Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the question-and-answer session. I advise you that this conference is being recorded today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If you wish to ask a question, you need to press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the pound or hash key. Please note that due to time constraints, each caller will be allowed one question. If you wish to ask further questions, please re-register by selecting star one again. The first question comes from the line of Jason Fairclough from Bank of America. Please ask a question.
Good evening, guys, and thanks so much for doing this twice. We really appreciate it here in London and probably elsewhere too. Look, just a question on marketing potash. If you decide to build Jansen solo, will you participate in Canpotex to market your product? With that, how might this answer change if you were to choose an alternative development approach?
Rag, why don't I ask you to answer that question?
No worries at all. Look, Jason, we're deeply respectful of Canpotex's capabilities, an established logistics and joint marketer. The organization has stood the test of time and continues to deliver some great value for Nutrien and Mosaic. I think it's important that we actually reflect that this isn't the norm. Most producers typically sell directly to customers via conventional regional representation offices. In regions where they do not have representation, they do it by agents. Based on our experience in terms of bulks and recognizing the norm across the industry, we believe that the best way to maximize long-term value of the Jansen asset is to control our own production and logistics, supply chain, and sales.
BHP therefore intends to replicate basically the marketing model we use in a whole bunch of other commodities and make use of our existing global network and sales office.
Next question comes from Myles Allsop from UBS. Please ask your question.
Great. Thank you. Yeah, maybe just following up from that, why do you need a partner? Obviously, from a financing perspective, six months of cash flow spot at the moment, it's not a big deal. You say you've got the expertise in mining and you're not worried about Canpotex. Would you only sell for value, a stake for value, or why would you be thinking about bringing in a partner?
Rag, one for you.
Yeah, sure. Listen, I think we need to be deeply respectful of the fact that to date, we haven't sold a ton of potash. There's a reality that, look, we fully respect that there's expertise out there, that others may be able to bring experience, local knowledge that would actually come into the mix. Something I do want to emphasize here is just that we're not adverse to bringing in a partner to Jansen. In point of fact, if you'd like to take a look across BHP, our modus operandi tends to be typically to have partners involved. If you take a look at our met coal deposit, iron ore, majority of our petroleum business, we do have partners involved. We don't need a partner to actually make this work.
For ourselves at the moment, we're focused on getting Jansen to a position where we can take it to the board. For that, we need to lock in a port solution. Look, happy to consider a partner. At this point, we don't need one to proceed, though.
Next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you. First question is sort of somewhat of a technical one, just on excess capacity. Just for full disclosure, I'm far from an expert on the market. If you look at some of the capacity numbers out there are different ways of quoting it and measuring it. There's effective utilization, and then there's nameplate utilization, which is a lot higher than what you're showing in the presentation cap. Can you just discuss the differences there and why you don't use or refer to the much higher nameplate utilization number?
Paul, do you want to take that one?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the reason we sort of had that slide that we've got back up again here to take you through how we consider capacity is exactly because of the shortcomings, I think from some of the series that you might have seen. Either you have nameplate, which I don't think in a lot of cases is reflective of how much a site is able to actually produce. You might have effective, which might be a guide of what they can produce this year, but not necessarily what they can produce in the medium term if they're being fully utilized. We've developed our own in-house model on this to understand capacities, where we look asset by asset over the last 20 years, trying to estimate what their limitations on output are.
We put those limitations in place, and then when you have years like 2020 where you know that demand was so strong, available capacity was being run very hard, that helps you to validate whether your assumptions on the limitations are accurate. It's done exactly that for us. That's why we refer to this rather than some of the external series, because we think it gives us a very good indication of what sites are available now. Sorry, what sites are able to produce now. Also we can get a good handle on what they're going to be able to produce, if any, offline or understaffed capacity is brought back in the future.
Our next question comes from Dominic O'Kane from JP Morgan. Please ask your question.
Morning. My question relates to the port options. Could you maybe just give us some insight into what the different options are for ports and the pros and the cons, and then in addition, what you're expecting in terms of domestic transportation costs?
