Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to Vale Day 2021. I'm Ivan Fadel, Head of Investor Relations here at Vale. First of all, I'd like to thank you all very much for being here with us today. I think we're still transitioning to this in-person meetings, so it really means a lot to have you all here with us. I'd also like to thank our live audience online for your time and interest in our company today. The idea here, we have the top management team of Vale to have a slide presentation. We're gonna talk about the main deliveries and main milestones for the last 12 months.
We're gonna also update you on our strategy, how we're looking into the future, how we're positioning ourselves in this decarbonization world, and we're also gonna make some announcements, so stay tuned for that. The presentation should take about 1 hour and 15 minutes, 1 hour and 30 minutes. After that, we're gonna have a Q&A session. It should take also about 30 minutes to 45 minutes. We're gonna take questions from everyone here present. We're also gonna be capturing questions from our live audience on the webcast. For that, you're gonna see an email address on the screen. You can send your question to that email, and we're gonna read them out loud here. Without further ado, I would like to invite Mr. Eduardo Bartolomeo, our CEO. Hope you enjoy this event. Eduardo, please, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Ivan. Good morning, everyone. It's very nice to be here in person, right? Actually, it's my first presentation in person since 2020. The only negative side that we cannot do in Bermudas. That is now 2020 because of the pandemic. Anyhow, I think I would like to reinforce the acknowledgement that Ivan said about being here today. Thanks a lot for making the effort to come here to talk to us and for the audience as well that are listening to our story will be here. Today I'm gonna quickly pass a little bit over what we're gonna try to convey and tell you how we are advancing on our strategy and actions. I remember.
Of course, you do remember our five strategic pillars. They are things that were embedded, two of them embedded after Brumadinho. The first two ones, the safety and operational excellence, and what we call the new pact to society. They are the drivers to an ambition that Vale has to be a safer, a more reliable, a more human-driven, talent-driven organization, a sustainable miner, and obviously a creator and a sharing value with the shareholders or with the society as well. Those ambitions in the, in the end, I think what is the main line around what we're talking here today. We believe that the homework that Vale has been undergoing since Brumadinho, it's I would say, because it's hard to say it's a continuous process, but obviously it's almost completed.
In the other hand, you're gonna see there is something in the very short term that we understand that it's the biggest value on our story, on an equity story, is that obviously world has the biggest challenge. Everybody knows it's climate change. It's been recently very exposed by COP26. We want to be as a miner and as a specific company, not only necessary, but wanted to the world because we're essential to that. Specifically, when you look at Vale assets, you're gonna see that we are extremely well exposed to both iron ore and base metals. The baseline is this. We're gonna talk a little bit around the homework. The first two pillars are a lot about what we're doing inside Vale to transform Vale.
The last three pillars are around how this getting from this homework done to capture the opportunities that our assets have in this new world. This first part I'm gonna do together with Carlos. Carlos Medeiros is our Executive Officer for Operational Excellence. Of course, and this is obvious for us, we will never forget Brumadinho. Brumadinho, as you know, has been the driving force in everything that we are undergoing inside Vale. All those behaviors that we need to change, all the things that we need to do is driven from a process of learning that was derived from this. It's a lot of listening because you have to engage with communities that are affected. In this case, it's a tapestry. I always say it's tapestry. It's tapestry.
It's a very nice piece of work done by the affected people, a widow of one of the victims, and it has been exposed in Inhotim. Inhotim is an open-air museum in Brazil. Very, very nice. It's true, a process of, as I mentioned before, of learning and acting, but fundamentally engaging to respond to the demands of the community. As you also know, in February 2020, we've struck a deal, an agreement with the local authorities in Minas Gerais, with the affected people, with the prosecutors of BRL 37.7 billion. Of course it brought legal certainty, it brought governance, and it brought ability to execute. To show you some concrete actions, because as I mentioned in the beginning, we want to show you concrete actions that we are taking in that direction.
I would like to show a small video of what is being done in Brumadinho.
In February 2021, Vale, public authorities, and justice institutions established an agreement for integral reparation in Brumadinho. This agreement is under execution, underscoring our commitment to socioeconomic and environmental reparations. The following is a highlight of our latest developments. We continue dedicated to expediting indemnity agreements. Almost 12,000 people are already covered by individual agreements. To secure water, we've completed a new 11 km pipeline and a water collection system at the Paraopeba River, which continues under round-the-clock surveillance. In the urban infrastructure, we've delivered social impact facilities, such as daycare centers and family health units. We've expanded access to healthcare and prepared professionals with training. In addition, over 5,500 pieces of equipment were donated, and 143 basic health units were assisted. In the social and economic aspect, we have supported projects to foster and diversify the local economy.
Together with the Yara Tupinambá Institute , we've trained members of the local communities with professional courses in civil construction and gardening. The students were able to apply the knowledge and skills in more than 230 homes and gardens. We remain committed to repairing Brumadinho with transparency and speed. Everything we have learned since the B1 dam breach has helped us advance toward a better Vale.
As you can see, a lot of things has been done. 55% of the total payments that we're supposed to do, and Gustavo will come later on the disbursement profile of that, has been done. As I mentioned, with legal certainty, with execution, more important, with governance. Because when you see the projects that we are listing here are things that you have to execute, you have to listen to society. That, by the way, was for us maybe the biggest wake-up call to move to transform our culture, is the active way of listening, understanding what are your areas of improvement. Of course, I won't go through the right side of the slide because that was mentioned in the video. I would like to jump to an important thing that is undergoing inside Vale.
It's that we need to transform our culture, but of course, that culture is transformed by the people that are inside Vale. These people putting people at the center, as we mentioned before in Brumadinho, putting people at the center as we do inside the company, is critical. We chose a path. I'm gonna share in a minute what are the key behaviors that we want to change. We actively engage our managers on that. 80% of our managers are actively activated on that. Of course, we have 99% critical rules of success are mapped, so human resource or people is a key element for that. Interestingly, we started to, because of this, and we said in one of those our Vale Day presentations, we need to double our gender diversity. We had 13%.
Mining normally is a man's world. Of course, as everybody knows, a diverse, inclusive company performs much better than a non-diverse, inclusive company. This is another very important point I want to make here. This is concrete. This is not something I'm talking about. Since 2019, we increased our workforce by 39% female workforce. We added 4,450 women in our workforce, and we have 80% increase in senior leadership roles. Actually, Malu was supposed to be here. I even doubled my VPs. We now have my human resource and my sustainability as leadership in females. There is a second diversity issue, more focused in Brazil that I think is being brought to our attention and has a huge impact as well in diversity, is ethnicity.
We just made a census in Brazil specifically, around what is self-declaratory, of course. You ask people what color they are. We are 65% non-white in Brazil. What that implies here when we have this goal that I'm gonna mention next. We only have 29% of our leadership roles from supervisors as Blacks. There's an imbalance that's not acceptable. It demonstrates a structural racism problem. We have this goal as well to increase our leadership roles for 40% by 2026. It is not enough to be not racist. Last week or week before, we just launched a manifesto of anti-racism because it's very, very important.
We are in a country, as the U.S. has the same issues, and we have to target very clearly, very openly. As I mentioned before, will bring to us a much better, a much more inclusive, a much better performance company to achieve those ambitions that I mentioned before. Culture is something hard to manage. Everybody asks, "Are you transforming culture? How do you measure that? How it's." We have a tool, it's called EchoPulse. It's standards. It's a more or less standard in the oil industry. We do surveys, of course. Under the five, I myself answered the survey. You see the five behaviors that we have that we believe that will change the company.
There are obsession with safety, active listening and engaging, as I mentioned already, ownership, empowerment. That's very important. People feel empowered to do what they need to do, and open and transparent dialogue. When you look at the graphs, I'm not gonna bother you with the graphs, but you see that we have a huge perception in Vale today with obsession with safety, because of the obvious reasons. People believe that we are actually truly. When you look at the other behaviors, actually, the lowest here is the empowerment. The active engagement with society is the lowest, or should be the one that we should try more. What I'm trying to say here is that we have gaps still. Yeah, that's why I said the homework is being done. Of course, it's a continuous homework. It will never end.
Anyhow, our leadership is truly committed to make it happen, because if we don't change the culture, we will never get to the results we want, even if we have the better assets in the world. Just to conclude, and as a good engineer, although maybe too long ago, we believe in a very simple equation that I'll try to share with you, and then Carlos is gonna help me with that. If you have the right people, if you have the right people with the right behavior, if you have the right process, you will have the right results. Results is not defined as just financial results. Of course, in this room here, financial results makes a little bit more logic. Financial results is a consequence.
When we talk results, we're talking about safety, we're talking about predictability, we talk about even how society perceives you. We believe that our management model is something that was lacking inside Vale, that some of you might have known or heard about is the VPS, is a Vale Production System. It's all around ABS, like Aloa has or Toyota. It's a structure, it's an architecture, but we call it VPS. It's culture put in action. We will show you how this thing together will improve our performance. I'll invite now Carlos to share his views because he's the owner of the ball in this case, and then I'll come back to talk about the social part.
Good morning to you all. I'm here to provide an update on our operational excellence and safety performance. Hopefully, I'll try to make it clear how it ties up to the cultural transformation that we are going through. We have been in this journey for 2.5 years. Vale is implementing its integrated management system, or as we call it, VPS. This is a system based on operational excellence or lean manufacturing, like Eduardo described. You know, a system that defines how we do things. We truly believe that our people, with the right processes and the right culture, they'll be capable to deliver consistent and positive results. The examples we brought here today, they corroborate our thinking.
As you look in this chart, our VPS maturity index goes up, you know, the safety as well as the maintenance performance improve. Consequently, the overall production performance also improves. We picked here three examples. One of our mining complex, one from our railways, and one of our ports. They describe pretty well how operational discipline can leverage performance. This is very much what has been going on at Vale. We truly believe that the VPS or our management system is a reflection of our culture put into practice. Specifically talking about our safety performance, you know, you can see on your left-hand side, this graph number one shows the N2s evolution. N2s are events that are precursors to significant injuries and fatalities. Our objective is to zero the N2s by 2025.
On the right-hand side, you can see the total recordable injury frequency rate or TRIF. The top graph shows the TRIF progress through time, while the bottom one shows the ICMM 2020 benchmark. Here, the N2 is a leading indicator, while the TRIF is a lagging indicator, and we are making progress on both. We're also making good progress on occupational exposure. Since we're reducing our workforce exposure to agents such as noise, heat, dust, and chemical, hazardous materials. Vale also has a very thorough methodology for operational risk identification. This is called HIRA, Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment. The first HIRA cycle encompassing all Vale sites was concluded during 2021. The second cycle will start next year. During this process, risks are mapped. Controls and mitigation plans are identified through a bow-tie diagram and then registered.
On the right-hand side, you can see tangible examples of risks that have been either eliminated or minimized. I'll highlight one in Canada at Port Colborne, where the chlorine gas was replaced by bleach, therefore eliminating the risk entirely. Another one at Mozambique, where the ammonium nitrate inventory was significantly reduced and then also reorganized, then the risk was minimized. When we talk about dams have always been a major point of concern. So far, Vale has decharacterized seven dams, and one of them was announced today in the press, a dike at the Pontão Dam that was decharacterized. There are 23 more to go. Decharacterizing an upstream dam is a very complex and slow process. This is why we had to review our decharacterization schedule, and now it shows completion by 2035.
It's important to reiterate that the intrinsic risks associated to an upstream dam will be significantly reduced before the decharacterization is completed, therefore minimizing the risk to our neighboring communities and to the environment. You will now watch a video showing our Decharacterization Program.
