Good morning. Good morning, everyone. I'm Yoko Kosugi, General Manager of Investor Relations and Analytics. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to APA's 2021 Investor Day. It's great to see lots of physical faces here in the room today, and we do also have many people online and able to participate in today's meeting. If COVID has taught us anything, it's utilizing technology for improved and more far-reaching communications. As this event is being held in Sydney, on behalf of APA, I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples joining us today. Safety first. The room is well signed with exits.
In case of an emergency, please follow the Shangri-La staff, who will guide us to a safe location. You would have seen that today's presentation is entitled Strategy and Capability to Deliver Growth. Throughout the course of the morning, we will take you through how APA's refreshed strategy will leverage our extensive energy infrastructure capabilities into new areas of growth. Joining us today is APA's executive leadership team. We will have two Q&A sessions today, which will cover questions in the room, as well as any questions through both the teleconference and the webcast facilities. The instructions will be up on the screen for those attending virtually, as you see on this slide here as well. If you have any further questions following today's Investor Day, please feel free to contact the Investor Relations team.
My details are included at the end of today's presentation pack, which has also been uploaded onto the ASX platform this morning. I will now hand over to APA's CEO and Managing Director, Rob Wheals, to introduce you to his executive leadership team. Together, they will take you through a deep dive of APA's strategy and capabilities.
G'day everyone, thank you for joining us here for APA's 2021 Investor Day. Isn't it wonderful to have folks physically in the room today? Thank you also for those of you who are joining us online, and we certainly appreciate your interest in APA. I thought I'd begin also by acknowledging and thank you, Yoko, acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. Now, you might have noticed at the commencement of proceedings today, things might have looked a little bit different, and that's because we've taken this opportunity at Investor Day to unveil our refreshed brand. Now, 2021 is the year in which we celebrate our 21st birthday, and it's also, as you know, a time in which we've refreshed our strategy.
We thought it was appropriate to have a rethink about how we present the APA business to the external world and to present a more contemporary and modern look and feel. I hope you like it as much as what we do. Importantly, though, we've answered that age-old riddle as to what does APA stand for. APA is always powering ahead. That is true because today we are always powering ahead with our purpose, which is we strengthen communities through responsible energy. We're powering ahead with our vision to be world-class in energy solutions. We're powering ahead with the role that we will play in the energy transition and our commitment to net zero operations emissions by 2050. We are powering ahead with our refreshed strategy.
The half year results outlined our refreshed strategy, and we will delve into that in a little bit more detail during the course of this morning. The essence of it is that our refresh strategy brings stronger alignment to our purpose and vision, and it enables us to unlock the vast opportunities that we see in front of us through investing in electricity and gas energy infrastructure, both contracted and regulated, here in Australia and also in North America, through leveraging our skills and capabilities into next-generation energy solutions through our Pathfinder Program, by responding to the ever-changing needs of our customers, but all the while maintaining the discipline that you would expect of us, the financial discipline and the balance sheet strength.
Now, at the half year, I communicated that we were firmly in execution mode, and I can say that three months on, that is exactly the case. Now, we've had a number of small disappointments along the way, but I can tell you that the momentum that we have developed has given me even greater confidence that we have the right strategy and the right team, the right skills and capabilities to be able to execute our strategy as the energy market transitions. I think it's probably appropriate just to take a look back, and it's a story that you should all be very familiar with, that over the last two decades, APA has been very successful as we've evolved and diversified our business, and we've made strategic investments in different forms of energy infrastructure.
That's enabled us to develop and grow and evolve our business, utilizing those skills and capabilities, and we'll continue to do that as we evolve into the future. Now, we are probably best known for our skills and capabilities in safely and reliably operating gas pipelines and gas power generation. Did you know that every day we're operating and maintaining and providing services to 1.4 million customers, both households and businesses in Australia? Did you know that we're the eighth-largest renewable energy generator in Australia, and that we are currently constructing our first-ever hybrid microgrid? Did you know that we have proven capability in electricity transmission infrastructure through our investments in the electricity connectors between Queensland and New South Wales and South Australia and Victoria?
Time and time again, we've demonstrated that we can evolve our business and leverage the skills and capabilities that we have into different asset classes. With our refresh strategy, we are absolutely confident that we'll be able to leverage those skills and grow and diversify our business into the future. What does the future look like for APA? What does the future look like? Well, we see enormous opportunities for APA. We see enormous opportunities. As the energy markets transition and that acceleration increases, we believe we can play a leading role. We're well-positioned to play a leading role. That's consistent with our vision, which is to be world-class in energy solutions. All those skills and capabilities which I've just described, we'll be leveraging them as we grow and diversify and capture growth in new markets.
When you actually do the numbers, we've identified that in our chosen markets of Australia and North America, there's an excess of $2.7 trillion of opportunities to play for. $2.7 trillion. Those are in the areas of renewable energy, firming and storage, gas pipelines, and electricity transmission. Julian Peck and Ross Gersbach will do more of a deep dive into the opportunities in those markets during the course of the morning. As the hydrogen economy develops and matures, we believe that that will also create enormous potential for APA. Hannah McCaughey will also talk about the opportunities that we are identifying through our Pathfinder Program around next-generation solutions. Recently, the International Energy Agency, or the IEA, they highlighted the enormous investment that's going to be required as the energy market transitions, particularly in power generation and electricity transmission.
Those are two areas that APA has existing and growing capabilities. You'll see it on the chart on the left, these are Bloomberg forecasts, and what they show is the threefold increase, threefold, three-time increase in electricity generation capacity that's going to be required by 2050 as the energy market transitions and coal retires from our energy markets. Threefold. Of that electricity generation in 2050, 60% will be wind and solar. Of course, that'll be complemented by technologies such as hydro and batteries. The point I want to underline for all of us is the critical and important role that gas generation will play as part of our generation mix. 15% of our electricity generation in 2050 will come from gas. If you do the numbers, that's actually a near doubling of the generation capacity that we have today. What does all that mean?
Well, it means that gas is going to continue to be a critical part of our energy mix going forward, and importantly, it's the perfect companion for renewables such as wind and solar. Let me take us to more of an Australian context and talk about the critical role that gas will play, and does play, and will continue to play in Australia. First of all, around a quarter of our primary energy use is natural gas, 26%. 20% of our electricity generation is gas generation. As I said earlier, gas generation is an essential companion for renewables such as wind and solar. Not only that, gas plays a critical role for high heat-intensive industries that are hard to abate, such as the industrial sector.
As the energy transition accelerates and more and more coal comes out of our electricity system, as is forecast, and it's forecast to accelerate, the role for gas can only grow. Just recently, the Interim National Gas Infrastructure Plan was published, and I quote from that plan, it says that, "Due to the record levels of supply from solar and wind, the firming role that gas power generation will play in grid stability and reliability is becoming increasingly important to keep the lights on in Australia." That importantly growing role for gas gives us confidence that even as we pursue opportunities in new markets and new energy classes and new energy solutions, gas will continue to be an important part of our energy mix, and therefore is core to the APA strategy. That confidence is borne out in this chart.
You can see that our growth CapEx pipeline over the next number of years exceeds more than AUD 1 billion of growth capital expenditure, albeit off a number of years of lower investment. That is despite the fact that we have changing gas market dynamics occurring in our market, with energy policy uncertainty flowing through to customers contracting shorter terms requiring greater flexibility. You will have already seen some of those energy market dynamics flowing through to our results this year, coupled with the flow-through effect of lower capital investment in the last number of years. I'm confident with the uptick in capital investment that you can now see, that we'll see growth flow through into the years ahead in 2023 and 2024. As we execute our strategy, we will do so consistent with our commitment to net zero operations emissions by 2050.
What does that mean? It means that we will embed net zero into the way we think about our strategy, our business processes, operating decisions on a day-to-day basis. That will be underpinned by a Climate Change Management Framework, which will be focusing on five key priority areas. I won't go into those details this morning. What I will say is that during financial year 2022, we will publish transparent interim targets around net zero, which will guide us towards our ultimate goal of net zero operations emissions by 2050. Key to being able to execute our strategy is having the right skills and capability and experience in our people. I'm confident that we have not only the right team, but the right operating model at APA to deliver on our strategy.
You'll be familiar with most of the team already, including their areas of focus. Probably the one exception of Jane Thomas, who's just joined us earlier in this month, in the month of May, and is sitting up front. Jane joins us from Westpac, where she held a senior leadership role, and I know that Jane's still getting her feet under the desk, but I know that a big part of her focus will be helping to drive our diversity and inclusion agenda, boosting our women in leadership roles, and also strengthening our safety performance. Jane's appointment, more generally, has increased the bench strength of APA and our ability to execute on our strategy going forward. With this team together, we will be driving a strong culture with a big focus on high performance.
We'll be focusing on building our talent pool and making sure we have the right skills and capabilities to execute our strategy. We'll be looking to foster stronger relationships with our external stakeholders because that's so important for our social license as we want to execute our strategy. This team will also be focusing on operational efficiency because scalability is important for growth. To sum up my introductory comments, APA is in a very strong position. We're in a very strong position, and as we face into the challenges and opportunities of the energy transition, I believe we've got the skills and capabilities off the back of the last two decades of diversifying our business and building those skills and capabilities, which we'll be able to leverage into new markets over time.
All the while maintaining strong financial discipline, maintaining the strength of our balance sheet as we focus on steadily growing distributions for you, our security holders. That focus around balance sheet financial strength and distributions will be elaborated on further by Adam Watson a little bit later during the course of the morning. I might just focus a little bit about the format for the rest of the morning. The structure is going to be, as you can see clearly, around strategy and capability. Capability is all about how we execute our strategy. We'll first have Julian Peck and then Hannah McCaughey talk about how we're going to execute our growth here in Australia, as well as leverage our capabilities into next generation technology solutions through our Pathfinder Program.
This will be followed by Ross Gersbach, who will be joining us live via video link from Houston. Ross will elaborate a little bit more about our growth strategy in North America. This will be followed by Q&A. We'll have the whole executive leadership team up front. We'll have a short break. After the break, we'll change tack a little bit and focus more on capability. That will include presentations from Darren Rogers and Nevenka Codevelle, followed by an update on capital management from Adam Watson. Once again, we'll have another session of Q&A. I'll make some closing remarks. I hope that today you'll find the information that we share useful, informative, and hopefully the morning will also be entertaining. I now welcome Julian Peck, our Group Executive, Strategy and Commercial, onto the stage.
Thanks, Rob. Good morning, everybody. I'm really pleased to be with you here today. As a number of you have said to me already this morning in person, it's nice to actually meet people in person again after too many Zoom calls, I'm sure, for everybody in the last 12 months. I'm going to talk about our focus for growth in energy markets in Australia. I think we'll elaborate on our core pipeline infrastructure business in Australia, and we think that remains an attractive and essential part of the energy economy. We also recognize, the management team, that the energy transition is well upon us, and we recognize that in our expanded strategy, and as such, we plan to participate in those markets going forward.
In terms of our gas pipeline operations and what we can see in terms of capital investment opportunities going forward, obviously, we have good visibility in that market, and we think that that pool of potential investment at the moment is around AUD 8 billion. When you look at the energy transition, and that's going to drive significant investment clearly in renewables and electrification over time, just using the AEMO numbers in the ISP, you've got AUD 60 billion of combined investment across renewables, firming, and LGC infrastructure. We've broadened our investment scope in a refreshed strategy in the half year this year to include those areas, and I'm going to demonstrate to you today how we plan to participate in those markets as we move forward into this energy transition. That energy transition is well underway. The diagram on the left is from the AEMO ISP.
That data is taken from that document. You'll see in there, consistent with Rob's comments around the broader globe, in Australia, we see around 35 GW of solar and wind, solar at the top, wind second-top, coming into that market. That energy is obviously displacing coal. You see around 15 GW of low capacity factor coal plant dropping out of that market. It's really important to recognize that for every megawatts of coal, you need 2 MW-3 MW of renewables to come in to replace it. That's more capital investment, and it also means investment in the grid, which I'll come to, but also investment in firming batteries, pumped hydro that we hear about, but also gas-fired firming. The energy transition is really driving retirement of coal, replacement with renewables, but those renewables need a certain amount of firming and dispatchability.
This is a central case scenario from the ISP. I think Kerry Schott and ESB are completely right to say we are more on the fast change track if you look at those public studies. It will be no surprise, I think, for us to see coal drop out faster and lumpier than some of these very macroeconomic style projections. We've seen Yallourn retire 2028. Origin has flagged the early retirement of Eraring in stages, it's not very economic to retire coal plant in stages, they all tend to drop in big lumps. I don't think it's any surprise in that environment, you're going to see governments and policymakers look to the security of gas firming in an environment where you can see coal drop out quicker than expected and in bigger lumps than expected.
On the right-hand side, a number of states have put out renewable energy targets. In the diamonds, the bars are current penetration, and we have seen and we will continue to see, I think, the reality is that governments will adopt policy and intervention to drive those renewable targets or their renewable penetration towards the targets to close that gap. That's been a feature, obviously, recent announcements by the state governments, and I think the reality is we expect that to continue. That will drive that renewable growth, and we are positioned, I think, to continue to participate in the renewable sector. I think I'd like to remind you all that we are, as Rob has already said, the eighth largest owner of renewable energy projects today. Probably gets a little bit overlooked. We also have capabilities in combined-cycle gas generation, open-cycle gas generation, and gas engines.
So we actually have a range of capabilities in the business across the stack of gas generation that can play different roles in the market to support that renewable generation. Across that portfolio, which actually is almost a model portfolio for how the market might look over time, APA's carbon emissions tons per megawatt hour of around 0.27. The NEM today is over 0.7, so we are well below half in terms of our emission contribution on our combined portfolio today. We are a meaningful owner-operator of renewable and gas generation today with our own operating capabilities and our own development capabilities. Again, within the scale of APA and the big focus on the biggest revenue earner being gas pipelines, I think this gets a little overlooked.
We're also exploring next-generation energy solutions like the Gruyere Microgrid, I can say that we are engaged in a number of customer discussions around similar developments where customers are looking for microgrid solutions, renewables paired with storage and firmed by gas. I think that's a great foundation to participate in renewable growth going forward. We've got existing capabilities that we can leverage. We have growing demand and customer relationships, particularly mining and industrial customers who, as you expect, are on their own net zero journey, a lot of those customers. They want to decarbonize over time, Clearly don't want the lights to go out and looking to natural gas solutions to firm their own operations. Gas, I think, is a perfect companion for renewables through this transition phase, We'll explore that a little further in the coming slides.
