Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being here today with us. We are going to start soon, so first, a few safety instructions. In case of an evacuation, lights will come on, an alarm will sound, and the emergency exits are on your left and on your right. Then you will have to exit taking the stairs, and you will be directed to the assembly point outside of the building. So I am Sandrine Nourry-Dabi, Head of Investor Relations at Eramet. We are very pleased to be here today with you for Eramet first Capital Markets Day.
The agenda for today's session comprise presentations with members of the management team of Eramet, including Christel Bories, Chair and CEO of Eramet; Virginie de Chassey, Chief Sustainability and External Affairs Officer; Nicolas Carré, Chief Financial Officer; Geoff Streeton, Chief Development Officer; and Kleber Silva, Chief Operating Officer. There will be a coffee break midway through the presentation. Once we have gone through the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. I certainly hope you'll enjoy today's event. Thank you. Good afternoon to all of you here in the room and to those who are participating remotely. I would like to thank you very much for participating in this event.
This is the first Capital Market Day of Eramet, and I hope that after these presentations of today, you will understand much better the fundamentals of our companies and also its full potential for value creation. As you have seen just in the film, Eramet today is a pure mining and metal company with a diversified and first-class portfolio of assets. Very international footprint, an international and agile organization with safety rates at the level of the best in the industry, and the reference in CSR. But Eramet has not always been like this.
It was a very different company, six years ago, with a lot of non-core downstream metal processing businesses, very French-centric, having Gabon as the main source of cash, quite slow in making decisions, and with quite mediocre safety results. So when I joined the company, six years ago, I launched a huge managerial and strategic transformation. The first thing I did is I put safety as the first top priority and a value for the company. I then put CSR at the center of the strategic vision of Eramet, the central pillar, and as the center of the business model, to be a committed and contributive corporate citizen. I also reinforced it by integrating it into our corporate purpose....
This corporate purpose is now embedded in the article of association of the company, and it is to become a reference of the responsible transformation of the earth's mineral resource for living well together. This corporate purpose is very important because it is now the backbone of everything we do at Eramet. I also completely reposition the portfolio of the group. First, by divesting the non-core downstream processing businesses which were not profitable, and it's mainly Aubert & Duval and Erasteel. But also selling or closing some non-profitable activities like Sandouville or the electromanganese activity in Gabon. All together, these activities, which are finally out of our portfolio now, have burned almost EUR 1 billion of cash over the last five years.
So you can imagine how much their exit of the portfolio have changed the face of the company and made it much more financially robust. At the same time, we have invested to grow our cash generative and attractive mines. During the period, we have almost doubled our manganese ore production in Gabon through productivity and the opening of a new plateau in Okouma. And this mine is now by far the largest manganese mine in the world. But also, and it was a game changer, we opened, in 2019, a new big nickel mine in Indonesia at Weda Bay, and this mine will produce this year more than 30 million tons of ore. So in less than four years, it has become the largest nickel mine in the world.
Those two big mines are now strong cash generators for the company, and they have still a lot of potential for further growth. At the same time, also, we have paved our way for our positioning on the energy transition through the opening of our outstanding deposits of lithium in Argentina, which will be in production by mid of next year. But also launching some projects which are in pre-FID phases. One with BASF in Indonesia for a nickel cobalt HPAL plant at the bottom of our Weda Bay mine, and the other one with Suez in France for recycling of the EV batteries. We have also more upstream projects that will be detailed later on in this presentation.
Beyond the portfolio repositioning, I also completely transformed the organization of the company to be more agile, more flexible, faster in making decisions, more international, also bringing a lot of new talents from the mining industry from all over the world, creating new position that didn't exist in the company before, and also being more diverse, putting more women in managerial position. It would not have been possible to transform Eramet in such a way without having this huge managerial transformation at the same time. So Eramet today is definitely a different company. The first, and it is clearly the company's greatest strength, is that we are refocused on a portfolio of world-class mining assets.
All our mines are large resource, long life, high grade, and scalable deposits, and they are all positioned in the first quartile of the cash cost curve , and this is quite unique in our industry. The company is also much safer, and we managed to create a strong culture, of safety throughout the organization with, quite outstanding results. As you can see on this chart, in five years, we moved from the worst to the best position in our industry, dividing by more than seven, our incident rate. And for me, this, tremendous improvement is a marker of the huge transformation that this organization has gone through and has successfully achieved, because I'm convinced that a safer company is also a more efficient and a more productive one. And I suggest that we have a look at this, great journey in a video.
Aujourd'hui, nous travaillons sur la construction d'une culture sécurité au sein de Comilog. 0 accident reste l'objectif visé par tous. Nous travaillons de manière très rapprochée avec la direction sécurité et prévention du groupe Eramet, dans la mise en œuvre des exigences essentielles de sécurité, du système de management de la sécurité. Nous travaillons avec eux aussi sur la feuille de route 4.0. On a mis dans nos engins miniers aujourd'hui, des caméras embarquées qui nous aident à détecter quand nos conducteurs sont fatigués, qui alertent le dispatch, et qui nous permettent donc de les descendre de la machine et les remplacer par d'autres conducteurs plus aptes.
... I think the key element to boost this positive safety culture is to make sure that we have the strong leadership, we have the commitment from the top to the bottom, and also we have to get more involved with the people through different like safety coaching, training, and also campaigns to try to, like, influence their perception, and then accordingly, change their behaviors at site.
En Eramet entendemos y aplicamos la seguridad como un valor. Es a través de confección y ejecución de procedimientos, y estamos trabajando en el desarrollo de la cultura permanente a través de capacitaciones, a través de programas en campo, a través de realizar actividades conjuntas, en las cuales podamos todos discutir sobre cuáles son los riesgos más importantes que tenemos todos los días y, sobre todo, hacer una buena planificación y un buen análisis de riesgo, que nos permita evitar tener incidentes.
La plus grande fierté, c'est d'avoir réussi à mettre la sécurité au cœur de l'activité. À la Comilog, c'est plutôt tout le monde qui comprend que la sécurité est une valeur et qu'on ne peut pas faire sans.
La seguridad dentro del equipo de Eramet está definido como un valor. Es lo más importante para nosotros y aquello que nos está definiendo como compañía líder en el mercado.
So indeed, we are much safer. But thanks to our portfolio reshuffling and the management for performance, we are also more financially robust and more resilient to the downs of the cycle. As illustrated on this chart, thanks to our intrinsic improvement over the last five years, at same price condition, the new portfolio generate two times more EBITDA than the previous one, and significantly more cash. We are also geographically more diversified, and this is important because we are less exposed to a single country's geopolitical situation. And last but not least, our excellence in term of CSR is recognized by all the rating agencies. They are positioning us among the best in our industry, whether we talk about climate, environment, social responsibility, or relation with communities.
This successful transformation of the company allows us to be now well positioned to benefit from this unique time in the history. The world will need more metals, and these metals will have to be provided in a more responsible way. Population growth, economic development of the developing countries, increased urbanization requires always more metals. Metals like manganese for infrastructure, nickel for capital or consumer goods, or mineral sands for construction. But the key accelerator is coming from the energy transition, driven by the green technology and by the electrification of the mobility and of the industrial processes. Power grids, batteries, windmills, all these assets will require even more metals and new metals, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, or even other metals in rare earths. We are then moving from the age of oil to the new age of metals.
Such a shift happens at a time where there are higher than never expectations on CSR practices for mining and metals companies, whether it is on CO2 emission, on biodiversity, on social responsibility or long-term sustainability. Those challenges give the opportunity to responsible mining and metal companies like Eramet to bring key solutions to the green transition, and also to play a strategic role in the future of our economies. Eramet is perfectly positioned to capitalize on these trends and to fully benefit from the huge metal growth, particularly coming from the energy transition. As a consequence, Eramet strategy is now based on two pillars. The first pillar is to continue to support the global economic development through urbanization and infrastructure with our manganese, nickel, and mineral sands products.
In these areas, we have leadership position, and we still have a lot of potential to continue to create value through organic growth. The second pillar of the strategy is to sustainably develop the critical metals for the energy transition. Here, we are talking about lithium, nickel, cobalt for batteries, but also being active in the recycling value chain. These are fast-growing markets where we have strong levers to compete. We have outstanding deposits in all these areas, and we have a strong know-how in hydrometallurgy that is used in most of these metals. This strategy is supported by an ambitious new CSR roadmap that we labeled Act for Positive Mining, and that will be described later, today, by Virginie.
So in conclusion, with our repositioning, we think that we have now the right portfolio of assets, with the right organization, at the right time to become a major player in the new era of metals and of energy transition. Let's see.
Red or black? White or blue? Matte or shiny? Hypnotic in their infinite forms, impossibly vast, imperceptibly small. Alive, electrifying, powerful, resistant, reusable until the end of time, irreplaceable. The Earth glistens with metals. They're essential today and vital for tomorrow. Searching for them, finding them, enhancing them, bringing life to these raw materials. What a privilege! What a responsibility. Passionate adventurers, tireless researchers, creators and inventors, all connected to the earth and to the future. It takes boldness to find these precious resources. It takes science to reveal all these riches. It takes care to select them and preserve this heritage. It takes many kinds of expertise to do it right. And it takes a special kind of commitment to build a better world. Because we live on planet Earth, because we act with consciousness and responsibility, because metals are a collective adventure.
Durable nickel, strong manganese, sleek titanium, energizing lithium. The world needs the metals we produce.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Geoff Streeton, Eramet's Chief Development Officer, and I'm gonna now go further into the detail that sits behind the strategy that Christel started to reveal to you in her comments earlier. So thank you firstly for being here at Eramet's first Capital Market Day. As Christel mentioned, we're entering a new era of metals with a transformed, stronger company that has a robust strategy now in line with today and tomorrow's key trends. I'm going to be taking you through the detail of that strategy, and then later in the session, my colleague, Virginie, will introduce you to the CSR roadmap that we have delivered over the last five years, and our new CSR roadmap: Act for Positive Mining. So context is everything.
Energy transition, economic growth, urbanization, the world needs increasingly larger quantities of metals to deliver a sustainable outcome. It's estimated that over the next 30 years, the world will consume more metals than it has extracted since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The OECD predicts that metals will be the fastest growing material of all the various major material commodities over the next few decades to 2060. Drivers of this demand: population growth. So what the UN is predicting, a population growth to 8.5 billion people by 2030, moving towards 10 billion by 2050. Urbanization. So that growing population is also increasingly urbanizing. By 2050, 7 out of 10 people are expected to live in a city, typically requiring large investment in infrastructure to house and transport them, and feed and deliver power.
At the same time as we have that demographic trend, we also have underlying GDP growth in the emerging economies, driving the consumption of people, driving their economic purchasing power, and creating further demand. Finally, over this, we have the emerging and significantly urgent trend of decarbonization. Economies starting to transform, how they deliver energy, how they transport people, how they process materials, and that, as we move to tackle climate change at a global level, that will increasingly also drive demand for key materials such as metals. The demand for metals is really expected to surpass all the prior estimates that have traditionally underpinned the mining industry.
Now, we know, and it's been spoken about a lot, that the electric vehicle boom will be a huge driver, and it will be particularly a driver of a boom for miners like Eramet, with a large critical metals resource base. We're going to be spending a lot of this session today explaining to you the resource base we have and what opportunities it creates for the growth of this company. Just to put this into perspective, electric car sales increased by 60% globally in 2022, exceeding 10 million units. We currently expect that half of all cars sold by 2030 should be fully or partially electric, and 70% by 2040. This EV revolution will require a lot of batteries, and to build those batteries, we will require a lot of metals.
For example, one nickel-based NMC battery for a typical 70-kilowatt electric vehicle, which is today the most common vehicle on the market, requires six times the amount of critical metal as a conventional vehicle. Some 45 kilograms of nickel, and for us, in our business, that requires around 5 tons of laterite ore to be mined, and likewise, 6 kilograms of cobalt coming from that same laterite source. 40 kilograms of lithium carbonate equivalent, requiring around 20 cubic meters of brine to be processed at Centenario. As a result, we look at these critical metals for ecomobility, and we believe they will drive tremendous growth, creating multiples of today's annual demand for some of these commodities. So we are focused on building and developing the resource base to supply these metals, and through that, delivering value to our shareholders.
Just to look at, a bit more specifically, at the lithium and nickel Class 1 project, where we see both of these metals poised to experience sustained high growth. So if we look at lithium, for the remainder of this decade, we are looking at a 20% cumulative annual growth rate, and 12% annual growth rate for the next two decades to 2040. Nickel growth rates are lower, but we must bear in mind that this is off a much larger existing industrial base. All of this means, though, that there is room for high-quality, first-cost quartile, critical metal projects, such as the ones that Eramet has in its portfolio, and that we're going to introduce you to today. So what is the role of mining and metals companies in the foundation of this global electric vehicle supply chain?
So, the journey to create a battery is complex. It requires numerous input materials and multiple stages and processes to get to that endpoint. Our investments focus on the mining or extraction of the underlying resources, and primary conversion on location into an intermediate product that can then be sold into the global battery precursor product markets. We build resource positions through exploration, through business development, through evaluating and understanding our ore bodies, and then we develop operations to deliver the metal units needed into the battery value chain. Our nickel customers in the battery value chain are the base metal refineries, who then feed what's called the Pre-CAM, the pre-cathode active material producers. And our lithium products will flow directly to the cathode active material manufacturing sector. As Christel mentioned earlier, CSR and ESG have absolutely become key factors for mining and metals companies.
They've emerged as the topmost concern for our industry. With ESG taking center stage, mining and metals companies have no alternative, no other solution than to focus heavily on the implications of our activities and our operations in terms of the environment, society, and our stakeholders. Just below ESG, we increasingly see geopolitics and climate change as two other key matters. As climate change becomes increasingly urgent, we see governments paying greater and greater attention to the valuable resources that facilitate energy transition. And our customers are increasingly demanding action by upstream producers, such as ourselves, and we'll cover our response to this later. So a strong commitment to CSR is no longer just an ethical choice. It's a competitive advantage, and frankly, a strategic must.
Eramet has recognized this, and we place CSR at the heart of our strategy, at the heart of our values, and at our mission. By taking it seriously, we're not only doing the right thing by our stakeholders, but we believe we are positioning the company for long-term success. This is especially pertinent in the mining and metals sector, where transforming mineral resources responsibly is essential. To emphasize this, having a license to operate is not merely about legal and regulatory permissions. It's about building and maintaining trust with the communities we operate in, with our customers, our investors and the wider public, and through that, sustaining the license to operate, through which we create value for our shareholders. Geopolitical factors are also creating both risks and opportunities for the company.
We face, in the recent years, the emergence of growing resource nationalism, which is changing how we have to compete to secure opportunities. We see increasing risk of geopolitical conflict disrupting mineral supply chains. On the opportunity side, though, through that also comes an increased desire for sovereign states to secure the supply of the metals they need for their economies. We see increased desire of companies to secure the supply of metals they need, and for us, that creates new sources of demand, new sources of financing that we can leverage in building our portfolio. So if we visualize these key trends, these macro factors, and compare them to our two strategic axes, you'll see that Eramet has developed a strategy that checks the boxes of addressing these drivers.
Our long-term strategy is in line with this macroeconomic context, and we have access to the mineral resources to deliver it. To further grow in our historical metals, the metals which we have participated in, in some instances, many decades, that support global economic development. We'll be focusing on driving productivity improvements through improved operational performance and to deliver better capital asset utilization, improve productivity, and gradually and organically grow our output and improve our capital returns. We're gonna be leveraging now on the increasing push for sustainability and green steel by leveraging our already leading carbon footprint in our metallurgical businesses, and increasingly trying and to seek to develop greener products that can take market share in the emerging demand for these materials.