Vale reaffirms its commitment to society and continues to make progress with the Upstream Dam Decharacterization Program, operating within the strictest monitoring and international management practices. Overall, 30 upstream structures, including dams, dikes, and drain stacks, will be decharacterized. Seven structures have been eliminated since 2019. In 2021, we concluded the decharacterization works of the Fernandinho Dam at the Vargem Grande Complex. We also completed the decharacterization of Dike 5 in the Pontão Dam, and we will conclude by the end of this year the reinforcement of Dike 4 for subsequent elimination. We have also finalized the downstream containment structures that reinforce the safety of all of Vale's dams at critical emergency level. In 2021, we completed the containment structure that supports the Forquilhas 1, 2, 3, 4 and Grupo dams of the Fábrica mine.
We have begun the tailings removal from the Sul Superior and B3, B4 dams, an essential step towards their elimination. To increase safety throughout these works and reduce human exposure to risks, we've utilized unmanned remote controlled equipment. We've enhanced our dam safety management up to the best international standards with revised governance and multiple layers of defense and risk management. These actions support our commitment to people, communities, and the environment. To learn more, visit vale.com/esg.
When we talk about emergency levels, Vale looks at these structures with a precautionary and a risk-informed approach. We have a very strong governance in place that allows us to treat any discrepancies in a conservative and qualified way. Currently, there are 31 structures at different emergency levels. As you can see, by 2025, that is a significant improvement given all the work that's going on. Now, in order to ensure that everybody's understanding is on the same page, I'm going to walk you through, you know, the difference between emergency levels 1, 2, and 3. At emergency level 1, it means that we are talking about anomalies that require information, attention, or simply monitoring. At emergency level 2, we refer to anomalies that require treatment, but these treatments have not been concluded yet.
At emergency level 3, there is a higher liquefaction risks. However, for all these structures, they have these backup dams, as you saw in the video, that allow us to carry on with the decharacterization work. The main point here is that by 2025, we will not have any structure at emergency level 3, which means the most critical safety condition. As you are well aware, the ICMM jointly with the PRI and the UNEP, they have jointly launched the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management or GISTM, as we refer to it.
There is an industry's commitment that by August 2023, all the structures with extreme or very high potential consequences will be compliant to these standards and the remaining ones by August 2025. Since Vale has been working on its tailings management system for a while, we have recently run a self-assessment that indicated that we are 60% compliant with the GISTM. In February next year, we'll carry out an external assessment that will help us identify the gaps that we will still have. The plan is that by the end of next year, we'll be at least 90% compliant to the GISTM. This makes us feel confident that Vale will be able to comply with the industry's deadline. As you could note through all these slides, there have been important progress on operational excellence through our VPS.
Our safety performance is improving. We have a very strong methodology for identifying the operational risks and our decharacterization program is moving forward according to plan. Therefore, we can say that Vale is gradually becoming a safer and more reliable company. Thank you. I'll hand over back to you, Eduardo.
Thank you, Carlos. Okay, let's move to the second chapter of our soft issues, but I think they're not that soft. Myself and Luciano will do that together. It's the new pact with society that, as I mentioned before, was done when I arrived. What does that mean? We want to impact society beyond paying taxes, beyond social projects, and we have been doing that. I'll quickly run over those achievements because Luciano's gonna come back on the environmental side. We were one of the first miners that came with a very strict and strong. We changed our 2030 agenda on Scope 1 and Scope 2. We gave facts and concrete actions around that.
We announced a high amount of investments that are done positively impacting our business as well. We see, by the way, it is in the storyline how we see climate change. We see it as an opportunity, not a threat. In the end, we are moving towards more reporting, more transparency. We just launched the TCFD and ISO 14001 certification. On the social side, that is where we want to spend a little bit more time today because we have some announcements to do on that. We have already 300 community plans under execution. This year we launched a very important human rights due diligence program. We standardized our human rights due diligence program, and we, as mentioned already, increased a lot our female contribution.
I'm gonna come back to the social ambition. I think that's very important if we want to be desired, not needed by society. Then governance. You already know that in April 2021, from the finishing of our shareholders' agreement, we turn into a true corporation with an independent board, with the majority of our board independent. Our chairman also elected by the General Assembly as an independent member. We have the Nomination Committee, the Chief Compliance Officer, the Audit Committee. There are a lot of changes that were done inside the governance. Finally, our ESG gaps. The math 64, 51. Anyhow, we closed a lot of the gaps that we mapped. Still missing 12. One I think is gonna be end of this year, and it's gonna be leaving 11. Gustavo is gonna mention about that.
By the way, we were the first ones to link all these elements of ESG to compensation. First miner to link that. We did that, I think, in Vale Day 2019. We want to talk about social because I think on the environmental, social and governance, there is still a gap to be covered. By the way, Malu is our Vice President for sustainability. She was supposed to be here, but she was unable to come. Anyhow, let me just recap because the social agenda didn't start today with Vale. Let's just recap about what we have been doing so far, and I'll explain a little bit later what our ambition is. Can I show the video, please?
In 2021, Vale has strengthened its new pact with society. Together, we have intensified our social agenda to contribute to the development of resilient communities committed to sustainable mining. In a year still marked by the pandemic, Vale's actions to tackle COVID-19 continue. We have made donations in the countries where we operate. In attention to the increasing number of people in a situation of severe food insecurity due to the pandemic, Vale has promoted a campaign to tackle hunger through partnerships. By the end of the year, we will have delivered 1 million food parcels to support Brazilian families. Contributing to the construction of stories of social transformation, Vale Foundation has developed projects such as quality literacy programs for over 70,000 children in Maranhão, and the strengthening of public basic healthcare benefiting more than 1.5 million inhabitants in areas where we operate.
As part of our effort to value our culture, we'll conclude 2021, with over BRL 150 million invested in art and cultural projects, such as the restoration of the National Museum of Brazil after being destroyed by fire. In order to strengthen our social agenda, we set out today our ambition to be a partner company in the development of resilient communities, engaged in relevant issues to humanity, and committed to sustainable mining. Vale believes that together we can transform lives and improve the future.
Well, as you can see in the video there, I think there's one thing that we are very proud of is the food support that we gave in Brazil, 1 million food baskets. Everybody knows that pandemic brought extreme poverty to a new level. Brazil was really impacted by that. Even I've heard I was here last week in the U.S. as well, the U.S. has done that. Another issue that I forgot to mention that we are very proud of, we have 80% of our working force already vaccinated, double vaccinated, so that's extremely important. We say vaccination, yes, in Brazil, although a lot of problems we have, this is the problem that we don't have. That's a good thing, and we're doing very well.
Although a little bit delayed, we went through the pandemic, and we're in a good shape. Of course, always with the guards up because of the obvious reasons that we are seeing today. What you saw in the video, how we redefine our social ambition? First of all, we want to be this partner company in the develop of resilient communities. Well, I just want to give a step back here how we did that. I mentioned Malu. Malu was hired. We didn't come up with something that we said, "Oh, it's nice, looks nice, and that's what people think is nice." No, we went and talked to everyone, talked to NGOs, talked to ourselves, talked to our leaders, talked to institutions, to shareholders as well, and we understood that those are fundamental issues that we have to tackle.
First of all, we have to help the resilience of the communities. What does that mean? They have to be autonomous. We don't choose to go to a place. Mining is a given. Mining is not an option. You have to create value there when you're there, and when you leave there, because you're gonna leave one day. Second, because of the size of our company, because of the span that we have, we operate in over 30 countries, we have to be engaged with relevant issues to humanity. I'm gonna come to them in a minute. Of course, we have to be committed to sustainable mining. The first thing, what's resilient communities? It's income generation, it's health, and it's education. You don't take people out of poverty if you don't do these three things. Second, global causes.
Human rights, we chose to start. There are several others, dimensions in human rights, but of course, indigenous relationship is important to us, not only because of Brazil, but Canada. We work on the Arctic with the Inuit needs. The relationship with indigenous people is key, and we can help that a lot. Of course, as a global cause, Amazon forest, we are there present, mining there for more than four years. We, by being a reference, and I think we can extend that. Being a sustainable miner, we have to be a good neighbor. We have to do no harm. We have to be sure that we are affecting positively the communities that we are in, and of course, creating social value, as I mentioned before.
As we did in 2019 when we came with the goals for the environmental side, we came with those three goals, and we'd like to share with you because they are bold, and they'll take the commitment of our leadership, and as a shareholder, you should be acquainted with. First of all, we want to lift 500,000 people out of extreme poverty. Just to have an understanding, in our areas of influence, we have 1.9 million people. The reference for extreme poverty is $1.90 something cents per day per capita in a unit of a family unit. So it's not acceptable to have that. We're gonna have a plan to do. It's until 2030. Of course, and I forgot I mentioned in the beginning, but I want to reinforce that.
It's not Vale that's gonna do. It's Vale with the communities, Vale with societies, Vale with other companies. It's Vale use its power with suppliers. It's Vale bringing to the local communities growth. Indigenous people, we want to develop right plans or development plans with them under UNDRIP, which is United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. There we have 13 communities, 13 indigenous communities there are around our operations, and we are developing a plan with them to demonstrate their rights and to ask them what they really need and want. In Canada, it's obvious it's different than from Brazil, but we have to create and to reinforce their well-being. Lastly is a goal that is an end and beginning goal.
On the social side, when we are mapped by Sustainalytics, MSSI, and Dow Jones, we want to be in the top three when you look at the social elements of that. You might even say, "Well, this is an auto..." How can you say that? "It's an auto-reflection goal." No, it's a matter that if we're doing the right things, if we're doing the requirements that are needed to be there, we will be achieving our social goals. We'll be accredited because it's very important not to say that I'm beautiful. Somebody has to say to you that you're doing the right thing. I think that's the main issue around those three goals. Now I wanna make a transition, as I mentioned it to you in the beginning. This looks a lot about the soft issues.
Somebody asked me yesterday, "Do you think ESG is important? It's critical." First of all, we don't do greenwashing. What we come here and talk to you, we do it. We put money where we are, we execute, and we give transparency. The things that when we take 10 in environment, ten in social, 10 in governance, will allow us to be a company that will deliver the results. Now I want to make the transition to the future, and I will ask my new VP that is known from you as the ex-CFO, it's Luciano Siani, that will show you how we're gonna move this company. A lot of opportunities that people even in iron ore are not grasping because when you talk about transition, the new world is copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium and iron ore is there.
I'm spoiling your presentation.
These social goals are a nice last brick in the ESG construct of Vale. I will remind you of the first announcements of targets that we made two years ago in this same room of the environmental goals as a starting point. You see those six goals on the left-hand side. You may say, well, Scope 1 and 2 emissions, net zero, reduce Scope 3. This is the standard in the industry. Everyone talks about it. On the right-hand side of the goals, we have some that play to our strengths. Renewable electricity, forests, for example. You have a nice progress in the case of forest protection. About 120,000 hectares of forest, like we signed agreements in order to protect beyond the 1 million hectares that we already do. Here it's all about execution.
Focusing on Scope 1 and 2, this is just a reminder of what the profile of emissions in the middle, in the donut in the middle, shows you, which is no different from other mining companies. Most of our emissions come from the furnaces that we have, the pelletizing and metallurgy furnaces. You see the rest of the profile. We're very focused on this. The question here, as this has become a baseline for the industry, everyone has to achieve that is how credible it is that we are going to achieve our targets in 2030 and then in 2050. The message for you is we have an abatement curve for Scope 1 and 2. We have a technology roadmap. We have an internal price for carbon, and we have capital allocated to that.
We have the proper governance, a very senior forum with the Executive Vice Presidents managing the process. As a result of that, there's a lot of stuff already going and the next video will show you examples of that.