We've seen recently Snowy announce the Kurri Kurri Power Station, looking at a firming solution into the market. I can share with you that we are working with Snowy on that pipeline and storage solution. The development team and my team have come up with an innovative solution. Snowy had a choice. It didn't have to use APA, it has partnered with APA on that project. We've also participated in some recent transactions in renewables. Those transactions went to price points where we didn't think they created value for shareholders. We worked with a multidisciplinary team within APA, commercial side, operations side, development side, capital side, brought a team together of over 30 professionals to really diligence and understand that business and look for synergies and value in that pipeline.
I came away from that exercise being new to APA with a great deal of confidence in the capability of the team and the ability to be competitive and find value in the right way. As we said, I think that transaction, which I'm sure you're all aware of, went to a price point where it didn't create value for shareholders. We will continue to examine that market, and given our capabilities, we have the ability to participate in renewables, both in a greenfield market environment as well as looking at existing assets. We will be highly selective of acquisitions and developments in renewables with a greater focus on wind in the current environment, but making sure we're delivering value for our security holders.
To make all that renewables work implies a very significant step up in the electricity transmission grid because renewable locations, as you all know, are not conveniently located where the retiring coal fields are. The T&D sector has to step up in order to make that renewable transition work. Numerous examples, and I'm sure the lenders in the room are aware of some of those, where congestion in the transmission grid has not effectively facilitated that renewable penetration. T&D has to step up. Governments are well aware of this and are looking to create Renewable Energy Zones to co-develop the transmission with the renewables such that those congestion points are largely removed, different from models for how this will work. It's very clear that governments will also welcome contestability in those arrangements, given the huge pool of capital that is there.
Just again, using our AEMO numbers and just the T&D component of around AUD 18 billion just across Vic and New South Wales, although that is the majority. If you look at the total spend for Victoria and New South Wales in their REZ announcements, which includes the generation and transmission spend, they're huge numbers. I think just on the T&D side or the transition side, rather, those capital commitments are more than 2 x the installed regulated asset base of the two incumbents in New South Wales and Victoria. There is clearly room for other participants to participate in that market and invest some of that capital. APA today has some existing capabilities in electricity transmission, as Rob has mentioned. They're smaller than our renewable energy presence at the moment.
It makes sense for us to actively study that market and leverage the capabilities we do have, and also look to selectively add capabilities as we study this potential market expansion. I think a number of our capabilities are quite relevant here in terms of gas transmission being very longitudinal infrastructure, land access, planning, stakeholder management, dealing with community, dealing with environmental approvals. A lot of those skills are transferable as well as construction management, funding, and the like. As we think about this potential market, we see a number of parallels between this build-out and what APA currently has and does. I would acknowledge that we will need to add additional capabilities to that, but we're starting from a very strong base from my perspective. Moving across to gas, but continuing the theme around decarbonization and focusing for a moment on the electricity market.
We think the NEM can be largely decarbonized today through existing technologies. The electricity sector is around 22% of CO2 emissions for Australia. If you think about the mix of what that could look like over time, renewables growing and displacing coal, firm by gas, then as you can see on the right-hand side of the chart, we can get to very low electricity sector emissions. Where does 937 come from? That's one of the Frontier Economics scenarios that they published publicly. As we looked at other markets around the world, there's a number of similar studies, actually. Obviously different markets are different settings, different resource bases. A number of economists would say whether it's 937, 955, 910, whatever it is, that combination of gas firming and renewables is the quickest and most practical way to decarbonize the electricity sector.
Whilst we believe, as you can see from the previous slides, that we are going to see greater electrification and renewable penetration, and we will participate in that, we also think that, and it makes sense that if we're going to build out a large commitment in terms of the grid storages and renewables for scarcely used peak demand, that we as an economy, a community, are going to invest in a lot of capital that doesn't get used very often. That last piece of abatement, if you went to a full electrification model, is actually very expensive. That's why you see the 955s, the 937s, 910s, whatever it is, different markets will, I think, be the most practical solution to quickly decarbonize the electricity sector.
We can't ignore the fact that electricity is about 22%. Obviously if net zero is the aim, then decarbonization across other sectors and abatement, they will be cheaper than trying to electrify every last molecule in the electricity sector. Of course, renewables being renewables, they have renewable droughts. What we've done here on the next slide is to pick a particular day in South Australia. It's the 12th of May. I'll just walk you through this. The yellow at the top is solar during this period. This is a 24-hour period. Solar ramping up middle of the day peak and ramping back down again. You can see that the wind, which is that greenish color at the top, stronger overnight and then fades and actually relatively low wind output during the day. It was down to a couple of percent.
You can see that peak demand is not coincident with either maximum wind or solar output. What happens? You can see intermediate gas, which is the red along the bottom, being pretty consistent with effectively a scenario or a day where there is low renewable output. The pinker color is the peaking gas ramping out in the morning, backing off when solar participates and then coming back up at night. This is a perfect example of the criticality of gas firming to support renewable penetration, but also that flexibility in the market. The darker gray at the bottom is largely imports from Victoria, which is call it 80% brown coal. If we did this two days ago in South Australia, South Australia actually had a big wind day, was net exporting wind, and there was about 250 MW of gas running in the market.
That ability of gas to ramp up and down, support renewables when it's not there and back off when the cheaper renewables is there, I think is a perfect real-world demonstration of the role that gas can play and why we think it is a companion fuel to renewables. We think that's a great demonstration of that and the role that gas can play as that companion fuel, reinforcing that decarbonization of the electricity sector can be achieved with gas backing renewables. We continue to invest in gas pipelines as you know, this year, we've made a couple of commitments to gas pipelines, and we are proud to do that. Why? Well, we think, frankly, pipeline gas is both lower emissions and cheaper than imported LNG. On the left-hand side are some studies we reviewed from markets with pipeline gas and LNG to those same markets.
If you stack up the energy used, you got to liquefy LNG, you got to ship it, and then you got to regas it as well. It makes sense, it makes logical sense that that is a more energy-intensive product than pipeline gas. On our numbers, post-combustion, again, depending on the LNG scenario, that's approximate 20% increase in emissions. If net zero is the aim and we're trying to decarbonize the economy, I'm very proud to say I think pipeline gas is the best solution for the economy. On the right-hand side, we were pleased to see that the National Gas Infrastructure Plan concluded that pipeline gas would probably be cheaper than LNG imports. That was certainly our assessment. We've just compared Victorian prices to delivered prices in Asia. Obviously, a range of benchmarks and long-term contracts, but I think this is a representative illustration.
You'll see in certain cycles, LNG might be cheaper because of winter, summer between Northern Hemisphere and Australia. On the whole, pipeline gas has been cheaper. Importantly, I think you can see a couple of significant spikes in the LNG market, which really drive that average cost of LNG up. The government's concluded domestic gas should be cheaper. We agree on average, and we also think that domestic pipeline gas is a lower emission solution if we want to really decarbonize the economy. Wrapping up on capabilities to grow in energy infrastructure. I'll talk to you a bit about how we see the electrification, renewables, and transmission. Strategy and Commercial, the team that I lead within APA is really the front office of APA. In the last financial year, we've committed to the Gruyere Microgrid.
We've committed to the Northern Gas Interconnect Pipeline in Western Australia. We've committed to the East Coast Grid expansion. At last count, I think we'd signed and extended 109 customer contracts with my contracting team, of which obviously the Origin contract was most recently done. We're working with Snowy on connecting its power station to the grid, and we continue to talk with customers around a range of new projects and energy solutions. None of that really works for my team being a front office without the support of that deep capabilities across the rest of the APA team. Obviously with infrastructure development, with those new projects, with the stakeholder management team, regulatory and the like, the operational and asset management capabilities are critical, obviously the funding and the capital management.
In conclusion, we'll continue to make targeted investments in gas infrastructure, and we see that that business has a robust future through this energy transition. We've got a very meaningful presence in renewable and firming power today, and we will look for opportunities to add value for our shareholders in the right way in that space. We have a small but existing presence in electricity transmission infrastructure, and we will look to leverage our existing capabilities in that market and then selectively add to them over time to participate in that sector. Now to talk about next-generation energy technologies, I'm going to hand across to Hannah McCaughey, a Group Executive of Transformation and Technology.
Hi, everyone. Over the last 20 years, APA built the infrastructure that grew the Australian energy market. What we're going to do in the next 20 years is lots more of that, and we're going to lower emissions significantly. We see the bridge from that past to this future will be built in part by new technologies and new innovations. That's really where Pathfinder comes in. We're going to leverage existing assets and existing capabilities to build those new technologies and those new customer value propositions to serve new interest in the market. Really, we're going to focus specifically on three technologies, clean hydrogen, energy storage, microgrids. Why these three? Quite frankly, they play to APA's strengths. Today, we have 15,000 km of gas infrastructure that carries molecules. We are already in the business of energy storage.
We already understand the value of energy time shifting, we already serve customers operating in some of the more remote parts of Australia today. First of all, we're going to talk a bit more about hydrogen. Australia now has a globally recognized comparative advantage in the production of clean hydrogen. We have abundant land, we have some of the best sun and wind resources in the world, we have a highly skilled industrial workforce, we have existing infrastructure that can be leveraged to build this new market. Yet with this great potential, there's a lot that has to happen to be able to capitalize and translate that potential into a new market. I'm just going to talk about two things today. One is regional hubs and the other is gas pipelines.
Just firstly on regional hubs, the government is rightly focused on regional hubs as an important policy play to build this new market. Why? It makes sense to group together infrastructure solutions near existing ports, so you get economies of scale, new users, new producers, and build these technical and commercial outcomes together. Effectively, when you actually look at what is a hub, it's renewable energy, it's pipelines, it's electrolyzers, and then it's connecting them all together to provide a product. APA has experience across many of these energy infrastructure solutions, and so we're talking with other players in the Hunter Valley because it has some great physical attributes, such as renewable energy, such as the Port of Newcastle, which is the largest exporting coal port today. The next thing I'm going to just talk about is existing pipelines.
The IEA recently said that gas pipelines offer a near-term opportunity to boost hydrogen production. The reason for this is that in order to drive down the cost of hydrogen, you have to develop it at scale. The way to develop it at scale is to produce it in the areas where it's the lowest cost of production and take it to use. That's not going to be done by trucks and trains. We are going to need pipelines to transport this fuel at scale. While I think this is a genuinely exciting proposition for APA, to actually realize this opportunity, there's technically a lot we've got to be able to do.
We've decided to roll our sleeves up, and we have this project called the Parmelia Pipeline Transformation Project, where we're going to take 43 km of a gas transmission pipeline southwest of Perth and see what it would take to be 100% hydrogen ready. The project is in three phases, and I'm happy to tell you today we've completed phase I, which is lab testing, and I'm happy to tell you that the first results are positive. The results have said that the material that the pipeline is constructed could technically carry hydrogen. While that is really positive, we still have to go through phase II. In phase II, we really have to understand how does this clean hydrogen interact with aboveground equipment? How do we operate it? We're not home and hosed. We've got a lot more work to do.
The first phase is now complete, and I think what's almost more exciting is that we are building a safety case for clean hydrogen. We are building a framework on which new hydrogen would be transported. We've got now relationships with people in Europe who are doing the same with their gas infrastructure in Europe. They're trying to understand how will they convert this infrastructure to be part of this new world. It's really watch this space. We're working through the project, but we do see the repurposing of this infrastructure to be an important opportunity. While that might be good for APA, what we're also learning is that it's probably going to be good for our customers.
Studies are showing that if you look at the full energy transition, that repurposing existing infrastructure and the clean hydrogen opportunity could mean that the whole transition to net zero could be half the cost of full electrification. That's a recent Frontier Economics study. This remains not just important thing for APA, it's important for our customers. Now, we need to get to energy storage. Energy storage, a mega trend for the next 20 years. It's going to be really important. As you've heard, gas is going to play an important role in that, but so is batteries. Therefore, it's really important that we start to understand how we can use batteries as part of serving our customers and a part of this energy transition. We've already started doing that at the Gruyere mine in Western Australia. It's a 4.4 MW battery. It's not very big.
Actually what's very interesting is that it's being partnered with solar and with gas-fired engines. To break this down is like solar provides the low-emission energy, gas provides the reliability, and the battery provides stability and an ability to save on fuel costs. As we build together these technologies, we're creating an integrated solution, and that integrated solution and the innovation required to build that can be scaled for future projects. Again, this is coming about through customers asking us for innovations. New technology and new solutions are going to be required to meet those customer needs. Now, a bit on costs. We're looking at all these different technologies, and the costs are different depending on the use case. In some instances it's just truly uneconomic, and in other instances it's closer to commercialization.
What we do with Pathfinder is through these projects, we actually understand the cost curve and understand the precise commercial necessities that will make these commercial in future. That means as the energy transition happens, we will be at the forefront of that change. We're going to be participating. We're not going to be spectators. We're going to be part of the new technologies required to meet these new challenges. Just really in conclusion, I think that's why I'm really excited about the Pathfinder Program, because it's not a separate hub, separate from the business that does a sprinkling of innovations. It's actually leveraging our existing infrastructure. It's leveraging our existing capabilities, and it's building new infrastructure solutions and new capabilities and having technology IP in-house such that we can expand our customer proposition set and continue to meet these challenges as the energy transition accelerates.
It's been great to be with you and I'm now going to hand over to Ross Gersbach, our President of North American Development. Ross is beaming in.
Thanks, Hannah. Good afternoon from Houston. After being here for a little over 18 months, nobody's more disappointed that I can't be there in person because of the travel restrictions. I'm very pleased to be able to give you an outline, a recap of how our strategy is developing, what we've been up to in the U.S. to obtain our first investment that will be our beachhead in what is one of the largest energy markets in the world. If we could move to the next slide, please. Energy infrastructure, as Rob mentioned, the amounts required are significant. Current forecasts, there are so many different forecasts, current forecasts that we're using suggest more than a $2.7 trillion investment opportunities in the areas that we look at across gas infrastructure, renewables and firming, and electrification in the U.S. through to 2040.
It's no competition with Julian, but I do remind him that this is more than 40 x the opportunities that Julian mentioned earlier, and doesn't take into account the hydrogen to leverage Hannah's work. Critically, natural gas will have an ongoing and vital role in the energy mix going forward to support the energy transition that is also happening in North America to support the replacement of coal and indeed potentially the aging nuclear generation fleet, firming for the significant increase in renewable generation and importantly, a resilient source of energy for business and households through all weather conditions. That's certainly been a feature over the last few months with what the Texas storms, et cetera, has highlighted the resiliency of natural gas for homes and businesses.
While we're not limiting our focus to natural gas, we expect our first step into this market will reflect our core capabilities and experience and will provide the opportunity for further expansion, diversification, and growth, which will be consistent with our new strategy. Moving on to the next slide, please. As you can see on this chart, even out to 2050, natural gas will be critically important in power generation in the U.S. In addition to that electricity generation, the industrial sector's significant need for energy from natural gas will be very difficult and costly to replace due to the very low natural gas prices in the region. Importantly, as I touched on, the colder climates in the U.S. also support demand for natural gas for heating.