On the other side of our strategy, we'll continue now to invest, to position ourselves as a key provider of critical metals for the energy transition, meaning we're gonna be focusing on developing our ongoing projects, and we are also, and we'll be introducing today, developing a portfolio of future projects. These include leveraging the absolutely world-class resource positions we have at Centenario and Weda Bay to generate significant value. This includes potentially becoming a major participant in the battery recycling project, which we believe will become an increasingly important center of mining activity in the coming years of the whole emerging industry of recycling. And, we are actively exploring and building a portfolio of early-stage resource opportunities that could drive our growth in the future as we work in, through them and develop them.
We've put in place the enablers to accelerate our our transition and to drive growth and the capture of value. In our innovation, we have a long track record of developing mineral processing technologies, developing technologies that can improve the sustainability of our operations and the economic competitiveness of our businesses. One of our primary objectives in our innovation activities is to unlock the value of our mineral deposits. In doing so, we believe we're also typically enhancing the sustainability of our operations, because as just as much as we focus on the traditional mining levers of yield and recovery, we also focus on reducing the consumption of resources, reducing the consumption of energy, reducing the consumption of water, all of which typically delivers a double bottom line benefit of lower cost and improved sustainability.
In decarbonization, we're moving to electrify and phase out the use of diesel in our mining operations. Importantly, we're advancing the decarbonization of our pyrometallurgical businesses, and we'll go through that in detail later on today. We're looking to expand our production of high-grade ores, which typically deliver greater efficiency from an emissions perspective and energy consumption perspective for our customers. We're also looking, as I said before, to start producing more tailored, low-emission products for the needs of our customers as they emerge. At our operating level, we're undertaking a digital transformation of our businesses, reinvesting and bringing our mines up to contemporary technological standards through which we can drive productivity, coordination, and value delivery. We're connecting our geology right through to the economy. We're optimizing our processes.
We're accessing now the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to optimize our day-to-day planning. We're integrating remote control centers that enable far better control of our operations, and we're investing in the materials needed and required by our customers increasingly around product traceability and quality. Just this little bit on SLN. In this very successful repositioning of our company that has been undertaken in recent years, and the repositioning of our strategy and portfolio, there is still one single asset for which we don't yet have a solution. We are still working on it. This is our historic business in New Caledonia, our historic nickel business, SLN, which today remains structurally uncompetitive and loss-making.
From a management perspective and an operational perspective, we believe we've delivered everything we can in terms of trying to drive productivity, improving the export of ores, including improving the performance of the plant, and putting in place improved energy security to underpin process security. But the remaining levers to enable SLN to be cash positive are structural factors, and these are not in our hands, but in the hands of the local and national authorities, issues such as energy price, issues such as access to ore, these are issues that have to be resolved by these stakeholders. We are working with these stakeholders to find the best solution for the future. But as previously stated, Eramet will not be providing any further financing to SLN.
Our exploration activity is an area that we are increasingly focusing on as a company to deliver future growth options for the company. We are, at the moment, building an exploration capability that is intended to be agile and global. Through this, we're particularly today focusing on identifying and capturing early-stage resources in the critical nickel, lithium, and cobalt space. These elements, which are, as we've spoken about already, pivotal in the, in the technological landscape today, are at the heart of our strategy. Our exploration and business development capability is designed to be global and is today prioritizing the capture of these commodities. Consistent with this theme, we today announced the acquisition of a package of mining and exploration concessions in Chile. This is in a lithium prospective region of Chile, and where we'll be providing some more information on this acquisition later.
But it is all about positioning the company for future growth opportunities.
...My colleague, Virginie de Chassey, will now talk to you about our CSR roadmap, Act for Positive Mining.
Thank you. Thank you, Geoff. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm thrilled to be here as the Chief Sustainability Officer of this company. As we saw, this new era of metal, of metals come with high level of expectations in term of ESG. Our journey towards sustainable mining started five years ago, and we are taking a new leap forward now. Our ambition being a key contributor by shifting mining from problem maker to solution provider, and the way we work is using our corporate purpose, this vision that we have, and acting on a daily basis with CSR action plans, dedicated organization and organization working with the operations, processes, high level of standards and strong reporting.
So let's have a look at what we achieved over the last five years, a journey in which we succeed to become a company committed to people, committed to responsibility, economic responsibility, and to planet. Most goals will be achieved or exceeded. We are now very well positioned in around our mines with community investment, giving more and more beneficiaries. Last year, we had 125,000 people benefiting from the actions that we conducted. And on the planet side, we managed to cut by 40% our carbon intensity, and we started a new way of working in the mining operations with active rehabilitation.
This gives us solid foundation to go further, and I propose that we look to a video to have, to see that.
Eramet does its utmost to contribute to a sustainable future. Emphasizing positive community relations, we work hard to manage operational impacts on local communities. Environmental protection and revegetation are our priorities, as seen at GCO in Senegal. And when people or economic activity need to be relocated, we ensure this is done in a respectful way, embodying Eramet's commitment to responsible mining and community engagement. Eramet maintains ongoing dialogue with local populations through liaison agents and a transparent complaints management system. As a responsible partner, a significant proportion of our positive impact on our communities stems from our contributions to local socioeconomic development, built on community-driven CSR focuses. In 2023, we launched Eramet Beyond, an ambitious community investment trajectory to support local, sustainable economic diversification.
The inaugural program's objective is to train 745 female entrepreneurs in Gabon and Senegal to develop their businesses with plans for broader deployment across other group sites. At Eramet, we produce more than just metals. We're also a driving force behind the economic development of our host areas.
Building on this successful transformation, we are taking a new impulse, and I'm very pleased today to launch this new CSR roadmap. Here comes the time for us to be bold, to be focused, and to act with a positive mindset. Well-positioned on the energy transition, Eramet is resolutely convinced that mining brings a strong contribution to our world, and we are therefore launching this new roadmap. But to be part of the solution means addressing the main sustainability issues identified by our stakeholders, by you, and all our stakeholders, internally and externally. And these plans address priority and significant challenges that are material. Of course, health and safety for our employees and our subcontractors, the way we contribute and impact on local communities, how we can decrease our energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions....
The sustainability of the ecosystem we have around us, but also water, biodiversity, and human rights. So Act for Positive Mining is composed of three axes, three dimensions: care for people, trusted partner for nature, and transform our value chain. Within these three areas, we have ten ambitions for 2026, and three long-term commitment. We are working with a results-oriented target for each of these ambition, and it's the entire organization that is aligned on the way to improve and to work with best practices. So let's have a look of this first pillar, care for people. In care for people, social responsibility starts, of course, with safety, and we're going to continue the journey started to change the culture of this company.
The group confirms its absolute commitment to operational safety with an even more ambitious target, drive, FR2 below 1. We also wish to address health and in a comprehensive way by defining a global benefits program for employees. Being more inclusive means being more performant, so providing an inclusive environment where everyone can grow is absolutely key. Despite a lot of improvement, we did not success to achieve the 30% female managers that we have in our previous CSR roadmap. We keep, we decided to keep this objective, and we also want, in this new roadmap, to work on young early in career opportunity. Regarding the communities, we accelerate the local and sustainable development for communities.
Job employment is the first preoccupation for the people living around us, so we are going to work on education, diversification of their economies, with an ambition of having 6,000 non-core business voluntarily supported with local programs, in addition to the jobs directly linked and indirectly linked to our mine. In this ambition, we also want to support young, talented people from the communities with 500 scholarships for secondary and higher education. Regarding environment, in this new roadmap, we will work on water management, control, and optimizing water consumption. We will have a deep dive, I would say, in the water recycling of the two sites where we have some water-stressed areas in Senegal and in Argentina.
And we want also to continue the work that we started on biodiversity with this rehabilitation ratio everywhere, but also by improving the quality of these biodiversity action plans that we have side by side. Of course, when we speak about protecting the environment, it means also mitigate and reduce the environmental impact. On this, behind lots of work that we do on a daily basis, we focus this roadmap on sharing with the communities ambient air quality monitoring and water discharge monitoring. Talking about decarbonization means, for us, talking about our whole value chain.
Reduce the CO2 footprint of our value chain means working with our customers and suppliers, working on our processes, and on our daily works in the mine, but 90% of our CO2 emissions come from our processes, so we'll come back on this this afternoon. Optimizing mineral resource consumption is also a key aspect of the work that we do. In this roadmap, beyond our historical activities, we want to work on a robust, technically and economically model to industrialize EV batteries recycling. Last but not least, transforming our value chain means also works on human rights and ethics behaviors for our customers and suppliers, and on this, we work with screening of them and trainings of our people.
I would say to lock this system, we have decided to also engage in the certification 100% of our mining sites with the highest level of standard, the IRMA one. We started this work two years ago, and we are developing it. GCO in Senegal will be the first mine to be IRMA certified. And we are working also on with Weda Bay, and the lithium that will come out from Centenario will be immediately audited by IRMA next year, well, the year after. So we have these short-term objectives, and we also have set long-term objectives because we need to set our eyes also on the long term. Care for people comes with 100% sites with D&I label, because we want to be an inclusive company.
Biodiversity comes with working towards net positive impact. By 2035, we want to cut by 40% our CO2 emissions, Scope 1 and 2. To achieve both short and long-term objectives, we have built, as you just see, a comprehensive system with a positive mindset to act on a daily basis in all our sites. At a corporate level, and with the operations, we all work full speed to become this leading player in the new era of metals, contributing to a sustainable future. I will now hand over to Geoff and Kleber to introduce you on our portfolio. Thank you.
Thank you, Virginie. So, what we're gonna do in the next two sessions is take you through our portfolio and how it aligns with the strategic axes that I spoke of earlier. I'm going to be joined in this exercise by our Eramet's Chief Operating Officer, Kleber Silva, and together, we'll take you through that portfolio and introduce you to the key value drivers. So firstly, just a little bit more detail on the Eramet portfolio. We have here what we regard as a diversified portfolio of world-class deposits and downstream processing activities. That portfolio is split between operations that contribute to our traditional business, producing the metals that go to support the global economic activity, and the emerging projects, which in some instances, leverage off our existing businesses to sustainably produce critical metals for the energy transition.
The key assets in our first axis, at the heart of it is our Gabon manganese business, where we are the majority owner of Comilog, which operates the Moanda manganese mine, and the railway infrastructure provider, Setrag, that provides the logistics services to move that manganese to the coast. In Senegal, we have the Grande Côte operation, which is a mineral sands producer, producing titanium mineral products and zircon. In Indonesia, the Weda Bay nickel mine. In New Caledonia, we have our legacy portfolio of the SLN nickel mines and the Doniambo nickel smelter. In France, Norway, and the United States, we have our manganese alloy smelter portfolio. In our second axis, the projects to produce sustainably critical metals, we have our emerging lithium business in Argentina, and our projects to expand the Weda Bay mine supply into the Class One nickel sector.
Our first strategic axis, as I mentioned before, is focused on manganese, nickel, and mineral sands. We regard these as resilient, well-formed markets in which Eramet is strongly positioned to continue cementing its leadership and generate value. Let's start with manganese, a product at the heart of our portfolio and one of Eramet's key value drivers. Our Comilog asset in Gabon, based on the Moanda mine, is the largest global producer of high-grade manganese ore today. Eramet is also the largest global producer of refined manganese alloys. I want to give you some market insights into why we believe we are well positioned in, why we believe being well-positioned in manganese is so important for growth and value. As you may know, manganese is an essential metal. It is, in fact, the fourth most widely used metal in global society today, after iron, aluminum, and copper.
In making steel, manganese is a critical ingredient that gives steel its important strength and durability properties. In terms of the market for manganese ore, the global steel sector is a mature and stable market, expected to reach around 1.9 billion tons in 2026, and over the next few years, we see around a 3%-5% growth rate. We see key growth signals for steel coming from emerging regions. In India, we are seeing rapid growth in the installed making, installed steelmaking capacity there over the next five years. Southeast Asia, we see continued investment. In the Middle East, we see emerging investment in, particularly transformative steel processes, moving away from the traditional blast furnace.
Our largest market, of course, is China, where we do not today see strong capacity growth signals, but it represents for us around 50% of our global market today. Specifically, for the high-grade ore we produce, there is an industry-wide push for high-grade ore, because it allows our customers, the steelmakers, to lower the consumption of the carbon reductants they need to use to convert ore into metal. It also, therefore, is more energy efficient. It lowers their emissions intensity. And this gives us an opportunity to expand and capture market share from the lower grade ores that typically have a higher emission intensity and higher energy consumption requirement for our customers. Another emerging demand for manganese ore is the manganese chemical sector, where feedstock demand for batteries is starting to now grow as an important market for us to address.
So let's look in a bit more detail at the high-grade manganese ore market, and what are the characteristics that make it attractive place for us? Firstly, it's really important to recognize that high-grade ore dominates the first quartile of the manganese industry cost curve. So in terms of the high-grade producers, it is Moanda, the Comilog business in Gabon. It's our competitor, GEMCO, operating out of Australia, and a number of smaller high-grade mines. Collectively, 70% of the global high-grade market is made up from three producers. And we only see growth signals at the moment from operation in Gabon and South Africa. Our competitors tend to be constrained in their ability to grow. South Africa is a very important participant in the manganese market because in addition to having some limited high-grade capacity, it is a significant producer of medium-grade manganese ores.
So these are semi-carbonate ores, which have a different chemical composition to our high-grade oxide ores. And, they have a lower grade, and typically, they are used by our customers to reduce input costs. But the ability to use these lower-grade ores has to be balanced in the blend by maintaining a certain ratio of high-grade ores. And that means even if our customers want to drive towards lower-grade ores, they have to maintain the use of high-grade ores. And secondly, because their manganese content is lower, and because they have a higher, therefore, unit cost of production, they provide, from a cost perspective, a pricing umbrella under which the high-grade producers can comfortably live in terms of pricing and margin.
So we see in this instance, high-grade manganese, growth is constrained other than for our business, and strong emerging demand for high-grade ores to drive energy transition outcomes. Looking in a bit more detail at how high-grade manganese ore is priced, because it's typically priced at a premium per DMTU or per manganese unit to the medium-grade ores. Now, traditionally, that premium was around $0.40 per DMTU. In recent years, we've seen that premium rise to as high as $1.2. At the moment, the premium is closer to $0.60. Our view and the view of a number of other commentators is that that premium will likely settle around $0.80 for the next few years in our midterm forecast. So that's an 80-cent premium that is attributed by our customers to the benefits of high-grade ore over medium-grade ore.
The drivers behind that are, I've touched on them already. So it's the lower energy and reductant cost associated with processing these high-grade ores. It lowers the energy, the energy demand, it improves the emissions intensity. There is, as I said before, there is this undersupply of high-grade relative to the capacity of the medium-grade sector to expand. So if they want to increase their use of semi-carbonate ores, lower-grade ores, our customers have to also increase the usage of high-grade ores in their blend, and we are really, at this point, the only producer able to expand to address that market. And of course, the environmental factors of increasing demand for high-grade ores to improve the efficiency and environmental performance of our customers. So all of this is really significant.
As I said before, Moanda is really the only existing high-grade ore asset with significant available growth potential, and we will go through that in more detail shortly. Let's now look at the manganese alloys business. So this is the business of converting ore into a manganese alloy, which is then the product that can be added into the blast, into the furnace, in the creation of steel. Overall, the manganese alloy market is a geographically fragmented market. China, which is the single largest customer for manganese alloys, is a closed market with around a 20% import tax. So effectively, China's manganese alloy demands are produced domestically, and we are a significant provider of ore to those producers. For Eramet's alloy smelters in Europe and North America, we see Europe and North America as the most attractive markets.
Because for us, these are the markets that are in terms of the steel industry, that are leading the push for lower-emission steel products that are going to increasingly require lower-emission manganese alloy inputs. As we lower the carbon footprint of our alloys, we will have a competitive advantage in those markets, and we already have a competitive advantage because of the nature of energy source. Secondly, we have in our portfolio an enhanced capacity to produce refined manganese alloy products, which have a higher manganese content and a lower in-carbon content in the alloy. This is really important because refined products are operating in a less competitive market, they are harder to produce, and they attract a pricing premium over standard manganese alloy commodity products.