Vale will invest up to $6 billion to cut 33% of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030. From mine to port, let's take a look at some of our actions. Starting by our energy matrix. We're investing in renewable energy initiatives such as the Sol do Cerrado solar energy project and the Folha Larga Sul wind power project. Our renewable energy projects will power the operations in our mines. In iron ore, we'll expand the use of conveyor belts. We're also increasing the adoption of self-driving vehicles with improved energy efficiency. In our Canadian operations, we'll have more than 40 electric trucks by the end of 2021. Pelletizing and metallurgy are a massive challenge, accounting for 57% of Vale's emissions. Pilot projects are already underway to replace coal and other fossil fuels in the furnaces with bio-oils and biocarbon.
Renewable energy will also be present on our railroads. On the Vitória Minas railway, we're piloting a 100% battery-powered switch yard locomotive. At our ports, we're investing in efficiency with cost reduction. One of the country's largest battery energy storage systems will operate at the Ilha Guaíba port terminal. From mine to port, we have a clear ongoing plan to support our transition to a low carbon economy.
Scope 1 and 2, it's all about execution and being credible in delivering the targets. Now Scope 3 is a completely different game. Scope 3 is about opportunity. You are all probably looking at the mining companies and thinking, well, what are the mining companies which are most exposed to the theme of decarbonization? You think, well, these are the mining companies that have cobalt, that have nickel, that have lithium, that have copper. You look at the Vale portfolio, and you may think, well, Vale has 85% of its revenues and profits generated by iron ore. Please do not miss the fact that electrification isn't the only theme of the low carbon economy. The other theme is reducing emissions in the manufacturing of things. Steel making is almost 10% of worldwide CO₂ emissions.
It is an industry that will go through a dramatic revolution in order for humanity to succeed in fighting climate change. We're gonna show you that we are the best positioned to create new markets, new opportunities, and to create value by playing into the decarbonization of the steel industry. Let me show you some things here. Left-hand side talks about iron ore. Right-hand side, I'll make comments about nickel and copper. Vale has the highest Fe content on average of any portfolio of iron ore products compared to our peers.
This, you know. What you may not be well familiar with is that the more the world transitions into, for example, hydrogen-based steelmaking, and it will need to go towards that direction through stages, maybe first with direct reduction, natural gas, that kind of stuff, the more high quality iron ore will be important and it will be valued. This is gonna be a key differentiation in the future. See in the bottom how the market share that we have in the segments that will dominate this decarbonization trend, how dominant we are in comparison with our peers. You see the green portion of Vale market share, leaders in the high quality segment. We'll talk more about that.
On the right-hand side, now talking about the traditional metals that we need to offer to help the world electrify, this is a curve of CO₂ emissions of Class 1 nickel. What's the point here? Many people are saying, "Well, the Chinese will crack the code and will produce Class 1 from nickel pig iron, for example." They are exploring some routes towards that direction. Most of those routes are also carbon intensive, so it defeats the purpose, right? You wanna electrify the world and produce Class 1 nickel through routes that emit CO₂. The Vale Class 1 nickel is by far the lowest carbon intensity in the world. For example, thanks to hydrometallurgy processes in Long Harbour. The footprint here for those who are going to seek to source low-carbon nickel, we're gonna be winners.
In both of our key businesses, we have great opportunities tied to the decarbonization of the economy. I'll invite Marcello Spinelli now to start introducing you to how we're gonna play this future world.
Thank you. Thank you, Luciano. It's a pleasure to be here again, now in person meeting. I'm really happy to be here. Well, I'll drive through one of Vale's strategic pillar that is called maximize flight to quality in iron ore. My presentation has three chapters. First one, new way to operate. I'll bring some updates about our resumption plan, the way we are reducing the necessity of dams, and also improving the quality. Second chapter, as Luciano said, why Vale is a supplier of choice for this new green world in the steel mill industry. Finally, the third chapter is about all this together, how can we enhance our competitiveness? Let's move forward to new way to operate. Well, we've been sharing our actions to reduce the use of dams.
Today we have an exposure of 70% and, you know that some years ago we started a blending strategy. We bring Carajás fines from the north of Brazil and the low grade ores from the south of Brazil. We blend in China. We form the BRBF. BRBF today is a half of our sales. It's a very successful strategy. As we do this, we don't need to use water to concentrate in the south. That was the first strategy. We can produce it in a dry processing method. We are saying that we are moving to 85% in this journey. How are we gonna do this? Five actions. First one, improve the capacity in the north. We need to go to 240 million tons of capacity.
We have the roadmap. In the north, it's specific. We have one plant that use water. That's the plant one in North Range, and we need to convert to a dry process. We're gonna do this in a few month. Second action, the main volumes that are coming from the brownfields, the greenfields that are coming in the south are coming in the dry processing method. As an example, we have Capanema. Third action, filtration. You're gonna see some more updates about this. Using the water to concentrate, we're extracting the water to dry stack the tailings and we don't need also the dams. Fourth action, dry concentration. It's a new technology. It's going really well. We have under construction.
I'll give some more colors about that. Finally, we have here, it's a new thing here. It's co-products. Again, it's a very nice initiative that we also have. You're gonna hear about this a lot in the few months, and I'll give more details. Moving to the filtration. I wanna check the box here. We've been promising this for some month now. We are delivering. I wanna show a video now that can see the progress.
In March 2021, Vale took a meaningful step towards a safer and more sustainable mining operation, the beginning of the activities of the tailings filtration plant at the Vargem Grande complex in Minas Gerais. Two other plants at the Itabira complex and one other in Brucutu will start up operations in the following months. The filtering of tailings reduces the need of dams use and consists in using vacuum filter in order to reduce the presence of water in iron ore tailings. The resulting material has much less moisture. It can be transported, stacked, and distributed in layers, allowing for vegetation rehabilitation. The plants will support beneficiation plants, reducing the need of tailings disposal and dams.
They also allow and improve on portfolio quality with the production of high iron content products, which contributes to the optimization of Vale's margins. We invest in innovation to create a safer mining, more sustainable, and more competitive.
That's great. Now dry concentration. As I mentioned, we have a plant that is under construction, 1.5 million tons in Vargem Grande. This is a breakthrough technology, magnetic concentration. We don't need water. We can produce pellet feed, sinter feed, high quality ores. This is something that we have a lot of flexibility. We can bring this plant close to the mine, or we can locate close to the clients. That's a flexible plant, simple plant. Believe, we are doing something that we are not considering, that we are using this technology as a cleaner. We produce the pellet feed for blast furnace. If we using this process, we can upgrade to direct reduction a pellet feed to use for pellets.
You know very well that the direct reduction route will be the product in the future when we consider the decarbonization process. Now going to the co-products. You've never saw this before with us, but it's not something new inside Vale. Just to bear in mind, we're gonna generate 50 million-60 million tons of materials coming from filtration, dry concentration, and dry processing. A lot of materials. At the end of the day is about sand with some part of iron. Now we are saying that is Vale sand. We've been using this in testing. Now we have permits to use this sand in applications for cement, concrete, mortar, and also high quality products like quartz. This year, we sold and donate 750,000 tons of this material.
We are planning to go next year to 1 million-1.4 million tons. What is the rationale here? As we need to move this amount of this size of 50 million-60 million tons, we need areas. If we need area, we need permits. If we need permits, we need a timeline together to get the permits. If we don't get, we can jeopardize the production of iron ore. That's the mindset here. The beauty of this action that we can bring, we can create value and can share value with our communities when we bring industries related to the sand and also donate like in pavement, paving works close to our communities. This is something, again, you're gonna hear a lot in the future in Vale.
Well, I'm talking about new way to operate. This is nothing new here when you see the extended supply chain. We have the capability of logistics you know very well. We bring iron ore from Brazil to China or from Europe. We need to be good in logistics. I want to draw your attention for something new that is in this chart here. First, in the blending strategy, we're not only using our more than 17 ports in Asia to blend our products for BRBF, but now we are bringing other ores to do as one product to our client. We want to serve our client, be close with them, and reduce their costs here. This one thing really nice is going on there. Another information from the port side.
For a lot of years, we used to call only four berths, actually less than that with our Valemaxes in China. Only this year, we are berthing seven ports in China. We are going to nine ports next year. It's already bringing a lot of flexibility and making our fleet faster and moving better. In my right-hand side, you see the concentration facility in China. We are taking advantage in their capacity to concentrate there. As we are sending high silica ores to China, you know that this year we are concentrating in China and selling the sand there. This is a niche, yeah, but there's a possibility to grow.
Again, the main message here, we are closer to our clients in China and around the world to strengthen our relationship. Well, now let's go to the numbers. I know you love it. In my left-hand side, capacity. This is the chart of capacity. We're gonna talk about the production in some minutes. We have the capacity today of 341 million tons. We're going in the end of next year, by the end of next year to 370 million tons of capacity. How we're gonna do this? Right-hand side roadmap. The beginning of next year, we don't expect to improve our volumes, but we are bringing quality. You saw the progression of the filtration.
We are converting our a tier of high silica ores, low silica ores to pellet feed, to high grade ores. The main impact in the beginning of the year is related to quality. During the year in the North, we have very good news. We have several products that are coming online. I'll remind you, the S11D crushers, S11D+10 , Gelado. We don't consider that we're going to bring volumes to the total number to Vale because we are offsetting, and you remember that we have a delay in what we call rolling license in the North range, so we don't have, on average, the increase of volumes in the North, but it will be really important to the increase that will happen in 2023 in the North.
It's an important roadmap in the North. By the end of the year, yes, we are going to bring capacity with Brucutu dam, Torto dam in Brucutu, and also the raising of Itabiruçu in Itabira. That's a roadmap. Now moving to the numbers of production. First information here, we are narrowing the guidance for this year. We are in the guidance, and we are just putting a lower the upper range now 320. For next year, our production guidance is 320- 335. Two messages here. You know very about this. Value over volume is our mantra, yes. This number of production is what we believe the market will need in terms of volume, but in terms of quality that we can deliver. That's our vision.
I want to draw your attention again for one more information that is in this chart. Higher Fe content, take a look at what is going on in 2021. We're improving the quality on average to 63.5% iron content. It represents today in around 350 million tons, $350 million in margins only considering the impact of the quality. I'm not talking about the premiums here. Those are the numbers for this year and next year. Moving to the second chapter of our presentation, why Vale is ready now for the future for this greener world. There is a consensus on the roadmap, the pathway to decarbonize the steel industry. I think we are seeing everywhere that we need to reduce the use of blast furnaces.
Today, 73% of the steel mill production is based on blast furnace. We are going to move to direct reduction routes using, in the beginning, the natural gas and later the hydrogen. That's the main pathway. In the first decade, we need to improve the efficiency of the blast furnace. We need to reduce the emissions of the blast furnace. That's the whole picture we have. Beyond MUs, because everybody is connected to the clients, but beyond the MUs, we are bringing solutions now. We are bringing products and services now. That's what Eduardo and also Luciano said. We have three main actions here, three main ideas to attack this necessity. First one, increase the quality portfolio. We are talking about expanding the North Carajás mines.
We're talking about dry concentration, expanding the pellet feed production. That's our roadmap of production. That's what we do. Second action. We strongly believe that we're going to need what we call agglomerated products. In any route of direct reduction or to reduce emissions in the blast furnace, we need pellets. Used to have only one kind of product here, pellets from pelletizing plants. Now we have the green briquette also. We are talking here about 100 million tons of capacity in a few years to serve this market. Third, we call asset-light solutions when we have technology inside Vale, like Tecnored, that is a melter or a furnace, and you also can co-locate the briquette plants or the dry concentration plants with our clients and design the best solution through this journey of decarbonization. That's our roadmap.
That's what we've been doing. I want to deep dive. I really love this green briquette. We've been developing this inside Vale for more than 50 years. When I arrived in Vale again, and I saw this is amazing solution for our clients. We can reduce 10% if you use this product as a substitute of lump or as a substitute of sinter, we can reduce 10% in our Scope 3 emissions or in our emissions in the blast furnace for our clients. This is half of the OpEx comparing to the pellet plants. And is one-third of the CapEx intensity if you compare to the pellet plant. This is amazing solution.