On to the next slide. Plenty of discussion on net zero by 2050, but consistent with the views in Australia, without gas, it will be a very significant challenge. As you can see on the right, which we've taken from the Net-Zero America report prepared by Princeton University. I commend this report because of the comprehensive and very rigorous report that sets forth the economic, the technological, the land use, and the energy system challenges that would be required for the U.S. to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. For the U.S. to move to a highly renewables-only scenario by 2050, it's estimated that that would require some $9 trillion capital investment, which is a 26-fold increase in wind and solar, which also requires land use in the U.S. that would be larger than that of New South Wales, approximately 11% of the total U.S. land mass.
While we see renewables having a very strong future in the U.S., we still see that the natural gas sector will be required to play its part in reducing carbon emissions. In relation to the gas utilities and the energy transition, there are three things that we are seeing. The introduction of lower carbon fuels into the system, increased focus on building efficiency measures to reduce energy consumed, and also plenty of discussion around the electrification of buildings currently using natural gas. On the first point, increasingly regulators are allowing the gas utilities to source a portion of the gas procured to be renewable natural gas, such as biogas, even though it is currently significantly more expensive than natural gas. When I say that the regulators are allowing, it's because normally utilities are supposed to source their energy from the lowest cost producer.
Given availability of cheap natural gas in the U.S., there is considerable focus on the need to scale up the renewable natural gas sector to help bring down those prices. It's pleasing to see that the gas utility industry are actively supporting and participating in those developments. On the second point, in terms of new building efficiency measures, which is coming without any doubt. In terms of gas utilities, I see it as a win-win initiative for both gas utilities and consumers, this because gas utilities earn a return on the infrastructure and not on the gas going through it. Lower gas volumes should not impact on returns on the infrastructure, but they do hopefully reduce the monthly bills of customers. On the third point on building electrification, I'll touch on that a little later. On to the next slide, please.
The market dynamics, the size of the market, and the investment opportunities is why APA continues to look for investments in North America. There's nearly 180 million Americans, or 72 million households, and 5.5 million businesses that use natural gas. To put that into context, as a country, it consumes nearly 30 x the amount of natural gas in Australia. On a per capita basis, U.S. consumption is 72% higher than in Australia. This is driven by the polar climates, the huge industrial base, and the fundamental competitiveness of price of gas versus electricity. Just to remind everybody that the U.S. has immense reserves of natural gas to support both domestic and the export markets, which will in turn require the infrastructure to deliver it. Moving on to the next slide.
I often speak about the cheap cost of gas and the plentiful supply, and it's expected to be this way and sustainable for many decades. Very low cost of production and a very significant gas reserves available to produce. Of course, that then means it's an inexpensive fuel for the end user. How is APA participating in all this? Well, the two focus areas for APA continues to be natural gas utilities and pipelines. There are a number of interesting differences I see between the U.S. and Australia that I think makes the U.S. very attractive. A key difference is the allowed rates of return for regulated assets, particularly gas utilities, which is generally around a 9%-10% return on equity.
The regulators have this approach in the U.S. for gas utilities and pipelines to make sure that they set a return that sufficiently attractive to attract new investment into the sector, this has been very stable over quite a long time. Another key difference which I really like in terms of the gas utilities are that they are often vertically integrated. While not universal, it's common for gas utilities to source the gas for their retail consumers, and this gas is passed through for zero margin. This compares to Australia's regulatory environment, where there is structural separation of the owner of the gas infrastructure from the gas retailer. I think this is a big advantage for the U.S. model. The gas utility actually owns the customer experience and can more easily focus on providing services such as renewable natural gas that their customers require and desire.
As the cost of gas is passed through at zero margin, there is no significant commodity risk for the gas utilities. What the gas industry in the U.S. needs to continue to remind the regulators and public is that it's also a very efficient way of delivering energy. Generally speaking, the major use for natural gas customers on the distribution network is heating. As you can see in the graphic on the bottom of that slide, it is far more efficient to transport natural gas directly to homes for heating than it is to turn that gas into electricity by gas generation, and then transport the energy by poles and wires to this home for electric heating. From a carbon emissions point of view, electrification of heating would worsen emissions until the bulk of the generation fleet was zero emissions.
To compound the challenges is to look at the amount of energy delivered by natural gas networks. To electrify the customer base of gas utilities will require significant new generation to replace this energy. To put some numbers to it, to fully electrify gas utilities, the U.S. must not only replace all 800,000 MW of its current fossil fuel-based generation, but then almost double that level to support electrification of gas utility loads. This implies, and I'll say this slowly, this implies a total of 1,300,000 MW of new generation, and therefore requires constructing of over 43,000 MW of firm capacity per annum for the next 30 years. That 43,000 MW is approximately the amount of the total capacity installed in the NEM in Australia.
A very significant challenge and opportunity, but it would be naive to say that that's an enormous challenge for the market to achieve. Those statistics ignore the fact that other new capacity may very well be required for other new electrification requirements such as electric vehicles and electrification of industry. Onto the next slide. From an APA perspective, the U.S. remains a highly attractive market. We have been active in this market for some time, and while we've had some misses, we continue to believe both in the attractiveness of our diversification strategy and our competitiveness in the market. In fact, I think we are more confident over the last 12 months of our competitiveness than we had been to date in our targeting initial acquisitions. We, of course, have learned a lot already, including that we can financially compete and that we have complementary and transferable capabilities.
We continue to pursue opportunities that match our risk and return profile. Unfortunately, over the last 12 months or so, COVID did create volatility globally, and we have found that boards and management here in the U.S. have been loathe to transact in these environments. It's not too dissimilar to the GFC times. We do see markets are coming back, providing a more stable transaction environment, just as they did following the GFC. There's been recent announcements of a couple of gas utility sales that confirms there is considerable interest to invest in gas infrastructure, and I think those announcements are likely to trigger further asset sales to capitalize on the demand for such assets. We remain confident that the market is attractive enough to spend more time in it, but just touching on the competitive landscape and how we can compete.
Prior to COVID, many of the gas utility acquisitions were driven by the electric utilities looking for growth. I see this as unlikely to be repeated given the very significant capital expenditure that electric utilities have got from inorganic growth, and certainly their focus is on how to fund that organic growth. You will see some of those transactions recently were actually sales of gas utilities to help fund utilities' organic growth. In terms of other competitors in the gas utility space, they also have significant organic growth, which they need to fund and which they seem to be focusing on more than on the M&A front, as well as trying to get their balance sheets in shape after some interesting years over the recent times. They are reducing gearing and trying to slim down their business.
That leaves financial sponsors, which are still active in the market, but we're confident that we can compete with them financially. What separates from them is that we can also bring and have the added benefit of having the operating capabilities that we can draw on from elsewhere in APA to be more fundamentally more confident in the valuations that we ascribe in any acquisition. I do believe that there will be an attractive range of attributes, and we are more confident in our competitive position now than 12 months ago. We're very busy looking at opportunities with detailed discussions underway, particularly gas pipelines and gas utilities. There are good buying opportunities, but of course, we will remain disciplined. On to the next slide, if I could.
Really, to conclude, we continue to engage with the market, based on all of our due diligence of both the market and specific opportunities to date, I'm confident in our ability to apply our existing capabilities and our operational, our engineering, and financial expertise to supplement the skills we will acquire. Gas infrastructure provides an attractive entry point for APA into this market, which will provide a beachhead for further growth as we seek to play for our stakes in the $2.7 trillion in opportunities on offer in this market. In the meantime, as I said, we will continue to patiently look for the right opportunity. In the meantime, I will thank you, and I will pass back to Rob Wheals.
A big thank you to Julian, Hannah, and Ross for their presentations. We're now going to go to a Q&A session, afterwards we'll take a short break. If I could ask the APA executive leadership team to join us on the stage, we're just going to bring the chairs up while we do that. As the team join us up on stage, I'll also do some introductions for those executive team members that haven't yet presented. Just a little bit of a process discussion around how we're going to run the Q&A, just as we're getting ourselves organized. We'll focus initially on taking some questions from the room, and then Yoko will be managing the questions that will come online.
We'll take a number of questions from the room, and then I'll defer to Yoko for questions online so we have a good set of questions from both the group in the room as well as those that joined us virtually. I'll do some introductions for those of the team that you haven't yet had presentations from today. You've met Julian, Kevin Lester. I often refer to Kevin as Bob the Builder. His job is the Group Executive of Infrastructure Development, all the things that you've seen up on the screen today in terms of what we've developed over the last number of years and what we plan to build over time will fall in Kevin's responsibility. Nevenka Codevelle, Group Executive of External Affairs, and you'll hear from Nevenka a little later.
Jane Thomas, who I introduced earlier, Darren Rogers, who you will hear from a little later around our capability from an operations perspective, and Adam Watson, our CFO, and of course, you've just heard from Ross Gersbach sitting behind us. With that, we'll take questions, and what we'll do is I'll either answer the question or, if there's a really difficult one, I'll pass to one of my executive team. Thank you.
Hi, Ian Myles from Macquarie. Thanks for the press, that was really good. Just a quick question. If we think about net zero emissions, you say it's part of your strategy, you've told me about all the growth and all the opportunities. We haven't really talked about the fact that you've got 1,000 km of pipelines in the ground and how that transition, the revenues are going to transition in the coming years. We're already seeing your customers shorten their contract lives. I'm not sure I quite agree with you with the need for gas plants, given AEMO says we only need 200 MW in the next 10 years, battery technology is evolving very quickly. I'm just really curious to understand how you see that element of the business evolving and how it will change in the coming three to five years.
Thanks, Ian. I'll make some comments and then throw to Julian to elaborate a little bit more. You would have heard from our discussion today, both from a global perspective, but also bringing it to a more local perspective here in Australia, the critical role that gas plays as part of our primary energy usage, but also as part of gas generation. All the forecasts that we look at give us confidence that it will continue over the next number of decades, all the way through to 2050. We still remain very confident about the important role that gas will play, and Julian talked about that as well. As we talked about in our presentation. We also can see the energy transition happening, we will be investing into these other areas.
We remain very confident, and you can look at a number of different forecasts of the importance and critical role that gas will play. Just look at what happened yesterday in Queensland with coal-fired generation coming out of the system and gas having to step up. I'll throw to Julian just to add to my comments.
Thanks, Ian. I think on the shorting contracts, and I think I would think about different markets. East Coast Grid, we're seeing some of that. The Origin contract was sort of three to five years. I would contrast customers who have an existing book, existing position, and rolling that forward. I think if we've got customers who have more specific project needs, they're looking for longer-term security. If you look at the West Coast, which is a large market for us as well, you got resource customers doing projects. They're not looking for three-year security. I think you've got to really think about the different markets as to how contracts might play out. The forecasts that you see from the various participants like AEMO on the East Coast are also public as to what that outlook looks like.
We see strong and growing demand on the West Coast for resource demand and resource growth is continuing. I think Robert sort of flagged the sort of contract extensions on the East Coast. Again, you've got to think about specific situations and specific customers, and certainly as we talk whether it's now about Kurri or other customers, the agreement with Microgrid, for example, that was contracted over more than a decade. It's not a one-size-fits-all, and different customers are running their own portfolio. On AEMO, just to finish that one off, I think they also forecast EnergyConnect was going to cost less than AUD 2 billion and currently it's AUD 2.4 billion, and the AEMO model had a very strong bias, I think, towards transmission and storage. Obviously, if you rerun the models with different costs, you'll get a different balancing.
I would say to you, there's the macroeconomic models which tend to spit out certain results, then there's the commercial discussions and customers who are looking for energy security here and now are having probably a slightly different conversation than you might see in an AEMO model.
Apologies to labor the point. You've got a Victorian government who's actually set a policy of net zero emissions and is now actually actively running a policy paper to try and work out how to take customers off gas. Historically, it's been about capacity and needing pipeline capacity. It feels as if we're shifting away from that need for pure capacity to other versions, whether it be a storage, which is Iona or the likes. Doesn't that have implications for your contracting ability in the business, that certainty which historically APA has been able to deliver?
Thanks, Ian, and I think you just pointed to Victoria and every state's approaching these things in a different way, but you already have heard from Hannah earlier about how we're thinking about the repurposing of our gas pipeline infrastructure, and there's plenty of analysis that can get you comfortable that the fastest way to get to, the most economic way to get to a net zero outcome is what, number one, gas will continue to play a role. Number two, that as new technologies become available and just pointing to hydrogen and the economics of that does become comparable, then that's why we focused on the repurposing of our infrastructure.
I think, you look back over the last 20 years of APA's journey, we've constantly evolved and responded to how the market's evolved and just think about how that East Coast Grid didn't exist, and we built the East Coast Grid. I don't think we need to be sitting there with our blinkers on thinking that the world's going to stop tomorrow. It's about how we evolve and adapt. Julian's, I think, already talked to how that East Coast market in particular is a demand-supply balance, and we look at that from a more macro perspective as to how our customers' needs need to be met. That is different, you are right, to the contracts evolved 10 years on a contract on the Moomba to Sydney Pipeline from Moomba to Sydney. Those markets have changed, there's no doubt.
Building new infrastructure, and we see also on the West Coast, when we're building new infrastructure out to mine sites, et cetera, we're always looking for longer tenure to support the capital investment.
Hi, Rob. Mark Busuttil from JPMorgan . Within Julian's presentation, you talked about an AUD 68 billion opportunity over the next, I think, 20 years. Out of that, AUD 40 billion, which is roughly 2/3s, is coming from renewables. I'm sort of interested in the investment opportunity within that space. A couple of questions on this. Firstly, we saw material declines in contract prices in recent years, so maybe you can give us an update on availability, tenure, and price of PPAs today. Secondly, the returns on these projects, do you see adequate returns in building particularly wind farms, given where prices have gone, and how do those returns compare to other opportunities? I guess lastly, on solar, given what middle-of-the-day prices are doing, do you want to invest in solar at all?
All very good questions. I'll make some initial comments and again, throw to Julian, given that a lot of that falls in his space. There's no doubt that the price points around renewable energy, whether it's wind and solar, and if you look at the forward price curves, that's a constantly evolving situation, which we're always looking at. If we think about how we've successfully built our renewables portfolio, which as we said is the eighth largest in Australia, it's by engaging directly with our customers around meeting their needs and securing long-term contracts off the back of that.
I still see that as an important way forward because, I think there's still going to be, whilst there's some pretty sharp prices out there, I think that market's going to have to reach some sort of equilibrium where it does continue to attract the right level of capital in to support that. Just one other minor small comment I'll make and then throw to Julian is, you'll have seen all the states come up with their programs around building Renewable Energy Zones, and in particular, if you look at the New South Wales model, it's designed to encourage capital investment and give certainty to those who are investing. Julian.