Do you want to take the first part?
Missed that, Tristan. Were you handing that one to me?
Yes. Yep.
No worries at all. Sorry, remind me of the first part of that question? I missed it, I'm afraid.
You're looking at two different port options.
Sorry. Great. Yeah.
If you could maybe give some insight into the pros and cons.
Look, both port options that we're taking a look at are located in Vancouver, Canada. We have one facility that we're considering that is a commercial operation, that's of an already existing facility. Then another one that's a greenfield operation. Both have relative pros and cons that are quite attractive. Giles and the team, as our leader up in Canada running the project, are exploring and hopefully finalizing it up in the near term in terms of those options around that. In terms of the logistics cost on that, look, prefer not to talk about that in this call today. I think we've given a broad indication, though, in terms of the FOB cost that we're broadly expecting with the project.
If and when the project does sanction at a later date, we'll be more than willing to actually talk and give you a bit more detail at that point.
Next question comes from Sylvain Brunet from Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for the second presentation. My question is on the risk of displacement of MOP demands by cheaper new specialty fertilizer supply like SOP or polyhalite. We're not specialists in this, but clearly it would help if you could give us a sense of how real you think the risk is, or if we're talking slightly different markets, which would find their own customers, and how much of that is embedded in your 1%-3% demand CAGR you're presenting into the next decade. Thanks.
Paul, one for you.
Yeah, sure. As I said, you've got different kinds of potash. When I say primary potash, that's stuff that's directly extracted from natural resources, and then you can also have derivative products that are converted from primary potash. MOP is the most abundant and most economic source of primary potash to extract, and that's why it dominates the market, because most people, they buy potash fertilizer because they want the potassium content. That's its job, and that's what MOP is doing. Most of these other products, like potassium sulfate or polyhalite or potassium nitrate, things like this, they've all got additional characteristics, which in certain niche applications, make them more desirable. They usually trade at a premium per unit of potassium as a result.
They do stay as a niche part of the market because people need to be willing to pay that premium for those products. In terms of how we forecast, we forecast the requirement from agriculture for potassium, then we look at potential non-MOP sources for that. None of those other products are new, by the way. They've all been known of for a long time. polyhalite is the one that's most recently come to commercial production, but it's long been known as a potash mineral. At the moment, those are remaining niche, and we would expect them to do so. As we do with everything, we range things in our forecasts, and we range the amount of some other primary sources of potash that come on. Basically, our expectation is that MOP continues to be by far the largest source of potash fertilizer.
Reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Carsten Riek from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and good afternoon. I think we can all discuss for hours where demand will actually go, whether the population growth will be positive or slightly negative, looking at how the risks are forming up in Asia. One thing is actually more tangible, which is the new capacity coming, especially from Russia CIS. I was just listening to your assumptions. You're saying the lowest cost operations are at about $100 per ton. I think most of the capacity we see from Russia CIS is pretty much in that bracket or even slightly below. Could that not lead to the flattening of the cost curve quite a bit and also push out rather high cost producers ending up with a reasonably lower potash price for a rather extended period of time.
If that happens, is there a point of no return when you actually go with Jansen? When you simply say, if the decision is done, there's no way that actually can turn from that project, and we have to live with the potash prices.
Why don't I ask Paul to start and then maybe Rag wants to or Hugh may wants to chip in afterwards. Paul, do you want to start with that to answer?
Yeah, sure. In terms of projects coming on, I think pretty much all projects that are out there, they have OpEx that is below today's short-run marginal cost in the cost curve. In other words, on an OpEx basis, they would come in somewhere in the middle of the cost curve. Some of them might even be Q1 on the cost curve. That's true. They're certainly not going to be pushing up the short-run marginal cost. You'd have to take what I would say would be an extremely bearish view on future demand if you think that the capacity that's currently under construction is actually going to push out the fourth quartile volume that's currently setting the marginal cost in the industry at the moment.
