Hello, everyone. Welcome to Vallourec's Capital Markets Day. I'm Connor Lynagh, Vice President of Investor Relations here at Vallourec. On behalf of the Vallourec team, thank you all for joining, and thank you for your interest. Before we get into today's content, I would like to note that today's presentation is being recorded, and a replay will be available on our website following the event. Also, today's event will contain forward-looking statements. Future results may differ materially from statements or projections made within the context of this presentation. Those forward-looking statements and risk factors that could affect those statements are referenced here. These are also included in our universal registration document filed with the French financial markets regulator, the AMF. Let me give you a brief preview of our agenda today.
So first, we'll give you an overview of Vallourec and our transformation program, New Vallourec plan. then we'll provide a deep dive into our key markets. Following a short coffee break, we'll give you a detailed look at our key operational regions. Then we'll overview our financial framework within New Vallourec plan and close with a Q&A session. Let me also introduce you to today's speakers. We have Philippe Guillemot, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Jacky Massaglia, Senior Vice President of North America, Laurent Dubedout, Senior Vice President of OCTG Services and Accessories and Eastern Hemisphere Sales, Ulrika Wising, Senior Vice President of Energy Transition, Bertrand Frischmann, Chief Operating Officer of the Americas, and Sascha Bibert, Chief Financial Officer. So with that, let me turn the stage over to Philippe Guillemot, our Chairman and CEO.
Thank you, Connor. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Philippe Guillemot. I've been appointed Chairman and CEO of Vallourec almost 18 months ago now. Previously, I have managed several industrial multinational companies in different industries: automotive, electricity network, telecom, all in turnaround situations like Areva Transmission and Distribution or Alcatel-Lucent, to name a few. I'm very pleased, very pleased to host today with my talented team here, this Capital Markets Day, the first in 10 years. Let me now turn to the key messages for today. First, Vallourec is a mission-critical supplier of complex steel tubular solutions, supported by industry-leading research and development and world-class production facilities. Second, we are making Vallourec more profitable, more resilient, and more cash generative while delivering on our ambitious ESG targets.
Third, we see multi-year tailwinds across oil and gas and new energies markets that will drive significant demand for our products and services. Fourth, we aspire to be one of the most shareholder-friendly companies within our peer group. Sascha will walk through this in more detail, but we reiterate our target to achieve zero net debt by year-end 2025 at the latest. We have also laid out a simulation of our mid-cycle earnings level, where we see EUR 850 million of mid-cycle EBITDA and EUR 450 million of mid-cycle total cash generation. We aspire to return 80%-100% of this to shareholders, which of course, would need to be approved by our board and by our shareholders during the AGM. Now, let's start with who we are. Vallourec is a vertically integrated supplier of high-end steel tubes.
Within our core markets, our technological prowess is best in class due to our ongoing research and development. We are a partner of choice for our customers, given our cutting-edge product offering and ability to push the boundaries of industry technology. We also offer one of the lowest carbon footprint for our product in the market, and we have ambitions to further this advantage versus peers. Today, we unveil our new motto: Vallourec is a trustworthy partner for cutting-edge steel solutions that make energy transformation possible. Here is a look at our global asset base. Following the implementation of New Vallourec plan, we will have three premium tube production hubs. Our largest by revenue is North America, which is a premier domestic manufacturing operation that serves the high-volume North American oil and gas industry.
In South America, we have a fully vertically integrated asset base from our mine and forest business to a state-of-the-art steel shop and three rolling operations. In the Eastern Hemisphere, we are creating a new premium production hub in Asia, specifically in China and Indonesia, and we have significant local production capabilities in Saudi Arabia. We support all of this with a lean corporate office in Paris and a highly, highly sophisticated research and development operation in Aulnoye-Aymeries in Northern France. Some quick facts on Vallourec here to further illustrate our business. We serve four key markets with our global operations. Our tubes business, which makes up the majority of our portfolio, serves the oil and gas, new energies, and industry markets. We also operate an iron ore mine that both supports our tube business and sells iron ore into the local Brazilian market.