That's a good question. I think, and maybe you're referring to AGL's mark to market, but there's no doubt that some period of time ago, contract prices were higher and they're coming down. Why are they coming down? I think part of it is frankly, the machines are getting more efficient, getting bigger. The actual cost, the efficiency of the machine is delivering a lower delivered price, which is what you would expect over time. You also got a cost of capital environment that's lower than it was 10 years ago. When you think about prices that might have been struck 10 years ago in that particular environment and now, there are just some mechanical differences in the power markets and in terms of the efficiency of the equipment that you would actually expect would be stepping down in terms of those contract prices.
Look, I don't want to get into specifics of individual situations, obviously, but the projects that we're reviewing had pretty reasonable PPAs on them, in terms of the pricing outcomes, including ones that have been tendered recently. So I think, to Rob's comment about equilibrium and finding a level, you've got a lot of potential renewables entering the market, but you've also got customers looking to secure renewable energy as part of that, and they are finding a balance, I think, and we saw some pretty reasonable revenue numbers coming off some of the contracts that have been entered into in relatively recent times. Obviously, I can't go into specifics on specific customers. Certainly, I think, wind is more attractive at the moment.
If you think about solar and wind and the duck curve sort of description, I think I mentioned in my presentation, we would have a preference for wind at the moment. If you look at pricing projections and you have your time-weighted average, and if you look at the ROARers of the world or the Baringas and whatnot that produce market forecasts, the solar capture is particularly low of those pricing outcomes. That's probably not no surprise. The challenge I think for solar is the enemy of solar is more solar, in that you've got a commodity that's maximizing production at a time during the day when it's at the least value because there's other production has been maximized all at the same time, which is the opposite of really what you want, producing something of low value at maximum production.
Whereas with wind, and we talked about that particular day in South Australia, but if you look at wind projections, where we looked at recent transactions, we're not taking macro, we're going to a specific site-level analysis of wind capture and with the right wind site, you can get capture in the evening and the like where you've got higher pricing. It's very easy to make thematic comments, but ultimately, when we invest in a project, it's a microeconomic analysis, and we need to understand that particular project, and that's what we'll do. Certainly at a thematic level in the current market, as I said, wind is more attractive. Again, solar is its own worst enemy in a lot of ways. Certainly, I think customers are being circumspect around contracting, which doesn't mean they're not there.
As we said, we've seen some recent contracts, which are actually pretty reasonable. Again, I think it's easy to say, 10 years ago, someone contracted at AUD 100, and now they might be AUD 50. A big part of that change is just the efficiency of the machines came from a 1 MW machine to a 3 MW machine, et cetera. You should get different economics out of those pricing, which doesn't mean you can't get a return on capital. On comparative returns on capital, it's a great question. We're absolutely looking at that across our asset classes, Adam's been through an exercise recently of capital management review and looking at relative risks and returns across asset classes.
With that broadening of strategy, we've got a very conscious decision to make on where we invest our capital and making sure when we're taking bets, we're not mispricing risk and return across different asset classes. I won't get into specifics on returns, but I think that gives you a flavor for how we think about those things.
Storage. You asked about storage as well?
No.
Okay.
Good morning.
Thought I'd missed it.
Tom Allen here from UBS. Just staying with the same theme on the risk-return profile that you're able to capture on growth assets. Can you provide some color on how you're managing that risk-return profile on greenfield pipeline assets? We're seeing what would appear to be a slightly changing risk profile there. There's some implications that came out of the pipeline Decision Regulation Impact Statement for greenfield pipelines. The reason greenfield pipeline that you've committed to build in Western Australia, and then perhaps also the compression expansion on the East Coast Grid would suggest that you're willing to take a little bit more back-end risk than perhaps you were in the past.
Thanks, Tom. I'll make a few comments. I'll ask Julian to comment more specifically around those projects.
Sure.
Nevenka, you can talk about the greenfields exemption. I guess the main point that I'd want to make before turning to Julian is that the instances that you've particularly pointed to the expansion on the West Coast and the expansion on the East Coast are case points where we know the markets really well. We understand where the demand is coming from, and we also understand that it's an expansion of existing infrastructure. They are case examples. I wouldn't extrapolate that across as a general theme. Indeed, when we've got other projects that are live at the moment that we've either executed contracts on or in negotiations with, where we're looking for longer tenure. I think it's just two particular cases where we've got specific circumstances. Julian, if you want to add to any of what I've just said.
Just a little. I think Rob's probably largely covered it. I think when you think about Goldfields, for example, take the West Coast, if you did a pie chart of demand, you'd have lots of individual slices, bigger and smaller of that pie. We're investing capital in that market, and it's not a matter of one individual customer having a big chunk of demand in that pie, if you will. It's a lot of individual customers who are expanding their mining operations and add a few net zero there, and you really are building that book against that known market.
Very different to sort of building the equivalent pipeline out to a, I call it, a brand-new market, where we've got existing customer relationships, existing demand profiles, customers that we know are going to need more load, and that was the most efficient solution for that particular situation. I'd contrast that again to take a Gruyere or a Kurri Power Station where you've got a single owner, you're committing to a certain project, that really needs to be underwritten by that owner. I think they're particular case examples that reflect known markets, known customers, known positions, and incremental demand or growth on demand that we know we can back in with some confidence as to how that would translate. To Nevenka.
Yeah, sure. Maybe just a word on the regulatory regime. As you mentioned, the pipeline transparency list came out very recently. It's yet to be enacted in legislation, we have an expectation that that would be the case by the end of the year. Probably two points to draw out in the context of Northern Goldfields Interconnect. one is the decision to move to two forms of regulation rather than have three, new build pipelines that are not otherwise the subject of greenfields exemptions will be the subject of the lighter form of regulation. We're very comfortable with that. We have many pipelines operating under that regime, really from our perspective, we're very comfortable with that as the regulatory status of that new build. There is a greenfields exemption. There always has been a greenfields exemption.
It's never been used or hardly ever been used. Our expectation is certainly from our perspective, that the lighter form of regulation that provides for commercial arbitration is a space we're quite comfortable being.
Sure. Nevenka, are you concerned about some of the changes to how coverage applications might apply, where the NCC will no longer be deciding that and the Australian Energy Regulator will be deciding whether or not a pipeline should be regulated or not?
Yeah. Maybe break that into two. We're very comfortable with the form of regulation test, and in fact, that was a position we advocated for in our submission. Doing away with the coverage test and just having those form of regulation factors to determine whether you go light or heavy. Whether it's the AER or the NCC, we held a position that we think it's good governance to have a separate body make the call on whether something should be the subject of heavier regulation rather than have the regulator make that determination. Nonetheless, wiser minds than ours came to a view that it should be the regulator, and that's just the place we're in. We will just manage that as we always do with our regulatory issues.
Sure. Just to follow up your comment, Julian, just to give investors confidence on your understanding of that market in Western Australia, can you share some data points on how you're going in terms of the average tenure and the proportion of pipeline capacity in Northern Goldfields Interconnect that's currently contracted to date now?
Sure. Obviously, the pipeline's not there today, so we're entering into a range of contracts, and I think might be one announced soon on that. We're building up that book of customers. I think I would say it's on track in terms of our expectations, in terms of engagement with customers. All the individual customers have their own projects with their own timing, and it's a periodic process. I think it's one where it's not like we're going to have a particular month or day where we're going to suddenly have a big announcement on a big tranche. It's an incremental process, but at the moment, we're on track with our expectations.
Just to add to Julian's answer, the time your question around length of tenure, I think I'm correct in saying, Julian, that more often than not, the projects that we're looking at are looking for longer tenure.
Yeah, that's right. Just picking up that comment before around East Coast, West Coast dynamics, again, resource projects and a number of these participants, as you know, do project financing and the banks want security of supply on the energy arrangements. Again, you expect in that market that you get longer-term security.
Sorry. Looks like it's me. Scott Ryall, Rimor Equity Research. Thanks for the presentations. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit. You didn't talk too much about the decarbonization of what's actually in your pipelines. One of your competitors a couple of days ago called for a renewable gas target. Could you give your view on that and can you play in carbon capture and storage as part of that, please? If you want to talk about blue hydrogen, not just green hydrogen in that'd be great as well.
All right. Well, thank you. There's a number of questions on that. On carbon capture and storage, I'll ask Hannah to address that, and Julian, if you can make some comments around targets. More generally, and I know the comments you're referring to around setting targets around trying to attract clean energy and clean fuels into the pipelines, I think as a general comment, we're supportive of that sort of an approach, and we've seen that in the renewable space where targets are set and that created scale, and scale is what improves economics ultimately. There are some dangers, of course, for setting targets, and I might just ask Julian to elaborate around that. It's just around how you set the target and what behaviors that drives.
Yeah, that's right, Rob. Look, there's different models in different markets for renewable gas policies. The U.S. has got a RNG scheme as you might know. That's really more of a transport scheme, I think. That comes at a cost. I think it would make sense, and we're certainly supportive of increased biogas or renewable gas in the system, bearing in mind that we would like to see mechanisms that aren't going to increase the cost of the commodity, et cetera, because that could be counterproductive. I just think before we go down a particular path, those sort of policies I think need to be well worked through and studied so that they actually get to the right result, rather than commenting on a specific model now, but that would be my perspective on it.
Hannah, did you want to pick up?
Oh, yeah. I think, look, we are focusing specifically on clean hydrogen, energy storage, and microgrid. CCS sits outside that. We are, as part of that, looking at blue hydrogen. We don't have a closed mind towards it. Certainly, if you're really looking at a net zero endpoint, most of the forecasts today have that ultimately renewable hydrogen, green hydrogen would be the lower cost. Blue hydrogen is an important transition. We're actively looking at it.
Okay. Well, no more comments on that. In terms of then looking at the U.S., you talked about the opportunity set in Australia and from a high level it does sound attractive. I think this is further to Myles' question, really. If it's so attractive here, why would you go to the U.S.?
Thanks. I'll make a couple of comments and then Ross, I hope you're still there, can support my comments around the U.S. If you think about the APA business today, we've been very successful doing mostly one thing, and we have diversified over the years, but we've been very successful building a transmission pipeline network and then adding through diversification into other forms of energy infrastructure. That business is solely in Australia, and we see part of the future is to diversify into other asset classes, which we've talked about, and that can be done in Australia. As you rightly pointed out, there's some significant opportunities that we can play for in Australia, but that opportunity is many times bigger in North America. I think Ross threw out a number of 40 x. I might just throw to Ross to add to my comments.
Yeah, thanks, Rob. Yeah, look, it's a few graphics of asset locations. All the opportunities for gas utilities and gas pipelines that we're best known for, we see as significant, and we believe we can leverage our knowledge base in Australia to support all of that acquisitions. It's just a fantastic gas market in which to participate in, and we see many opportunities that we think that we can match the sort of risk and return profiles that we see in Australia.
Good day. It is Rob Coe from Morgan Stanley here. Thank you. Can I ask, I guess, a question about the hydrogen pathway and how you look at your existing assets as a possibility to leverage the future, I guess, hydrogen demand sources, which I guess starts with things like heavy transport and the future hydrogen production sources, which I guess is sunny places with lots of clean water. Is there any particular assets that you see as prized in that pathway?
Thanks, Rob. I'll just make one comment and then throw to Hannah, is clearly what we're doing through the Pathfinder Program, and you mentioned the Pathfinder Program, is understanding what it's going to take to make pipelines either be able to cope with 100% hydrogen or some sort of a blend, depending on what is required. I think the main point I'd make before throwing to Hannah is that there's a technical approach to how we tackle that on a pipeline-by-pipeline basis, and then there's a market-based approach that we'll look at to say, where is the demand source and where is the market?
What I would say is that, as Hannah said, Australia is blessed with a lot of landmass, a lot of sunshine, a lot of wind, and we've got a pipeline network that can transport that fuel from what has the potential to be Renewable Energy Zones into industrial sectors and export markets.
Yeah, thanks. Great question. I think it is interesting. I was touching on that on costs. It's very difficult to talk about hydrogen costs as an equal whole, because you're right, transport is more near-term. That's why the IEA comment is very interesting about gas pipelines being a near-term opportunity because they're really seeing blending as actually being an important use case, which goes back to why we focused on Parmelia, because we do think that's a really use case. It probably then picks up on, we are talking about solar, and the duck curve in the middle of the day.
One of the things that we're really actively looking at in hydrogen, and I don't think there is a clear answer today, is one is we are going to need large areas where we have large-scale projects, but it also is going to be possible to use more distributed model around hydrogen and capture those value points around duck curve in the day, and that could have good flow-on effects for solar in future because it could be an added revenue stream. I'm not telling you there's a single model, but we do think going back to hydrogen hubs are definitely going to happen, and at what size we've got to work out.
We think that's if we say, "Where do you want to concentrate?" We do think those hydrogen hubs are going to make sense because it is going to be this infrastructure solution approach.
Okay, great. Thank you. Can I ask another question, I guess which follows on from that, but also I guess touches on stuff that Mr. Gersbach also mentioned about volume risk and Mr. Peck mentioned about capacity factors. A lot of the technology of the future will be quite low capacity factor. The Kurri plant might only be 6% used, I think, according to media reports. How are you guys thinking about that in your business model risk? Are you going to entertain more trading-based models, or are you going to stick to your more infrastructure-style background?
Thanks, Rob. I'll make one comment and then ask Julian to add to it. The APA model, as you know, is a low-risk business model, but it's not a no-risk business model. You've got to take some risks to be able to grow and to capture value in different market segments. I'll just make that as an overarching comment, but in terms of picking up on Ross's comments earlier around the capacity and your example around Kurri, our focus is around getting a return on our infrastructure, and that's going to more often than not be the business model that we will continue with. That is the APA that you know and trust. Julian.
Yeah, just to elaborate a little bit on that. I think ultimately it'll come down to the customer's desires as well in terms of what they need in terms of their products. Each customer is different in terms of the way it wants to contract the pipeline, amount of flexibility it's prepared to take or interoperability or use park and loan and storage products on the pipeline. The job for us, for my team, is to try and understand that and then figure out solutions that work for the customers.
At the moment, we're not seeing customers driving to models that would suggest a trading model for APA, and I think we would need to be very careful from a conflict perspective as well that given the amount of information that flows through the business to be trading on that, and I think our customers may not want us to be doing that anyway, Rob. I think the reality is that's probably a discussion that might be market-driven over time.