We have already under construction 7 million tons of capacity, and we are planning to expand this to 50 million tons of capacity. That's a breakthrough. You'll see a lot of these initiatives in the near future. Finally, to close this section, I want to emphasize two things. Two main takeaways that I can see from this journey to decarbonize. We can see two things. One is what just Luciano said. We need for any route to decarbonize, we need high quality ores. We need high quality ores. That's an answer. We're gonna need high quality ores. And Vale is really well positioned to do that. The second takeaway, never in this world mining industry has had to be so close to the steel industry. Never.
We need to work together. That's the reason why last year, this year actually, we engaged with more than 40% of our Scope 3. Our Scope 3 are clients. There's no solution without them. We need to work together to find and to fight against this challenge. Now moving to the final part, the third part. How can we rebuild Vale's competitiveness? Well, I'm gonna show. I'll use the all-in costs to show this roadmap, and I'll split this analysis in three components. The C1, the freight, and the premiums. Let's start with the C1. Another common sense that if you increase our volumes, we can dilute the cost. It's right. We are still growing our production. When you reach 400 million tons, we can dilute our costs. It's right.
There's another point here that I want to emphasize, that we are producing with a lot of constraints or inefficiencies that we need to remove. There's another point here that we need to add. I'll give an example with Timbopeba site. We had Timbopeba production halted in March 2019. We brought back this production in May 2020. A half of the production. This year in the first quarter, we brought back the remaining three lines in Timbopeba, so we got the full capacity, but we didn't produce the full capacity full year. Next year, we're gonna reach the full year capacity for Timbopeba. That's the impact we see, a 20% reduction in cost because we are just producing with a leaner way the full capacity coming from $27, the unit cost, to $21. That's impact.
In near future, when we bring Capanema project in this site, we're going to 15. That's the same pattern you see in Vargem Grande, Brucutu, and Itabira. That's the same. It's important to consider in near future. Now I can bring the numbers for C1 cost. We're saying that we're coming this year from 17. I'm not considering here the impact of third parties purchase. We're going to reduce 0.7 coming from dilution or increase of volume. The cost efficiency that I just mentioned represents another $1. I want to say something here. In spite we have a leaner production in the future when we restore our capacity, we are committed to bring also an optimization in cost.
Gustavo will show more colors about that, but we have part of this number related to the cost optimization that we already started. We are in the turning point of the cost in Vale, and we have the analysis for 2023, and that's the reason why I put this timeline here, because we are going to have some value from that. In 2023, we expect to have the C1 in 15.5-16. And if you consider the evolution of the production, we'll have another $2 decreasing to $14-$15 a ton in long term. Just to compare to the number that we gave to you two years ago and one year ago, we have some adjustments here.
The inflation that we had in the last two years is huge, and also we adjusted our perspective about geotechnical cost and also some depletion. That's the reason we are changing our long-term idea for C1. Second component, freight. You know very well about our strategy in freight. Big vessels, we have a long-term fleet. We've been working hard to offset the impact of the IMO regulations. It's working well. If you see the 27 comparing to 19, it's a huge protection that we have. What can we expect for the future? A reduction of $3, part of that coming from the macro conditions, spot rate, and the bunker.
We also have 20% of this number coming from an improvement that we can improve the fleet and also Ecoshipping. That is a program that you can reduce the consumption of fuel. It's going really well. We are already passing ours in our fleet, and we can capture value from that. Our long-term vision from this component is $16 a ton in the long term. The third component, premiums. You always say that our clients are willing to pay premiums if they consider some factors here. If they are making money or not, the margins. If they need to improve their efficiency, their production. They need to save the cost of energy, coke.
You need to consider that the availability of high quality ores to get this value from the premiums. That's what happened when you see the past and you see the history in 2018 when they had the supply side reform. They are making a lot of money. They need to improve their capacity, so got the premiums that time. That's what happened this year in the first half. We need to add another point here, the cost of the coke in China for us in a very high level, different from the second half of this year. What we can expect for the future, near future, we are going to bring back the pelletizing capacity.
I'm talking here going back to 50 million tons in average or more, and also adding the briquette to this premium. The increase of Carajás production will bring another component for the premium in the short term. In the long term, we may consider that the cost of carbon, and as Luciano said, all the journey we see our products will have premiums because of the capacity to give more efficiency to reduce the CO₂ emissions in our clients. To summarize this, we expect to reduce $10 in our all-in costs, coming from $45-$35 when you reach 400 million tons. We have a step in the middle, $40 per ton in 2023.
If you believe that the price of iron ore will decrease, we have an extra reduction here coming from the royalties and the impact of the third party purchase. An extra reduction can come from the premiums in this new green world. We can be below $30 a ton our unit cost, our all-in cost. Before I pass to Mark, I want to emphasize three main things. First one, we are committed to bring back the 400 million tons capacity. It's important to get the leaner production, the full capacity to get the best cost in our operations. The second message you know very well, I'll say again, value per volume is our mantra. We're not going to produce if the market doesn't need.
We are not going to deliver something out of the quality they need. We're going to stick to our strategy of value over volume. Third, definitely Vale is the supplier of choice of the steelmaking industry for this new green world. Now, Mark, back to you.
Thanks. Thanks, Marcello. In base metals, in Vale, we recognize that we must succeed in the base metals transformation, where base metals contribute significantly to the Vale of the future. We recognize that 2021 was a challenging year, where things did not go according to plan. In Salobo, broad safety and maintenance reviews led to suboptimal mine movement, impacting production significantly in the first half of this year. Delays in the SAG mill maintenance in Sossego impacted production and a two month strike in Sudbury. We know that we need to exercise the levers that Carlos Medeiros spoke about earlier, safety, risk management, as well as operational excellence, and that's where our journey lies. It wasn't all bad. We did have some successes where we did make some progress.
On the risk side and safety side, just last week, the Voisey's Bay mine was awarded the Miner of the Year by the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy for excellence in safety risk management through the operations as well as the construction of the underground mine. On the production side, we had good success in a number of our surface operations. Long Harbor is ramping up well. Our refineries in Sudbury, Long Harbor, as well as in the U.K., have operated very well, as have our smelters in Sudbury and Indonesia. It sets the course for a bright future. In 2022 is the year where we must succeed in our base metals transformation and show progress. Here, I'll review our copper and nickel guidance for next year.
On the copper side, where our production guidance is 330,000 tons-350,000 tons of copper. Significant point here compared to last Vale Day projections on copper is the absence of the startup of Salobo III, which it has a significant impact in our production next year. We must execute on our key milestones that I've set out here. The first one is a milestone for both copper and nickel. We need our Sudbury mines to produce. We need stable production coming out of our mines. We need to improve that mine movement and production in Salobo, and we are making good progress. We're hitting the right rates for next year as we speak in Salobo mine. We must execute well our SAG mill maintenance in Sossego.
On the nickel side, our production guidance is 175,000 tons-190,000 tons, primarily impacted next year by the rebuild of one of our furnaces, one of our four furnaces in PT Valley. As I mentioned, key milestone is the Sudbury mine production and the ramp-up of two critical replacement capacity projects, the Voisey's Bay underground mine, as well as the Copper Cliff mine expansion in Sudbury. We need to make sure Onça Puma produces stably next year. I want to talk to you about what we see as a very bright future for our copper portfolio. In this picture here, this is a picture of the old Igarapé Bahia gold mine in Carajás region, which is the future site of our copper project, our Alemão copper project.
Let me tell you a little bit more about our copper portfolio in Carajás and the bright future that we see. We see Carajás as a tier-one copper mining complex. It is now, and it will be growing in the future. I just want to orient you a little bit to highlight the proximity of a number of our copper iron ore operations in the Carajás region, leveraging off of synergies in the area. I'll point out the two red dots. In the bottom right-hand corner is our Sossego mine, and you have the proximity to a number of projects, all of which I will review in the coming slides, such as Cristalino and some of what we call our satellite projects, like Bacaba and Visconde. In the top left-hand corner, you have our Salobo property.
Underneath that, you have the future Alemão project, and over to the right of that, you have something that we call the North Hub, with a number of potential deposits that we've been drilling, such as Paulo Afonso and Furnas. We are advancing on Salobo III, and it's coming on stream next year, with ramp-up beginning in the second half. It will be contributing over a life of mine 30,000 tons-40,000 tons of copper. Earlier years, it will contribute more. In fact, by 2023, you will see in excess of 50,000 tons of copper coming out of Salobo III. We are also looking at a future expansion for Salobo IV, which could result in an additional 30,000 tons of copper. We are currently studying that.
I will highlight, we still have coming the gold stream payment once we demonstrate through commissioning, depending on timing and ramp-up, a potential payment in excess of $500 million, again, in 2023. Here's a little bit about the potential for growth. Alemão, which I've mentioned, will add approximately 60,000 tons of copper and about 100,000 ounces of gold per year. The investment decision will come at the end of next year or beginning of 2023, dependent upon the environmental license being issued. Discussions are going well, but it will take that time before we get that permit. In the middle, talk a little bit about the South Hub. The Cristalino project is absolutely necessary for the ongoing operations in Sossego as the Sossego mines diminish in the coming years.
The studies are going well for Cristalino, but we also have the satellite deposits, a number of deposits in close proximity to Sossego, where we are looking at the options of bringing those forward and feeding the Sossego mine and actually providing an opportunity for further expansion of Sossego. We're looking at that North Hub that I mentioned, the Paulo Afonso and Furnas. We had significant exploration, 60 km of drilling this year, and we are seeing the resources being increased. This could be a project or a number of projects that add 70 tons-100,000 tons of copper in the future. Switching over to Indonesia, we have what we call a world-class copper discovery. We see it as the third largest copper find in the past 10 years.
Since the last issuance of a resource statement in February 2020, our studies and our drilling have de-risked that project, and they all have added about 15% contained copper to the project. We estimate that this project could produce between 300,000 tons-350,000 tons of copper with in excess of 200,000 ounces of gold per year for the next 45 years. This potential project is high tonnage, high grade, and low cost. Just pointing out in this slide, the details aren't important. It's just about the work that we're doing to make sure this comes on stream. If you put it together, what we're doing, investing in the midterm to stabilize our production, adding in Salobo III, our production gets above 400,000 tons per annum.
When you add in South Hub, Alemão, and the Victor startup, a mine in Sudbury, Canada, we're looking at a joint venture with Glencore. We're above 450,000 tons of production past the middle of the decade. On the right, when you add the growth of the North Hub, Salobo III, South Hub expansion, Alemão, we are more than potentially doubling our copper production in the next decade. There are not many players who have this kind of copper portfolio. Let's talk a little bit about nickel. In the base metals transformation, there were a couple of key levers that we needed to execute on in the past few years. One was dealing with the difficulty of New Caledonia, and one was replacement capacity of our mines in Canada. Here's a little bit about both.
Earlier this year, we did successfully transfer the New Caledonia asset, finding a sustainable solution for the continuation of that project, but we have taken it off of our hands. On the right-hand side, you have a number of advancements that we have made in the replacement capacity in the Sudbury Mines, getting first ore in the Copper Cliff mine extension. We've had first ore received in the Reid Brook Voisey's Bay underground mine. Significantly, we approved an investment of $120 million to expand the Thompson Mine by 10 years. Also adding potential production increase of about 30% by 2023 and 2024.
Our portfolio makes us very well positioned to pivot towards the growth of the EV supply chain in North America as well as Europe. Our mines are producing the nickel that the industry wants. Our Class 1 nickel, as Luciano was saying, is low carbon, strong ESG credentials. We're currently selling about 5% of our Class 1 nickel to the EV supply chain. We anticipate that growing to 30%-40% in the coming years. Listed a couple of other opportunities here that are in our hands as well.