Although these figures will change as we execute our restructuring plan, let me give you a sense of the scale of our operation. In 2022, we have more than 40 major production assets and are present in more than 20 countries. We supported this operation with our global team of 16,000 employees. In 2022, we generated EUR 715 million of EBITDA on 1.8 million tons of tube sales. Among peers, we have one of the best ESG profiles and strive for more. In addition to the figures you see here, we are in the EcoVadis Platinum class, and CDP rates us with excellent mark on our climate, water, and forest management processes. Here is a glimpse of the blue-chip customer base we serve. You can see we have a broadly diversified group of customers.
We serve all of the Western oil majors, like ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, and the like. We also have a strong position with key national oil companies like Petrobras, Saudi Aramco, and ADNOC, among others. In the U.S., we work with the largest pipe distributors to serve a customer base of some of the largest independent U.S. exploration and production companies like Devon and EOG. Many of these customers have been our, have been our customers for decades. In our New Energies business, we are serving these same customers, but are also adding new customers like Fervo Energy. We will expand on how we serve this customer base shortly. Clearly, our key customers are heavily focused on oil and gas, so I think it is worth spending a minute on the macro outlook here. Let me address the greatest concerns and doubts about demand outlook for oil and gas.
We share the view of many market experts that demand for oil and gas will not decrease in both the near and long term. Our customers have every reason to be confident in their long-term prospects. On the left-hand side, we show forecast of oil demand. Despite this market's concern, we would note that both OPEC and the IEA forecast growth in demand through 2027 and 2028, the final years of their near-term forecast. Looking longer term, the IEA forecasts that bearing significant changes in worldwide policy, 2050 oil demand will actually be 5% higher than 2023 oil demand. The same is true for gas, for which demand is forecast to be 8% higher in both 2030 and 2050 versus the 2023 level.
In a world where our customers are experiencing sustained demand, we expect we will be. Moving to the supply side, the picture gets even more interesting. Keep in mind that our sales are driven by customers investing in their capacity as existing or new. Even without talking about growth, just to maintain current level of production, sustained investment in existing and new field will be required. We focus on the supply side for oil here, and we look at both short and long cycle resources. On the left-hand side, you can see crude oil inventories, which are in effect, the shortest cycle barrels in the market. As compared to the major inventory overhang that persisted in the 2015, 2018 period, you can see inventories now are lower than they have ever been at any point in the last 10 years... 20 years.
As the global economy picks up, our customers will be called upon to drill new oil and gas wells quickly to fill supply. Looking at the longer cycle resource base, you can see a measure of how mature global oil production is. As oil and gas fields age, production becomes harder to grow. Newer fields, by contrast, tend to grow their production for several years. Here, you can see that beyond shale, the level of production from new fields is at the lowest level it has been in the past 40+ years, a symptom of the industry's underinvestment over the past decade. Now, the industry finds itself in a position to reinvest, and we will walk you through how we see that playing out over the coming slides.
Before we get into our specific business outlooks, let me start by describing the core of the reason why this management team is standing before you today. We are here to share the ways we are reshaping Vallourec to make it far more profitable and sustainable. Let's start with some background. Vallourec has a rich history in the steel tubular business. Following the invention of the seamless rolling process in Germany in 1886, the French steel producers that would ultimately form Vallourec began operating in northern France. Vallourec itself was formed in the 1930s, and our introduction of the VAM connection in the 1960s was transformational for the oil and gas industry. We also have a long history as a public company. We have been listed since 1957.
In the early to mid-2000s, we grew our footprint substantially in the Americas with the acquisition of North Star Tubes and the commissioning of our state-of-the-art facility in Jeceaba, in Minas Gerais, in Brazil. In 2016, we expanded our presence in China by acquiring full control of our Tianda operation there. However, due to both an industry-wide downturn and poor cost and balance sheet management under the legacy regime, Vallourec was forced to restructure its balance sheet in 2021, resulting in a new shareholding base and new focused board oversight. In 2022, with the balance sheet restructuring and renewed governance in place, I joined the company to lead its operational transformation, and many of the managers you see today also joined my executive committee.