Mark Jones, Resolution Capital. Circling back to the U.S.. Last week at the American Gas Association conference, there was fervor around the sale of CenterPoint Energy's LDC gas assets, in particular the valuation of 2.5 x RAB. I would like initially your view on that valuation and then maybe more interestingly, assuming that this is a floor or benchmark for gas LDC assets in the U.S., how does APA create value at such a valuation?
Thank you. Good question. Ross, are you with us? Do you want to address that question?
Yes. I think that was an interesting process that a lot of market participants were keen to understand where that was going to go because as I pointed out, there hadn't been many transactions during the COVID period and probably leading up to that. I think let's just say that CenterPoint, I'm sure was delighted with the price that they've got. I think the acquirer had particular strategic reasons for that price, operating in that same state, et cetera. Certainly, it did get the market's attention. I think these transactions, it's very hard to just use that one multiple to compare. There's so many different things go into it, whether they bring synergies, the growth, the capital growth that they forecast against that asset.
I agree, it's what a lot of the market participants use just as a rule of thumb, but there are many things that go into determining whether that was expensive or not.
I might just remind everyone online and on the teleconference that you can press the please ask, sorry, the Ask A Question button on the website, or if you're on the telephone line, press star one if you would like to ask a question.
Perhaps if I could just add a couple of other comments to Ross's comments. There's no doubt that 2x-2.5 x multiple at CenterPoint would have been very pleased about. From my understanding, that included the cost of some gas recovery. That's another, if you strip that out, you get to a slightly different number. I think your question around how does APA create value, just to sort of hit that one on the head, two things. Number one, or three things. Firstly, the assets that we're looking at have, supported by regulatory outcomes, that generate those 9%-10% returns, which we're comfortable with. Number two, we're looking at assets that have a strong CapEx profile.
Remember, when you're investing capital over time over the next number of decades, you're investing at a 1x RAB, and you're getting that 9%-10%. Thirdly, whilst the regulatory structure stipulates a typical or more traditional debt equity structure, we can bring that back to the APA balance sheet and structure in a way that's more efficient to deliver returns to our security holders.
Hi, it's Mark from JPMorgan again. A couple of other questions, if I may. Firstly, just some question on the U.S. I mean, we've been talking about a U.S. acquisition for the better part of two years, if not longer. I appreciate the discipline angle, but what's taking so long? Also, secondly, just in terms of the announcement you made, I'm going to say a few weeks back and not a couple of months back, just in terms of the expansion of the East Coast Grid, just some general comments about where you see gas movements and elaborate on the reasons why you're doing that.
Sure. Thank you. I'll make just one comment and throw to Ross on the U.S. question, and then Julian, if you can pick up the East Coast Gas Grid question. Look, it's fair to say that it is true that we've signaled quite some time ago that we were going to look at the U.S. market. But the timeframe that we are truly measuring it from is the time that once I took up this role, Ross Gersbach to move to the U.S. and drive our strategy. That timeframe we're measuring from the back half of the calendar year 2019. Obviously then you flow into a more difficult period in 2020 with COVID. That's not an excuse, that's just a reason.
Ross, perhaps you could just add and give a bit of color on some of the things that we've been doing and learned along the way.
Yes, Mark. It's not the first time I've been asked that question, Mark, to assure you that. There haven't been many transactions, and boards of management, it just hasn't been seen to be a good look running an M&A in the middle of a period where, quite frankly, they're flat out managing the impacts from COVID, remote workforces, et cetera. It is an excuse, it's quite a valid excuse. We have been active, and we continue to be active and looking forward to the U.S. settling down and getting some clean air so that we can be more active in introducing ourselves face-to-face and developing and having discussions with the market participants to work out opportunities that work for both sides. We have been active on gas pipelines, on LDC. Unfortunately, the environment hasn't been conducive up until very recently.
On the second one. Yeah. Look, there was some announcements made at the time of the Origin contract around some northern gas that was coming down, and we see plenty of gas in the north in the short and medium term. I think obviously government, through the gas security mechanism, has been encouraging, I'll say, the producers to send gas to domestic markets. I think the producers are seeing that as something they would like to do and continue to send gas south. There is gas in the southern fields that continues to be contracted. In the longer term, we do see in the government, again, in a National Gas Infrastructure Plan.
There's clearly support federally and Queensland government around more pipelines and connectivity around the Bowen Basin. Longer term, you've got the Beetaloo Basin world, et cetera. Thinking about our East Coast Grid solution, there's the here and now in the nearer term, then there's the longer term where we continue to see prospectivity around more northern gas in the southern markets. Clearly, the East Coast is, in terms of demand growth, flatter, but you're seeing a shifting of supply. Again, you can just look at the AEMO data as a reference point. Obviously the southern fields, notwithstanding some of the recent activity, are declining, and that's going to shift more gas either through the north or through potentially an LNG terminal.
Longer term, and again, I think the NGIP has got some independent reviews of that data, the scenarios around LNG terminals, the scenarios around more southern gas, but it does make the comment repeatedly a number of times that you need more northern gas, more domestic gas supply from the north to supply the energy markets in the south. I think we would agree with that analysis.
Rob, we have someone on the telephone line that would like to ask a question. Nathan Lead from Morgans, can you please go ahead with your question, please?
Yeah, thank you very much for your presentations this morning. Question from me. Last year, you published the first time your climate change response report, and one of the scenarios under that looked at a potential 5%-15% decline in NPV for the existing asset base, depending on the climate change pathway. I'm just wondering whether you can discuss or whether you've done any analysis on just how much capital you might need to deploy at current returns you're seeing on projects to pivot away from that downside scenario or protect against a downside scenario.
Thanks, Nathan, you're right, we did publish that. We did that climate change resilience report, which looked at our business and a number of independent scenarios around how different climate change scenarios might play out and how it might impact on our business. Just before I throw to Nevenka, we looked at all of those, and we tested our business robustly across all those scenarios to give us comfort that. The conclusion was that under any of those scenarios, even in the one and a half to two degree scenario, that our business did remain robust. On the specifics of how that work was done, because remember, that work is about an unmitigated situation, I'll throw that to Nevenka, just to explain the mechanics of that a little bit further.
Oh, fantastic. I get the easy question. Maybe a bit more color about the resilience report. I won't answer the capital question, but I will just talk a bit more about that report. I think the scenario, we modeled three scenarios, one and a half degrees, two to three degrees, and the four degree plus scenario. In terms of revenue on an NPV basis, it was only the one and a half degree scenario beyond 2040 that we saw a drop-off in revenue. There was no impact on our carrying value. This was done back in November, and that was the conclusions of the report. The purpose of the report was to test our bookends. We tested the one and a half degree, we tested the four degree in an unmitigated world with us doing nothing on our existing asset portfolio.
Looking into the future, there will be lots of change. This is a piece of work that informed our strategy. This is a piece of work that was really important to us considering about our pathways going forward. It's a snapshot in time of our existing portfolio based on those three scenarios, but certainly looking forward. We'll continue to do that work, and we'll continue to feed into our strategy as we go forward. Can I pick a number out of the air and say it's going to require X spend on capital for us to protect ourselves? No, because there's any number of pathways we're looking at, and that's what our refreshed strategy is all about.
Tom again from UBS. I just ask a question on your growth plans in electricity transmission within Australia. I want to understand the scale of the opportunity that you're looking at there and whether or not we're talking about a smaller scale exposure to electricity transmission where it's strategic to your growth in gas, and that might be because it's a strategic easement and it comes with agreements with past release holders or things like that. Are we talking about competing in large new interconnectors that the likes of TransGrid or Lumea or Mondo might be competing for?
Thanks, Tom. Sounds like a question for Julian.
Thanks, Tom. I think the answer is, and not to avoid any question at all, but the frameworks that the governments are going to roll out on this I think are still evolving. If you've engaged with the Victorian and New South Wales governments, they're still thinking about how they're going to implement this. What we do know is they've got big ambitions and big targets, and particularly New South Wales, that's effectively bipartisan. We have pressure from the view they're going to do it. Exactly how the whole is going to work, I think is still evolving in nuance including, the degree of, is it a contestable proposal where we come in and we give them a product and someone else's product? What's the role of the AER in that? Is it going to be automatically rolled into a RAB?
That sort of boundary line, if you will, between the regulated backbone and when does the REZ start and stop.
We're still waiting to see some of that detail come out, and I think from there we'll have a better handle on exactly what that sizing looks like. We know it's potentially an effective market. It's compatible with an ambition to build out more renewables. We'd like a model where we can do both at the same time. How that exactly works and how they think about participating in the renewable market at the same time as perhaps participating in the energy infrastructure or the firming side, I think they're still thinking through. But that's our job is to engage with them and push it in a model that suits us. I think it'll be clearer, I would say, in the next six to 12 months, exactly how those procurement models are going to shape up. Certainly they've got some ambitious targets.
I think Tender 1 in New South Wales they want to run by the end of this year or start of next year, but they're still working through the frameworks of how that's going to work. I think there's a lot of work to do to articulate how that's going to work for round one. I think the exact sizing and exactly which targets are going to go through for those markets, I think is going to be a little bit clearer for us as well as for yourself and the other analysts in the room, I think, and probably around 12 months, Tom.
Just a couple of questions. Firstly, can you give us some color on how many megawatts you might have in development sites which you haven't disclosed to date, just in sort of like a growth form? You've got no visible development sites other than [Bilby] in your portfolio of renewables, yet you talk very large about growing into renewables.
Yeah, I don't think I'll be disclosing any more today, Ian. That's a good question. We'll take that on notice. I think we've got various developments we're looking at. Since the transaction that was addressed in the market, we've got any number of parties coming to us, knocking on our door and offering up their development sites and the like. Frankly, if you look at Tilt, half of their development sites were acquired from other parties for relatively small fees, and they had people running around effectively doing work and then selling them a development site with milestone payments and the like. There's a variety of different ways to enter that market, and we're assessing those sites.
I think to go back to Tom's comment and link those two together, if you look at the major markets where there's REZ zones, the competition or the opportunity inside the REZ and then outside the REZ or what people are starting to call the open access market as well, having flexibility around participating in those, perhaps both of those may be the right model, because depending on where the governments have these settings, exactly where they're going to land will depend upon what's more likely to get monetized at the same time. If we do look at picking up sites, for example, from other developers, it's not going to be something that's of any significant size because they'll be early work sort of stuff and relatively small scale.
The other question is, you talk about microgrids, and I think of your compression stations all around the country in the middle of nowhere, where there's probably plenty of sun. What capability have you got to talk of converting those into having solar and gas, and so you don't burn gas to compress the gas down the pipes, but you actually use electricity?
Yeah, I'll just touch on that briefly. We have done some work on, in fact, a project in Victoria where we're looking at the economics of electric drive versus compressor drive. It's still got a little way to go, but it's something that is active and live. There is a further challenge around how we might convert existing stations, but that'll be a big part or will feature as a big part of our Climate Management Plan Framework, which we talked about, and one of the key elements there is how you reduce and avoid emissions on a go-forward basis.
I think we're up to time now. Thank you very much to the ELT and thank you everyone for asking the questions. There is another question session in the second half after Darren and Nevenka have presented. We will be back at 11:20 sharp, please be back at your seats or virtual seats at 11:20. Thank you very much.
For operations for APA, and this morning you heard Rob, Julian, Hannah, and Ross talk about our refreshed strategy, our purpose, our vision, technology within our business, but also how technology is changing the energy landscape. What I'd like to do now is connect this morning's conversation with our existing assets and how we are well-positioned for growth. Now, I just came back from a couple of weeks in Western Australia, visiting most of our remote sites in WA. In Western Australia, we have 3,500 km of pipeline, two wind farms, a solar farm, a world-class underground storage facility, and a gas-fired power station at Gruyere Gold Mine.
When I was speaking with my remote workforce in six or seven different locations, we ran through the strategy, the purpose, how our assets have been operating, and you can really see our strategy coming to life in Western Australia with the multi-asset base that we have.
When I think about our refresh strategy, we all know that APA is well-known for our pipeline business. As was mentioned this morning, we have a substantial renewable energy business and gas-fired generation on the east and the west coast. APA continues to deliver reliable services for all of our customers. If you're one of our customers on our transmission network and you ask for a gigajoule of energy, you get that gigajoule of energy over 99.9% of the time. As we operate a range of renewable energy facilities, our overall availability of greater than 98% is an achievement. We were just talking about efficiency before. Diamantina Power Station up in the North West Power System in North West Queensland is a highly efficient, really great technology, where on an emissions basis, it's 50% of the Queensland NEM.
We know that we operate and maintain assets, but we also build assets. We've got an enviable track record of delivering over AUD 2 billion in the last five years. We work with our customers to plan, design, get the approvals, execute, and then hand over to operations. This delivery, as you can see, has been across multiple asset classes in the last five years. When I was in Western Australia, catching the 5:00 FIFO flights, I went out to see around 75 of our employees that are based in the regions. Nothing is more important to us at APA than the health and safety of our employees and our contractors that work across our sites. We brought all of operations together just over 12 months ago, and we've had a relentless focus on continuous improvement and efficiency.
In that time, we've halved our total recordable injury frequency rate for our contractors, and we've knocked, by the end of the year, about 25% off our overall TRIFR for the business. These results still put APA in the middle of the pack, we still have more work to do. Process safety is the heart of everything we do at APA. Process safety is about keeping the energy where it should be. That's gas in the pipeline, the electron in the cable. We're disciplined. We have a disciplined approach based on the latest standards. We have KPIs across the business that go into the board. Last year, we were very proud to receive the 2020 Australian Pipelines and Gas Association Annual Safety Award for our process safety fundamentals. Earlier today, Hannah highlighted mega trends in technology.
Equally as we look to the energy future in technology on the energy landscape, we look to technology internally. How can we be more efficient? How do we scale quicker? Our Integrated Operations Centre, which we've talked about previously, which has controllers, commercial operations people, process engineers, operational technology folks, we've invested over AUD 30 million, and we continue to invest. We've recently got up and running our digital twin. We're one of the few companies in Australia to have a full digital twin of our major pipelines across the country. What it allows us to do, it's a predictive tool. If you think back to the cyclones in Western Australia at the beginning of the year, or if it's bushfires in Victoria or floods in New South Wales or Queensland, that can impact customer demand.
We use the digital twin to think about the events, the future, to optimize the outcome for the customers, and importantly, optimize the commercial outcomes for APA. Now, as my commercial colleagues often tell me, operations looks pretty easy from the outside looking in. This is a great example of collaboration, technology, and alignment all coming together. Now, the photo in the middle is just outside the Melbourne central business district. It's actually in South Melbourne. It's a very highly densely populated area of town, and the orange line is about a 2 km section of pipeline. The photo on the right is the easement access that we have, which is congested, a lot of neighbors, stakeholders. The purpose of this project was to run a pipeline inspection gauge or a pig through the pipeline.
