needed in order to provide the industries with green fuels, and later also, let's say, the transportation sectors. To put it in perspective, I mentioned the example here on the slide. In order to import 1 million tons of hydrogen, 400,000 cubes of storage capacity is required. To give you a bit of a benchmark, the Gate terminal is 540,000 cubes, so not that much more than this.
So that's only required for 1 million ton of hydrogen per annum. In 2030, we expect 4 million tons to be imported in the Netherlands of hydrogen. So you can imagine the need for the infrastructure that is required. Also here, what is driving our progress in this market segment? Our proven track record, and I think that's really key and important for ammonia, because ammonia is not an easy product to handle. It's toxic, you need to be careful in how you store and process it. And I think we have the capabilities and also the learnings on how to do this in a proper manner with these six terminals around the globe.
These terminals have been developed already many years ago, usually as, let's say, feedstock as part of industrial parks to provide feedstocks to the industries, but we can also convert them and build additional capacity for export flows. We are present in the key markets where the green molecules are being produced, and also in the key markets where the demand is with our existing terminals. I'll show them on the map later. Dickk already did that a little bit in the morning. And also here, we can leverage on existing partnerships. The main demand centers and the main users of the ammonia will be the same customers that we currently serve in the oil and the LNG markets.
So they know how to find us, they know about our capabilities, and they know what they can expect from us in terms of delivery, both operational but also in terms of project development. Because if you're developing a strategic facility like this, like this, that is gonna supply strategic feedstock to your, to your plants or to your, to your power facilities, then you need to have a reliable partner, and they know that they can find that in, in working with Vopak. So the hydrogen or the ammonia supply chain, ammonia is produced out of the green or blue, hydrogen. It's a, it says here liquefaction, but it's actually a production process where the ammonia is really produced. We will not-- we, we will not be involved in that.
It will be transported to our terminals, and from there, it will be exported to the demand centers. There, we will facilitate the import, and then there's two avenues. One is that the ammonia will be used directly by an end user. That can be by, let's say, co-mingling with other fuels, for instance, in a power plant, and that's what the Japanese power plants are really betting on. There's a lot of, let's say, dual-fueled turbines being developed nowadays, where coal-fired power plants are being combined with ammonia, which is, of course, much more efficient than the other avenue, which is the cracking of the ammonia back into hydrogen, and that is more an avenue that is being chosen in Europe. And so... And then there's also other end-user markets.
Of course, the existing industries that also need to decarbonize, they can use greener ammonia, and also new end-user markets, like, for instance, the, the marine transportation.... On where do we play? Obviously, in the terminals, export and import side, but we also want to participate in the cracking facilities. Just like with regasification of LNG, we feel that a cracking facility is an integral part of a terminal, and we'd like to invest in the cracking as well as in the, in the terminaling. Must add to that, that the cracking technology is much more specific, also still, quite immature at scale, so we will need to work with, let's say, technology partners to do that, together with us, both in terms of technology development, but also in terms of investments, because these are sizable investments in cracking.
So where do we play? Key export markets: the U.S., U.S. Gulf Coast, Saudi Arabia, we see already developments happening on hydrogen and ammonia facilities, and also Australia is a really, really big export market, emerging export market. Import markets, those markets that are really big on legislation, on decarbonization: Northwestern Europe, Singapore, but also North Asia, and then I'm really referring to Korea and Japan as key import markets, especially for the power sector. Really nice example, it came by already a few times, the Vopak Moda Houston project, that was announced a few weeks back. Vopak Moda is an ammonia import terminal serving the industry along the Houston Ship Channel.
An interesting thing about this project, because we talked about viability of projects, is it really gonna happen, and when is it gonna happen? The Gulf Coast is one of the seven hydrogen hubs that have been announced a few weeks back that can enjoy together $7 billion in funding to develop, let's say, construction facilities for green hydrogen and green ammonia. So having this terminal there in the middle of this hydrogen hub is a really good asset to have to facilitate exports, and that's exactly what we, with our partners, INPEX, Air Liquide, and LSB, want to do to produce a ammonia export facility to especially serve the markets in Korea and Japan. Really, good partners we work with.