So we can earn stronger margins in refined alloys, and our strategy is typically to maximize our output of refined products relative to conventional, commodity alloy products. So what is our value-add strategy for our manganese ore business going forward? On the ore side, effectively, we want to continue to grow manganese ore production, but in response to the market's needs. We want to capitalize on our customers' emerging and growing demand for high-grade ores. We want to unlock value through productivity improvement, targeted debottlenecking investment, but effectively trying to gradually grow the business with as lower capital intensity as possible. We want to build market share through displacing the marginal semi-carbonate and lower-grade producers where we can, and increasingly provide a premium, high-grade product to the battery chemical sector that can underpin that element of the global energy transition. On the alloy side, our approach is slightly different.
Because the alloy sector being a much more competitive market, it is more about managing for value rather than managing for volume, and that is our strategy in this sector. So we will, in our alloy sector, want to focus on this value-over-volume strategy. That means constantly monitoring the market and adjusting our production plans to meet the needs of the market, and where it makes sense from a margin perspective, to potentially reduce production and sell surplus electricity back into the Western European energy markets. However, as our customers in Europe and North America increasingly lead the shift to the premium-grade products and increasingly lead the shift to low emission intensity steel products, we are going to in-build within our portfolio product offerings that meet those needs with a view to locking in a first-mover advantage, and if necessary, partnering with those steel industry first movers.
So how are we gonna produce a low emission intensity manganese alloy product? It is a key, a key step for us, and we'll be going through that in more detail, but it effectively involves transitioning away from fossil carbon sources to bioproduced carbon sources, exploring technologies such as carbon capture storage and carbon capture utilization. What I'm now gonna do is pass over to Kleber, who is going to introduce you to our operations on the ground and explain to you the value chains of our manganese ore and manganese alloy operations. Thank you.
Thank you, Geoff. Good afternoon, all of you. I'm very happy, extremely happy to be here to show you the marvelous mines that we have, plants all over the world. First one is our Comilog Setrag. 35 years there operating with a partnership with the government, 75 years mine concession, 30 years the railroad concession, a strong fiscal stability there, really well-positioned in the country. More than 9,000 people working there, contracting ourselves in this place. Really well-positioned in terms of mine, railroad, and port. And, as Christel mentioned, as Geoff mentioned, I just refer to the beauty of this asset, of this mine. It means huge base of resource, 454 million that we can continue to develop because we are still exploring there in brownfield exploration.
We are very well positioned in terms of cost, cash cost at $2.3. You see the price of last year, just to compare, and also with a perspective of growth that we have as in the last four years, we went from 4.3 to 7.5. It means really the mine or this structure that is well-positioned to serve the world in the steel business, to decrease the carbon footprint or to any growth that we can have. Completely integrated from geology, mine, railroad, port, and we have the transshipment that we can do different size of shipments and to our customer. It means we have the full chain there, a completely integrated in order to serve our customers.
As Virginie said, the CSR is with us. It's a part of the business. It's inside us. It's our DNA, and I have some examples in the different axes that she described here for caring for people, the consultation, the assessment of water. In the decarbonization, we have a plan to electrify conveyor belts, trucks, electric trucks, and shovels, and full hydropower. In order to rehabilitate, we are rehabilitating more than our mine, and the rate is 1.65, with 270 hectares of rehabilitation. And we have a Lac de Fondation, a foundation that is a protected area of forest there. It means, it's not only the mine itself, it's that the CSR is with us.
CSR is inside us, and we feel very, very good, as Christel mentioned, safe performance in mind. Today, our total FR2, our total recordable was around 0.7 at this mine. Therefore, we can continue to respond. We can continue to create value. I think Christel touched it, how we create value from 4.3 to 7.4 in the last four years. But the beauty of our model, that we can continue to respond. We have a scalable, we can expand because of the resource and reserve that we are investing. We are invested at the mine with a very low CapEx intensity in terms of OE improvement of utilization, productivity there.
And we can target 8 million or more, depend on the market, and be flexible also in terms of to create the value. And the same thing, we can have even a target. We have a target to be beyond 10 million there. So it is the beauty of our model is that scalable, low cost, long run, and quality. Because as Geoff said, each ton of manganese of that they took from us, compared to the carbonate, decreased their carbon footprint by 20%. All the effort that the mines are doing in order to decrease for high grade ore, iron ore, for instance, this we have in our hands, and the only one that is scalable.
The same, in order to continue to grow what at at. We have to continue to invest at at the railroad. We you know that the bottleneck there, the system is the railroad. We are renew, we are increase the size of the train, the crossing, in order. And we are responding. We are at a 4.72, and we can be to 8 and plus. It means all this all this give us really the condition to respond at the market at the first quartile cost, high quality, and quantity. In order to go through a little bit of this marvelous mining system, now we have a video of of Gabon.
Moanda, Gabon. Eramet, through its subsidiary Comilog, operates the world's largest manganese mine, after making major strategic investments and opening a second pit on Okouma Plateau. In four years, production has risen from 4 million tons to 7.5 million tons of product, primarily for the construction industry, but also for the energy transition. The target is to increase this to 10 million tons in the long term. This performance is made possible, thanks to the operational excellence that lies at the heart of our project, supported by the digitalization of our businesses. While opening the new Okouma Plateau, Comilog has invested in a new integrated operations management center, the IROC, whose control room is in direct contact with the teams on the field.
24/7, the IROC offers a global vision across the entire value chain of manganese, from extraction to transport and shipping, enabling teams to take decisions in real time and improve productivity. The Okouma Plateau combines both wet and dry extraction, with the latest techniques making it possible to recover tons that have not previously been exploited on the historic Bangombé Plateau. To keep pace with the mine's growth, major investments have been made to secure product transport by rail and sea. An ambitious program to modernize the railway is in progress, while 2022 saw the start of trans-shipment operations, enabling the loading of capesize carrying up to 200,000 tons of ore for our customers. All these new techniques testify to the agility of our teams and our spirit of innovation.
Through its two subsidiaries, Comilog and Setrag, Eramet demonstrates its ability to combine performance in manganese mining and logistics with the best practices towards environment and local communities. As part of these efforts, Comilog has decided to freeze 15% of the Okouma Plateau to preserve forests and biodiversity. Similarly, in line with Eramet's requirements, Comilog and Setrag have worked with the authorities to develop CSR programs focusing on infrastructure, support for economic development, education, and health, allowing Comilog to set an example as a socially responsible company. CSR also involves implementing low-carbon energy solutions at the mine and at our two local processing plants in the form of hydroelectric dams. These are all initiatives that resonate with our customers' aspirations, while meeting Eramet's ambition to become a reference in sustainable mining.
I will talk a little bit about our manganese alloy business, and Geoff will continue to the strategy to start to discuss. Last year, 608,000 tons. Very well positioned in terms of refining, where the margins are better, where we have a high added products. With a program to decrease the carbon footprint, and we'll see some customer that will talk to us today to see how we are in the right direction with them, hand in hand with these two business, in order to decrease the carbon footprint. It means it's a business that has the quality, has the reliability, has the value in order to continue to respond.
And whenever we have a peak of price in the steel business, as you saw last year, we are there. And when it's downturn, like this year, we are there also, because we have, we are very competitive in the cost that we have, in the energy that we're in the base of energy, and a reliable partner for our customer. And I like to say, because even though in the peak of the COVID, all these plants work and do serve our customers and do protect our people, plants in mind, and that show the strength of this business and all the business that we have. Now I'll hand over to Geoff to continue to develop the strategy that we have for the manganese alloys.
Thank you, Kleber. I spoke earlier about the manganese alloys market and its strategic consequences. It is a competitive market, and in response to that competitive market, we have to be able to manage this business to maximize its value in a variety of market situations. This has led us to adopt a value over volume strategy. As we're doing in manganese ore, we absolutely are focused on improving the productivity and asset utilization of this business. We are seeking to optimize its products as well as invest in long-term decarbonization. Through our operational improvement and with minimal capacity investment, we believe we have the capacity to grow the ability of this business to deliver up to 800,000 tons of alloys products a year.
However, with a value over volume strategy, that doesn't necessarily mean we will produce 800,000 tons, but we want to have the capacity to respond to demand in the market when it's needed up to that level. Importantly, we're also really tackling how to position our manganese alloys in the market. Of that 800,000 tons, we want to maintain that at least half of it can be refined alloys production, where we would represent, at that point, around 19% of global demand for alloys. And this would cement our position in the market seg- in that market segment with a low carbon content. And on top of that, through our decarbonization initiatives, we would like to be able to launch a zero carbon dioxide manganese alloy product in around 2028.
Now, in a value over volume strategy, when the market margins aren't there, when the signals are not there, we will scale back production, and if it makes sense, sell energy back into the Western European grid, if that's a more profitable activity, and then rapidly scale production back up when the market signals are in place. So how to become a supplier of choice for the emerging green steel sector? Because for us, this is an important long-term sustainability objective of our business. Now, firstly, I really want to emphasize, we are already today, in our portfolio, we already have the lowest existing carbon dioxide footprint in the industry. Our CO2 footprint today is 60% lower than the industry average globally, so 2.3 times lower than our competitors.
This is because today, our portfolio is largely powered, with one or two exceptions, by renewable or low-emission energy. In Norway, we have a hydroelectric power portfolio. Our smelter in Gabon is hydroelectric. In France, we access nuclear power, so it is only today, our U.S. smelters that are powered by fossil fuel energy sources. This already places us at a competitive advantage. We're already 60% lower than the global average. For us, the focus on how to further decarbonize our asset is about removing the use of carbon or fossilized carbon in the conversion of ore into alloy, in the chemical conversion that takes place in the furnace. How do we intend to do that? How do we intend to reduce by 70% that emission of CO2?
Firstly, we're really working on, at this point, on three key initiatives. We're looking to replace the use of fossil carbon products, such as coal and coke, with biocarbon products. So this can be for products such as charcoal or the emerging bioreductant, which is an engineered bioproduct that can replace coke. Where carbon capture storage projects emerge in the basins in which we operate, such as in Western Europe, we are looking to participate to capture and store our CO2 through those industry-leading projects. We're also looking at targeted carbon capture utilization projects that enable us to do plant-specific investments that can capture an emission stream and convert it into other value-add chemicals, such as ethanol.
SSAB is a steel-producing company. We produce steel from both scrap in the U.S. and iron ore in Sweden and Finland, but we have global sales, so we sell all over the world. We have a turnover of SEK 130 and 14,500 employees. For SSAB, working with business partners with the same values and the same ambitions for a better future is important. Eramet is a long-term supplier for us. We've been partners for 20 years. Your Scope 1 and 2 emissions are our Scope 3 emissions. So when Eramet works on reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions, I know there is a target until 2035 of reducing 40%. That's an important factor for us when choosing a business partner. All traceability is important for anything we buy, including, of course, alloys.
We have a project together with Eramet on the traceability, and we're looking forward to seeing the results of that project. ... In 2026, we will have fossil-free steel on the market. We already have a near-zero steel on the market since March this year. We're very proud. It's called SSAB Zero. The difference is Zero is produced from scrap, and, the fossil-free steel is produced from iron ore, and that doesn't exist today already. I actually have a small little sample for you here if you would like to see it. World's first fossil-free steel that exists. Eramet has an important part of this, as well as, of course, responsible business practices and also the social dimension of the sustainability agenda. All of this makes Eramet an important partner to us. We want to create a better world together.
Let's now discuss another key metal in Eramet's overall strategy, and this plays an important role in both of our strategic axis, and that's nickel. So nickel is a highly prized material, and it can be recycled endlessly without any loss of quality, and it has unique physical and chemical product properties that enable it to be used in a variety of applications. It's mainly used today, and the single largest demand source is stainless steel. 66% today of nickel units produced go into the stainless steel sector, and that puts it into then being used in all ranges of special alloys and industrial applications. In the battery space, it offers a greater energy density in electric vehicle batteries, which makes an essential metal for the energy transition that we've already spoken of.
It's also used in a whole wide range of socially useful applications across food, safety, pharmaceutical, surgical sectors, for example. So we see strong, ongoing industrial demand for nickel in its existing applications, as well as, of course, the really rapid emerging growth in demand for the energy transition. So over the next few years, we see a cumulative average growth rate for nickel of around 8%. So from around 3 million tons of demand today to 3.8 million tons by 2026. And the bulk of that demand, as you can see in this chart, comes from the emerging battery market, where we accelerate really, as I said earlier, around a 21% cumulative average growth rate.
So that would actually see, if it's maintained, batteries and the battery sector overtake stainless steel around 2032 as the single largest source of demand for nickel. But at the same time, we still continue to see continued growth in demand for stainless steel, and we see an underlying growth there for—that we will continue to invest to support for as well. So this is a recurring theme when you look at both of our key growth assets of Weda Bay and Centenario. And this is something that I learned early in my career, is the orebody is the king. It's the source of value. And if you want to grow a world-class ore body, you have to drill out and discover whether your ore body is world-class.
At Weda Bay, we have been implementing a strategy emphasizing on establishing its resource position, which we have established for now as being quite simply huge. Now our approach going forward is to maximize the value from this huge resource strategy. We will continue to drill out the ore body, continue to convert mineral resource into reserve, and through that, be able to develop mine plans that can that can deliver an expansion in production and value. It's really important to re-recognize that Weda Bay is a first quartile nickel mine source, and it is substantially scalable. But of course, it's operating in the Indonesian nickel market, which is a closed nickel market. We can't export our ore, so we can only expand the ore to the extent that there is demand for the ore to be processed.
That takes place, in the case of Weda Bay, at the Weda Bay Industrial Park, where we continue to see strong growth in investment in the conversion, in investment in plants to convert nickel ore, be it saprolite, into nickel pig iron. And increasingly, in the last year or two, we're now seeing strong investment to convert limonite ore into nickel intermediate product through HPAL plants. Now, on top of that, we're looking to further build our nickel laterite position. But I really want to emphasize here today the enormous value opportunity that comes through our resource position at Weda Bay.
You know, just to delve a little further into the role of Indonesia, this is a topic that's much discussed in the global nickel industry, and the role that Weda Bay plays at Indonesia. So Indonesia today, 2023, delivers around 40% of world supply, and this is expected, with the investments that are taking place to grow capacity, to move towards 60% of world supply by 2026, over the next three years. So Indonesia is emerging now as the world's nickel superpower. And the Weda Bay Industrial Park represents already around 25% of the nickel units coming out of Indonesia, and we see strong growth plan for the park.
We see a number of Class 1 nickel HPAL plants being planned, which will create a significant demand for limonite ore that, until now, has traditionally not been valorized because it's not had a conversion process operating. At the same time, we're seeing continued investment in nickel pig iron furnaces, often at the expense of installed capacity elsewhere in the world being shut down, particularly now in China, and being relocated to Indonesia. Our role at Weda Bay is to feed that value chain and unlock the value potential of the Weda Bay deposit. ...Clibaire will now take you through in more detail the nickel operations at Weda Bay.
After the beauty of the manganese, the units of manganese from the present and from the future come from us, we have the beauty of the nickel. There, Weda Bay, as Geoff said, as Christel said, Weda Bay. We start our journey there is around 600 million tons of resource, now just 2.8 billion. This year, we'll do 350,000 meters of drilling there in order to continue to grow the base of resource and reserve. Very, very well positioned in terms of cost. Strip ratio 0.447. My, my, my goodness? Our grade from 1.2 to 1.9. What Mother Nature did a very good job there.
They did. Mother Nature did a good job in Gabon also, in Moanda, but here also, it means. And we are doing the best as human beings, safety, social way to operate there. And it means high grade, a huge base of resource, very well positioned in terms of cost, in terms of quality, that can serve our customers there. And the same as we discussed for manganese term, there they still look better because the market is there, the mine is in the upper part, and you have all the plants there that consume today. These plants today, the NPI plus the HPAL, 80 million tons of ore per year. It means we are behind. We do just 30, we have to do 80.