Behind all the folks in the orange and yellow, you can see a cylindrical-looking vessel behind them. That's actually a pig. You send this pig 2 km down the pipeline with a myriad of instrumentation on the gauge, and it assesses the condition of the pipeline, the integrity for ongoing safe use. This project is also in the middle of a really congested area of the network where we have a lot of customers, residential, commercial, and industrial. We work with the system operator, the distribution companies, the regulator, our neighbors, and our stakeholders to successfully inspect this pipeline in a safe and reliable way. This is a small example that you don't normally get to see, but we're executing these projects day in, day out across the country.
We just want to talk about transferable skills a little bit, because this morning we've talked about gas transmission, electricity, renewables, hydrogen, batteries. I thought I might to share a little bit of my own experience in that I spent 15 years in the electricity industry, working my way through the electricity industry and ended up managing a renewable energy portfolio in the early 2000s, which seems like a lifetime ago. Back when Julian was talking about scale, wind was very much smaller in the early 2000s. From there, I went to major power stations on the East Coast and then found my way into upstream oil and gas. From there, I went back to electricity, into coal seam gas, and came over to APA.
Now I've got the enviable job of actually looking after gas and electricity assets, and certainly when you listen to the strategy session this morning, these two commodities are coming together. They're coming together because you need to provide the service for energy, and that energy needs to be decarbonized. Over the last couple of years, we have brought considerable talent into the business, and we fostered the capability that we have. The types of folks that I've brought in over the last couple of years are from the electricity industry, process control, operations, upstream oil and gas. It's a wide variety of people, and I'm very confident that we have the people to leverage our future growth. We do know we are competing for talent.
I've had the pleasure of meeting many of our graduates, our interns, our new line leaders over the last few years, and I can say that the refreshed purpose and vision resonates really well with this demographic. We do see that as our competitive advantage to get the right talent. We're committed to building on the folks and the capability that we have within APA and bringing the skills we need to support growth. Thank you very much, and I'll hand over to our Group Executive, Governance and External Affairs, Nevenka Codevelle.
I didn't get the music, nor there's music at changeovers, so I have to inject my own. It's really good to be here this morning and as Julian said, good to actually have you here in person rather than a Zoom call.
Talking about people, this is actually what I am going to be talking about. Not only what we do, but how we do it really matters. We know that doing the right thing by all of our stakeholders is absolutely imperative to enable us to continue to grow on a sustainable, ongoing basis. It is much more than just compliance or getting the tick in the box via access approvals. It is actually about a commitment to sharing value and delivering better outcomes for all your stakeholders. It is about engaging with them in a way that is holistic, thinking about standing in their shoes, understanding their world, what matters to them, and the best way to work with them as we go about doing our business.
To this end, there's been a real step change in the way that we at APA approach stakeholder engagements and our focus on ensuring that we deliver benefits for them and deliver outcomes that are beneficial, not just for our stakeholders, but also for the environment. We take, as I said, much more of a holistic view in the way that we do this, and stakeholder engagement is at the core of what we do. It's about listening to understand, and it's about delivering that shared value to enable us to benefit, but also all our stakeholders to benefit. That's the only way that we'll maintain sustainable growth going forward. We see our sustainability objective quite simply as really living and breathing our purpose and our vision.
Looking around some of the step changes that we have made, last year in FY 2021, we developed our sustainability roadmap, and that's really the blueprint of the way we approach sustainability generally and also our stakeholders. Key in that sustainability roadmap was a decision to focus on certain priority areas. For FY 2022, those priority areas are going to be around climate, which we heard a lot about this morning in the earlier session, social performance, and also indigenous. There'll be a continuing focus on safety, diversity and inclusion, and also environment. On climate, Rob spoke this morning about our net zero ambition, which we announced at the half year. There was discussion around our resilience report, which we published in November.
We've also developed our Climate Management Framework, and the commitment really for FY 2022 is around the development of interim targets and also disclosing and being very open about those targets and the way we're going to get there. On stakeholder engagement, big thing for us in FY 2021 was the voluntary establishment of consumer reference panels for all of our regulatory processes, and that proved tremendously successful. Not only did the AER congratulate us on the quality of that stakeholder engagement as part of our Amadeus Gas Pipeline reset, but it also resulted in better regulatory outcomes. The final regulator's decision was about 20 pages, I think the shortest we've ever seen it, because by and large, the regulator accepted our proposal, which was informed by that stakeholder engagement process.
We spoke at one of the Q&As in the break was around the RIS, the Regulatory Impact Statement. Again, the final result of the RIS was largely in line with the submissions that we had been advocating or the position we had been advocating, which again, was informed by our stakeholders and that stakeholder engagement process.
Getting it right, the value that we saw come out of those stakeholder engagement processes caused us to take a decision to expand that framework so that we will be engaging with stakeholders and having stakeholder engagement on all of our business and not just our regulated assets. One of the big steps as part of that framework is the establishment of a stakeholder engagement advisory group, and we'll be announcing shortly who is on that group. We're very excited about the establishment of that group, and we'll be holding stakeholder forums throughout FY 2022 to not only tell APA's story, but to hear from those stakeholders as to what matters to them, what role they want APA to be playing, not just in the energy transition, but in society generally.
We'll certainly be taking that feedback on board to inform our strategy and the way we go about doing things. Just customers are a very important stakeholder group. They are at the heart of what we do. Not only will we continue to be working with our customers on energy solutions going forward, but we're also working with the rest of the industry through the Energy Charter to think about delivering better outcomes for customers and consumers as a system as a whole. During FY 2021, we worked very closely with the rest of the energy industry through the Energy Charter on delivering better outcomes and supporting customers during COVID, particularly those in vulnerable circumstances. During FY 2022, that work will continue not only through the Energy Charter, but also through the rollout of initiatives under our sustainability roadmap.
A case study on how all of this comes together in a very practical, on-the-ground way is our West Coast Grid Northern Goldfields Interconnect project. Our infrastructure projects are complex. They always are. It involves touch points with many, many stakeholders, be they local land holders, communities, indigenous groups, government regulators, consumers and, of course, our customers, just to name a few. The critical success to ensuring that these projects are delivered on time and meet the needs of our customers is getting it right with all of our stakeholders. There is a balance to be had. There's often competing priorities. There's interrelationships between those stakeholder groups that we need to manage and accommodate and work through. Developing a clear understanding of what the expectations are and how we best deliver them is absolutely critical to the success of delivering these projects.
I don't propose to go through every aspect of the NGI project, but perhaps just a couple of call-outs. The first is a focus on local content. This is about local jobs, local procurement, local business opportunities. That's absolutely essential. It is a focus for this project, and we've required all of our suppliers and contractors on this project to commit to social performance indicators to support these objectives. The second is indigenous groups, our traditional custodians. We are absolutely committed to best-in-class engagement with our indigenous communities and with the traditional owners. It is critically important for us that we work with those groups to ensure that cultural heritage is protected, but also, as importantly, is to ensure that they benefit from us being there, working on their land, and that those communities benefit through employment, training, and business opportunities as well.
These are complex projects, and issues do arise, and it's the strength of that stakeholder engagement that really enables us to work through those issues as they do arise. We are there for the long term, and relationships absolutely matter. I think just finally, successfully delivering infrastructure projects is what we do, and we're constantly lifting the bar on the way we do things to improve and to meet the challenges that come from an environment that is ever more complex and ever-changing. That's what we do. We have a step change. It's an exciting time ahead, and we stand ready to transfer that capability across whatever asset class we're looking to invest in. With that, I'll hand over to Adam Watson, our CFO.
Thank you, Nevenka. The music was a bit quiet. I was expecting some more pump-up music for the CFO and the exciting discussion around pigging the New South Wales transition system. Well, okay. I'm often asked the question around what makes a successful growth company. That's certainly our ambition, and whilst there are many, many ingredients, I always will break it down to three things. One of them sounds a little self-serving, but first, you need a sound and executable strategy, and I think we've got that. Secondly, you need the capability to execute, and we've been through that today, and again, I think we've got that.
Again, this is the self-serving one, but the third thing I believe we need is a sound, a strong balance sheet to be able to not only fund the growth but ensure that we're delivering strong returns for those investors who are providing that funding. I think we've got that recipe right here at APA. It's been six months for me in the role, and it's been a very busy six months. Hopefully, haven't burnt the team out just yet because there's a bit of time to go. It's been one of listening and one of learning a lot about the business and a new industry for me, a very exciting industry for me. It's also been a busy time of execution and putting all of this talk to work.
Some of it we've delivered some really tangible results, some of it we've built our learning that will be applied to the next one. A tangible result, I'll talk about it a little bit more in a moment, but the liability management exercise that we implemented back in March this year. I thought it was February, but it was March. We did all the work in February. Back in March this year was an excellent example of how we can create value through the capital strategy and through our balance sheet management. Again, I'll talk to that in a moment. The other one was just the learnings, but more importantly, the confidence that we have through a couple of the large M&A transactions that's been spoken to before, one in the U.S., one in the renewable space.
Having that confidence that we have not only the cost of capital to be competitive, and it doesn't mean you're not going to get beaten at times, but we've got the cost of capital to be competitive. Importantly, we've got the funding right to be able to ensure that we can execute and most importantly, create value. We've developed a framework or refreshed a framework as part of the work that we've been doing over the last six months with the capital strategy. It's that pie chart. In summary, it's in that pie chart before you.
Without going into detail in each of those elements, first and foremost, it's about making sure that we get the balance right between the amount of funding that we apply or the cash that we generate, the amount of funding that we apply to our organic growth CapEx requirements, and how much we give you, our investors, in the form of distributions.
Access to capital, particularly for an infrastructure company and particularly for a growth company, is so important to making sure that not only have we got deep capital markets to be able to source our funding, but also to make sure that we can do it in a way that's really efficient, both from a timing perspective, being able to do that quickly when we need it, and also from a cost perspective and making sure that we've got the right competitive tension out there that we can generate at really low cost of capital. Third is the risk management stuff, the stuff that you probably don't see, but is all the important documentation and policies and processes in the background that make sure that we've got a really robust, risk-averse structure in place so that we can weed our way through unexpected events or whatever it may be.
The market engagement is really important. We've put a lot of emphasis, including today, in making sure that we're making the information and the communication flows that we give you, our investors. I'm not talking just equity investors here, I'm talking our debt investors as well, of which there are many here today. Making sure that communication and that information is insightful for you and meaningful. Ultimately, it's about creating value. Creating value for both our debt and equity investors. We believe we've got the right strategy. The existing capital strategy for APA was certainly the right one for the APA of old, and we've refreshed our growth strategy, we've refreshed our corporate strategy, and we're very confident that through the modifications we're making to our capital strategy, and I'll just call that out. They're not wholesale changes.
Nobody was expecting there to be some sort of groundbreaking wholesale change. The capital strategy is all about modifications to complement the new refreshed growth strategy of APA. We're very confident it's the right one. Moving to the cost of capital and the hurdle rates, it was one of the questions we had before. Julian touched on that earlier through the Q&A session. A big piece of the work that we've done has been to ensure not only are we really confident and do we understand our cost of capital, but in particular, we understand the cost of capital and the hurdle rates that we can apply to each of the various asset classes that we're looking at. Very fortunately, those ranges are actually quite narrow because, again, we are a low-risk business. We're not a no-risk business. We are a low-risk business.
Nonetheless, there will be different risk patterns for one particular asset class vis-à-vis another, or you might have a highly regulated asset versus a highly contracted business. We are making sure that we've got appropriate risk profiles and appropriate hurdle rates assigned to those. We've been able to test them. We've been able to test them in the market, and we've got a lot of feedback. The thing I do want to leave with you is that given the size of the market opportunities, we have the fortunate benefit of being able to be disciplined, and we will be disciplined as we apply these hurdle rates to our growth ambitions. It sits very comfortably with us that we will be outbid on projects. That's fine. That's not a measure of success for us.
The measure of success for us is the ones that we win, where we create value for you, our investors, not the ones where we lose because somebody else thinks that they can create value in a different way that we could see. That disciplined investment sits very comfortably with us. A clear demonstration of our capacity to be able to create value, not just through our operations, but through our balance sheet, was evidenced with our recent liability management exercise undertaken in March. What is liability management? Most of you know, but it's basically the early refinancing of existing debt and replacing that with new debt. You would typically only do that if it's going to deliver benefits, which this one certainly did.
It was a AUD 2.2 billion issuance to replace a bunch of existing facilities that were due to expire over the next couple of years and gave us a real boost of confidence around, again, our balance sheet, but most importantly around investor confidence in APA. Certainly the biggest issuance that we've ever done at APA, done in challenging market conditions, albeit the banks always tell me that we're about to issue into a challenging market. I don't think I've ever done a transaction where it's not a challenging market. Craig, I'm looking at you over there. It's always a challenging market when you're a banker. It was a challenging market. We raised AUD 2.2 billion across multiple tenors and multiple markets, and really strong demand for APA's credit, which means they believe in us, which means they want to continue to invest in us, which is fantastic.
The outcome was that we de-risked the balance sheet, we extended the average tenor of our debt, and we lowered the average cost of our debt. That will flow through to free cash flow improvements as well, which has been well communicated. The other thing that we did as part of the capital strategy review as it relates to our debt book is looking at just generally the level of gearing. I've had quite a few questions coming in around where we want to sit. Is the gearing, or best measured, I would say, through the rating agencies, through the FFO to debt measure? How do you want to sit within that ratings band? Firstly, it is the right rating band for us. It gives us the appropriate access to deep capital markets.
We've just proven that. Balanced with the capacity to deliver the lowest cost of capital to be able to fund our growth projects. Very comfortable with the level of gearing, very comfortable sitting in that BBB, Baa2 rating band. The question is how much flex have we got within that rating band? You've heard me say this before, we're at the top of the rating band at the moment. We don't need to be there. We're not going to push ourselves aggressively to the bottom of the rating band. But it gives us a lot of headroom and a lot of firepower to be able to fund the next one, two future growth opportunities. Moving to our distribution policy. I hope you can remember, but I've asked most of you about what you think.
We've sought feedback from our investors, from the analysts about the appropriateness of our distribution policy. It was almost without question, a requirement or a request to have the right balance between funding our organic growth CapEx profile and making sure we deliver strong returns, strong distributions to our security holders. It was a balanced approach. There weren't many people who said, "Go your hardest on distributions, raise equity to fund your organic growth profile." Equally, there wasn't really anyone that said, "You have to keep every spare dollar you've got to fund organic growth, and then whatever's left is there for distribution." You asked for balance, and we agree with that. We think it's the right strategy, and that's exactly what we've done. Two things that we've done to modify our distribution policy.