You think that there's a lot more capacity to come beyond what is currently being built, which in the case of the CIS, I certainly don't think is the case. The deposit in the Urals, where Uralkali is almost entirely staked out. There's only really three future greenfield permits there, all in the hands of Uralkali, and two of those are earmarked for replacement of depleting resources. Belarus as well, I think there's going to be construction in the future just to replace depleting resources. Given our demand expectations, I don't see a point where you'd have so much very low-cost capacity coming in that it depresses the short-run marginal cost from where it is today.
If no comments from Hugh and Rag, but we might just go to the next question.
Next question comes from Oliver Kruka from Berenberg. Please ask your question.
Thank you. On Jansen, do you have any concerns over past inflation, mining methods, or your understanding of the resource?
Rag, do you want to make some comments at the start? Or maybe Giles wants to add some comments.
Look, let me start there. It'd be fair to say that as we're coming out of COVID, in particular, there's no doubt about we're starting to see some inflationary pressures across most commodities, whether it's diesel or some of the other consumables that sit out there. What I think the potash team have done a fantastic job on, though, over the last couple of years, though, has been really about focusing on optimizing the project to find even more efficiencies in terms of how we take this project and actually hold costs or even in some cases, get them to slightly decline. Now, important to understand that when this is a BHP project and the work we're doing here, we actually have a very robust system that we built off of a lot of history in terms of projects across iron ore.
In point of fact, we've just completed our South Flank project on time, on budget, our Spence growth option project in Chile on time, on budget. Using that same project methodology, we're actually quite confident in terms of the cost estimates we put in place, the escalation and the elements that sit behind that. Giles, I might hand over to you if there's anything further you'd like to add to that.
Good morning, Giles Kelly from Canada. I think it's fair to say that the positioning of Jansen in Saskatchewan and being close to Alberta would see us having less inflationary pressures on labor in the short term. We're getting all the indications that we won't see anything more than CPI going forward. I think, as Rag said, there's been a lot of attention to detail around certainly looking at the estimates. I know we've had questions around steel, for example, and pricing recently having gone up. Our exposure is quite low. We have, for example, in that particular commodity, we're into roughly all of the supplied and fabricated steel is around about, say, Rag, it's like $350 million. Our exposure on that in, say, tubular steel is probably around about 30% of that.
The exposure levels on some of those key commodities there is relatively low. Of course, as Ragnar Udd said, we've done a lot to de-risk the project already. We put quite a bit of infrastructure into the ground with the shafts. I think a lot of optimization has definitely taken place. I would also just clarify, understanding resource, which was the second part of the question, such an extensive commitment around three-dimensional seismic across the entire property, supported by BHP controlling knowledge of underground structures. We have a very, very good idea of what we're dealing with resource-wise, and we build a mine plan that is capable of going out to the entire life of the mine from day one. Very well positioned in terms of starting like nobody else would possibly have had in the last series of constructions, which were 50 years ago.
Thanks, guys.
Next question comes from Jason Fairclough from Bank of America. Please ask your question.
Thanks, guys. Just to follow up. Really interesting, your comments on the long run marginal project being the Canadian solution mines. I'm just wondering, how should we think about the timeline for capital allocation to these mines? For you, is it after Jansen's producing at 16 million tons a year?
Paul, do you want to do that one?
The easy answer is we don't know, because we don't know when Jansen's going to be producing at 50 million tons a year. The stage one decision on Jansen is completely distinct from subsequent decisions to expand, which will be made based on how the market evolves. In terms of timing, so what we showed there were the projects that are currently under ramp up or under construction. I think beyond that, there's a certain amount of brownfield that we factor in and some particularly low-cost greenfield projects that might come in. There's not a huge amount of volume in those two buckets.
It's after that that we see this big resource in Saskatchewan becoming not the only source of long-term supply, but the one that's really got the big scale of resource to sort of keep adding to or keep meeting incremental demand volumes sort of decade after decade. Yeah, there is certainly potential for Jansen to expand alongside other projects in Canada coming in.