Together, we are creating a New Vallourec, which will leverage this rich history to create a more profitable and more sustainable industry leader. In addition to improving our management structure, we also improved our corporate structure, which suffered from overly complicated joint venture structures that burdened some of our primary production assets. This was a critical enabling step to executing the rest of the restructuring plan. In 2021, we bought out the minority stake of Sumitomo in our primary U.S. steelmaking and tube production subsidiary, Vallourec Star. Then, we repurchased Nippon Steel's and Sumitomo's minority stake in VAM USA, our high-end threading assets. Finally, we repurchased Nippon Steel's 15% interest in our primary Brazilian subsidiary, VSB. Putting this together, we have not only executed timely acquisitions from a cyclical perspective, but our operational decision-making processes are greatly improved.
Before I discuss the mechanics of our restructuring plan, I would like to share with you what my first and lasting impressions were at Vallourec. This formed the basis of New Vallourec plan as you see it today. Early on, I was immediately struck by two extremely clear takeaways. First, the absolute quality of the people at Vallourec is very high. This comes from our engineering DNA, and a visit to our research and development center in Aulnoye-Aymeries convinced me that, without a doubt, we do not produce commoditized products. The second impression was the degree to which this talent base was undermanaged and underutilized, which was evident from the substantial losses tolerated at our European operations for nearly a decade. This points to the immense opportunity we have to unleash the potential of our people and our asset base.
As such, we have commenced New Vallourec plan. we have two primary objectives in this: to deliver best-in-class profitability and to cycle-proof our business. We want to ensure that we do not only deliver benchmark returns when the sun is shining, but that all of our stakeholders can count on Vallourec, no matter how supportive the macro environment is. We have three major operational initiatives underway to deliver these objectives: realigning our industrial footprint, focusing on product mix, and improving our pricing strategy. But we are also substantially improving the governance and management of this company to ensure that these changes are durable and the organization has the tools to adapt to whatever challenges our industry presents over the next several years.
In this vein, we have reshaped our management team, executed transactions to harness the full potential of our premier asset, and have set ambitious ESG targets that will ensure we continue to drive the organization towards best-in-class operational performance. Let's start with the first point and dive a bit deeper on the industrial realignment we are executing. The primary initiative underlying this plan is a shutdown of loss-making operations in Europe and the transfer of some of these production capabilities to our superior asset base in Brazil. You can see the immediate impact that this will have on our operations. While our European assets have lost in excess of EUR 100 million of EBITDA every year for the past six years, the rest of our organization has delivered far better results.
These European assets suffer from a high cost base, including energy, and a very small domestic oil and gas market. While the closure of the major asset was a difficult decision, in my mind, it is the only way forward for Vallourec. To help you understand how we are planning to reposition our assets without diminishing our industrial capabilities, let's take a look at how Vallourec was organized in 2021, the year before we announced New Vallourec plan. you can see we had four major production hubs in North America, South America, East Asia, and Europe. Saudi Arabia was a relatively smaller local production center. We are shutting down the majority of our European operations, but you can see here how we can continue to serve our global tubes customer base. In North America, we have a fully vertically integrated operation designed to serve the local markets.
In South America, we have our other vertically integrated asset base. This is our primary premium production hub, which we use to serve the market for global premium demand. In the Eastern Hemisphere, we are not fully vertically integrated, but have low-cost sourcing capabilities and localized downstream operations, which we will expand on later. We are able to address all of the major Eastern Hemisphere markets through this system, despite the reduction of capacity in Europe. In contrasting these two charts, you will see how much more we plan to leverage our asset base in Brazil. In our mind, this is one of the industry's premier assets. We intend to maximize this asset's full potential in New Vallourec plan. the second key tool in New Vallourec plan is emphasizing value over volume.