Then you see the potential of the growth there, of this mine, and with all the different players that are there. This is a huge potential of growth and with a mine that can deliver cost, quality, quantity, resource to serve them. The same as I said for the manganese and CSR in the heart of our work. CSR is with us in terms of safety, is one of the best safety results that we have in the whole group and our benchmark of the world. And work with the community, we have a lot of work projects of infrastructure, water treatment, IRMA standard, as Virginie said, for all our mines to be the IRMA standard there.
Revisitation, we are starting the mine because we are developing, but we are doing what, what she said, the active rehabilitation at Weda Bay, at GCO, at Comilog. And that's why we can continue to growth. That's why what we did. This photo here, I love this photo. It's the first truck, the first truck that bring the, the precious nickel ore. It was first October 2019, first October, and now 30 million tons this year. And our long-term target, 60 and more, with very, very efficient. It means cost and the beauty of this model there, that we have there, that the CapEx intensity is extremely low because we put the infrastructure and the contractors that are there, bring their equipment, the people, we train them, we work with them.
They have 11,000 people work at this mine, ourselves and contractors. It means the mine can respond to the growth, as Geoff said, Indonesia is where the units of nickel will come. In Indonesia, the units of nickel come from this mine, and then we can generate value, we can continue to create value as we did from the first truck to 30 million tons, 60 million tons, and the sky is not the limit. It means we can respond. The units of manganese will come from us, the units of nickel come from us, the unit of lithium come from us. Now, we have a video that show a little bit of this marvelous mine to us, this wonderful mine.
Weda Bay is the largest nickel mine in the world, located on a 45,000 hectares concession on the island of Halmahera in Indonesia. It's a high-grade deposit of 2.8 billion wet metric tons, operated by Weda Bay Nickel, a joint venture formed by Eramet and Tsingshan to produce nickel ore, a crucial metal for economic development and energy transition. In less than four years, Weda Bay Nickel has managed to transform Weda Bay into a giant that's on track to produce over 30 million wet metric tons of nickel ore per year. This is just the beginning. With the development of HPAL facilities in Halmahera and the opening of new pits, production is set to reach 60 million tons in 2026. Performance is not just about outstanding production.
True performance means delivering the metals that the world needs while protecting water, biodiversity, and local communities. True performance means ensuring that in the long term, mining operations have a net positive impact on people and nature. ... In Halmahera, Weda Bay Nickel has developed fair dialogue with locals, supporting social, health, and infrastructure initiatives benefiting over 11,000 people. To protect employees, Weda Bay Nickel has implemented a strong safety culture. To prevent erosion and monitor discharged water quality, Weda Bay Nickel has built water management systems alongside roads and extraction sites. Weda Bay Nickel monitors its impact on biodiversity by carrying out constant surveys, an approach that has already proven successful. 15 years after the first revegetation programs, the outskirts of an old mining pit are now covered with trees 20 meters high, just like the original forest. And this, too, is just the beginning.
Weda Bay Nickel aims to meet the world's most demanding standards for sustainable mining and obtain IRMA certification in 2026. Thanks to these efforts, in coming years, Weda Bay will become not only the largest nickel mine in the world, but also a benchmark in sustainable mining.
Now I hand over to Geoff to present the strategy for mineral sands, and we'll come back to talk about GCO.
Thank you, Kleber. So mineral sands is an extraction business that's slightly different to the previous two mines that we've just dived into. And so it's a little bit more complex in some areas, but it's a very attractive and important, valuable, and valuable business within the Eramet portfolio. So within our mineral sands business, we produce two titanium mineral-based products, ilmenite and zircon. The needs for these two minerals is primarily directly related to growing urbanization and construction sectors. For ilmenite, its uses are largely for industrial and metallurgical purposes. So 89% of the ilmenite goes into the global pigment market, and 7% is used for the production of titanium metal, known for its strength and corrosion, with a lot of high value-added, value-added applications in aeronautics.
So, industry forecasts expect the demand for titanium dioxide to grow at a compound growth rate of around 2.8% for the next few years. More importantly, demand for that chloride feedstock that feeds the pigment sector is expected to grow at a higher rate. So we see there is an opportunity today to continue to grow our GCO operation to meet that increased demand through productivity improvement and targeted debottlenecking. Again, our focus here is low capital intensity, gradual volume growth to meet demand. On the flip side, we also have the Zircon side of our business, of our product suite. And Zircon is consumed particularly in the ceramic sector and in refractories and foundry applications for making the refractory materials.
Around 20% finds its way into other industrial areas, sectors such as cosmetics. Zircon's demand is likewise expected to continue to grow at around 2.8% for the next few years. But what's important in zircon is not so much the growth rate, but it's actually the production decline rate. And we're actually expecting to see a number of significant zircon producers reduce their production as they reach towards the end of mine life over the next few years. And we see a real opportunity here for the higher quality product we produce at GCO, which has a lower chemical contamination, to move to meet that emerging gap between supply and demand.
So we look at our mineral sands business, and we believe it's well-positioned to capture market share, and it's well-positioned to benefit from from disciplined, low-intensity capital investment to to grow as it does that. Now, our mineral sands business, actually, until recently, had two elements. We have looked to optimize the portfolio, particularly the upstream elements, and at the same time, look to increase value capture by exiting the downstream aspect of our portfolio. We recently announced the sale of our titanium slag smelter in Norway, ETI. This really represented for us an opportunity to capture more value from divesting than we felt we could achieve from retaining the asset. While there's growing demand for the end users, there's also rapidly growing capacity, and particularly in China, in the processing step.
We feel that our ability in an energy cost-constrained operational environment like Norway, our ability to continue to add value in that competitive environment was limited, and it made sense to take the opportunity to divest that business. We have entered into a long-term supply contract to that business from Grande Côte, so we will continue to capture value through the supply of ilmenite, where we see much better market fundamentals than the processing of ilmenite. That means our strategy in this sector is to really focus on the upstream, in the minerals, in the mining production, and particularly at Grande Côte. And there, our emphasis is on optimization, productivity improvement, targeted debottlenecking to gradually expand the business. Where we can, capturing value through the high quality of the Grande Côte product suite.
It is a particularly well-placed operation in that regard, and we continue, like we do at Weda Bay, like we do at Moanda, like we do at Centenario. We continue to invest in drilling to expand the knowledge of the resource base, so that we can optimize and maximize the value of this deposit. So we've strengthened Eramet's balance sheet by exiting the ETI asset and reduced our exposure to the downstream competitive processing sector, and we have a resilient source of cash in the upstream mining end of the value chain at Grande Côte, with limited capital investment needs. Carr`e will now introduce you to the operation itself.
Thank you, Geoff. As Christel said, and as you know, the beauty of our business that in terms of mining, things are extremely well-positioned. And this is 3 billion of resource. It means with very well-positioned in terms of cost, CapEx intensity for growth. The fourth largest producer of the world. The biggest dredge of the world, 21,000 cubic meters per hour. Dredge. It's crazy. And we can continue to develop this mine, and this mine in terms of quantity and quality.
That's the same point that Virginie, that myself, that we made, that is extremely well-positioned in terms of CSR, because there, the way that you mine is, it will have to displace population and do it in the best way as possible. They are keen to participate on this journey be- because we do in a really, really, really respectful and good way. A very, in terms of safe, one of the best place that we have in terms of mine. IRMA standard, it to be the first one to be certified at, in our joint certified IRMA. We have a solar PV that a project now that we are putting there to, for 20% of the energy of GCO. And, to...
As we mine very quickly, we also do the work in order to do rehabilitation, to give back the area that we mine to the population, to the government. It means a very, very strong CSR is our DNA. And I like to say it's not only the license to operate, it's not this. Because this is ourselves. This is our way of being, to have good business with CSR and people will like us. People, "Come, come, come here, Ahmed, because we are good." And the same profile of investment, not in the same scale, but the same profile. We are working how to debottleneck with, as Geoff said, with very low CapEx intensity.
We increase the resource, the reserves, and the production of the dry mine, while debottleneck the plant. We are going to the high-grade area in the mine, in terms of mine plan. It means that we can have a really good business, and as I said, the units of manganese will come from us, the units of nickel come from us, the units of titanium will come from us, and the unit of zircon will come from us. Now we will have a little break. You'll see the units of lithium that will come from us also, okay? Thank you so much, and we will have a little break now.
Welcome back. In this next session, we're now going to explore the second axis of our strategy, which is to sustainably develop in the metals, the critical metals for energy transition. And I think here we're gonna particularly obviously focus on lithium and the, and the nickel for battery sector. As the world transitions from combustion-propelled mobility towards electrified mobility, the trend there is on how rapidly can this take place. And what we spoke of earlier is we're seeing this huge uplift in demand for the critical metals that support the electromobility transition. And what we're gonna talk about now is how is Eramet positioning itself to take advantage of that huge uplift in demand?
The key product, therefore, is the battery, and the most developed battery technology today, of course, is the lithium-ion battery. And that contains both anodes and a cathode, between which the electricity differential is triggered and current, the current is generated. It's in the cathode where Eramet is poised to play its part as a supplier of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. And we are really well-positioned here to supply to provide these, these metals, which are critical. With our large lithium, nickel, and manganese resource positions and the project options we're building, we believe Eramet is really well-placed to supply the energy transition. So, our positioning, as we spoke through earlier, is very much in the primary upstream space, mining and first transformation.
This is the sector where we see high returns business, provided we're investing in first quartile businesses that are well positioned to compete globally. We're also looking, and I'll explore in more detail, to start to position the company to have options to participate in the secondary upstream market that is going to gradually emerge in battery recycling. So our target in this space is to really leverage our existing deposits and extract the raw materials that will feed into this chain through participating only in the first transformation. So we feel it's time now to really look at the positioning of Eramet and the future evolution of recycling, and to position Eramet in the growing lithium and nickel sectors.
So, let's have a little bit of a look now at this development pipeline, and we'll go into these projects in detail. But essentially, in lithium, we're seeking to unlock real short-term growth potential in the Centenario deposit. We're currently constructing phase one, and we'll talk later about the project that's just been approved to commence on phase two. We have Weda Bay, which we've spoken of in terms of its resource potential. We also have an opportunity at Weda Bay to look at investing in making the mine a nickel for class one, for battery products driver, as much as it is for class two ferronickel products today. We have a portfolio of projects under study in MHP. So producing a mixed hydroxide product in Indonesia, battery recycling, as I spoke about, potential other early-stage lithium projects.
I'm gonna take you into a little bit more detail about our exploration and R&D capabilities that we have. All of these are all about positioning a portfolio of projects that we can develop in a sustainable and responsible manner. Our exploration and technical teams are really critical for us being able to unlock value. And when you look at the projects we have today, they have come from the origins of the work done by our exploration and technical teams. So in exploration, our focus is to enlarge our mineral resource base. So we focus on drilling out our existing ore bodies, proving up the ore that's there, so that we can maximize the value of our existing ore bodies. And we focus on identifying and capturing early-stage opportunities that could become future projects in the Eramet portfolio.
We're establishing exploration positions in Indonesia and Chile, two core regions for our commodities, namely nickel and lithium. And with our innovation center in France, we continuously focus on developing new ways to process minerals, to improve operational performance, to improve the sustainability of our operations, and the competitive positioning of our operations, and to reach our targets for sustainability. You may have seen in the announcement that was published this morning that we have announced the acquisition of a package of exploration and mining concessions in Chile, and that a binding offer that we recently submitted for this package has been accepted. And this transaction is a significant milestone of our entry strategy into Chile. So Chile, along with Argentina and Bolivia, forms what's known as the Lithium Triangle. It's the concentration of the highest lithium concentration globally.
The transaction that we've announced positions us to hold general exploration and mining rights over quite a large package of mining concessions that cover a series of undeveloped but potentially high-grade salars in northern Chile. This in and of itself does not give us a lithium project, because lithium, being a controlled commodity in Chile under the Chilean constitution, its development is controlled by the government. But by holding these rights, we are effectively trying to put ourselves in pole position to partner with the government for the development of the deposits that sit under these concessions. So we believe we can bring to the equation our proven capabilities in lithium brine exploration, in lithium brine project development, the DLE technology that we've developed in-house and are deploying today in Argentina, and of course, our CSR approach.
We believe we have a very compelling value proposition to, to put to the Chilean government now. The, the package that we've acquired is very extensive, 120,000 hectares, covering over 40,000 hectares of salar surface. The, this would enable us to be the sole owner of mining concessions on these salars, which then means we are the only party, who holds rights that the Chilean government needs to negotiate with as it wants to develop these projects. We see significant exploration upside, but our next steps really are to focus on engaging with the Chilean government and the state-owned entities charged with developing lithium, to put in place a potential partnership for taking these projects forward. It's a future project potential for Eramet.
Now, let's have a bit of a look at our Class 1 nickel. So we've already spoken extensively of the incredible resource position we have at Weda Bay, 2.8 billion tons of nickel resource ore there, and still continuing to grow. To date, the bulk of the nickel produced at Weda Bay has come from saprolite ores that are processed in furnaces to produce nickel pig iron or ferronickel products. There's a tremendous expansion now of capacity taking place in Indonesia in what's called high-pressure acid leach projects. So this is a hydrometallurgical process rather than a furnace-based pyrometallurgical process that can convert a different type of ore, called limonite, that coexists with the saprolite into Class 1 nickel products. Now, HPAL projects have been around for some time.
For the last 20 or 30 years, there's been HPAL projects developed, and there's been mixed performance. But what's changed in the last five years is that China's engineering and investment in HPAL projects in Indonesia and other and elsewhere has cracked the engineering and operational designs needed, and they've cracked how to build them on a far more cost-effective basis. And what's happening as a result of that is that coupled with the structural settings and policy settings in Indonesia, we're seeing a big increase in demand for limonite to convert into nickel intermediate products through HPAL projects. And given a third of the resource at Weda Bay is limonite, this is a huge new market for Weda Bay that we can expand to to feed. So we're very well placed to be a really significant supplier of nickel units into the battery sector.
Now, in addition to the potential to expand the Weda Bay mine to feed the HPAL sector, we've also been working with our partner, BASF, from Germany, to investigate the potential to build our own HPAL plant at the Weda Bay site, where we could take advantage of rights that we have under our partnership to secure ore supplies. So, this plant would produce what's called mixed hydroxide product. This is an intermediate product that contains both nickel and cobalt, and is then converted in a base metals refinery into downstream products that can feed the battery value chain. So our goal there is to access the—to leverage the access we have to Chinese engineering and construction, to leverage the access we have to ore, and our partnership with BASF to potentially consider a significant investment.
Now, the capacity of this plant would probably be in the region of 60,000 tons of contained nickel. We would look at a dry tailings, dry stack tailings method of disposal to ensure that the plant was operating from a tailings disposal perspective from the most sustainable means possible. To be very clear, today, the conditions are not yet met for us to be willing to commit to an investment in this plant. We have to work through still issues associated with how we would deliver this project and also to be completely comfortable with the investment case metrics. But this is something we're working towards with a view to potentially being in a position to consider an investment decision in the first half of next year.
I've spoken a little bit about battery recycling, and here our approach is that we believe this is an emerging area of activity that the mining industry can't ignore. Now, what I'd like you to think about is we've spoken already about the tremendous volume of nickel and lithium that is building up in batteries. And if you think over the years ahead, millions and millions of cars with batteries in them, we're gonna have this huge inventory of metal building up that is increasingly going to become, of itself, a significant source of metal as it is recycled into new projects. And so, we have been developing in-house at our innovation center, a hydrometallurgical battery recycling project that captures lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese from batteries. And, we're investigating the potential to consider investing in a battery recycling plant here in France.