Paul, I wouldn't mind just building on that because I think it's a really important point here for folks taking a look at the decision that BHP will be taking on, is we're talking about just over 4 million tons of potash coming in around 2027 and obviously ramping up throughout that period. That's into this market of sort of 70 or 80 million tons. That's the sort of scale we're talking about here. Yes, Jansen has got some fantastic optionality to it in terms of the size of the shafts that we've built actually enable stages two, three and four behind it. Please understand, as an organization, we will take decisions on stages two, three and four at an appropriate time when the demand basically calls out for it and we're prepared to sanction and compete for capital like any other project in BHP. Thanks, Tristan.
Next question comes from Myles Allsop from UBS. Please ask your question.
Yeah, maybe again, just following up slightly on Jason's question first, and then there's another question. What would the incentive price be for stage two, three and four for Jansen? I presume that would be back in the 200s. Secondly, just in terms of the potash content in soil, do you think are we at levels now which are below what is the long-term kind of sustainable level? You think there is a deficit as we look at soil quality around the world today? Do you still think that there is an excess versus that kind of sustainable level?
Myles, notice the cheeky two questions in one there. Why don't we get Hugh to start? Choose your one you want to start with, Hugh.
Okay. Thanks, Tristan, and thanks, Myles. I'll take the one about soil quality. On the chart where we talk about demand expectations for the 2020s, one of the metrics you'll see on that slide for each of the major regions is the FAO's latest assessment of the degree of nutrient imbalance in those major regions. You will see that the positioning is not good. The word poor appears essentially everywhere, and some of them have a comma and then the word deteriorating. We're well below where we could comfortably be in those major regions. This is the uncertainty. We know that it's a problem. We know we're sleepwalking towards something, but we just can't really time it. That's why we range a lot of different scenarios where sometimes things adjust steadily and smoothly, and sometimes the disruption is stuck.
We have to look at all of those things within our ranges. That's one of the ways we think about the skew of risks around our central case.
Right. Myles, I think that the first part of your question, unless Rag has anything to add, I think we'll probably pass on that one. Probably hand over to the next question.
Look, let's be a bit more overt on that.
Yeah.
The reality is that any decision in terms of those next couple of stages is at least 5+ years out. What we're talking about today really is Jansen stage one. Let's stay focused on that, if we could.
Next question comes from Sylvain Brunet from Exane BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Thank you. My question is a back-testing question, if I may. The last time BHP took a public view on potash was August 2010, at the time of the bid on PotashCorp. Curious to know what the surprise is, positive and negative, have been to your forecast back then over the past decade, please. Thanks.
Sylvain, not the best line, but I think it was what was our supply-demand views in 2010. Hugh, over to you.
Okay. It's quite an echo there. I think it's being tamed. Yeah. In terms of what we were saying 10 years ago, I can speak with more force to what's happened over the last five years because I've been on the inside of the process. Our forecasts have been quite stable over that period. We've been very clear about identifying that one particular bench that we've been discussing at length today, that solution mining bench, which is really the best candidate to be the consistent source of greenfield at scale once we get to structural market balance. If you think about the short term, I think we've also been very consistent saying, well, this market's probably going to get worse before it gets better.
Because if you think about where we were in the middle of the 2010s, this is where the supply catch-up to the huge price signal around the time of the super cycle was starting to come through at a time when demand was having one of its off years. We really did get slammed down very hard to short-run marginal cost through that period. It was a tough period for the industry, in the second half of the 2020s. Over that period of time, we didn't lose sight of the deep fundamental drivers in this market. We didn't lose sight of identifying that long-run bench. Those two points have been very consistent throughout my experience of BHP thinking about this market.
Thanks, Hugh. I think we've just got time for one more question. Take one more question and we'll move over to Rag.
Our final question comes from Carsten Riek from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Just on the crop yield differences, especially India versus U.S., as you mentioned it, do you know how much of that is technology driven rather than a function of soil quality? Means the availability of machinery such as combines to harvest the crops more effectively?
Paul?