INPEX is a big global LNG player that we also know very well from our LNG assets around the globe. Of course, big in supplying LNG to Japan and Korea. Air Liquide, of course, a lot of expertise in utilities, hydrogen production, but also carbon capture, because that's also part of the project. A lot of it will also be blue hydrogen. And LSB is a really experienced ammonia technology provider for ammonia plants. If the developments proceed, the first phase will produce more than 1 million ton of low-carbon ammonia by the end of 2027, and hopefully we can ship that then to our new import terminals, either in Singapore, in Rotterdam, or somewhere in Northeast Asia. Yeah. These are, I think, three examples of where we are active today.
I think in the morning, Dickk addressed the underlying market drivers and our strategy. Frits elaborated, I think, on our operational project development capabilities, and I think, Michiel stressed, let's say, the financial health and the financial capability we have to invest in these type of digital technologies and developments. And I hope I've given you some perspective on the opportunities and the projects that we're working on today as Vopak to make the company grow in new avenues. Thank you. Maybe, I'd like to open the floor for some questions. Maybe also to be fair, for the people on the webcast, give an opportunity to address some of their questions.
Yes. Thank you. We have three questions from the webcast. The first question is: "Are there any updates regarding the piece of land that you have bought in the port of, like, Antwerp? What are you doing for furthering developing that?" The second question is that: "We didn't hear a lot of the long-duration energy storage. Can you please provide what is the progress and your plans towards that area?" And the third and the last question is that: "You are present in a lot of locations around the world. Would you be open to explore some new locations for the new energy projects? Thank you.
Okay. First question was on VEPA. Yeah, Antwerp. Yeah, so we, we acquired the land, last year, and it's a former Gunvor refinery, as most of you know. A lot of the focus at the moment is on demolishing the existing assets, the refinery and all the tanks around it. Majority of the tanks will be demolished. We will not be repurposing that. Where do we stand at the moment in terms of the pipeline funnel? I think VEPA is a really attractive piece of land because it's in the middle of an industrial area. Many crackers are present at the moment in Antwerp, so there's quite a lot of demand for industrial terminal facilities that we can offer, the tanks that supply feedstock and rundown products for the industrial cluster.
On the new energy front, I think most of the areas that I just addressed can be served from VEPA, and there's also interest from market parties on biofuel. Also, Antwerp is quite a big marine bunkering center, so there's interest there from a few shipping companies to set up shop in Antwerp on that piece of land. CO2, like I mentioned just now, I think CO2, liquid CO2 export can be facilitated. There's no pipelines from Belgium into the North Sea sink, so that needs to be done by liquid CO2. That's an opportunity we're currently exploring. And also, here, ammonia. Because of the presence of a large industrial cluster, ammonia import and hydrogen import is an important avenue that we're pursuing.
Maybe a third one, which I haven't mentioned in my presentation, was also not addressed this morning, is chemical recycling. Apart from the feedstocks in the fuels business, there's also quite some development in recycling plastics into pyrolysis oil, and that's also mandated. We need to. And the chemical producers need to replace, let's say, conventional fuels like naphtha. They need to blend that with, let's say, recycled feedstock. So there's a lot of demand there. Obviously, Belgium and Antwerp is a large demand center for naphtha and feedstock for crackers.
So consolidation of pyrolysis oil on that land and then feeding it to these crackers might be, might be a business opportunity, but also the production, because there's quite some new companies like Xycle, that we've invested in ourselves, that want to set up shop in, on that land. Then on, batteries, the long-duration energy storage, indeed, was not mentioned today. Also, you could see it on the curve. It was a bit more further to, to the right, of the curve. That doesn't mean that we're not interested. We, we still want to establish a position in that. I think briefly, Frits mentioned it. We have invested in some companies, that develop flow battery technology, like Elestor, but we really see that technology materialize only later this decade.