Now, this plant has already secured a very significant grant from the EU Innovation Fund. We've also successfully secured grants from the French state. We're looking effectively at two plants: what's called an upstream plant that dismantles batteries and extracts the black mass, excuse me, and a downstream plant that then recycles the black mass and extracts out of it the nickel, cobalt, and lithium. Tomorrow, we'll inaugurate a large-scale demonstration plant of this technology that will showcase our black mass recycling process that we've developed. This demonstration plant will be located at our innovation center, and we will use it to facilitate the establishment of the business model, commercial partnerships, and marketing of our capability. So we have a potential to be able to enter this industry around 2027.
Of course, it will be subject to do the investment, metrics make sense. We're also, at an earlier stage of maturity, investigating a novel geothermal lithium project here in France. So we have a partnership with Électricité de Strasbourg, the electricity utility in Alsace, who already operate an existing geothermal energy business. And the geothermal brines that they're extracting heat and energy from today also contain lithium. And we're looking at bringing our proprietary lithium extraction technology, coupling it with the lithium extraction rights that are held by Électricité de Strasbourg, to see whether there's the potential to also process the hot geothermal fluids for lithium, as well as extracting heat from them. So this would be a really novel project. It would provide for France, obviously, a domestic lithium source.
It would be effectively a zero carbon production because the energy source in the plant would come from geothermal energy. You know, at this stage, it is still very early stage. We've commenced a pre-feasibility study. We've got a continuous pilot plant underway at the project location, testing the existing technologies. But there's a lot of technical, economic, and social hurdles to overcome before we have a project that we could advance to investment. But it's an interesting project nonetheless. First production might be possible by around the end of the decade, but we, as I said, have significant issues to still work through. We're now gonna hear from our partner at both Weda Bay and Centenario, Tsingshan, our partner in both those operations.
After we've heard from Tsingshan, Kleber will introduce you to Centenario lithium deposit in Argentina, and the phase one project that is currently under construction there.
We are a private company. We have something around 30 years history in China, and we start with a very small stainless steel mills, but now we've become the biggest, stainless steel producer in the worldwide. And also, we are the biggest nickel producer. Four years ago, we start our, battery business. Also, two years ago, we are very happy that we expand our business in Argentina, jointly together with Eramet, to explore the lithium resources in Argentina. In Weda Bay, we developed together a world-class nickel resources. And also in Argentina, starting from last year, we are developing a lithium, world-class lithium resources in Argentina. Tsingshan and Eramet, we are great partners. I believe that Eramet is expert on exploring world-class resources in the world.
We can find that in Weda Bay, and also we can find this advantage in lithium in Argentina. And also, Eramet has a very strong R&D resources. In Tsingshan, we believe we have a strong engineering experience, and we are good at to deliver a project. And also, that Eramet have a very high standard on safety, for example. By putting this together, we also have very strong on financial. Eramet and Tsingshan, we all committed to develop our resources in the sustainable way. So Eramet bring the highest requirements and standard for the IRMA, and with Tsingshan, we would like to follow. In both projects, in Weda Bay and Argentina Lithium, we spend a lot of time to build up the solar farms to support our mining business, which we believe that can substantially reduce the carbon footprint.
Now, we talk a little bit about our lithium project in Argentina. As I said before, the way that we are developing and the potential is huge, as we have for manganese, as we have for lithium, for nickel, for titanium, zircon. This is a huge, huge. It means we start around the 10 million tons or at 15 million tons of lithium carbonate units. 350 milligrams per liter of very good grade. And this combination of grade and quantity and cost will give us the same way of participate of the lithium business of this high growth market in the best way as possible. We have a lot of work that we did before.
As John Lee mentioned, as Geoff mentioned, a lot of process development of DLE, direct extraction, a lot of work in drilling, in drilling program to find water, to find the lithium units. I mean, there's a huge work that we did in order to be where we are now. We are now at the moment that are delivering this project, okay? With 24,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, EUR 800 million of investment, and EUR 200 million-EUR 300 million plus of EBITDA associated. We have, as Geoff said, and Christel mentioned, we are studying accelerate the phase two, because, as I said before, all these ore body, they are scalable in a good way with CapEx intense and cost.
It means we are entering the lithium business. I like to say, from the front door. We really will be a player that can be in top five in some years. It's one of the reasons, as I said before, very well positioned we'll be in terms of cost. Very well positioned. It means you have the whole spodumene chain before touching us because of the brine. You know, the brine is the most cost effective way to extract lithium and viable both because of the volume, because of the highest. There's no issues in the geology. The 400 meters, and you pump it, and we have been working on this with our pilot plant since four years back, and it's really good.
It means you have a business model that can really. You can imagine a cost of $4,500-$5,000 compared to the price that you have even today or even the long term. First quartile and a huge resource. The same as I think is extremely important for this mine, CSR, for our mines and plants. We compared to the spodumene are 60% less carbon footprint. We're recycling the water and optimize the water. We have a very, very strong community, a project development support. I was there two to four weeks back, and we visited the community around the mine. They like work with us in different activities there.
IRMA certificate, we have the audit, we have the self-assessment, there will be the audit in 2024. And we are developing solar energy in order to really to be this lithium as green as possible, in this project. It means. And here, just a little bit of where we are today. 75% accomplishment. 1,420 people work at the high, at 4,000 meters in order to build this beauty, this project.
We have four years that we are work with the pilot plant there to test in real conditions, and we have the best recovery of the industry in terms of economics, because we recover more units in terms of also environment, water consumption, 90% recovery, and battery grade. And we're happy to say that we are in line. We are to deliver this project to start the production in the Q4 next year. It means it's tomorrow that we see this bright product coming from there. And the potential, as we have everywhere, the potential there, 15 million tons of a lithium carbonate. And we have also the source of water. It means these two and very good CapEx and CapEx intensity for the industry and the cost.
It means we can have, and Geoff will develop. We can have really in this area. In this is a 65 km ore body, yeah. And we have Arizaro. That's another body there with the same characteristic. It means that in this area, we have a huge potential to continue to grow, to serve this important market for us. And now a little bit of this marvelous project there. We have a video, and then Geoff will conclude with the future developments of our lithium there.
Eramine, sustainable lithium. This is where it all began, at the Eramet Ideas Research and Innovation Center in France, with the development of an original filter, a technology protected by 12 patents that improves the efficiency of the lithium extraction process to unprecedented levels and drastically reduces its impact on the environment. This is where it comes to life, at Centenario, a salar located 3,850 meters above sea level in the province of Salta in Argentina, and one of the largest deposits of lithium brines in the world. Here, Eramine, a joint venture between Eramet and Tsingshan, is implementing Eramet direct lithium extraction technology to produce and refine 24,000 tons per year of battery-grade lithium carbonate from June 2024, with plans to increase this to 50,000 tons annually by 2026.
Adapting to the challenging conditions of this desert area: wind, cold, heat, and altitude, Eramine's teams have combined their expertise and experience to create one of the world's most efficient, sustainable lithium mining and production facilities. Eramine's cutting-edge technology extracts more than 90% of the brine's lithium content at low temperatures, 80 times faster than conventional processes, while recycling 60% of its fresh water consumption. A high-performance mine with 20 wells pumping lithium brine from a depth of 400 meters, far below groundwater level. A low carbon emission plant powered by solar panels. Building on four years of experience, running a demonstrator plant, a responsible approach towards surrounding communities based on a constant dialogue and local projects, improving community's economic development and well-being. Here at Centenario, the stage is set for Eramine's transformation into a global benchmark for sustainable lithium production.
So thank you, Kleber. So you've seen a little bit now about phase one of Centenario, 24,000 tons of capacity, first quartile producer, low cash cost, high, really attractive business, $800 million of capital. What I'd now like to introduce you to is what our board has just approved, which is conditionally approved, which is the first tranche of our phase two project. So Kleber showed you, we've been drilling, we've proven up more lithium resource, and now we're able to expand production. And so phase two, first tranche, will give us an additional 30,000 tons of LCE production capacity, around $800 million of capital. So on a dollar per lithium unit, it is more capital efficient than phase one.
a similar cash cost of production to phase one, and a 50% reduction in the primary consumption of fresh water in the process through optimization that we've been able to do between the design of phase one and the optimization we've done for this phase two design. So this gives us the opportunity to accelerate a very competitive expansion project, very sound fundamentals. We can take advantage, and we have taken advantage of our partnership with Tsingshan to access improvements in the capital efficiency, access to Chinese engineering and procurement, and their strong skills in project construction, and to really bring forward what we now feel is a really exciting and competitive project. There's a lot of lithium projects being kicked around capital markets at the moment, most of them being hard rock.
They'll typically end up in third or fourth quarter of the cost curve, and you saw before that the cost curve in lithium, the place to be, is in the first quarter, which is where this project will position us. So if you look at our lithium portfolio, phase 1, we look at commencing production and ramp up in the second quarter of next year in a matter of months. We've moving towards nameplate capacity in later in 2025 and into 2026. Phase 2, first tranche, has now been approved. We need to work through some permitting to commence construction. We anticipate commencing construction next year with a view that we would commence ramp up of operations in 2026.
So around two years behind phase one, we should be starting to turn on valves and produce in phase two, first tranche. We then have potential to do another comparable expansion, which would take us up above 75,000 tons of capacity. The resource is there. We're doing further drilling now to demonstrate the resource. But the timing of that will be confirmed as we first focus on advancing the first two projects. Then, we have in Arizaro, this is a very similar salar, but a bit smaller, where we hold a tenement position. At Centenario, where Eramine is really the sole holder of tenements. At Arizaro, there are other companies that also hold tenements.
Our objective at Arizaro this year will be to drill and demonstrate a resource position there with a view to understanding what the future of project potential is there. But it gives us another potential growth option to bring forward into our portfolio. So that's now the end of our portfolio presentation. I'm now gonna hand over to our CFO, Nicolas Carré, and he'll take you through the financial section of this Capital Market Day presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Geoff, and good afternoon, everyone, or good morning for some of you over the phone. So I wanted to now give you what was the overall financial journey, which is accompanying this very beautiful transformation, which we have described in the last six years, and also what is in front of us. So as I would like to divide actually this presentation into three different periods. I will start with the first one, which started between 2018 and 2020. It was actually our first significant CapEx cycle to unlock the great potential of our manganese deposits in Gabon.
That's something we have achieved tremendously, as it has been described, because at that time, we started at 4 million tons, and as we already mentioned, we finished, or we are currently at 7.5 million tons. That's the first thing which happened. We have also started our investment in the second strategic pillar with the Centenario project in Argentina. We just talked about it. At the same time, and I think it's really important to highlight this, we were still suffering heavily from an intensified cash burn from our now divested portfolio, and it's important to keep in mind, it's now divested. Also, at that same time, the fact is, we were in a pretty poor market situation, market context, so it was less favorable.
So this mean that, we had, at that time, a limited cash generation, even if we were growing significantly. So that's why during that period, and I will come back to that, we reached a peak of net debt at around EUR 1.3 billion, which was at the end of 2020. And despite very strong effort in terms of cost control, in terms of, also intrinsic performance by growing volumes during the period. By the way, just for the sake of information, in these three years, we generated EUR 200 million of, intrinsic performance, which was already a very solid performance. Then we moved to 2021 and 2022. Totally different context. Very strong market recovery post-COVID. And guess what? What could we achieve during that period?
As we are able to grow significantly before, we are actually able to seize the opportunities of having these additional volumes and being able to benefit from this strong market situation. So we were able to significantly deleverage the company, and also we accelerated the intrinsic performance, especially with the start of our Weda Bay activity in Indonesia. In this only two years, we accumulated EUR 340 million of intrinsic performance, which is an amazing performance. And of course, not only we are able to deliver, but we are able also to allocate cash to value creating growth projects, especially on the first pillar, especially in manganese. But also, we were able to reward our shareholders, and that's something we plan to keep in the coming years.
Then in 2023, the growth program is continuing, if not accelerating, and I will come back to that, especially with now the confirmed second phase of our Centenario project in Argentina. And also, we are still managing to keep our leverage below one in a much less favorable market environment, and I will come back to that, and that's something which is important. Why is it important? Because all this trajectory is giving us confidence, and that's the confidence I want to share, and we want to share today about the next phase, which starts now, thanks to a stronger, a much stronger balance sheet, as well as a reshaped, resilient, and diversified, more diversified asset portfolio. So new growth drivers, like Centenario in Argentina, will enable us to execute our strategy and position the group for new opportunities.
I guess, we've just talked about the opportunity in Chile, and I will come back to that. Either for growth and also to ensure that we provide further shareholder returns. Moving into more details. Now, I've mentioned in this period, EUR 200 million between 2018 and 2020 of intrinsic performance, EUR 350 million in the period between 2021 and 2022. This mean that, in these five years, we have generated EUR 550 million, which is an average of EUR 110 million per year.
I think it's really important also to highlight that in the same period, we have also had a very significantly negative performance of our nickel asset in New Caledonia, which is leading to negative EUR 163 million. So just for illustrative purposes, without this negative impact, our overall intrinsic performance on the assets on which we are keep growing was EUR 700 million in these five years. That's EUR 700 million of additional value provided to the company. And as Christel was mentioning in her introduction, we would have had the same market conditions in 2018 than in 2022, we would have been with a situation at EUR 1.4 million EBITDA for that period, at the end of 2022. That's thanks to this very significant intrinsic performance.
What does this mean for cash now? So here, the same. Sorry, well, before I move to cash, which is important, I want to first spend some time on 2023. So what about 2023? Because this performance has been amazing between 2018 to 2022. 2023 is actually the same trend, and I think it's really important also to highlight this. One thing I would like first to focus on is the fact that we actually communicated to the market at the end of Q3 the fact that we adjust our guidance of adjusted EBITDA to EUR 800 million for the full year 2023. Of course, it will be easy to say that it's the same, more or less the same value as in 2018.
But as also it has been said by Christel earlier, this is hiding the fact that in the period, we have faced very significant downturns in terms of market situation, with an altogether more than EUR 700 million of negative external factors. At the same time, we have increased our internal performance for the same value. One thing I would like to highlight is that on top of the EUR 550 million we generated in the five previous years, we are adding another EUR 150 million of additional intrinsic performance in 2023. Something which is really important to highlight is that you may have in mind that in H1, we have had very significant issues in terms of logistics in Gabon.
So almost the entire month of January was lost due to the earthquake taking place in December. We have had another issue stopping the transportation for 18 days in April. So all these two factors were leading to a negative internal performance of EUR 124 million, just related to the one-off logistics incidents. What does this mean? This mean that achieving one hundred and fifty million euros positive intrinsic performance in 2023 will be, it, it means that we are having a tremendous improvement in H2, and that's something we are currently delivering. And that was enabled, actually, by all the performance we generated before, all the investments we have done also in our manganese business, the CapEx and the still growing performance in Weda Bay, in Indonesia. So I promised it, so now I move it, I will move to it.
So what does this mean for cash? In that period, so between 2018 and here, we are talking about the situation at the end of June 2023, we have generated with the now the reshaped portfolio of Eramet, EUR 1.9 billion of cash, of free cash flow. If I compare to the EBITDA, which was generated for the same period, so between 2018 to June 2023, we are talking about 505 billion, sorry, 100 million euros, EUR 5.1 billion. So this mean that the cash conversion is actually around 37%... which is very close, which is actually a benchmark or with when we compare to the pure metals and mining players, and it actually confirms and demonstrates that we are now this kind of pure player of mining and metals, as we have described before.
One thing is to be also highlighted in this slide is, while we have used part of this generated cash to grow in lithium and also to pay dividends to our shareholders, unfortunately, in the same time, EUR 942 million so close to a billion euros, as you can see there, has been burned into the now divested portfolio. So Christel has said it, but I will repeat it: it's coming from the cash burn in Aubert & Duval, that we have finalized the divestment in April of this year, coming from Erasteel, for which we have finalized the sale in June of this year, and also it was coming from Sandouville, which has been sold in 2022. So all of this is gone.