While we and peers are typically communicating on terms, in terms of rolling, total rolling capacity, this is not the full story. What truly matters, what truly matters is premium production capacity. We will help you understand what this means shortly, but it is worth noting that we are moving from 78% of our production being capable of moving through premium production routes to now nearly 90% of our capacity. In other words, we are targeting producing almost entirely, entirely premium products going forward. In addition to focusing on premium products, we are focusing on premium markets. The industry and all the volumes shown here are far more commoditized markets that do not require the high-end premium steel tubular solutions we can offer.
These industry tubes made up a substantial portion of our European production volumes, and with our exit of these operations, we are leaving all these volumes behind. Over the cycle, this mix effect should also manifest itself in a margin uplift, as our oil and gas volumes have on average generated a 60% higher margin per ton versus these businesses. Beyond mix effect, we have also structurally improved our pricing policies and commercial management. We have changed our focus from maximizing throughput to maximizing margin and cash. Part of this is driven by internal processes. We more clearly measure profit and capital employed from distinct businesses and even on distinct production routes. We do not feel that this has been done diligently before now. The other part of this strategy is how we manage ourselves in the market.
We have increased our focus on contract terms and conditions, always with a focus on maximizing margin and cash flow. We have also improved our contracting style to reduce inflation and other risk factors by using more parametric price formulas. We now only have a small portion of our backlog in fixed price contracts, which will help us in volatile inflationary environments. But we are not done. We have embarked on a significant project to further improve the integration of data across our organizations, which will allow our sales organization to better integrate with our production organization and therefore substantially optimize our bidding and production strategies. Now, let us talk through the management and governance improvements we have enacted. As always, this starts with the managers we have placed at the top of Vallourec.
You can see here that over half of our executive committee is composed of recent hires, and over 80% of the committee has been recently appointed to these roles. This injection of new blood is an organization-wide trend that is allowing us to take a fresh look at all of our processes and ways of conducting business. You will hear from several of these managers during the formal presentation today, and nearly all others are here with us and available to answer your questions after the presentation. Obviously, we look forward to introducing this team to you in greater details and encourage you to spend some time with them following our formal presentations. Before we move past the topic of management, let me emphasize our unique level of alignment with our shareholders.
The top managers across the company are now involved in our management equity plan, which has two key components. First, a meaningful upfront personal investment in Vallourec shares at the start of their employment. The executive committee has invested over EUR 12 million personally into Vallourec shares. Second, a substantial amount of incremental shares, which vest only at the share price levels you see here. For anyone who is not part of this scheme, we intend to offer an employee share plan, which will also further enhance the alignment with shareholders' value creation across the entire organization. The final portion of New Vallourec plan i would highlight is how we are targeting a best-in-class operational and ESG profile.
On this front, while we have already achieved our 2025 emissions target, we have already set ambitious new targets for 2030 and 2035. We plan to reduce our Scope 1, 2, and upstream 3 emissions by an incremental 30% and 35% over these periods. In addition, safety, safety is a major focus for me personally and for the organization at large. While our safety record is commendable relative to the steel industry, this is not sufficient for us... we now have set targets to improve our safety metrics to best-in-class levels for the oil and gas industry. I think it is worth emphasizing why safety matters. A safe organization is one with significantly developed industrial processes, management, and worker training. It requires the mobilization of the entire organization.
The changes we are implementing are significant, and they ultimately contribute to not just worker health, but our overall efficiency and our bottom line. So let us summarize where we are in New Vallourec journey. our New Vallourec work streams are monitored weekly at the executive committee level, and remain top priorities for all of us. To date, we have overhauled our management team and substantially improved our internal management processes. We have begun the asset closure process, with select smaller assets already closed and social contracts in place to close the rest. The closures in Germany are well on track to be finished this year, as is the EUR 110 million investment program in Brazil that will allow us to transfer our oil and gas production from Europe. Our overhead cost reduction are also underway and on track to be completed late this year.