The critical minerals that are going into the EV batteries will lead to an issue that we need to deal with as an industry, providing a solution to the OEMs to recycle that material and bring it back into the supply chain, creating that circular economy. We have tested and can recycle what we call the black mass in our current flow sheet to recover nickel and cobalt. Finally, we are looking at a nickel sulfate plant investment with a decision at the end of next year, and we're having very good discussions with the Canadian government as well as the province of Quebec. Delivering on the stability of nickel, I'm gonna talk in the next two slides a little bit about how we support the Canadian mines for the decades to come.
In this slide, we're talking about what we're doing in the mines today. As I mentioned, we're ramping up the Voisey's Bay underground mine. Next year, we'll bring on Eastern Deeps, which is the second of two mines in Voisey's Bay, replacing the capacity of the open pits. In the middle, as I mentioned, the Manitoba extension, we approved that. We're gonna see advances in 2023, but we're also studying and doing significant drilling in what we call phase two, which could extend the Thompson Mine for decades to come. We're also studying in Sudbury. The Copper Cliff Mine has extensions three and four. The studies, we've just completed pre-feasibility studies, and we're looking to make decisions in the coming years.
There are other studies that we're also doing, such as the Creighton Deep and other things in surface deposits, where we will be advancing the engineering and bringing them soon for decisions in the coming years. Also Onça Puma. We're gonna be looking at the investment decision on the second furnace in Onça Puma early next year. This deposit has an extended life of many decades and has the potential for future furnaces three and four if we so choose. This slide, I wanna tap into something that is critically important. In Canada, we have the largest nickel sulfide resources in the world, high-grade polymetallic ore bodies, and we own a great deal of this. We are investing the money in the drilling and the studies to make sure that we have ore for decades to come.
We have a very extensive drilling program, 300 km per year of drilling in and around our current mines in Sudbury, in Voisey's Bay, and Thompson. Voisey's look to extend the Reid Brook and Eastern Deeps well past the current mine life of 2034, 2035. In Thompson, we're doing the drilling in the current mine, but there are many other areas that we're drilling around the Thompson Nickel Belt, including an ultramafic, a large tonnage ultramafic ore body. In Sudbury, we know there's more to come in a mining camp that's been around for 120+ years. We also have unique access in Indonesia. In the coming year, we will be making decisions about expansions in Bahodopi, where we've just announced this year a joint venture study with Baowu, TISCO, and Shanghai.
We also have the investment decision on the Pomalaa HPAL project. These two projects together can add 110,000 tons of production in the coming years. We will only be doing these with partners. In the end, with nickel, we're building a stable business, where we will recover and stabilize at a production rate of 200,000 tons per annum, increasing to 220,000 once Onça Puma’s second furnace comes online . More importantly, as we go through the base metals transformation, we become a stable operator. We reduce our unit costs. We have optionality for growth in the future. In summary, in transforming the base metals business, we're creating a solid base for the future, well-positioned to participate in the build-out of the EV supply chain in North America and Europe.
We have a tier-one mining complex for copper in the Carajás region of Brazil, and we have unique access to optionality and growth in Indonesia. With that, I'll pass it over to Gustavo Pimenta, who's gonna talk to us about capital allocation and a future vision for Vale.
Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everyone. This is my first Vale Day, so I'm very excited to be here and look forward to work with you all. I'd like to start with this first page that you are all very familiar with. I think Eduardo highlighted some of these elements over the last couple of years. Those are the three themes of our value creation, of our equity story. The themes are the risk in which we talked about today, reshaping and rerating. What I would like to do today is to go over a few of them, the most relevant ones from a financial standpoint, and share with you at least my first initial impressions in terms of potential rerate of Vale's stock. Starting with the reparation agreement.
I think Eduardo highlighted, we've had a lot of progress this year, right? Up to the end of 2021, we should have fulfilled approximately 55% of the obligations that we had under the agreement. If you look in terms of cash flow projections, 2021 was a very heavy year for us, right? We've disbursed approximately $2.4 billion under the agreement, which is good in terms of getting those things behind us, right, in terms of financial responsibility. Over the next couple of years, the responsibility and the payments and the disbursements should be anywhere between $500 million and $800 million. Renova is another one, right, in terms of the risk. Samarco is back in operation since the last time we talked, so that's positive for the business.
We see 2022 as an important year in terms of accelerating individual indemnifications following some of the federal court orders. We also see a year in terms of finalizing and the opportunity to finalize the revision of the 42 programs under the existing framework that we have. That is gonna be a busy year for Renova from our standpoint. In terms of simplifying the portfolio, in terms of reshaping, kudos to Luciano and the team. We have done a tremendous job from my perspective on that regard, right? We've sold a lot of assets. We've resolved a lot of assets that were underperforming in our portfolio. Specifically in 2021, we've sold and we got rid of VNC. That was a drain in terms of financial performance for us.
We were able also to monetize a non-core asset, our stake in Mosaic. We should expect this to continue to be very focused on portfolio optimization, right? We wanna make sure that every single asset that we have in our portfolio makes sense to be there. It's adding value to the portfolio. We are currently working, as we've mentioned before, on Moatize in Mozambique, our coal asset in Mozambique. We hope to have news there very soon. It's a non-core asset. Put that as part of our sales process, and we are moving forward as expected. The same with TSI. You should expect us to continue to trim down the portfolio and be focused on what we are good at. What is one of the benefits of this simplification of the portfolio?
Here's a list of assets that were classified under this category of underperforming assets over the last couple of years, right? As we sell, then you see the going forward in terms of cash drain gets to zero, right? We were spending anywhere between $500 million and $2 billion in those assets over the last couple of years. It's a very significant relief in terms of cash pressure that we have. In the case of Moatize, even if we don't sell, we're not expecting to have any cash need in that business because we've ramped up the production, and we are already in a positive EBITDA territory. In any way, that's I think it's a very positive when you compare Vale two years ago versus today, those were very important improvements in terms of the cash story of Vale.
This is new. We are announcing today, I think this is a very important priority that we are putting together. Spinelli highlighted some of the things that he's doing there. We are announcing today an initiative and a program that was discussed and approved with our board to reduce the overall cost of Vale total at $1 billion. That is on top of or over our total fixed cost plus sustaining. We are about $14 billion there. We wanna reduce this by $1 billion. Where we are focused on. We have three main levers here. We have productivity gains. Spinelli highlighted removal of inefficiencies as we ramp up and recover production. Better planning as we implement VPS, improve things like tool time. There is incorporation of digital solutions that we can reduce OpEx. We appreciate the need to get leaner.
There is a second large initiative here associated with organizational redesign. We will pursue that. Sourcing with third-party services, right? We buy more than $10 billion a year. We see an opportunity here to review a scope, review a specification, control internal demand. All of that should be bringing us about $1 billion of savings. The good thing is we are already expecting to have benefits in 2022. Our expectations for 2022 to have flat cost compared to 2021, right? Even with all the inflation pressure that all the sectors are suffering. We'll be able to absorb that as we implement those programs. My idea is that we bring this in more detail in our February call, and we monitor this quarterly with each one of you guys.
You guys will see the evolution of this program as we go along. What does that mean for us, right? We free up cash for growth. There's an opportunity here for us to continue to grow organically in a very accretive way. We are not talking about M&A here. We are talking about expansion of existing facilities where we have a lot of synergies to expand, right? I think we've highlighted, Mark highlighted some of them. Some of them have been approved and we are pursuing, but we have more to do. I don't think based on everything that I've seen so far, there is anyone better prepared in our space to drive the energy transition. I think we highlighted the quality of the products. We see opportunity to grow in copper in Carajás, very synergistic.
We see all these resources we have in nickel. I think Vale is very uniquely positioned to capture value as we continue to grow this business. Capital discipline is a major focus of mine, and it has been a major focus of Eduardo and team and Siani. Last year, we've returned 90% of our free cash to shareholders, right? We appreciate, and I fully recognize there is no better investment today than buying back my shares, right? We have that very clearly, and we'll make sure that we'll continue to be extremely disciplined on how we allocate every dollar out of this company, right? This has been the case. I think we have a very attractive dividend policy, right? 30% of EBITDA minus sustaining.
We wanna continue to be extremely disciplined on capital allocation, and we can talk a little bit about that in the Q&A. This is a slide to try to show what is out there in terms of potential value unlocking for Vale, right? We've run some scenarios in terms of sales volumes. This is a 2023 timeframe, and I'll explain to you why. We've run a couple scenarios in terms of volumes of sales, different prices. You see us being able to generate anywhere between $17 billion and $24 billion of EBITDA in that timeframe with a CapEx of about $6 billion. Our expectations for the total CapEx, including growth, should be between $5 billion and $6 billion.
If you run the math here, you're gonna see us with the ability to provide a free cash flow yield for our investors, right? I do appreciate in the very short term, we have some challenges, right? We have what I'm calling here transitory expenses. If we take Brumadinho, then the decharacterization, Renova, plus some of the assets that were underperforming in 2021, all of that cost us $4 billion, right, in 2021. We do expect the 2022 to be also heavy, right? We still have some of those commitments pretty much along the same lines, maybe different zip codes, but the magnitude of the spend is probably gonna be as relevant in 2022. We shouldn't expect this to stay there. This will get resolved, and we are resolving those issues.
Once we do that, we should be able to unlock significant value for our shareholders. What is the thesis here? I'll, combining my, so far, four weeks in the job, my internal view with some fresh eyes as well. I do see very clear catalyst for us in the next 12-18 months in terms of unlocking value, right? If you take the three categories here, you have de-risking. In 12-18 months, we're gonna have a substantial progress on reparating the liabilities. We've talked about that today. We'll have six dams to be de-characterized. Medeiros talked about all the progress we've done there. We have closed all of the SG gaps, right? That's very important 'cause a lot of the overhang in the stock, we know it's associated with the risk perception. We'll be resolving that.
We expect it in 12- 18 months to be in a much better position. Capacity increase, this is very clear. I mean, you have two main categories. I'm not talking here about five, 10 years for 100 million tons. What I'm saying is the next 12- 18 months, we should be able to bring 30 million tons, assuming the market can absorb that. The value of volume will prevail. We should be able to have Salobo operations, right? So that category, just that, those two buckets, is $2 billion of margins that we're bringing to the business. The third one is cost reduction, another $1 billion, right?
If you sum it up, you're gonna see us being able in 12-18 months, assuming, and we feel good about delivering those, we'll be able to unlock significant value to shareholders and to have a different value in terms of financial performance by then and financial projections, right. It's very exciting from our perspective. I think those things are in our, a lot of them are in our control. I mean, we have a lot of visibility about delivering on them. I'm personally very excited about delivering. Our commitment is as we go along, we wanna check the box and show you guys the progress along those items. All right. With that, we'll open up for Q&A. I think we have some time to assemble, and we'll get started. Thank you.
Hello. Yes. We'll just need about 30 seconds, one minute. We're gonna just have everyone here sitting on the stage, and then we can start with the Q&A. As I said in the beginning, please raise your hand. We're gonna try to take as many questions possible here from the audience. Also, we're gonna be taking questions online. You just need to send to the email address that is on your screen. Okay? Just bear with us for about 30 seconds or so. Thank you.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for the presentation. Thiago Lofiego from Bradesco BBI. Two questions. Spinelli, on the guidance for next year, how much of those tons will you not be selling depending on the iron ore price? So basically if you consider, you know, today's iron ore price, how much of that you think you're not gonna be able to sell? Or maybe another way to ask this is, what kind of price level have you considered for that specific guidance? My second question is, on the cost for 2022, the all-in cost, I'm not sure if it's for Spinelli or for Eduardo or Gustavo.