So it means that this huge burden the group had, especially in the last five years, is now gone. One other thing I would like to highlight is, of course, the fact that we have had this EUR 209 million of cash consumption of SLN in New Caledonia for the same period. This is, if I add up the two, so we are talking about altogether EUR 1.1 billion. What we have said, what I will repeat, is that we have confirmed our decision not to provide any further financing to New Caledonia, to SLN, so to our New Caledonian subsidiary, in the future. So also in terms of overall cash consumption, we don't plan anything in this area anymore.
If now I look at the evolution of our leverage, in any case, it's very similar to the initial introduction I was making. You can see that before, we are definitely facing significant ups and downs or peaks and lower stages. Here you can see the evolution, so as I said, the peak was at the end of 2020. What is important to know here is that due to the fact that we have now divested the very significant cash burns, also the fact that we are now much more diversified, and I will come back to that, we are much less impacted by specific downturns or, especially downturns in that case, of the market, limiting our cash generation. It's also the value of the transformation which has been done.
Before, we had a very strong leg in manganese, in Gabon. Now we have two big legs in, especially, and we have also GCO, but we have the one in Gabon as well, manganese ore, and as well as Weda Bay in Indonesia, in nickel. It will add with very soon the lithium activity we are developing. One last thing I would like to highlight here is the fact that, of course, with the additional acquisition we have just announced this morning, in terms of concessions in Chile, so this will lead us to a leverage which will get closer to 1 at the end of this year. But again, let's keep in mind, we are accelerating the growth, we are accelerating the investment.
We are also facing a much more challenging situation in terms of market. So despite that, we are able to keep a leverage below one, and has been the case, actually, for the last two years. So as you can see, it started to be the case at the end of 2021. It was much more than confirmed by the end of 2022, with a leverage below, so close to, to zero, because it was 0.2. And, now, even if it's increasing again, it's in a challenging market environment with investments and also making sure that we prepare the, further prepare the Eramet of the future. I've said a lot, and we've said a lot about, the operational performance which, brought us here, and which brought this picture in the last years.
At the same time, we were also very active in terms of, balance sheet and in terms of, financial situation, and especially our credit profile. A few things I would like to remind or to highlight: first one, in Q2, we have issued our first, sustainability-linked and as well rated bond for a total value of EUR 500 million, which is a five year maturity and a coupon of 7%, which actually reflects our credit rating and the expected trajectory of our CSR roadmap. And as you can see, so the ratings, that's a confirmation. We have, close to high, investment-grade ratings with, Moody's and Fitch. And, again, it's a confirmation of the transformation the group has achieved, recently.
Also, in Q1 this year, we have renewed and actually extended our term loan, so which has been extended to a value of EUR 515 million. Out of this, and I will come back to that when I will show the liquidity, EUR 370 million are drawn to date, and it's something for which we still have, in that case, EUR 145 million additional money we can draw. All of this, so thanks to this new bond, thanks to the extension of the term loan, we have actually increased the overall maturity of our debt by close to one year, from 2.2 to 3, during the in the last in the last six months.
And the last piece I would like to highlight here, all these numbers actually include, I'm sorry, the French state's loan to SLN. This loan is consolidated on our balance sheet, that's why it's shown here, but actually does not reflect economically a financial obligation per se for Eramet. So, this loan altogether, at the end of October and currently, is amounting to EUR 260 million. It was EUR 200 million at the end of 2022, and there is an additional EUR 60 million, which has been financed by the French state in 2023. I was promising to come to liquidity. So also in terms of liquidity, we have a very strong situation. It was at the end of 2022, EUR 2.6 billion.
It is, at the end of June, EUR 2.5 billion, so it's still very strong. So we have the cash available, which at the end of June, announced to EUR 1.4 billion. And on top of that, we have extended and renewed our RCF in 2022, in June 2022, actually, which is now expiring in 2028, which is totally undrawn today, which announced to EUR 935 million. On top of that, you have actually this portion of the term loan, which is not drawn. So this is close to EUR 1.1 billion of additional available money that we are showing at the end of June 2023. And it's not, it's not all.
So you may have seen that, in the last three months, especially in July, we have announced, and we have been able to generate two new features for the group. One is the one that Jeff has been describing already earlier, so which is a divestment of ETI, providing an additional source of money of $200 million. I won't come into details, but it was a great example that Eramet is capable to capture value on a non-core business, when there is a right offer, and this was really a right offer we received from Ineos to transform it into cash. And the second item, which happened in July, is the deal, very innovative deal we found with Glencore on the back of the lithium phase one products.
So, and I really want to clarify, it is not an offtake, this is a marketing agreement. This mean that we will, we will commercialize the products with Glencore, we'll keep the direct access to the market, and also, we will be able to capture the value of the higher prices. So it's not a fixed price contract, it's clearly at market price. So when, and, we are convinced there will be a rebound in the prices, we'll be able to capture it, and I think it's really important to highlight it. What does it confirm? It confirms two things. One, that we can be very agile and very innovative in our way on financing.
Second, it was also confirming the very strong market appetite, and also the trust in our lithium project, and that was just the start. So what is now our overall capital allocation policy? Actually, this one didn't change in the last two years, and we don't change it. I want to remind that our first priority was to make sure that we have a stronger balance sheet. It is the case. It has been the case at the end of 2021, at the end of 2022, at the end of June. I said we'll keep also this kind of leverage below one at the end of December.
So this means that now we are capable to move to the second portion of our plan, of our capital allocation policy, is to invest into our value-generative project and to continue the growth. It has been very successful, as we demonstrated in the last years. It will continue, and we will further continue with the just confirmed decision on the phase two first tranche of our lithium project in Argentina. And of course, we want to make sure that we will keep also reward our shareholders for their long-term commitment. So we want to make sure that we will pay dividends based also on the very quick return value of the investments we are describing in the second part of this policy.
So here is the CapEx plan, and that's something which has, of course, to be put in numbers, all what we described before. So yes, it is a significant value. We are talking about EUR 1.9 billion for the coming three years, which is an average of a bit more than EUR 600 million. You can see here the breakdown by year, so it will be heavy in 2024, especially because we start significantly the additional, so the CapEx and the investment on the phase 2 of Centenario. And you can see also the breakdown by project. So if I want to summarize it quickly, actually, around EUR 500 million is between our manganese business and our mineral sands business in Senegal.
The reason why we have to invest, and we want to invest further in the manganese business in Gabon, it's not because of the operations. Most of the additional growth that Claire and Geoff have been describing before will come from additional productivity, so we won't need significant investment in the operation side. What we will need is actually more on the transportation side. So that's the bottleneck. It has been reminded, and I think it's really important to make sure that we will do the investment there, because it has been proven, and it will keep demonstrating itself, that it's very quickly paying back this kind of investment.
So that's why it's really important to make sure that we make this investment. And, of course, the other piece which is significant is the additional investment we do in lithium, the phase two. And this is actually here showing it's around EUR 500 million. So this is a portion which is net of the part which is financed by our partner, Tsingshan. This is what we have considered in this overall value. Last but not least, I want to make sure that also I highlight there that we have not considered anything related to the projects for which we have not done the final investment decision. So I'm talking about Weda Bay. I'm talking about also the e-waste battery recycling project in France.
So of course, it will increase this number if we make the final investment decision in 2024, as it has been described before. I want to remind it, it has been said already by Jeff, but I think it's really important to share it again with our shareholders, the fact that we'll of course make this investment decision if we are comfortable with the delivery model, of course, and also if it demonstrate to be very strong financial metrics delivered by this project, the same as for the rest of the portfolio we have just been describing. The thing is, we have the space. We have actually, and that's why it was important to remind what is currently our level of debt and our level of available liquidity.
We could have the space to be able to finance it. This being said, we'll again only do it if it makes sense. And how will we be able to finance all of this in the coming years? So it's not only thanks to the liquidity which is available, but it's also thanks to the evolution of the portfolio. I will repeat myself here, but I think it's really important. This slide, what is really important to highlight is the fact that when we were in a previous downturn, downturn of the cycle, which was in 2015, Eramet was close to zero EBITDA, zero EBITDA. 2018, we have already mentioned it, it was at EUR 800 million, but it was supported by pretty strong market situation.
So here, as said, in 2023, which honestly, we can also estimate to be another downturn of the cycle, will also generate this EUR 800 million, as said. But it's, if we take actually the market conditions of 2018, we'll be more in the range of EUR 1.3 billion or even closer to EUR 1.4 billion. So that's, actually, the thing is, Eramet is able—we are now able to generate cash even in downturn of the cycles. And that's the case in our manganese ore business, that's the case in our Weda Bay business. One number I didn't give before, just for the sake of clarity, when we talk about Weda Bay, in 2022, actually, the cash conversion of this business was 70%, 70.
So it was an overall cash generation of EUR 237 million out of an adjusted EBITDA, which was close to EUR 350 million, so 70%. And this is expected to continue with all the growth projects we are describing. So again, some of it will finance the activities which are already ongoing. But as you can see, and I will here quote my friend, Cedric, "Sky is not the limit for the evolution of EBITDA." And that's also the beauty of the evolution we have done. So we are a much more robust company, a much stronger balance sheet, and also, we have- we are a much more diversified company.
As you can see in 2018, we are very much focused, and also Christel was mentioning it in her introduction, we are a very strongly focused manganese company. Almost all our EBITDA was actually coming from manganese. In 2022, we have already achieved a strong evolution, especially thanks to the significant increase at Weda Bay. So now it is 70%. So I will simplify it. We moved from 95% to 70%. Now, with the additional increase in Weda Bay, which will be sustained by the need of limonite, as it has been described before, plus the start of the lithium activity, we expect the manganese portion to be more in the range of 50%.
So that's also a very strong message because now we have much more legs to ensure that, we can capture and we can seize the evolution of the market. So clearly, the fact that we'll be entering into, two significant years of investment in 2024 and 2025, we can expect to be above our target on average through the cycle of leverage of 1. So that's really the expectation, but it is to be back quickly below it. That's why we keep our target to be, below on average through the cycle. And how can we do that? Once again, it's thanks to, very quickly, paying back investment, very strongly, value-generating, investment. So this is why, all in all, our leverage should be and will be manageable during the next two years.
That's also why, as you can see, it's if we are in a more solid market environment, starting in 2025, for example, we can expect to be back below this line of one at the end of 2025. If the market conditions are less supportive, in that case, it won't be in 2025, but we expect it to be in 2026. So in all situations, we expect to be returning to a strong financial situation. Last but not least, and I really want to also clarify that in case of, so I was saying that most of the investment we do, especially in Manganese, GCO, will be financed by themselves, by the local operations.
If we talk about lithium, especially the phase 2, we'll try to find the best mix between the cash, which will come for the phase 1 of the project, and also from financing, external financing. We do believe, and it has been demonstrated by the deal we found with Glencore, the prepayment. We do believe that we have the possibility to find also external financing, and that will be another source of potential financing for this project. So now, as an overall summary of this financial presentation, we have, I hope you felt it during the presentation, a very clear strategic roadmap, which has already proven to be very strong and which will continue. It will be thanks to sustained operational excellence. It has been the case in the last five years.
Again, EUR 700 million of overall intrinsic performance we have been able to deliver. All of this underpinned by a strong CSR commitment. So that's what is the New Era of Metals, and it enabled us to ensure a stronger balance sheet and will keep ensuring that we have a sustainable financial policy. And also, we want to make sure that we are providing shareholder return on the back of very strong value creation businesses. As it has been said several times, we are positioned, very well positioned in the cash cost curve for all our products. Normally, there is absolutely everything in our hands to be able to deliver this value. Thank you very much, and I now hand it over to Christel for the conclusion of this overall presentation.
I hope that all these presentations that you have seen today have managed to convince you that we are really well positioned to benefit from the strong growth of the new era of metals. We have a great portfolio of very competitive and cash-generative mining assets, with still a lot of potential for further growth. We have a good pipeline of projects in the fast-growing sector of the energy transition. Altogether, we think that we have a huge potential to create value in the future. Safer, highly responsible, financially more robust, more diversified in term of geography and in term of product portfolio. We have set the base and the organization in order to deliver this potential.
With operational and commercial excellence, with the digitalization, with cutting-edge innovation, and with our strong and permanent focus on management of performance, we think that we are able to deliver it in a competitive manner. So as you have seen, there are. We have a very ambitious mid-term target, production target, that we have described today. But we have also built a pipeline of projects that will help us to deliver further value growth in beyond 2026. So strategically, operationally, financially stronger, I think that now we are definitely ready to enter in the new age of metals as a leading mining company and as a key contributor to a sustainable future.
Thank you very much for your listening, and now, we will be ready, my team and I, to answer your question.
Okay, so we will now start the Q&A session. So we will first take questions from the people in the audience. Then we will take questions from the people who are connected via the phone, and finally, questions from the webcast chat. If you are asking a question, please introduce yourself, name, and company. Thank you.
The first question, go?
...Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Sylvain Brunet, with BNP Paribas. Thanks, and thank you very much for all these detailed presentations, and growth ambitions. My first line of question would be around capital allocation. If you could give us a sense of whether anything has changed in your analysis of internal rate of returns in this new environment for metals, new environment on costs? And related to that, if you lead to believe that some long-term prices need to be adjusted in analysis models and in consensus. And my second question around project delivery would be to get a sense of how much flexibility is built in your delivery of project in the event the cycle would be less supportive than we think or you think.
How much engineering has already been done? How much capital has already been committed, or what is left to be decided later in the delivery of these different projects, please? Thank you.
So Nicolas will start with the first question, and I can answer with Geoff also the second one.
Yes. So, thank you, Sylvain-
Mm-hmm
...for your question on, especially on the return, the rate of return we are targeting. So, I would say that it has not changed versus what we have always done. So we are always looking for very high rate of returns, and I think it has been demonstrated with the investments we have performed in the last years, especially the one we did in Gabon. So, the rate of return was very significant because here we are talking about altogether an investment of EUR 500 million, but the value it has created in the last 3-4 years is actually amazing.
So that's just to say that, no, we are not really changing dramatically the approach, and it's a segue to your second part of the question, which is, should we be more prudent in terms of pricing assumption? Here, I really want to emphasize the fact that usually our approach is actually to be prudent, and I think we can see it for the lithium project. In any case, we are usually taking the consensus in terms of pricing, and here we know that there can be significant deviations in these assumptions. Why did I take the lithium example? When we look at what some of our competitors, and I won't name them, it's not necessary-
Mm
...but are using as a lithium price for their long-term estimates, it's far above what we are doing. So it's mean that here we have, in any case, a common approach. We usually take the consensus, and clearly, when we are deciding for a project, it's based, and it has always been the case, based on the very solid IRR.
Just maybe, to give some examples. So right now, we looked at the consensus recently. Long-term consensus for lithium is $22,000. We, you, we have shown you, we take something between $16,000-$17,000 for... And we always take, not that we believe that it will be the case, but to make sure that we are on the lowest part of the range, to make sure that in any case, conservative case, it will be robust. And we don't need that much because in order to have NPV zero, including so our WACC, NPV zero, we need $9,000 for this project. So the long-term lithium price at $9,000, I can tell you that a lot of projects on the cash cost curve will not exist anymore.
So it means a fundamental difference in the demand and supply balance. So we take usually very conservative lower part of the range because we want our project to be robust in any case.
If I also, the last piece I would like to complete is, when we say that, we'll make decisions, for example, for Weda Bay and for the EV recycling project, if it is sound financially, this is also taking clearly conservative assumptions to avoid making decisions-
Mm
...which could jeopardize our financial going forward. So, that's why I was answering very clearly to your initial question. So have we changed anything? No, we have not changed, because this is always how we have decided our projects.
On the project delivery, how much is engaged, et cetera, we, for the time being, there are, so for phase 1 of lithium is almost over now. I mean, it's close to the start. On phase 2, we are just starting to buy a long lead item right now. So there is not so much, huh? We have, we are just in at the beginning. And when we look at the other project, we are more in the study phase, so it's marginal versus the magnitude of the project, if we take the growth projects that we have in our second pillar.