Quantifying exactly how much each factor is contributing to yields in different countries is extremely difficult because there's so many contributing factors and they change, never mind country to country or state to state, but field to field and from crop to crop. There's certainly, obviously, a huge scope for increasing the amount of technology used in agriculture in India. As we've said, we think that that's actually a positive because one of the things we think in India, and it's partly driven by the subsidy system that sort of skews retail prices. Higher retail prices for phosphate and potash, lower retail prices for nitrogen. Very high nitrogen to potash use ratios in India. I don't know that technology doesn't just sort of buy you free yield. It's about what can it do for your yield.
One of the things it can do is help you identify where you need potassium, where potassium is under applied, and work to more of a nutrient budget approach rather than just applying some and seeing whether you get your yields or not. Certainly over the last sort of decade, it was 10 years ago, India overhauled its subsidy system. Potash retail prices kind of trebled overnight, as did phosphate retail prices. If you look at yield growth of different crops in India over the last decade, it hasn't fallen off a cliff, but it was already at a low base. The rate at which it's been growing seems to have slowed down. I definitely think that the setback in consumption of phosphate and potash fertilizers has played a role in that.
Well, look, thank you. Thanks, Paul. Thanks everyone else for joining us for the Q&A. Before we finish, we thought that some closing remarks from Rag on Jansen would be warranted. Over to you, Rag.
Thanks, Tristan. A big thank you for joining us today and for your questions. As Tristan said earlier, we've got a really big decision ahead of us on Jansen. That said, a number of investors had asked us for a deep dive into our views on potash ahead of any decision, and that is really the primary purpose of today's briefing. Our decision at Jansen depends on more than the fundamentals for potash. We're still working through the final steps to get a decision, as I mentioned earlier, particularly finalizing the port. Before we close, though, I'd like to give you some of my personal reflections on the project.
As you'd expect, the starting point for any portfolio decision is its fit with our strategy to create long-term value and returns. That's built on three aspects. Firstly, growing our exposure to highly attractive commodities with world-class assets and BHP operational excellence. If I was to touch briefly on each of those three components. First, on commodity, I don't know that we could do more to impress on you just how evident from you and Paul, the depth of our understanding of the potash market. In case you missed it, we actually think that the potash market has some very, very attractive fundamentals. Second, we see world-class assets, large, long-life, upstream, high-margin, and expandable as a key focus for us. Jansen has this potential through a great resource. It also provides us with attractive diversification as a commodity.
Byproducts, it's a huge diversification by customers and also by operational location. Finally, in terms of operational excellence, I really believe that we have the capabilities to operate and expand Jansen in a way that would confer a number of significant competitive advantages. We accept that potash mining is new to BHP, but we do have world-class capabilities in bulk mining and have a long history of marketing high-quality commodities in global markets. We would apply the latest technologies, be that in 3D seismic, advanced material handling capability, or automation. We would also bring the BHP culture of safety, simplicity, and operational excellence. This includes, and really importantly includes, our approach to social value on key topics such as cultural heritage, water stewardship, and emissions.
If I was to reflect back on Jansen and sort of the last decade, we've been very open that we're not happy with the amount of capital that we've already sunk here. If we were to have our time again, we would have gone about doing things differently. That said, we are where we are, and our decision needs to be about how best to apply the next shareholder dollar. All investments in BHP need to compete for capital against the other options in our portfolio and against cash returns to shareholders. In making our assessment, we are always going to take into account a number of metrics, not just IRR. We will also consider NPV, payback, margin, and various risk metrics. In addition to that, you'll also be familiar with that in BHP, we don't tend to make assessments on solely single point outcomes.
We tend to work in ranges. Now lastly, we are finalizing the assessment concurrently with locking in our port option, and we'll then sit with our board to determine whether to now pull the trigger on the first phase of Jansen. We continue to expect that this will occur in the next few months. Thanks so much for joining us this evening or this morning, depending where you are in the world, and that represents the end of our briefing.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your interest. You may all disconnect.