Thinking about the all-in delivered cost into for 2022, are we talking about $45 per ton, give or take, given, you know, inflationary pressures, C1 costs are gonna be stable. Are we talking about a $45 per ton level for delivered costs for next year? Thank you.
Okay. Well, first of all, production. We're not considering to sell what we did this year, the high silica, you know, the low-grade ores directly to the market. We are using our supply chain to blend and sell as our BRBF blending product. Again, to sell directly is not a question only of the level of the price. Depends on the freight. Freight is a very important point. And discount. You know, discount of the high silica was really high. We're gonna track this. Remember that we're going to convert that high silica in high-grade ores. When you do this, we reduce the mass. That's a
In the beginning of the year, there will be more availability capacity of this high silica. During the year with the filtration, we are reducing this capacity. You can ask this question, what is the availability of this high silica? It can be 10 million tons in the beginning of the year, but during the year we reduce this possibility. Again, we're not considering this number inside our guidance. Related to the cost, you're right. We consider our C1 stable for next year. Stable with a lot of work because we are offsetting the inflation. It's hard work. In Brazil we had some impact in all of the world, but in Brazil specifically, we had impact.
We are considering the other components, freight probably slightly lower than this year. The macro conditions for that, it's important component. Probably offsetting the better VIU, better Fe content, the quality will be better, the premium will be better because you saw the impact and you see the impact of the high silica in our average price. Averaging is slightly lower can be a good view for that.
Thank you.
Thank you. Daniel McConvey, Rossport Investments. Couple of technology ESG questions, which is unusual for me. Who's in charge of the electrification storage products you're looking at? How is that managed in the company?
Well, for iron ore, we have in our business different.
Okay
perspectives, yeah.
Can you kind of describe what, you know, the hierarchy is and what the big products you're looking at, and if you're doing it directly or doing it through consultants, or how is that working?
Yep. For Scope 1 and Scope 2, we have the MAC curve, you know, all the products in our pipeline to reduce to the end of this decade. We are considering for the whole Vale. Actually, in iron ore is more intensive, but it's $4 billion-$6 billion to invest. We have several actions. The main action is in the pelletizing plants or the main impact for that. The kind of action is related more to source of energy, to change the coal or use biomass. The actions are related to that.
Electrification, we have in the railroad the locomotive we call the belt that is already running for shunting, but we are going to put it in long range. We also have a development with the supplier for the trucks.
Mm-hmm.
We are already investing in catenary. I don't know in English. You know
Catenary.
Catenary?
Catenary.
Yeah.
Catenary.
For electrification in part of the mines. The roadmap is a transition today, bringing some electrification in parts of the consumption of fuel, diesel, but going to full electric vehicles with the trucks and the locomotives. I think you have other initiatives in the-
Yes.
in the airline side.
In terms of electrification, as Luciano's video showed, we obviously are bringing in electric trucks and loaders, et cetera, into the mines. We're testing more. We have 40 coming in by the end of the year, but there's obviously a lot more work. If it's questions around broader decarbonization, then we get into some other initiatives, for example, replacing diesel fuel in Northern Labrador with wind power and things like that. We obviously have similar type of process where we're trying to replace, you know, coal and carbon and things like that with heat recovery and biomass, et cetera. Very similar, we have our own agendas into this MAC curve.
Okay, thank you. On briquettes, this new technology which I'm not that familiar with. Can you describe how it works and how much carbon, if you can quantify the carbon savings per ton of steel produced?
Yep. Well, we agglomerate this with products. But in a pelletizing plant, you need to use the, you know, the furnace to agglomerate the product and other binding components. It's almost a cold agglomeration with the briquettes. We still use furnace, but for the end of the process. We don't use this to agglomerate, but just to a kind of a final part of the process. Thinking about Scope 1 and 2, we can reduce by 80%-85% if you compare to a pelletizing plant in terms of intensity of emissions of CO₂. This is our side. Our client side in Scope 3, this is really important.
The beauty of this, as a cold agglomeration, we can mix other kind of products. We can make this briquette acid or basic. If they are acid, we can use as a lump. Just have the electric charge in the blast furnace like a lump, like a pellet. You can add other components, like MgO. It's impossible to do this in the pellet. It's impossible to do this in the sinter. You can do this inside the blast furnace with the briquette. This is amazing.
This is a breakthrough because we can and the metallurgical technical information we can just in a simple way you can keep the furnace with more efficiency with a higher level of heat, and the efficiency really goes better and better. That's the idea. We already tested this technology in five furnaces, big ones, not only small. And this we already the we are converting two plants, pelletizing plants into briquette plants. We have a new one in Vargem Grande. We're already doing this and testing together 'cause it's going really well. The results are fantastic, and our clients are really excited about that.
Spinelli, just maybe.
It's about 10% reduction.
Yeah, 10% reduction on the.
Yeah.
-on the route. On the-
Scope 3 and our Scope 1 is
Scope 2, it's a matter if we are going to replace by pellet, the pellets by-
Yeah.
The cold agglomeration. We don't see that today, so it's not in a MAC curve substituting our pelletizing plants. Those two also were very old plants that we decided to adapt to the briquetting. When you say 100 million tons of agglomeration, it has to be pellets on that as well.
Yeah.
Our plans for briquettes are around 50 million tons. We believe it's a real breakthrough. We, as Spinelli said, we tested already in big furnaces. We are very optimistic that that will work very well on this transition part now.
Carlos, yes, please.
Yeah, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much. Carlos de Alba with Morgan Stanley. First question on iron ore, maybe just following up on the conversation. Just to confirm, the iron ore guidance, production guidance, does that include third-party purchases? And what are you thinking about iron ore inventories and potential sales of those to bridge production versus shipments? And on green briquettes, have you signed any contracts? Do you have any firm orders for the capacity that you are investing or bringing in the future?
Okay. We consider the third-party purchase. The level that we purchased this year, we're now repeating probably for next year because part of that was based on high silica products. It'll be an average that what happened the last year or before that. I think this year was a peak in terms of third-party purchase. Now we don't have yet. There's a list to make this contract. The first round, we expect to launch this to start up in the beginning of 2023. We have the whole year to make this happen.
This amount today will be probably they will go to Europe, part of that and part will be in Brazil, so the main clients that we are targeting today. The roadmap to 50 million tons, we can not only consider the production as a hub like the pelletizing plant, but we can consider to co-locate or to be closer to the clients, go to Europe, go to a site.
To expand this capacity. In this case, we need contracts with the clients in the long-term relationship. We don't have yet, Carlos.
We have MOUs with like,
Yeah. A lot of MOUs.
10 was where we tested already. It's gonna be a step-by-step change to adapt. We talked to some steel plants in Europe, and they say, "Look, people are." Of course, this is a technological change, but we're pretty confident. As Spinelli mentioned in the beginning, it's 15 years of studies, and we did a lot of the tests to be sure that this whole agglomeration is gonna work out.
All right. Let me make my last question maybe a combined one. I'm gonna cheat a little bit here. Gustavo, any comments on the Dam Decharacterization disbursements in the coming years? Maybe I missed that. Alexandre, I'm gonna take the opportunity that you are here as well, to make a comment. We have seen a lot of news since Friday on the investigation of the federal police. What does that mean in terms potentially of the agreement that you have already very thoroughly negotiated? Does this open the possibility for potentially higher payments? Thank you very much.
On the De-Characterization, disbursements, it's anywhere between $300 million and $500 million per year. That's what we should expected for the following decade.
Carlos, thanks for the question. Last week, we saw the federal police issue a report where they pointed out basically the same charges that the state police and the state prosecutors had pointed in the past. Recently, the Supreme Court decided that the jurisdiction for this case should go to federal court rather than state court. By doing that, the Supreme Court dismissed all the charges that were brought in state court. Hence, federal police and now the federal prosecutors would have to evaluate this report and decide whether to bring these charges now in federal court. Specifically about your question, nothing changes in the Brumadinho reparation agreement. Absolutely nothing. Also because that agreement did not address anything criminal. Purposefully, we did not. It wasn't a plea bargain or anything like that, and not a deferred prosecution agreement.
What it was is a settlement that solved all the civil actions, all public civil actions, collective actions, brought also by prosecutors and the state. Okay? I think that's simple.
Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much, Vale, for the presentation again. It's a pleasure to be here. Leonardo Correa from BTG Pactual. The first question for Luciano. During your presentation, Luciano, you mentioned on the ESG roadmap for Scope 1, Scope 2, which is in Vale's control, right? I think the big question that the world is asking is Scope 3, where Vale basically can help. But at the end of the day, you need the Chinese steel industry to invest trillions of dollars to decarbonize. We know that the steel industry is the one that most pollutes, right? I just wanted to hear you how these conversations have been evolving with counterparts in China, and how confident you are that Scope Three will be reduced going forward.
The second question, maybe for Eduardo on diversification, right? It's an old theme. Vale did its move in 2006 with Inco. Over the past years, the story has been to focus on the core. How do you see potentially looking at greener metals and diversifying into other businesses? Vale is still seen as an iron ore play, a pure play, trades on 3x EBITDA. Just-
That's true.
If you guys are potentially looking at any targets to diversify. That's it. Thank you.
Okay. The difference between us and other peers is that most are celebrating, and we are as well, MOUs with clients to investigate ways of reducing emissions, right? Basically these efforts within Vale they're different because we come in with a suite of solutions, and we offer detailed knowledge to our clients to see how can we fit in those solutions within their plants. We have the briquettes. We have, for example, the Tecnored technology to produce pig iron with biochar. We have potentially HBI. We have this ability to using the cleaner to increase the grade of our blast furnace pellets towards direct reduction. Another agglomeration technology that we are developing, for example, for biochar. Instead of they getting coke in their blast furnaces, they're getting a kind of briquette also from biomass.
We're coming in with a suite of technologies, and some of those technologies, they open up product opportunities for us. That we believe is the difference between our approach and others. We're just not going there to the steel makers and looking, "Oh, what are you doing here?" We're offering a suite of solutions, and we hope that this way we can find a path.
Yeah. I think what sir on what Leonardo is trying to ask is how serious the Chinese are on that. I think we just had a meeting, like, I think. When was that last time? I don't know.
Last week.
Last week.
Last week.
Has to be last week.
Yep.
With CISA, we truly believe the Chinese are on it. When we talked to Baowu, like the MOUs that we just signed, they really I met Mr. Shen in Brazil, and he's very excited with the agglomeration of the briquettes in. We didn't have the green briquette yet, we just had the agglomeration. He knows because he's a very. I think China is taking seriously that. One of the reasons they stopped their growth this year, you know how they pushed the brake on China is.
Because of the carbon emissions that they have targets already. I think they are on that. As Spinelli mentioned, we have to be very close to them. That's definitely we have to be close to them because they are. As going to your second question, that's how we are perceived. We are perceived as a pure iron ore play. We just saw what happened with the price, how we felt. We felt directly related 100%. That's why I thought your question would be like, are you going to make the spin-off, the merger? This is all about trying to bring attention to a business that is inside Vale, that we know, by the way, you know the value that it has.
Diversifying itself for other minerals or other companies, I don't think makes any sense if we still have the platform inside Vale. What we need to do, extract value from the platform that we do have. Mark was trying to show the growth opportunities in Carajás, what we have in nickel in Canada. We are the greenest, the safest, one of the most ESG, and we saw the level of gigafactories that are gonna be built in North America. We are the player of choice, of course, there. Why? What we need to do is finish the homework, make the Canadian mines stable because the rest of the operation is doing very well, and then bring the production back to the levels that they should be.