The first one is that we have changed the denominator of our payout ratio. That's not a big wow moment. That's just a small thing. You've probably heard me say, one of the things I wanted us to do was make sure that we're measuring our payout ratio in a way that was consistent with our peers. We've done that through changing from an operating cash flow method to a free cash flow denominator. In really basic terms, the difference between the two is that free cash is your operating cash flow less the payment of your maintenance CapEx or your stay in business CapEx. Your stay in business CapEx, your maintenance CapEx is going to be fully funded, and then we pay out after that.
You can then see the second change that we've done, or the second modification, which is we're moving away from what was a largely rigid payout ratio, where effectively we wanted to pay out a percentage of our operating cash flow to one of a range. That is purely and simply intended to provide us with more flexibility to ensure that we can consistently grow our distributions over time. Again, we've delivered on what you've suggested. We do believe it is the right thing to do, and that capacity to be able to give us a little more flex ensures that we can continue to deliver healthy distribution returns to our security holders, balanced with our capacity to be able to fund our organic growth CapEx.
That's not to say that we have to fund 100% of our organic growth CapEx from free cash because we've got the balance sheet headroom, but it gives us, again, that flexibility to be able to get the balance right. Market guidance and communication is another area of focus for us. I'll start by saying that, as you would expect, we would need to confirm guidance today, and we've done just that. We confirm or reconfirm, I should say, our underlying EBITDA and net finance cost guidance. There's a big caveat there around the underlying, because there are a number of transactions that have occurred this year that are likely to be reported as significant items that distort the actual reported level of EBITDA and net finance costs. The liability management exercise will change the actual reported interest cost that we present at the full year.
The impairment of Orbost, the marked-to-markets on our renewables business. There are non-cash transactions that will impact our reported earnings, and I just wanted to make sure that we call those out, and it's obviously documented there. Those changes that are occurring to our business in terms of the accounting adjustments, through either the transactions that are occurring or through accounting standard changes that continually are being presented upon us, are making it really difficult to provide a really narrow EBITDA guidance range. More importantly, and in fact most importantly, is that EBITDA guidance and net finance cost guidance was provided to the market to give you clarity around what our free cash or our operating cash flow was going to look like and what our distribution was going to look like.
To avoid all of that confusion and to focus on the thing that matters, which is our distribution growth, we are moving consistent with our peers to a distribution growth guidance model from FY 2022. Mark, I've already read your research report, and you had it in brackets, something around cloud-based accounting. I call that out as an example where we have, I think two, three weeks ago, there was an accounting standard clarification. I'm looking at one of the finance. I've butchered it. One of the accounting standard clarifications is basically saying that all cloud-based or SaaS-based technology investments must be expensed through the P&L. That has sort of been a theoretical assumption for a long time, but there has been a lot of gray in the accounting standards, which means you can capitalize those costs. Most companies, as far as I'm aware, have done that.
That's just an example of something that has come out a couple of weeks ago, that all of those costs need to be expensed and go through the P&L. We're not going to be the only one who needs to report these sorts of things. There'll be plenty of others as well. Just another example of something that doesn't change the cash profile of our business, but will change the way that we report our EBITDA. To wrap it up, we think we've got the right strategy. We've got a strong balance sheet. We've got the appropriate level of gearing, and we've got a distribution policy that really marries and certainly balances our capacity to be able to organically fund our organic growth CapEx and balance that with a healthy flow of distributions to our security holders.
We're confident with that capital strategy that we can be competitive in our growth ambitions. We're confident because it gives us a low cost of capital. We're confident because it gives us access to the world's biggest and deepest capital markets, which means we can fund that growth. Again, I just want to reinforce and reiterate that given the size of the opportunities there, we can and will remain disciplined in that pursuit for growth and ensure that we continue to create value for you, our security holders, over the long term. With that, I will hand it back to Rob. Get the music.
Right. Thank you very much to Darren Rogers, Nevenka Codevelle, and Adam Watson for their presentations. We're now going to go into another shorter period of Q&A.
If we could get the chairs up on stage, and I'll just get the executive leadership team on notice that when we've got chairs, you can come up on stage. Thank you.
Whilst we're waiting, I might just remind people who are on virtual, that you can ask a question by clicking on the Ask a Question button, or if you are on the telecom line, press star one, please, and wait for your name to be called out.
Right. I think again, Yoko, I'm just looking to you whether any questions have come in online during the course of the morning, and maybe if they are ready, we can address those first before we throw to questions in the room.
Thank you, Rob. There is one question about Orbost. The question is: any color on the way forward on the Orbost gas plant in light of continuing performance issues? How much more money are you willing to invest to bring this asset to its nameplate capacity?
Thank you. I will make a few comments on Orbost and then throw to Darren, who's lucky enough to have responsibility for operating it. Just a couple of comments first from myself. Firstly, Orbost is important to us, and getting it to a steady state of performance and improving that performance is equally important. I'd also remind everybody that from a scale perspective, it's actually a really small part of the APA business. Whilst it's important that we get the performance steady and improved, it's a small part of the overall APA business. I think I'll throw to Darren just to give us an update on where we're at from a performance perspective.
Mm-hmm. Well, as we all know, Orbost had a pretty rough and tumble start to its early life. It came into operations in August last year. We went about building a pretty sophisticated and experienced team at Orbost. I will make a quick call out to the team. When we received it in August, we were running at 15 to 20 terajoules a day. We can stably run now at 45 terajoules a day. We have plans to improve that performance. We're confident that we will be able to improve the performance from where we are now. Before the next question gets asked, which is, what is that number? We won't be providing guidance on what that number is. It's a relatively complex plant divided into two parts.
The first part of the plant is the sulfur recovery unit, and the second part is a more traditional gas processing plant. The gas processing plant performs perfectly well, 100% capacity. The issues have been in the sulfur recovery unit, and we're still doing a pretty detailed root cause analysis with the technology provider and our partner at Cooper Energy. We do see that over the next six to nine months or so, that we'll improve performance and continue to operate the plant safely.
Any questions from the room?
I apologize in advance, Adam. Your depreciation policy, I know it's on cash, we talk about net zero by 2050. We're seeing the AER shorten lives of assets within regulated assets. Have you guys gone through a consideration of your asset lives? I think you probably have some which are out at 90 or 80 years or thereabouts.
Happy for me to answer that?
Yeah. Go ahead.
There's a couple of ways to answer that. Firstly, when you look at a useful life of an asset, any infrastructure asset, and you're asking about gas pipelines in particular, it's no different where you've got an accounting perspective, you'll generally have a tax perspective, which is different, and then you'll have a commercial perspective when you're trying to price a project. When Julian is trying to work with a customer and work out what return we're going to generate, we have to take a useful life view on those. As I said, they're all different. If you start first and foremost with the commercial one, we have to make sure that we are generating return over the life that we are confident we can keep that going with that customer or with a different customer, or a different service line for a period of time.
We work on that constantly. Again, the key focus for us is making sure we get returns back as quickly as we can. From an accounting perspective, there's just not enough clarity at the moment to change anything. Again, whether it comes back to the work that Hannah's doing around repurposing our asset lives, or whether you take the various scenarios that Nevenka spoke of before through the resilience report, there's just sincerely not enough clarity that would cause us to change any of that at the moment. That may evolve over time. I don't think it's going to be a thing that will evolve in the next five years or 10 years even.
As we get further and further out towards a net zero economy, then we will continue to assess that, and it's all going to be done in the context of where we in the industry is at in the ability to be able to utilize that asset. The short answer is, there is no intention to change at this stage.
Okay. Just on dividend reinvestment, how do you think about that as a means of funding the business? Historically, if APA had one, you got rid of it because shareholders complained. We've seen a lot of infrastructure companies reinstall it. What's your views around it, Adam?
I'll make a few comments first and then throw to Adam. I think historically, you're right, Ian, that has been the view. I think as we think about our funding strategy for growth, whether that's organic or inorganic, that is another means for funding that growth, and it's certainly something that we will be open to. Adam, if you want to-
Yeah, I guess you always look at it from a portfolio perspective. You've got many sources of capital. You've got the cash that you generate. We're a strong cash-generating company, high margins, relatively low-risk business model, and that's evidenced for our ratings and so forth. You've got a lot of capacity there. You've got your debt and equity markets. One of the purposes of putting.
A presentation like today on is that when we come out and buy something that is meaningful, largely M&A-driven, we're likely to be raising equity at some point in time. What we want to ensure is that our investors and the equity we feed our investors with a lot of that information are not surprised by what it all means. We've got confidence around those. There are going to be points in time in the cycle where it does make sense to recycle capital. There's no point trying to speculate or suggest which one makes the right one. It may not be a complete sale. It could be bringing joint venture partners in. That's one of the things that we actively look at. There's a lot of experience in the organization having worked with joint venture partners.
I have, Ian, in my past. There's roles to play for joint venturing, there's roles to play for owning at 100%, there's sometimes a point where it just makes more sense for it to be owned by somebody else, where they can generate a higher return or see more value in it than we can. We're agnostic to that. I don't think anything would be off the table.
One final question. The government extended the tax break till 2023 or thereabouts. How quickly can you accelerate? I wish we could do this program in the business and spend more money. How much can Bob build?
I'll throw to Kevin, actually, because I'm pretty much asking that question every day. Look, firstly, just as an opening, they are really good policies and with Julian and Hannah and the team, you do get customers coming to you and saying, "Well, you're going to create some value out of this, so can we accelerate something and share a bit of that value?" They are good. Shout out. They are very good incentives. It's not the only reason, the only thing that drives investments, they are good incentives. The fun part is that the finance guy can now put pressure on the delivery person and say, "Come on, hurry up. You're going to get it delivered on time." Did you want to talk, Kevin, about how you go about that process?
I don't know whether we've actually accelerated any projects, but certainly NGI and stage one of the East Coast Grid fall into that category. We will have them complete, and we need to ensure we have them complete to get that tax incentive, and that's what we'll do.
If I can add, there are a couple of things that we're looking at the moment that could potentially go into that bucket, as I talked before, around customers with various products. I think it's a good policy measure. I think my observation from the initial budget measure was it was too short for infrastructure. Some of these things have a long lead time, and I think probably the initial measure was good for people if they're buying trucks because you do it within 12 months and get it on the ground, whereas our projects, as you know, take longer. I think it was a good policy measure to extend it and allows a little bit more lead time for things that involve turning the spade in the ground and building something substantial. I think it's very helpful from that perspective.
Otherwise, you're literally just buying things that are off the shelf and will get the benefit of that tax deduction.
Good. Thank you, Ian. If I can borrow your how fast can Bob build, I might just use that more often, Kevin.
Rob, we have one more question from the webcast. The change in gas market dynamics, how long will it last and what is the impact to APA's medium-term outlook?
I think first of all, as you would've seen today, and it was on one of Adam's slides, that we've reconfirmed our EBITDA guidance for financial year 2021. That's the first point. You would've seen that I commented during my presentation that the changing gas market dynamics underpinned by a whole bunch of drivers, not the least of which there's been a bunch of uncertainty around energy policy, emissions policy, and that's flowed through to customer decision-making, the need to be able to contract shorter, require greater flexibility. We've seen some of that flow through this year's results already, coupled with, as I said earlier, the lower investment in growth CapEx that we've seen in the last couple of years.
We're very confident that the growth CapEx that we're seeing now and the uptick in this year and next and the following year will flow through to growth in revenues in subsequent results. I think all the while, and Adam talked about this as part of his presentation, that with our refreshed approach to our distributions policy, we'll be able to manage a steady growth in distributions through the cycles where we have a few ups and downs in how the market performs.
Good day, guys. I guess a question around the hurdle rates that Adam's going to tell us what they all are. Just I guess two questions. Do you have a mechanism in there to do like a mark to market as market rates change? Secondly, if you're willing to disclose it, do you have a higher hurdle return on, say, renewables versus gas infrastructure, or can you just attend to the relativities?
Thanks, Mr. Coe. A couple of things there. One, when we look at the asset classes, there's the traditional cost of capital inputs that I won't bore you with. There's one or two major drivers when you're looking at these different asset classes from a risk perspective. The other thing that we're trying to do is making sure that we take a forward view on a lot of those inputs. It's a forward view on interest rates, not a what is APA's current cost of debt. It's very much a forward view and looking at all the various market forecasts that go into those inputs. There is no doubt going to be a different risk profile, again, within a very narrow range, but a different risk profile for the different assets.
It's really down to, obviously, a regulated asset is going to have a very different risk profile to a contracted business. Then there are going to be certain assets, going back to Ian's question before, where you're going to build an asset based on call it a 10-year contract, but you know that asset is going to be generating a return over a 20 or a 30-year life, if you want to take a wind farm or whatever it may be as an example. You've then got to try and price in that risk around what happens after the 10 years when you're then going into recontracting. The way we go about that, so that determines the asset beta, essentially, for the different asset classes. Most important, and over and above all of that, is a long-term view on rates.
Again, we've got to be very careful that we don't get hung up on the changing dynamics of your cost of capital. What we try to build in is a buffer largely focused on views on rates that is sustainable over time, because we can't be changing our hurdle rates every five minutes or every year. We want them to be sustainable over time.
Okay, thank you. Makes a lot of sense. Where in that, I guess, project evaluation/capital budgeting process are you doing carbon pricing scenarios?
Do you want me to talk to that or Julian? We are early days, and in fact, that's one of the things that we're working with Nevenka's team, and Megan is in the room here, who is leading that charge, where we are alive to the fact that we've got to somehow build that in. It'd be lovely if you could just grab a market model and say, they know exactly what they're doing and we'll use that. If you can tell me one that's robust, I'd love to hear it. It's in a very immature stage at the moment, it's going to start building up over time.
I'm not sure if Nevenka or Darren, Julian want to comment.
Maybe just to say, rather than immature, I'd say that there's lots of room for opportunity.
I'm not saying we're immature, I'm saying the market is immature.
Yeah. It's definitely part of our climate measurement plan. It would be a really important part of ensuring both TCFD compliance, but also just good commercial sense to ensure that we've got a price for carbon factored into our modeling.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I guess, just one last question from me. It might be more of a risk management treasury style question. I believe it's still the case that APA's never written off a receivables in all its corporate history. I don't know if that's still the case, counterparty management was always something Freddo was very proud of. Can you just talk to if you've modified that at all, and if there's protections in contracts, if, say, one of your counterparties, I don't know, demerged and part of it wasn't investment grade anymore?
Rob, I'll take that initially, and then I'll throw to, looks like Adam, and possibly Julian to comment as well. I won't comment about your question around counterparties demerging. Just specifically around, I think your question initially was around never having written off any receivables. It's certainly the case in terms of anything material. There's always a few little bits and pieces here and there, but we've really prided ourselves in making sure that we contract with high creditworthy counterparties, and where they're not investment grade, we take an appropriate amount of credit support, whichever form that might take. That's been our history, and that continues to be the way we think about things when we contract with our customers, and that will vary from customer to customer, depending on where they sit on their creditworthy scale.