That being said, one important thing I would like to outline is that, the worst thing that can happen is a stop-and-go, and it's something I would like to avoid for the future of Eramet. In the past, we had a lot of stop and go, and as you know, we have most bought our lithium project in 2020. If we could have avoided to do that, it would have been in production in 2022, with a lithium price at $80,000 per ton, and would have reimbursed the plant in some months. So I think we, that's why being a stronger company is very important, is to be able.
Once things are really launched, it doesn't mean that if there is a huge issue we could not stop, but it's something that we want absolutely to avoid. Do you want to add something, Geoff?
Well, maybe I think you've covered lithium, where, as Christel said, for phase one, it's, you know, it is all largely fully committed and 75%-80% complete. Phase 2, yes, we're just at the lead item ordering stage, and we won't commit to the main investment until the conditions that our board is opposed to around permitting are in place, and we still anticipate that to be some months away. I think what also is important to look at is the ongoing investments we've been making in Gabon to gradually increase capacity there. And that's not really one big project per se, as in one big, single commitment. It's really more a whole series of investments that all come together. So it's buying rolling stock, it's buying wash plants, it's investing in additional fleets.
So it's a lot of it is very incremental and very suited to if we had to staging further.
Yeah.
Yes. Hi. Sorry. Hi, Julie. Hi, Julien Dyon from Stifel. I have one question I would like to come back on Weda Bay project, which is not decided yet. First of all, a few years ago, we were talking about huge cap, you know, expense price. I mean, CapEx, we were putting about $3 billion in the press, something like that. I understand that there have been some breakthrough in terms of technologies-
Mm-hmm.
and that, therefore, this EUR 3 billion is probably not any more EUR 3 billion, fortunately. So what's this magnitude of CapEx we have to have in mind, knowing that you will share it with BASF?
Mm-hmm.
- if you were doing that?
Mm-hmm.
My first questions. More fundamentally, you say, "We are looking at the different hypotheses.
Mm.
We want to be cautious." But there's one major hypothesis, which is a solid batteries, which could-
Mm
disrupt completely the nickel market. And if you expose even more in going in this grade, you take the risk that if the solid-state battery developed by Toyota succeed, you will get a big problem later on. So how you tackle these events, it's more easy to sell, I would say, nickel ore to HPAL plants. You take no risk. If the market go down, well, you lose less, but it's okay. To NPI also.
Mm.
You will take an impact, but not necessarily as big as you will make a huge CapEx, and then you discover that there is new battery technology which destroyed the market. So how you see those two elements, first, the CapEx and the long-term risk concerning the solid batteries? Thank you.
Maybe two elements here. We'll not disclose the CapEx, but it's significantly lower, and it's more in line with the HPAL that have been announced right now, because this new technology, the Chinese one, is the one that we'll be using in Indonesia. With the Indonesian construction cost, et cetera. Altogether, we are talking about something more in line with the one that have been announced recently of Tsingshan, et cetera. If you could, if you take this reference, you will have an idea of what it, what it is-
I'm not going to have the reference, but if-
Then, regarding the solid battery, and I will let Geoff elaborate, but one thing that is for sure is that we know approximately the batteries that we will have in the next 10 years. Because of the plants, the Gigafactories that are being built now, I mean, they are built now, and they will not... And when you launch a new model with a battery, you're not going to change right now, so I think it's yes, we may see, and we take, for example, a higher share of LFP than we used to because it's there, and they are already battery manufacturing of LFP today.
But when you take the install base of batteries today, you know, approximately what will be the production of the next 10 years. Beyond that, it might be another issue. So we think that today, anyway, there is not such a capacity in HPAL, and HPAL is much better in terms of CO2 and in terms of cost than the pyrometallurgy route and the other kind of Class 1 nickel. And so there is still enough room for HPAL capacity to come on stream.
That being said, it's something, the kind of assumption we revise all the time, and we have to make sure that we are comfortable with, as we say, a conservative long-term price in order to to be able to make the decision.
Yeah.
Geoff, you want to-
Yeah. Thank you. So maybe just build on a couple of things. And I think, you know, if you look at our actions, you also can get some insight into how we're viewing. So to your point, you know, yes, I get out of bed every morning and read about some new emerging potential battery technology. And it's undeniable that over time, the chemistry mix of batteries will evolve. That's absolutely the case. We see a much more consistent theme of lithium-... in battery chemistry through that trend. And that, I think when you look at our actions, which is our desire to promote and bring forward investment in our lithium production capacity, that plays out in terms of our confidence that we see in that aspect of battery chemistry.
In the same way, that absolutely, we're spending the time to really study and be careful about how we view the nickel battery chemistry playing out and the demand for that form of nickel. You're right, we could just participate in mining nickel ore. It's a much lower capital investment intensity exercise, as Kleber spoke. You know, the bulk of the productive capacity there is really brought on by engaging contract mining, not through large fixed infrastructure investments. So it's a very scalable business. It can be readily scaled up, and if it had to be, it could be scaled down with a relatively minor balance sheet impact. So when we look at Weda Bay, Christel's already spoken to the magnitude of the potential investment.
You know, to finalize that amount, we need to also finalize the scope of the project, and that is driven in part by how it interacts with the existing industrial park and the infrastructure of the industrial park. We need to finalize the project delivery model, and are we comfortable with the project delivery model, recognizing that this is an industrial park that's heavily geared towards to date Chinese-engineered investments. So we need to be comfortable in bringing that forward. And absolutely, we need to be comfortable in this view and outlook on the nickel sector. You know, we're just taking our time. We wanna make sure in this instance that we've got an investment, given its magnitude, that is one we'd be comfortable with for the long term.
Because you have new project also in lithium with a new concession you bought.
Mm-hmm.
So somewhere you have a lot of projects, so taking a big risk on these projects with huge CapEx, where... and you don't know in 10 years, 10 years is tomorrow.
Mm.
I mean, it's tomorrow, tomorrow.
Yeah. So I can assure you, it's, it's, occupies a lot of my time thinking about-
Mm-hmm
... these issues. Thank you.
That's also why we have not taken the decision yet. There are plenty of Andre.
Bonjour. Nicolas Montel, Bernstein. First question is about Weda Bay. You are going to double the ore production there. Can we expect some improvement in the cash cost? Because the size of the operation is going to be much bigger, so what can we expect about that? Second question is about, I don't know how you call it, but phase B of phase two, or something like that.
Mm-hmm.
What is the best timing for you to launch this new phase? And my first question would be my third question would be about the Glencore financing. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how we are going to see that in your balance sheet or cash flow statements? Thank you.
Kleber, maybe on the cash cost of Weda Bay, and Geoff on the Phase 2B, and Nicolas on Glencore.
Yeah. We'll have a progress of a scale because of the size of the mine. But in the other hand,
Mm
... we are going up in the hill, which means we are going to develop other areas that have the profile, the distances is going up in order to access the high grade ore. This mine will continue to be first quartile, and will make it the base of a very low cost compared to the part of the industry. It means a scale, even though the grades, the trend of the grades, as you know, we start with the higher grade, we go to the lower grade. But our scheme there give us extreme competitive cost with extreme high returns.
On one side, we have the scale effect-
Yeah
... but on the other side, as usual, you start with the highest grade when you start a mine. So over time, we'll see some lower grade, and but it will take time. I mean, it's a high-grade mine, but you'll see some more lower grade. And we are going further away from the coast, so we have longer transportation costs. So all in all, it means that we should not bet on a lower cash cost in Weda Bay than what we have today.
In terms of possible timings of the next aspect of phase two, so as you saw in the presentation, we don't yet have a fixed date there. Clearly, we're keen to commence operations in phase one and confirm and see plant performance. We also would be keen to see Eramine being a cash-generating business before we probably commit to a further investment beyond what we've announced so far. My speculation would be, we'd probably be, at a minimum, a similar timing to the gap that we've had between phase one and phase 2A. So as I said in the slides, yeah, that was a 2-year gap between those two investment decisions. I think at a minimum, it would be possibly a similar gap.
But, you know, if we see strong market fundamentals and we've got strong performance in phase one, we bring it forward. If market fundamentals change, of course, we have the option to defer it. The beauty of being in the position we're starting to get into is that we have a portfolio with options, and we have the ability to turn those options on or off, depending on the market signals, rather than being feeling that we're forced into them. And so, you know, if we have to defer, we've got the option to defer. If we want to bring it forward, we can bring it forward. That's the beauty of options, and our role is to increase that cupboard of options that we can exercise over time.
Nicolas?
So, thanks, Nicolas, for giving us the opportunity to talk again about-
Mm
-this Glencore deal, because we are really thrilled about it. It's providing a lot of very positive pictures. So a few things I would like to remind, even if I said it before, so it's a marketing agreement, meaning that we'll sell together and, of course, we'll sell the products to Glencore, but Glencore will sell the products afterwards with us to other customers. As said, it will be with market prices, so we are not locking in into a fixed price, and we'll still be able to seize the opportunity on the lithium selling price evolution. And I think it's really very important to highlight, given the expected evolution of the market.
Now, if I talk more about the financial conditions, so, it has been, including the marketing fee, we'll pay in this context at very good financing rates, altogether. So it won't change dramatically the cost of debt of the company. In terms of overall drawing of this facility, we expect to have it drawn for around 20% before the end of this year, and the rest being in 2024. Now, there is a last part in your question I won't be able to address today, is how it will flow in the balance sheet. It will be, of course, a debt.
Now, given the nature, that's something we are still looking at, because there is a lot of aspects which could advocate for working capital debt, and some of them for financial debt. So that's something we'll confirm when we'll have the final answer on that one.
Next question?
Hello, Maxime Kogge from ODDO BHF. So I have three questions. The first is on SLN. Can you perhaps give us an update on the current liquidity situation and outline the next steps ahead of a potential exit from this operation?
Mm.
Second question is on Comilog. You had a derailment, I think that was last week, and that's the third in a year that you had such issues. So there are parties to blame for the natural conditions, of course, but how can you reassure us that they will not happen again? And where do you see the challenges here? And lastly, on manganese, it's quite surprising to see how depressed prices are, and that despite a decent steel market, and that's benefiting iron ore and met coal, actually. So are you not? It seems actually, from what I read, that the fact that you're shipping a lot of material in H2 to offset H1 is contributing to this market weakness. Well, I would love to have your thoughts on that.
I know you're not afraid that by increasing production, you will contribute to further weakness on this, on this market.
So, SLN liquidity, you want to answer?
So, SLN liq-
I will comment on the exit.
Yeah.
Potential.
So, clearly, SLN liquidity is challenging. Given the evolution of the selling price of ferronickel, which, as we've already shared in previous presentations, is getting much closer to the NPI price. So the LME is not anymore the reference. So the average price has been much lower in 2023 than in previous years. So even if the operating performance of SLN has improved, still, given this negative evolution of selling price, high input cost, and it will be a segue to your question about manganese alloys, because input costs have risen everywhere, and clearly it was impacting significantly H1 for especially for SLN. So with all of that, so there will be a significant cash consumption in 2023 at SLN level.
It will totally consume the additional loan which has been provided by the French state. So, clearly, the liquidity, there is still some available liquidity for SLN, but we expect it to be consumed in the coming-
Weeks
... weeks. It's, I wanted to say in the range of a couple of months, maximum.
So regarding the potential exit, as you know, there are a lot of discussion right now in between the French state and the New Caledonian authorities about the nickel industry in New Caledonia, because all the three major players are running out of cash. So SLN has opened a conciliation procedure, Prony as well, Prony Resources, and for Koniambo, Glencore has already said that end of February, there will be no financing anymore, and they will not continue to finance it. So the three main players are in the same situation with their main shareholders, Glencore, as us saying that they will not reinject any more any cash in their subsidiary for reasons that are obvious.
We have done everything that we could from a managerial point of view, and honestly, the team has done a great job improving productivity and delivering what they can deliver. But today, with the energy prices that we have in 2023, we paid our energy $200 per megawatt. So it's about seven times the level we have in Norway or in France, even for the hyper electro intensive. It's about three times the level we have in Indonesia. So you cannot operate that way. The second thing is that we have huge difficulties to access our own resources with the northern province blocking all the permitting.
We have 25 permits waiting on the desk of the northern province, which is, in fact, making us- it's sometimes totally impossible to operate, and we have to put in care and maintenance one of our key mines in the north, the mine of Poum, in July, because of the lack of permitting. So I mean, all these things are out of our hands, I would say. It's not levers that we control. So they need to decide what they want to do with their nickel industry, but it's not anymore something that we can manage for them. So today, our position is clear.
We continue to operate, but we don't want to bear the burden of keeping this industry live without having solutions for all these aspects. You want to comment on the derailment?
I think today we improve the railroad reliability.
Mm-hmm.
We had this derailment. It was not a big one, a small one, after 120 days without any issue. Means today, we monitor better the geometry part of the railroad. We have also the renewal and the maintenance, and I think we are far much better position than we were in the first half. And that's going forward, we'll continue to improve. And-
Just to give you an idea, I mean, in 2017-
Yeah
... there was around 20 derailment per year on this line. So it's something that, unfortunately, happens all the time. They are small things, and that we usually, we manage to fix in some hours, a day, two days. The one we have mentioned at the beginning of the year were significant things, that were not normal derailment, but it was a huge landslide, following a season and et cetera. So it was something totally different than the usual, I would say, derailment that we can face on this line.
And that, as Kleber said, we have improved a lot, because now we have much less than we used to have in the past because of all the investments that we have done on this infrastructure.
In terms of-
Yeah
... manganese market, and maybe just to build on that previous point. You know, we are steadily investing, but prudently. If we were to completely upgrade the line overnight to give you the assurance that you're looking for, there'd be no derailment, we'd be talking about an investment of EUR billions and a huge disruption to our production. So we have to steadily upgrade over time. We're utilizing technology to manage and improve line performance, but we have to balance that investment with the constraints of an operating business. In terms of impact-
Maybe, Geoff, because I think it's an important point. It's a segue also of the investments we have considered, when we talk about growth from manganese ore. So it's not only to generate additional growth, it's to sustain the growth.
Mm-hmm.
So exactly what Geoff has been describing. Of course, we are not talking about renewing totally the line or to create another one. It's just to ensure that we are steadily improving and accompanying the growth. So that's why it's really important that we spend time and really I cannot emphasize enough what Kleber and Christel have been saying, that the situation has dramatically improved already versus what it was five or six years ago.
Yeah. I mean, it's very important to remember, this is a railway line that was not originally built to carry heavy ore wagons. This was a railway line that was built for general passenger and freight traffic, and as a consequence of events in history, it now carries much heavier ore wagons, and we have to steadily upgrade its bearing capacity, but that's a prolonged program. In terms of impact on manganese ore, you know, we're 30-odd% of the high-grade market, so there's 70% of other high-grade producers that are producing into this same market.
I spoke earlier in the strategy section, you know, we don't shy away from the fact that we have the capacity to grow in a first quartile cost position and potentially take share from higher cost producers who are traditionally swing producers. We're now starting to see in the market some of the usual rational response of swing producers in the market. So we're seeing capacity starting to turn off, that is loss-making in the current pricing environment. And, we're in the position where we can continue to be cash positive through this environment, and we're then obviously able to instantly enjoy higher margins as and when price recovers on the back end of this. Yes, there are higher inventories at the moment in the Chinese ports.
But we see, as you said in your comment in your question, you know, the Chinese steel sector does seem to be showing some signs of recovery, so that can move fairly rapidly, and we're well-placed. It's very, very damaging in a bulk commodity business to too rapidly adjust production up or down because you rapidly impact your cost structure, you rapidly introduce inefficiency into your production base, and you end up potentially doing more harm than you do trying to manage your market position. You end up doing more harm to your cost position if you're not careful.