Prove to people that we have good copper products. Alemão is taking a little more than we would like to have, but it is coming on stream. Salobo III, of course, COVID was a problem. Salobo III, you saw the pictures. One thing that we know how to do now is projects, so execute very well. I think we have the diversification inside our house. If you go and ask me back, should we stay and as an iron ore pure player, if you look at what's happened in Australia, I think it's a pretty dangerous play to do, right? Be in one geography, in one mineral. I don't think we should do that. We have that in Vale. We have Canada, we have Indonesia, we have. I think we have the diversification side. We just need to prove to market, prove to.
That's why sometimes we bring this IPO carve out things to make people think about that. Because it's not, it's not reasonable to see what happened to competitor A, competitor B and us when the price fell. People just don't perceive the value that we have inside. That's the biggest homework that we have to do. I think as we said here in the beginning, transforming the base metals business and proving that to the market is extremely key. People really absorbing that we have a $4 billion-$5 billion business inside Vale. That's exactly the work that we have to do. Of course, we have to work on cost. Gustavo is now with a new knife in his hand.
We need to get all the inefficiencies that came after Brumadinho and COVID. COVID, as I mentioned in the beginning, brought a lot of cost to our operations because we took it very seriously. We even stopped, for instance, Voisey's Bay mine in the beginning. We need to bring back. We have a very competitive business. Nobody doubts the strength of iron ore when it gets back to where it should be. But still, Itabira and Brucutu key mines in Brazil that have to be brought back to production. We still have this thing. But if you ask me what are the most challenging one, is to prove to the system that we are diversified already. And we're not looking at M&As for sure.
How can you trade how we're trading today and when you look at the multiples of Freeport-McMoRan or else, so it doesn't make any sense. Let's just do the homework, get ready, and who knows? That's for the future, not now.
Okay. Just one comment here. We have a good problem because we have many people still on the line. I'm getting the signal, so don't worry. I'm putting you on the line. We have right now about six questions yet on the line. Okay. Timna, I think you're next.
Okay. I'll keep it to one. Good afternoon. Nice to see everybody. Timna Tanners with Wolfe Research. I just wanna probe the concept of being the value over volume swing producer, if you will, versus the obvious benefits of getting to 400 million tons. Very clear that your costs come down, your break evens come down, but at the same time, you're keeping your volumes low. How long will Vale be patient being the swing producer? At what, you know, you talk medium term, how should we think about that trajectory and what it takes for Vale to think about resuming production plans to where you wanna be ultimately?
I'll just give the spoiler for Spinelli. If we had Brucutu and Itabira's dam in Itabira, we'll be producing. Of course, we wouldn't, we would be very careful in bringing the right volume to the market, but then we're talking about quality. That would be the case. Of course, we can do other choices because we have several mines. In the long term, and I think medium term, he's talking 2023, 2024, because we don't wanna be like caught in the trap that we set in the far past. Are we gonna be running at a run rate of 400 million tons at the end of 2022? We actually are. The North Range and the South Range disappointed us that we had.
That's why we need to postpone that number. We need to more or less divide what we have in Carajás, South and North, and what we have in the South of Brazil. I think there's a piece of not being able to bring the volume, because if you look at that chart, and that's crazy because you can see 20 million tons are gonna change the market. We can talk about supply, demand, because it would be interesting as well, because we believe there are some misunderstanding what's going on on the market now. We see the market getting softer until the second quarter for sure. First quarter is gonna still until the Olympics softened.
China is not gonna produce 900 million tons next year. We don't see a hard landing next year. If the hard landing could happen, it would be now. It's a matter of what you are able to do, what how you can use that to do. If you get the sensitivity analysis that Gustavo mentioned, it would be better to do 340. You get $25 billion, and if you are able to keep the price at $100, like it's now today. Better even if you get the premiums, right? We cannot play that game exactly like that. We are not the masters of the universe. We know that we can bring actually 80 million tons to the market, yes.
We are talking two to three years, and then we're gonna do very disciplined. As the leaders in the market, we have to do that very disciplined, and we are going to do. Today, we have been disciplined by some of restrictions and some of our own actions. In the longer term, that's what this flexibility comes on, and mostly in the north. If you see all the projects that Gustavo mentioned, all of them besides Capanema are in the north. That's where we need to build our capacity, and that's where we are struggling to get back to the 230, mainly because of the environmental issues that Spinelli mentioned on the northern range. I think I answered.
Yep. Yep. Just two examples. As you said, Torto and Itabira, we can add 20 million-30 million tons of pellet feed and pellets. We probably bring this back to the market by the relevant volume. Definitely, there will be market for that. We have to assess this by the end of next year. That's a great product. In the north, that is the third point. The roadmap is clear. If you add the south-southeastern part of Brazil with pellet feed that we are producing 30 million-40 million tons of pellets today. We have capacity of 60. There's a room to improve that. There is the product that is missing today. The Carajás coming on 2023. Long term is 2024, 2025. That's the.
Just to keep in your mind the timeline. Okay.
Just because we're getting a lot of questions in the same theme here, online, so I'll just ask one, and I think it's going to be to you, Gustavo. The question is really about our balance sheet since you mentioned in your presentation that some of the obligations that composes the expended net debt will start to come down. How you think about potential leverage long term? Also in conjunction with that, we're getting probably five, six questions about how would you gauge between also the paying extra dividends and the potential buyback we have, currently.
Look, first one is, as we pay down those obligations, it will open up the space for us to releverage, right? We don't wanna be under-leveraged. I think we've announced, and I agree with the recommendation from the team to operate within the 1x net debt to EBITDA. As we pay down Brumadinho, and we reduce some of these expensive debt liabilities, we should be able to releverage and then think about the best use. Then going back to the second question, the best use today clearly is the share buyback, right? Given we are trading, someone mentioned we are trading at 3x. There is. It's very accretive for us to buy back our own share.
What we're gonna do is, at the time that we have those cash availables, we'll see what is the best use, whatever is more accretive for shareholders.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Daniel Sasson from Itaú BBA. Thanks for the presentation. My first question to Gustavo, if you could try to explain, coming from another company with fresh eyes, are there any, despite the excellent job Siani has done over the past years, anything that you'd like to tackle first, any opportunities that you see in terms of asset liability management or things like that? Can you give us a few examples on initiatives that you are working on, maybe with your suppliers, in order to reach those savings that you mentioned of nearly $1 billion over the next 12, 18 months, in addition, obviously, to the high dilution of fixed costs?
Maybe to Spinelli, can you comment a bit on the extra costs maybe coming from the reblending the high silica products into the BRBF or, you know, increasing the usage of filtering plants instead of using traditional tailings dams? That would be great. Thank you.
I think you know, the team has done a fabulous job, and I'm not saying this because Luciana is here. I think from the liability management standpoint, the balance sheet that I've encountered is in great shape, right? We've paid down debt. There's probably some opportunity to accelerate some of refinancings, but I think this is more nitty-gritty day-to-day, nothing transformational. I like the one-time net debt to EBITDA. I like that piece. If anything, what we want to accelerate is this cost efficiency and the capital allocation discipline, right? We wanna make sure that every dollar makes sense as we allocate them. They are allocated at the right level of return vis-à-vis share buyback. We wanna get leaner, right?
That is a priority, not only mine. I think it's a priority for the executive team here. We are all very focused on getting this done. It's not just because I came that we are announcing this. This had been discussed already internally, and if anything, I'm just trying to push a little harder, but we will get there. In terms of opportunities, we've laid out a couple of levers, I think, on the sourcing. Look, we spend more than $10 billion, I would say probably $14 billion annually, right? We are a big buyer among many things. Some of that spend is not addressable, but probably $10 billion is addressable, right? Things that we buy in the day-to-day, third-party services and everything.
There is several opportunities, as you guys have seen many companies doing this, right, to review specification, scope, even internal demand, right? I mean, how much we're using of optimize inventory. We'll be tackling a series of those initiatives. They are already underway. Hopefully we'll be able to, over time, share some of the success cases with you guys.
Well, Daniel, thank you. Actually, the new way to operate, we have some. If you see this in compartments, you see some increase in terms of OPEX. Like the filtration. That's an extra asset, and you need people there, you need to handle the tailings and stockpile. There's a cost involved in that. That one part is simple to see that you have something that you deal with risk. You mentioned the pre-blend. Pre-blend is different from that. Let's take this apart, because pre-blend is something to reduce the total cost of the client. It's not something for us. Actually, just figure out, we blend the BRBF.
Every client in this world, they blend their own iron ore, 'cause they buy from FMG, buy from Carajás, from Vale, they buy from BHP, and they blend. They do this in their plant or in parts. When you do this in only one moment, you can reduce their costs. This action is more, you know, an intrinsic relationship of something that we are strengthening together, the supply chain as a whole, of something engaged with them. That's the idea. Regarding the reduction of cost, optimization of cost, you know, I don't know, we have two main pillars here. The first one is constraint. Let's get out of constraints. There are a lot of work in this area.
Not only related to the challenges after Brumadinho with all the restriction with dams, but also we can find better ways to solve our problems. Like audit board knowledge, we can improve this despite Brumadinho. We need to improve, like in Carajás, in Serra Sul, in S11D. There's room to improve that. There is a front only related to that. The other part is related to how can we extract value from contracts or from the way we do this. Why you should consider that this $1 billion is important to return the value to the shareholder.
Considering what happened after Brumadinho, we spent a long time to organize ourselves to organize safety. We spent a lot of time to organize our process. Now we have an additional effort. It's not so, "Oh, now the focus is cost." No. We have a platform. We are building and doing our homework, like Eduardo said. Now we're increasing other action, another perspective to deliver your results as a leader inside the company. That's the right time to do that. It was quite impossible to make this two years ago. I you know, it's impossible. It was impossible. We were talking about, you know, other really,
Nando, just to
-problems.
Just to add, because we had two hits, right? One hit was Brumadinho.
Yep.
This disorganized everything and put our actions, and we have to do whatever we have to do. We create structures, levels of governance that brought a more less linear organization. As we talk here a lot about, and I'm truly a believer of that, like Gustavo said, tool time. You know what tool time means? Tool time is the time that the our maintenance people are directly related to the equipment. We're like 5 times lower than we should be. There's a huge amount of opportunities if you do the right thing with VPS, for instance. That's where we believe the biggest gains are coming. We saw that.
We showed to you, I think, in 2019, the railway numbers, the theft, how the accidents decrease and efficiency and the earnings efficiency comes in. That's why I think when I said 80%, it's a continuous work. It's continuous improvement by the way we see it. There is a huge gaps of opportunity there as we have the right structure, the right manning, and the right tool time, for instance. Tool time is key for us. We have, how can I say, not the best numbers so to say. Just one example, when you get like an equipment, you hire an equipment, people are asking for money.
That's, I think, the contribution for Gustavo, say no. People just found out that the equipment was not being used for the whole time. Why don't you use it when you. It looks like, wow. That's the moment that we're trying to get Vale back to normal. I don't want to say turning the page, nothing like that. We will never forget Brumadinho. Brumadinho will be ever in our minds to remember how things can go wrong. Fundamentally, we believe that we have our leadership now aligned with us. Now it's time to turn the screw, and I think there's a lot of things to come out of that. It's not something, some number that we think we're just throwing out because there are cost reductions, as you just mentioned.
We know iron ore was always very well run in that sense. As when if we bring better management, process for that with the right behavior, of course, we're gonna achieve cost for that.
Okay, let me just organize the line again. We still have four people to ask. I swear I'm getting all the signs and putting here. JC is gonna be next. You're gonna be next. Then we have Santander, Rafael, and then Bokkenheuser, and then we have Jonathan Brandt. We're not gonna be able to get more questions, so I think just respond quickly, answer quickly.