You want to-
All I'd add is nothing has changed, so that legacy lives on. The only thing I would say is that, and I'm not being specific about any customer, is to be a supplier in this market, you have to be highly creditworthy. We struggle to see how you can't be highly creditworthy. Whilst we've got really strong disciplines and processes in place to ensure that is the case, it'd be challenging to understand how you could be in this industry without being highly creditworthy.
All right. Just a couple of quick ones for Adam, if I can. Adam, definition of maintenance CapEx, or if you can size it for us.
Thanks, Matt. I'm not going to size it for you now because we just need to round out all the nuances in that. Look, essentially, Darren's team has the bulk of that. We have life cycle models that forward look into the asset maintenance programs. I can't remember the number, how much it is, AUD 100 million a year, there is a chunk of maintenance CapEx that effectively comes from the maintenance models. That's not to say that something comes up, and I'm talking on behalf of Darren here, sounding like an expert, that's not to say something comes up in a particular year where we redirect the attention to performing maintenance on that.
The other big part of our business and everybody's business these days is around our technology platforms as well. We've got life cycle models. We're refining our life cycle models around our technology platforms, and they would be included in that as well. My caveat on trying to clarify is this, for example, this accounting standard change, it's not a change, it's a clarification a couple of weeks ago, around cloud-based. We've got to do a bit of work with that, with the auditors around is there anything else you can capitalize that was previously capitalized and not? Give me some time, Matt, to clarify that likely before your results.
Okay.
Matt, if I could just add one or two other things to that is that from a maintenance CapEx, when you look at our linear infrastructure, our pipelines that traditionally have required less same business or maintenance capital, any rotating equipment, whether it's compressor stations, power generation, gas plants, and this last year we've seen a major overhaul at our Diamantina Power Station. That's a big lick up in maintenance CapEx, but that only happens every five years. I think what you're going to see is, as we move into different types of energy infrastructure, it's going to have a different profile as to what that maintenance CapEx being, solar farms, for example, being at the low end.
Thanks. Then Adam, you mentioned you're at the top end of the BBB range. You've got 12% FFO to debt. What are the guardrails on an FFO to debt basis, do you think, for BBB?
Look, as you'd expect, both agencies calculate it differently. It's an 8 to 11, 9 to 12 range. As you pointed out and I pointed out, we are at the top of the range. There's a couple of things to point out. One is we have modeled and we have a business model that means that our FFO to debt will be growing over time. You will always build in natural headroom. In fact, if we did nothing, if we didn't grow at all, from an M&A perspective here at APA, then we would be punching through those rating bands in the not too distant future. Again, if we've done all the work to say that BBB, Baa2 is the right rating, then that's where we should sit.
Sitting at the top gives us a fair bit of headroom and a bit of comfort, that's not the intention of where we want to be over the longer term. In very simple terms, bumping around the middle of the range is really where we would be. If there was a funding opportunity that would enable us to move quickly, to execute efficiently, and not have to raise equity, that could put us down in the lower end of the band, not below the band, but the lower end of the band. Then we can either let it naturally restore over time, or the next transaction, you do a bit of an over raise or whatever, we put in a DRP. We've got the flexibility, Matt, to work our way through that.
Ultimately, when we're pricing projects and we're looking at what is the capital structure for a project, whether it be for Ross in North America or for Julian, we are trying to target around that middle of the range, BBB, flat Baa2 rating.
Great. Thanks. Just last quick one. The couple of one-offs for FY 2021, specifically the cloud investments and the mark-to-market of the renewables portfolio, how are they treated in past periods?
The mark-to-markets on the renewables were fairly immaterial in the past. We still don't know what they're going to look like at the end of this year. What we've been working through with the auditors, though, is that we have historically treated them as net finance costs and clarification is that that needs to be treated as EBITDA. That's not dissimilar to mark-to-markets that are done by most of the generators as well. I think they treat them as significant items, so they put them below the line. We will call it out so that you can see the underlying performance of the business. That is one to be quantified. The other one, and again, it's non-cash. The other one, again, it's cash because you're spending the money, but it's cash that we would have ordinarily spent anyway.
There's no impact on our free cash flow calculation, is the technology spend. We need to work our way through that. It's only a couple of weeks old because there's not just the technology, but there's also the processes and systems and other investments that go with those sorts of projects. What we're trying to get clarity around now is, do you have to write the whole thing off or can you still only expense the pure technology piece? Keith, who's in the room, and the team are going to have a bit of fun, including me with the auditors over the next couple of months to try and get clarity around that.
While we're waiting for it, there's another question at the back.
I was going to say, Yoko, one of the questions that I would love to be able to ask, maybe I'll ask it now since I'm midstream is, Jane, you've been with APA for a few weeks, so this is my question from the room now. What are your first impressions?
It's actually 17 days, to be exact. To be fair, I did quite a bit of due diligence on APA before one joins a company. The consistent thing that I heard was refresh strategy, operational discipline, opportunities here in the U.S., and also locally, organically. I met some of the peers that convinced me to join, and also Rob in the chair. Important things for me when I do my due diligence, but quite excited to be here. Thank you, Rob.
Back to the floor. Thank you. Thanks, Jane.
Thank you. Scott Ryall from Rimor, again . I was hoping to switch to some of the stuff that Darren spoke about around the skills and the transferability of skills between energy streams, which I take. Maybe it's your question, maybe it's Ross's, how is the capability transferable to the U.S. where you've got different regulations, standards, very different governments, and those sorts of things? Can you talk to how many people Ross has on the ground for support for considering these things in his assessment of different excuse me, opportunities?
Thank you. Well, I might throw to Darren first just to talk about the transferability point, and then Ross, if you can just talk to how we view transactions and how we bring to bear the full capability of APA when we look at transactions.
Thanks for the question, and you're quite right that the standards and regulatory environments are different. We're not going to pretend that we're experts sitting in Brisbane or Sydney about U.S. regulatory regimes on pipeline technology as an example. The basic framework around asset management and operational excellence is actually global. If you looked at our asset management framework and our OpEx framework, and you compare that whether it's in Europe or the U.S., they've got a lot of common elements. The big players like Shell and DuPont, they're global organizations. We've mirrored some of those. I think that part of it's very transferable. If I think about the U.S. operation and a couple of the transactions Ross was talking about, we did talk about strategic control points. Where are they? Are they locally here in Australia or are they more remote?
It goes a little bit to the way that we operate our business within Australia. I'm not sitting there supervising a technician in the Pilbara, but we provide some guardrails and the control framework for how they go about their work and the decisions that they make. We make sure they have the right competence and capability to do that. The U.S., we would see, without having the actual business in front of me today, I would see it as somewhat similar. There's certain strategic control points around the asset management framework and operational excellence that you do want visibility of and you do want some input into. Once you're on the ground, those guardrails have to be able to be enacted by the people on the ground doing the work. Then I'll hand to Ross to talk about the second part of the question.
Yeah, thanks. It's important that in doing due diligence that the Australian operations understand what are the key differences between Australia and the U.S., and we brought across, a person specifically charged with that responsibility to compare and contrast those operating environments, to bring colleagues in Australia along and to understand what are the key issues required. Now, we've only got small teams in the U.S., about five, but rest assured that we have a fair few number of consultants that we are working pretty hard to work alongside the direct employees as well as our Australian colleagues to make sure that from a due diligence perspective, that we're aware of what are the key issues that we need to understand. Yeah, the operating environment, once we're successful, the U.S. operations has got to stand and do the running of the business on a day-to-day basis.
Certainly, there'd be dotted lines back to management in Australia to make sure that those key things that we need to understand, we do so. Things like finance, things like corporate relations, et cetera. Very key that the Australian operations are familiar with those key risk areas in the U.S. We're very confident that when we look at due diligence, invariably, if we're successful, we have the resources during that due diligence process, both internally, in the U.S., internally from Australia, but also supported by key experts contracting in.
If I could just add one other thing to what Ross said there. In terms of when we're looking at going through a diligence process, clearly we've got strong economic regulatory capability here in Australia, and we rely on the depth of that. It's obvious that the regulatory environment is different in North America, and it's different not just at a federal level, but at a state-by-state level. Just as a case in point, we rely on the capability on the ground through external advisors who then bring to bear all the nuances and differences that things that we need to consider as part of our diligence.
Can you just clarify? In the U.S., you presented the slide with the opportunities and renewables were on there. I'm just sort of interested, is that a second-order transaction for you that an LDC or a gas pipeline is what you're first looking at, and we're not going to wake up one day and you announce that you bought a gigawatt of renewable farms in America?
I'm happy to answer that, and I know Ross would give the same answer. That consistent with our strategy in Australia, which is looking at the full universe of energy infrastructure.
That is how we will look at the world on a go-forward basis. Where we are focused initially in North America is on those gas utilities, gas pipelines. What I would say, though, and I think we made this observation at the time of our half-year results, is that whilst that remains our focus, some of these gas utilities have already acquired other assets and come with some level of integration. We just forewarn that is a type of asset class that we may turn up with. Certainly, the focus is around those core competencies in gas that we believe are transferable, and as Ross, I think, made the point, a very attractive gas market in North America. Just wanted to clarify that.
Sorry, can I just go to one question on the telephone, please? Nathan Lead from Morgans, please go ahead with your question.
Actually, just got two questions, if that's okay. My first one is just the outlook for the tax profile, I suppose, given just your remaining available fraction tax losses and also the federal government budget with immediate expensing of the CapEx. Just what does it look like going forward, and I suppose just how that then plays into the franking of the distribution?
Thanks, Nathan. We will provide more clarity at the full year, and it is one of the things I was mentioning to some of our investors earlier that in the half year and full-year results, we will provide a bit more clarity in those decks around certainly the tax profile of the business in the year that we have just been in, but hopefully some clarity around how to look forward as well. There is going to be a fairly meaningful benefit to our tax position in this financial year. Some of that is because of the immediate tax deductibility government incentive that you refer to. The other one is that the liability management exercise where we had those early termination payments, we get a tax deduction for that. It's quite a sizable amount.
Don't quote me on this, but the cash tax in FY 2021 is going to be around that sort of AUD 100 million mark. It's certainly going to be a lot less than what we have traditionally paid. The available fractions question is, in short answer, is that it is reducing. About 75% of our earnings flow through our company structure and the balance flows through our trust structure. It's getting down to a fairly small number. I think it's in that sort of AUD 15 million-AUD 20 million type level. Again, Nathan, don't quote me on that. We'll give you that information and more clarity when we have the information, which will be as part of the full year results.
The second question I've got is just around your FFO to debt target there, talking about around about the 12% at the moment and those rating ranges. Do you take into consideration, what the FFO to debt looks like, I suppose, middle of next decade when you have quite a material step down in earnings from the Wallumbilla Gladstone Pipeline, initial contract expiring or the initial 20-year term? How do you take that into account?
It's a good question, Nathan. Firstly, just a point of clarification. 12 % FFO to debt is not the target. That's the top end of the range. The target is more around the middle of that range, around the 8% to 9 %, depending on what measure you take. The WGP, the Wallumbilla to Gladstone Pipeline amortization, or effectively how we deal with the fact that in 2036, you no longer have those revenues, yet you've got a portion of debt which sits corporately, that effectively would need to be repaid on the basis that you no longer have the FFO to support the debt with respect to your credit metrics, is certainly something that we're alive to and that we have modeled.
It has helped inform our distribution policy and a lot of the work that I presented to you today to again ensure that is sustainable over time. We've got until 2036 before it actually impacts us, which is quite some time away, but equally, we know that it'll knock on our door sooner than we all expect. We have certainly factored that in, and we, in the coming years, will look at different ways to ensure that we have the appropriate amount of cash available in the existing debt business to fund whatever debt profile we determine is the appropriate one at that point in time.
Last one.
Really mundane question. CopperString 2.0 doesn't seem to go away. I'm just wondering where there are opportunities and threats for you guys in that.
CopperString, Julian.
Yes. Thanks for the question. I think we put our submission on our website, so I don't know if you've seen that. It's factually accurate, I think best way to describe it. Look, it's still there. What are we doing? We're trying to provide our customers in Isa with the right solutions and a good delivered price of electricity. We continue to talk to them about different options, including renewables in that region. Fair to say, CopperString, if it was to get up, is going to get up because of, I'll just say, external support for various reasons. We wait to see more clarity on exactly how that's intended to work. Certainly not going through the usual transmission processes and the RIT-T that we all know and love. I think it'd be good for the market to see clarity around that project.
If it does come in, if and when joins Mount Isa, the role of our plant in that region will have to adapt and migrate over time. Obviously, we've got existing contracts out for some period of time. If it does come in, that plant's still going to be there. Its role in the market will necessarily change.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, that's the end of Q&A. If I can ask the leadership team to leave the stage, and I'll just make a few concluding comments. Well, that brings us to the end of Investor Day 2021 for APA, and I certainly thank you for your attendance today, physically in this room, and also to those of you that have joined us online. We very much appreciate your questions and your interest in APA. I'd also like to take the time to thank the APA team, not least of which the executive leadership team here who you have heard from through presentations and also through Q&A. There are many folks that have worked tirelessly behind the scenes, as you can imagine, like anything, to put something like this together, our investor relations team, our external affairs team, and a host of other folks around the business who've made this possible.
Very big thank you to you. I trust that you found today useful, informative, provided some further clarity on our strategy and our capability to be able to execute that strategy over the coming years and face into the challenges and opportunities that the energy transition presents for us. Hopefully, you also found it entertaining, like I said right at the start. You've heard from myself and you've heard from the rest of the leadership team this morning covering a range of topics, but I think there's just a number of points that I want to emphasize in closing. The first of all is that APA has strong foundations, and that's come from over two decades of investing in different forms of infrastructure and building that capability, and we will leverage that capability into new asset classes and new markets as the energy market transitions.
The second point is that, and it should be abundantly clear, that we're firmly in execution mode. We are constantly evaluating the opportunities that we see in front of us. The third point is that we are future-focused. The discussion that I think Hannah presented today, it gives you an insight into the steps that we are taking to understand those next energy and energy solutions to our Pathfinder Program is testament to that. The last point I'd make is that we will remain disciplined as we execute our strategy. We'll remain focused on that strong balance sheet as we focus on steadily growing distributions for you, our investors. Look, a big thank you for your attendance today. I hope that you've come away as excited as we are about our refreshed strategy. I hope you enjoyed today.
I'm looking forward to connecting with all of you again at our August full year results. In the meantime, APA is always powering ahead. Thank you.