Next question?
Thank you. Fabien Le Dissès , Kepler Cheuvreux. Regarding geopolitics and manganese, you didn't mention the recent coup in Gabon. Do you think there could be a negative ramification on this event on your business? I mean, maybe higher royalties, higher taxes, or maybe a change in the shareholding structure of Comilog. Second question on lithium: what's your view? What's your take on the recent lithium transaction? And, do you see a market in deficit in the next few years? And, do you think there will be a difference between European-based lithium production, European-based lithium and other lithium production, difference in prices? Thank you.
Just take the lithium one. I will answer on the Gabon coup. Honestly, for the time being, it has not changed anything. This interim government is quite business friendly. It is very trying to maintain a connection with all the countries, the foreign countries, and is not at all against France or the French interest. So, we are operating totally normally. There is no information or anything that can lead us to think that there would be a change in the conditions that we have.
By the way, the concession of Comilog and all, everything that goes with this concession, including our tax ruling, I would say, is, has been something voted at that time, a long time ago, by the parliament. So to change it, you have to go to the parliament. So it's another protection. And by the way, we are paying a lot on Gabon. We are paying a lot of taxes, higher than the average of the other businesses. We are paying, in addition, royalties. We are paying a lot of things. So what we want is not to pay less, it's to have stability.
But I don't think that we will pay more, and today, we have not heard about anything about the increasing their share, trying to increase their share in the capital of Comilog. So I would say, so far, no change and a quite business-friendly environment.
They recognize a lot, even-
Yeah
... what we are doing in CSR. I think we have the social. I think it's really paused there two weeks back to go to discuss with the government, and things are going in the right direction.
Comilog is considered as a very good corporate citizen in Gabon, with all the CSR that we are doing for the population, et cetera. And so, it's a highly recognized company for all those things. And by the way, it's something when we talk about the license to operate, I mean, what we do for the community is a very good protections, protection when you have this kind of geopolitical issues. The population protects you against sometimes the change of mind of some of the governments.
Maybe, one last thing to complete is, we have—you have seen that we suspended temporarily the activities the day of the coup. It was to make sure that everybody was in safe conditions, et cetera. It was really our preventive measures we do usually. But, honestly, since then, and I know it won't—it will sound weird when we talk about the coup, but it's been really business like as usual.
Mm.
It means that we have really operated normally, and there is absolutely no sign that it will change.
Okay, on lithium?
Yeah, on lithium. So I'll comment first on your price question about a European price emerging. Certainly, there've been no sign of a European price. I mean, we should bear in mind that battery-grade lithium carbonate is effectively another commodity. The price of commodities typically is set globally with local variation driven by factors like transport costs. I think it'd be very unlikely that there'd be a European-specific premium. Certainly, the conversations I have with the OEMs is they'd be very unwilling to pay a European premium. We may see in commodities, in general, in time, carbon content premiums emerge associated with the cost of emissions, but I don't see there would be a European premium per se, just about based on the fact it's produced in Europe.
I think it's more likely that to assist a project here based in Europe, it'd be more about what's the availability of government and EU grants to support capital development. I think that's the aspect where you could see a European-specific element rather than a European price per se. Your second question about the transaction, I take it you're referring to the acquisition we announced of tenements in Chile. Is that what you were referring to?
Your recent transaction in the market, involving the-
On lithium.
Oh, just general, the general transaction activity in the market. Certainly. Look, I think in lithium, and I don't want to comment too much about other, other companies' transactions. There's obviously been a lot of transactions, particularly back, back home in, for me, in Australia, where I've observed some very high-priced transactions. And I, I sit and look at the multiples, and I say, "Come and look at Centenario.
Mm-hmm.
I think, as I said, it's very difficult to comment.
Mm-hmm.
The merger-based transactions, where they are somewhat balanced, I think there won't be so much angst or regret later. But I think the direct acquisition-based transactions, it's pretty difficult to justify some of the valuations that we're seeing on those assets, particularly when you look at the role and location of spodumene in the longer-term cost curve. What we're very mindful of is, you know, this generation of brine projects emerging, both the existing brine projects that have existed for a long time and this new generation of brine projects, such as as our project, you know, they generally will, we feel, own the bottom end of the cost curve. And so, to be paying such high multiples for what may end up being second, third, or fourth quartile cost curve assets, well, you know, I would struggle with myself.
That's just my observation. You'd have to ask the companies involved.
Hmm. Okay, there are other questions?
Hi, good afternoon to all. Auguste from Kepler Cheuvreux.
Hi.
You mentioned lithium as a growth driver.
Sure.
And there is another French player with the same strategies, namely Imerys, and they are looking for a partner. So I just want to know if for you it's something that is possible to join forces with Imerys?
It's not something that we're, we are considering, and that we have considered. We think that we have other great projects, including so in France, the one that Geoff described, the geothermal one in Alsace with Électricité de Strasbourg. So, no, it's not something we have considered. We take other questions here, or we-
No, I think we have one question. We have, I believe, Jason Fairclough waiting.
Mm-hmm
... online, so. Okay, operator, if you could, let Jason in.
Yes. Thank you. Mr. Jason Fairclough from Bank of America, please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. Look, I've got two questions, I guess, both on nickel. First one is on Weda Bay, and I guess my question is: How do you think about value over volume in the nickel market? So we already have this Class 2 market as being oversupplied, and you seem to be planning to add volumes equivalent to about 10% of the market. So I guess my question is: Who makes decisions on producing more in the JV? Is it you, or is it the Chinese?
So I answer this question first, and then you ask your second question. Well, I think we have explained, I mean, the very specific situation of Weda Bay. Weda Bay is just above an industrial park that today consume 80 million tons. And if we are not providing this, anyway, I mean, there will be other mines around in Halmahera or elsewhere that will open and provide this ore anyway. So, and you know, it's a closed market because you cannot export ore from Indonesia.
So today, the demand is there, and it's much more competitive for them to take the ore from Weda Bay because there is no transportation cost through, I mean, the barges that are coming. So it's direct ore from coming just from upside. So it's very competitive for them. So we have a huge demand from the industrial park that is at the bottom of our mine.
So, today, it's value and volume, because I would like to also remind you that today there is a premium for ore on the formula that is existing in Indonesia because there are some delays in the permitting for some mines or renewal of permitting of some mines in Indonesia. So there is a shortage of ore in Indonesia, and they have to import ore from Philippines, which is lower grade and not as good as the one that we have in Weda Bay. So today we have a premium for selling ore in from within Indonesia, in Indonesia.
Honestly, today there is a value and volumes coming together for Weda Bay in the coming year and also-
And also I can add that it is what Christel said: increase the quality of the ore that they value. It means quantity and quality and less cost. This is volume and value.
Yeah. I think, Jason, it's worth bearing in mind, and I commented on this earlier, you know, yes, we're absolutely the demand expands. That's a considerable potential additional nickel units into the market. The dynamics of the ore, the traded laterite ore market are radically changing. So at the same time, we're seeing capacity expand in Indonesia, we're seeing capacity contract in other traditional nickel processing locations, particularly North Asia.
So as one market closes and another market opens, well, it's the other way around, to be honest, in this instance, that then closes off ore export markets for our competitors' operations in the Philippines, for example, but opens additional ore demand in Indonesia, where essentially that cost of production, driven by lower capital costs and lower operating costs, and the rapidly improving operating performance, is driving that new market to grow in Indonesia, effectively, partly at the expense of other longer-term nickel-producing destinations, particularly in North Asia.
One last point that you have to keep in mind is that the grades are decreasing everywhere, because all the mines in Indonesia have, as all mines, started with the highest grade. So now the grade is decreasing, so the same quantity of ore, you have a lower unit of nickel. And so it's the unit of nickel that you have to take into account in your calculation, and it's something that starts to have a significant impact in Indonesia. Second question, Jason?
Nickel.
Yeah, and probably a short answer on this one. It's also on nickel. Would you consider bidding for Glencore's Koniambo asset? It's probably for sale at a good price.
You are kidding? No.
Well, look, joking aside, there's a lot of nickel in New Caledonia, and the problem historically has been the insistence on processing it there and on processing it using high-cost local energy. There's got to be a solution here, right? I mean, they have the geological endowment.
Yeah.
Shall I comment on that, Christel?
Yeah.
So, Jason, you're absolutely right. And if you look at SLN today, you know, SLN today is actually two businesses. One mines ore. A portion of that ore is processed in New Caledonia, and a portion of that ore is exported, and the other aspect of the business is that in-country processing. Our export model is viable and profitable today. So, you know, we have to look at this business and recognize, yes, there are high-grade ores in New Caledonia. There are some of the best nickel laterite ores are still, to this day, in New Caledonia. The trick is, how can you participate and valorize that ore without being exposed to that structurally higher cost operating environment of processing in New Caledonia for sure?
Um-
Just as a follow-up, do you think this comes to a bit of a head? Like, do we get to a point where we have a serious discussion about moving to all the ore exports you want out of New Caledonia, or that can never happen?
No, I think the serious discussions are starting right now because, as I said, everybody's running out of money. So we need to have the serious discussion, which is good, because at some stage, I mean, either it's a huge financing that should come from the state and the local authorities, or it's we'll have to take structural decisions.
Okay. Thanks very much. Very clear. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Jason. I guess there are no other questions, online, so, maybe one last questions in the room.
There's one, yes.
Okay.
Yes, one question on ESG. I have something I don't understand. You, you have a plan, target of 40% decline in CO2 emissions, but in the same time, your production is supposed to double in Indonesia.
... you also increase in, in other place in the world. So how you match— and by the way, as you mentioned, the concentration of nickel will go down, which mean to consume more, let's say, energy to produce, to extract the nickel. So how you match this 40%? I understand the decline eventually in the manganese alloys in other businesses, but on a purely production of nickel, how can you, with doubling basically production, reducing by 40%, your CO2 emissions? I got a problem on that.
Shall I?
You want? Yeah. Yeah, maybe Geoff.
So you need to firstly look at the sources of emissions in our portfolio and,
It's in mining.
... 85% of our emissions are actually generated in our pyrometallurgical plants. Mining itself is really about 15% of our emissions today. Now, in the mines, while there's a lower component, the technology exists today for rapidly further reducing that smaller component. We can start to electrify our trucks. You've seen in our videos, we're not operating large, deep mines with very large ultra-class haulage truck fleets and big shovel fleets. We're operating smaller, more almost road-going truck fleets. The technology exists today to start buying electric truck fleets. Our mine in Gabon, for example, is conveyor belts powered by electricity and smaller trucks, and we have hydroelectric power. So we could completely electrify Gabon with technology that exists today. So in the mines themselves, there's a—we can potentially expand ore production and...
but at the same time, reduce the intensity of the emissions associated with that ore production. So the big lever in genuinely reducing our emissions is actually in our pyrometallurgical processes, where we'd have to talk to the levers that I presented earlier around the replacement of coal and coke in the furnaces with either charcoal or bio-reductant, carbon capture and storage, carbon capture and utilization. Now, we need to work through the technological and economic feasibility of each of these steps to implement, but that's the pathway to achieve that objective, is primarily through addressing our pyrometallurgical business and not so much in terms of achieving huge change in our mining business.
Yeah, we don't particularly intend to increase radically production of our pyrometallurgical businesses without also having a confidence that we can address that decarbonization journey.
A question from the chat?
Yes, please. So we have some question from the webcast. First on, from Barney Fontaine on manganese: Does Eramet produce manganese suitable for battery use?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, 10% of our production go to the batteries, yes.
For Kleber Silva: So you explained about the geopolitical context in Gabon. What about the legal context also in Indonesia and/or Argentina?
The legal context?
Context in terms of relationship, yeah, political-
Ah, political.
Yeah.
This is not political context. We are going through elections in many of our countries, by the way. We have the presidential election in Indonesia next.
Yes
... February. We have the presidential election in Argentina next week, next weekend. But in Argentina, the mining regulation is at the province level. Everything is regulated at province level, and here, the governor has been reelected already at the first round, and it is, he hasn't changed. So there is a stability for the Salta province, where we are, and we will see what happens with the election. Today, the one that is running ahead is the actual minister of economy. So the... And we know him, and we know his position regarding the lithium expansion, which is quite positive. So, we'll see.
In Indonesia, it's today the system is quite constrained because there is a lot of delays. They are reinforcing all their process to give permitting. So that they have now a lot of delays in giving the permitting, and it's a challenge, by the way, for all the players there because this administration is totally bottleneck. We think that till the election we might have some slowdown also in all the administration for our business. But there is, we don't see anything at risk today in the coming...
The people who are running for the presidential election today, the key ones are in favor of continued expansion in nickel, but in a more responsible way, which is positioning us well versus this target.
We have a question regarding CapEx financing. Could you consider new partners other than Tsingshan, and could you imagine new equity partners taking a stake into Eramet Capital?
... I will answer in two steps, because it's a question in two steps. First, concerning a potential partnership. As it has been described, on the projects for which we have not yet taken the final investment decision, we are, for Weda Bay, partnering with BASF. For the EV battery recycling, we are partnering with Suez. That's a confirmation that indeed, especially because usually in our business, in mining, and also in metals, it's a significant investment. Of course, we are open for partnership, to limit also the financing burden for the company.
But we are not restricting ourselves in terms of partners, and what we are currently doing in these two projects is a confirmation. So the answer, in a nutshell and very quickly, is yes. Now, about the potential opening of the capital for the for Eramet itself, so I don't think it's up to us to answer. But clearly, you, I'm sure you have seen that we have had a very stable shareholding in the last years, and I don't expect it to change in the short term.
Regarding the refinancing of your maturity for 2024 and 2025, what is your agenda, and do you still target to be, to have an investment-grade ratings?
So I think I will continue, because it's a financial question. So, on the first topic, so I think, again, we have done a lot, to extend the maturity of our debt with a high level of liquidity. So indeed, there is still some debt, which is expiring in 2024, but especially in 2025, with another bond. So, when we issued our bond in May of this year, we have said, and that's something I'm confirming, that we want to become a regular issuer. So, if the conditions are there, if the market conditions are there, we'll definitely consider something in the near term. So that's to answer on the first part of the question.
I do remember, indeed, when we issued also our bond in May, that we were saying that we could consider, on the long term, an even... or we could actually aim for an investment grade rating. Clearly, I think, the strength of our business model, the strength of our balance sheet, would actually suggest that we are entitled to it. It's not possible for the longest, for the short term, but clearly something on the middle term that we could indeed consider.
We have a final question regarding, again, battery technology. It seems like many Chinese LFP camp players are talking about LMFP within next two years, either single or mixed with NCM. What do you see of this kind of project?
Well, like I said in my comments earlier, I get out of bed every morning and read about battery chemistries changing, so there's absolutely no doubt battery chemistries will change. And I think as industry and carmakers and users determine, there's different characteristics of batteries that are suited for different applications, and I think we're gonna see that. The battery mix will respond to pricing, so consumers don't want to see the cost of their cars jumping up and down in response to the price of nickel on the LME. But so the carmakers will have to adjust chemistries over time to reflect movement in price.
So there's gonna be a range of factors there, and that's absolutely why, you know, we see a consistent theme of lithium through that, through that mix, and why we're, we're confident in our, in our lithium investments. As to the emergence of the other technologies, absolutely, we can be certain that battery chemistries will change in time. And our trick and our focus is to have competitive projects in the first quarter of the cost curves that can, that can, compete and, and position. And we obviously look very closely at issues like payback to make sure that if we implement a major project, we can be comfortable of receiving a good payback within a timeframe that we can be confident that certain battery chemistries will, will dominate the market.
Okay. Thank you. So we said it's the final questions. Again, this concludes the Q&A session. Thank you to everybody for joining us. Now it's time for a cocktail with the members of our executive committee. Thank you, and thank you to all of you for attending this first Capital Market Day. We were very, very happy, especially me, to have you today. Thank you very much.