We've also invested in Energy Dome, which is a CO2 compression type of battery that can already be deployed today. And it also has quite some nice project pipelines in it. We're currently working on a market entry strategy for long-duration energy storage, and we'd like to broaden our horizon a bit more from where we initially said we're gonna focus purely on flow batteries related to our tanks. We'd like to look at other alternatives as well that we can play in, like lithium ion or maybe compressed air, like the CO2 company. We hope to have some more analysis maybe around this period of time next year, and we might have progressed a bit more on this topic, so we can say a bit more. Last one, other geographies.
Well, I mentioned a few geographies on the map that we're not active today. For instance, Japan, we have a business development team now really exploring opportunities there. Can we re-enter? We used to be there in the past. I think Germany is an interesting market, really open to explore opportunities there. We're also talking to a few parties there to see what we can do. Really interesting market. Australia, we are present in a few locations, but we'd really like to expand our footprint there because it's such an important and growing market for the production of renewable fuels, but also for CO2 storage. But yes, we're open to other geographies as well. And really, my team, the Global Business Development team, is set up to do typically that. Okay. Any other questions?
Otherwise, I think we should wrap up.
One more question on this side.
One, one question then. Yep.
Thank you. Hi. Thank you. Just a couple of questions. So on the CO2, can you let us know what does it need to be commercial, maybe in terms of pricing, and maybe other color you want to share? Then, do you have any clients already doing CO2, and what is the indicated demand that you see? And maybe on the hydrogen, is there potential to get advantage from the IRA Act, especially in the Moda Houston, and maybe some color on the process there? How does it work? Maybe the potential that you see. Thank you.
Yep. Yeah, on the CO2 side, so your question was about the price of CO2, and when does the project become viable? I think we already have a viable product with the CO2 price today, but of course, it will only help once the CO2 price creeps up. I think when it gets around EUR 90-100, already we have a viable project. The project in itself will also be subsidized in order to get it off the ground, and I think when scale increases, I think the economics of the project will also become better also for customers. We already have customers committing to the launch phase of the project, so the idea is really to take FID with take or pay commitments on that volume in the launch phase.
On IRA, yes, our team in, in, in Houston, in the US, is really actively pursuing, and not only in Houston but also in other areas of the country, projects that fall under the, the IRA Act and might enjoy subsidies from that. So yes, it will greatly benefit our business development portfolio there. Yeah. I think we need to wrap it up from here. Maybe some practical issues, Dickk.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Walter, for the presentation. Brings us to the end of the session that we had here in person and also to the end of the live stream and the webcast that we had today. I hope you found it useful, you heard new things or confirmation of things that you already knew. But at least we tried to give you a good overview where we stand on the strategy execution, and I hope you would agree with me that we made really good and encouraging progress over the last 18 months on that strategy execution.
I think Frits really spent some in-depth time to expand on our sustainability ambitions, what we are doing over there, the role that we can play, where we have the biggest impact, and our capabilities that we are developing in that area, that we already have and that we're further developing. I think Michiel gave a very good insight on the financial framework and the different metrics on which we judge our performance and that you should judge our performance on, with good and elaborate insights on the different market segments. I also hope that you get the confirmation of that disciplined capital allocation process that we go through, that we're really very committed to.
And then I think Walter, this afternoon, gave you a little bit of a peek under the hood, where you can see how we're looking at some of these investment opportunities in the accelerate area that you might think are far away, but if you listen to him, there's a lot of activity that is happening today already in that area, where we are positioning ourselves well. And hopefully we can follow up to you with at the right timing, with exciting opportunities where we're committing to. So with all of that, a big thank you for being here in person. A big thank you for everyone who joined us online today. And for the ones that are joining us, the buses are ready to move to the big attraction, and that's Vlaardingen.
Then later tonight, we see each other at the dinner. Thank you, and thanks for organizing everything. Bye-bye.