Eduardo, given what you said earlier in the Q&A about wanting to keep base metals but highlight the value, but also the multiple being treated like a pure iron ore play. Mark did a great job explaining the growth opportunities in the business. I'm looking at the slide where you talk about going from 45 EBITDA per ton breakeven to 35, 30, 35, maybe even below 30 in iron ore. I mean, on 400 million tons, that's $4 billion-$5 billion of EBITDA potentially. To get that diversified multiple and get the base metals appreciated by the market, is there a percentage of Vale's EBITDA you're targeting for base metals long term? And how do you get there? Because the iron ore business is massive.
Yeah, that's true.
The market seems to want a certain percentage of diversification to give you any credit for it.
Yeah, I'll share my answer with Mark. Hi, Mark. We used to have this number before myself. I actually ran base metals, by the way. The way that we were trying to say is like, it has to be at least 30% of the base metals business. We still think it has to be something around that ballgame. When you look long term at base metals, it's able to go to $6 billion-$7 billion. We know that.
Yeah.
With the value creation, there is a lot of. If you think downtime in Brazil is bad, you don't know how bad it is in Sudbury. We still need to do this homework in the mines in Sudbury. There is a huge amount of volume and cost that has to be coming out of the nickel business and growth in copper. We need to bring growth from copper. Like Alemão has to come, Salobo has to come. Copper is a. Everybody wants copper, so it's not a big deal. Anyhow, if you have 30%, like out of 20, it's gonna be something like $6 billion-$7 billion. If you get the right multiple, then you can bring. We have two problems here.
We have the multiple of Vale that is behind the mining industry. You have the multiple inside Vale that is, even if it was aligned, would be behind because it doesn't dilute the base metals business. By my vision, you have the whole mining industry downgraded because it's not what it should be. We are essential to everything that we're talking here today, and we're trading like 5x, 4x. Why? Why is that? That's not only Vale's problem, that's everybody's problem. That's why I see them being so vocal and being wanted, not needed like we are today. On the base metals business, this is the ballgame. I would say 25 or 30, but it has to be relevant. Most important, we have to deliver on it.
That's, I think, the main issue around our base metals business.
I agree. I mean, I feel the pressure to put something out there that's meaningful, compared to what Spinelli can do.
Yeah, because we're very afraid. Put it this way. We don't like the idea to be exposed to Brazil, to iron ore alone.
Yeah.
I don't think this is the best place. That's where our minds are today. We are being pushed by our board, we are being questioned. But that's an ongoing discussion that we now have. What we know, we have the best assets in nickel and in copper. We need to do that better, and that has to be appreciated. That's why some of the discussions we even provoke. Should we create a wholly owned subsidiary like we did with VLI. Spinelli ran VLI. I don't know if you were acquainted with the VLI. VLI was a railway, third-party general cargo business that has only problems, brought only headaches for us. We spun off, gave autonomy. Now it's a BRL 20 billion business. Well, almost went IPO this year. If it were for Brazil's problems, would have been IPOs.
It's not the same. It's an adjacency. Adjacency is not a growth thing, but it's where our minds are. We need to push this business to perform.
Can I just add something?
Yeah, of course.
Obviously, in the end, the responsibility is to put together a business that, like Eduardo was saying, can generate strong EBITDA, strong cash flow. We have the plans to ramp, you know, to the $6 billion-$7 billion EBITDA, multibillion-dollar cash flow, and obviously put the reserves and resources on the table for growth. I mean, that's an enviable portfolio for what we're looking at in the future with the energy transition. I mean, that's the goal, and hopefully it becomes meaningful and seen by the market.
Rafael, yes.
Okay, thanks for the event. Rafael Barcellos from Santander. Another question related to briquette. Could you please elaborate on your commercial strategy? I mean, I know that you showed an incremental EBITDA, so I just was wondering if you're considering like a premium over pellet or something in line, just to understand exactly what are you considering. My second question related to base metals. I mean, thanks for the details on production, but could you please elaborate on your profitability into next year? Thank you.
The position of the briquette is not as a substitute of the pellet. Can be in the future, we can do this, but we are targeting the sinter to be the substitute. That's the main idea of the commercial part. Yes, we consider premiums coming from the briquette. And as we mentioned, what would be in the game here? We have some clients that they. The sinter part of the steel making is the most important part to attack when you want to reduce the two main things, the emissions and also the dust, you know, the pollution related to physical pollution. And we have some constraints.
Our clients have some constraints related to renew the permits to have new sinterization or new capacity for that. We are targeting who needs to change this to the blast furnace.
Who need to now reduce this exposure in sintering. That's definitely a good premium for that, and that's the way we are designing the commercial part. We're going to show this in the future in one year. It depends. Actually, it can be premium higher than the pellet. Can be a premium higher than the pellet or less than the pellet, depends on the. It's different market position. Pellet, blast furnace is one thing. Green briquette in the beginning will be driven by the sintering, sinter part of the blast furnace.
The assumption under the numbers is once you have 50 million tons of briquettes, you're gonna generate between $500 million and $1 billion of EBITDA. Which means an additional margin, let's say, of $15 per ton. If you have a conversion cost for briquettes around $10, which should be, it should be at least half, max half of the conversion cost for pellets. The assumption is an average premium of $25 over sinter, for example. Just to have a ballpark.
With a lower OPEX comparing to the pellet business.
Yeah.
It's half of the OpEx.
We have two more questions, and then we have to finish.
No more. There's another question.
There's a question about the base metals profitability.
Oh, sorry.
You want me to-
Go ahead.
Profitability is there. Copper obviously stronger than nickel. Very high EBITDA margins in copper. Strong cash flow. It'd be even better if we had Salobo III coming on at the beginning of the year, but they're still very strong. Nickel is EBITDA margins are growing. They're there. They're strong and they're growing. Both businesses are cash flow positive, and I think that's important in particular with the nickel business because of the high investments in the replacement capacity in the mine. We've been cash flow positive in nickel and funding the growth for a couple of years now. There's no shareholder funding or sharing.
Yeah.
Next year is a transition year. Obviously, we have the milestones we have to hit, and we'll see that profitability increase in particular in nickel as we get the Sudbury mines in shape and producing. I would say that really looking forward to very strong EBITDA margins and profitability on both copper and nickel in a couple of years.
Andreas.
Thank you. Andreas Bokkenheuser from UBS. I know it's top of the hour, so just one question from me on freight. I know that you obviously have your long-term freight contracts and that limits your exposure to the spot freight market. Most of the fuel cost or the freight cost inflation you've had seems to have been fueled through fuel cost, bunker fuel inflation. How does that work with the new IMO rules? There seems to be a fairly popular opinion forming, obviously, that the bunker fuel cost component of freight rate is gonna go up because of lower carbon emissions required on the IMO and lower sulfur, more expensive fuels. I know from your presentation you expect fuel costs to go down.
How does these long-term contracts you have on freight actually work with the new IMO rules?
Well, from IMO perspective, we have three points here today, right? The specific for bunker, the low sulfur, the high sulfur, we addressed this, you know very well, with the scrubbers. And also the long-term contracts that we don't have the low sulfur as a part of our impact in the business. You are right. I think the other two actions from IMO, they are related to the project consumption, project efficiency and the efficiency itself. There are two points here in 2023, 2025. From this perspective, if you don't act, you need to reduce the speed of the vessel. That's on average what we need to do. The impact for us is almost zero.
We only have one part of the fleet, the Valemax, the first generation, that if you don't decrease the consumption, if you don't add this Ecoshipping part, we need to reduce 2% of the speed on average. It's so really low. It's nothing. The impact for this fleet today is something that we are handling. Considering the future that we need to go to zero, what we are doing is our fleet, new fleet that is coming and also the fleet that we need to replace will be ready for some new solution regarding the fuel, like LNG or other kind.
We're seeing that even the one that I said that we're going to improve, we have some room to improve the fleet, will be ready for several solutions, not only LNG or bunker. What we can expect, we'll be ready to save fuel with the Ecoshipping. We'll be ready to change the source of fuel with this kind of specs for the project. The whole market, what we see today, Andreas, is two main components. The first one is the spot freight is really high related to the coal business. We see the coal going in a better shape in few months, considering the normalization of this business with China more balanced now. This is the main impact.
In the bunker, definitely, the other things related to oil. What we are doing is trying to offset with savings in terms of product or being ready for change.
In the near future with our new vessels. That's the way we're going to protect ourselves.
Hi. Jonathan Brandt from HSBC. It's great to see you all again. Just kind of one question from me. Eduardo, you've spoken over the past two or three years about wanting to have a more stable company, and certainly you've achieved a lot over the past two or three years. There's still a lot left to go. There's still production stops and starts, there's still lawsuits in Brazil and the U.S., and now there's a new board election, even though we just had one in April. I guess I'm wondering, you know, what initiatives can you do? When do you think you'll get to become sort of the more stable company that you envisioned?
Just related to that, with the upcoming board election in the next four or five months, do you expect to follow a similar process with a nomination committee, et cetera? Thank you.
Yeah. Okay, thank you. I think it's a very valid question. I think, as you mentioned, we believe we did a lot of strides on that. A lot of our business, like with Itabira Complex that Medeiros mentioned. When you saw the maturity index, it's pretty much more stable. Southern range is much more stable. Still have issues on the northern range. Canada mines, although like Long Harbor, we operate pretty well. Voisey's Bay is top-notch in stability. I think those issues are going to be solved. I remember when I visited Toyota in 2009, the CEO said, "I can give you the book, but it takes five years, okay?
If you do it everything very well." It took like that in the railways at Vale. It's a long-term journey, but we will solve it. It's not rocket science. It's people engaged. It's cultural. It's this process. We didn't have an architecture in Vale. We did have the architecture at the railways in ports, but not for the whole system, not even in base metals, we had zero. That's the main issue that I'm willing to have as a legacy, by the way. Because I believe that we have to be leaders proof. The day I leave, somebody takes my role, it will keep continuing improving this company as it should. We should be a world-class company, and we will be, because I think we're taking the right steps.
It takes time, but I don't think it's a never-ending story. That's why I said almost complete the homework because I truly believe that we'll be able to deliver on our promises, on our guidances, and we're gonna play the leader's role with how can I say that? With good judgment. Specifically about the board transition, it's a natural one, I believe. I don't see any because if you think what happened in our general election in April, it was shareholders' decision and was a vote. Who is there is there because of. We say we lost diversity because we have only one woman there now, but we created shareholder diversity. We don't believe there's gonna be assembly next April. Why for? What for?
Which player is not happy with that? Previ is a big relevant shareholder at Vale. Other players here are relevant at Vale. I believe continuity is fundamental to Vale and will happen. As my lawyer like to say, probably will happen. It's my real gut because I'm getting the full support of the new board. I don't see any changes coming from that. It's good to see different views and different pushes. People that arrives makes a lot of questions. In the end, we need to be stable. That's what Vale needs. That's another stability part. Truly, I believe it's gonna be. I'm not sure it's gonna be a nomination committee or it's gonna be a multiple voting.
I really think it can be just a renewal of the board, as it can be done by the bylaws, by the way. It can even be done by two years. If the bylaws, if the general assembly, if the shareholders wish like that, they can just reelect the whole team and for two years and relieve less doubts about that. I think it's natural. I don't think this is a big issue. From the standpoint of management, we're very well supportive of our board.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay. I think we have to conclude now. I don't know, Eduardo, if you wanna say something or if-
No, I think just thank you a lot for your interest, patience. Now for the people that were here in person, I really like that. I was going to make a joke in the beginning, and Alex didn't allow me. The good thing about the past is that we could do our meetings in pajamas or in Bermudas. Now we need to put a tie. It's really good to see people face to face and really see that you're true. You're still interested in our narrative, in our story. Just to conclude, this is a never-ending problem. No, we need to transition to a more stable company as soon as possible. I don't think there's a best buy in the market. We do what we
How can I say? We put our money where our mouth is. We are buying ourselves back. Buy Vale. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks for coming.
Thank you very much.