Later today, we will also delineate a newer ongoing project in which we are transforming our asset base in China to a premium production hub, and we are also expanding our capacity in Saudi Arabia to better serve this market. Looking forward, we have much more to do. We will finalize our land and equipment sales, and thus finish our primary asset wind down program in Europe. But from here, we have many programs underway to drive further value for Vallourec. We are working to improve our production processes and fully capitalize on our premium Brazilian assets. We are enhancing our data systems to connect global commercial and production processes. And finally, we are working to develop a best-in-class New Energies business. Before we leave this section, I would like to emphasize the significant change that has and will occur as a result of our New Vallourec plan.
Many of you were familiar with the old Vallourec of the prior cycle, which was burdened with a EUR 2.1 billion debt, near breakeven operations, and major, major negative cash flows. Looking forward, Sascha will lay out for you how we plan to operate a zero net debt balance sheet, generate EUR 450 of EBITDA per ton in our tubes business, and translate this into EUR 450 million of free cash flow. Jacky, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Philippe, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today. My name is Jacky Massaglia. I've been recently appointed as a Senior Vice President for North America, and previously was a Senior Vice President for our Project Line Pipe and Process business line that I will present to you a little later. I've been with Vallourec for 20 years. Started in research and development and held various positions, technical, commercial, and corporate, covering Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Soon, you will hear from our business leaders to understand how we play in select markets and regions. But before we get there, it's important to understand the overarching value add that Vallourec provides: our ability to create high-end, premium tubular solutions.
Let me first explain that within the market for steel tubular solutions, there's substantial differentiation among major product groups. The first major distinction is that of welded versus seamless tubes. Welded tubes are made of flat rolled steel or alloy that is formed into a tube and seam welded along its length. It's less sophisticated production process. The seam weld is always the weak spot, be it for strength or corrosion, and so these products are mostly used in low-end applications and markets where we barely participate. From here, we move to seamless tubes. Seamless tubes are products made from round steel billets that are pierced and rolled into a homogeneous tube without the natural weakness a weld creates. Vallourec focuses on seamless tube, the high-end premium segment of the tubular solutions... So why do our customers need premium seamless tubes?
Well, you will hear more about the applications later today, but basically, our tubes are exposed to significant and often extreme loads and environment. So let me give you a few figures to help you put things into perspective. In today's oil and gas fields and wells, pipes are sometimes used in water depth that extend to 3,000 meters depth. That's 8-10 Eiffel Towers. They go down hole, down to 10 kilometers, sometimes even deeper in the ground, so that's higher than the Mount Everest or the highest cloud in the atmosphere. And they extend laterally, sometimes 10-12 kilometers in lateral length.
So, at these depth and lengths, they may be exposed to pressures over 1,500 bars, temperatures at 200, 200 and 50 degrees Celsius, and they carry corrosive fluids that can shave away several millimeters of steel in just a few days or crack apart a steel pipe in a matter of hours. And you can see on these two pictures, the one on top is a collapsed pipe under external pressure, and the one is a corroded tubing that lost most of its material, its thickness, in just a matter of days. So these pipes must feature strength, toughness, resistance to fatigue and corrosion, and often in combination, and knowing that one characteristic often goes against the other. For instance, the higher the strength of the material, the lower its corrosion resistance.
So this calls for special metallurgies, special geometries, and connection technologies to connect one pipe to the other. So that's what really makes these pipes high-end premium pipes. I hope you better understand now that users of these pipes, the oil and gas operators, oil field service companies, they look for quality, reliability, technical support to select the right solution within large portfolios of products and services. It's important for them to make the right, selection. So while price matter, as you can see on the, on the chart on the right-hand side, it's only part of the equation. This is the core of why we focus on premium seamless tubes. Let's dig a little deeper in how these, premium seamless tubes are created. In both the U.S. and Brazil, we are fully integrated through this process.
So first, we convert scrap steel or the iron ore produced at our mine into round steel billets. It's worth noting that in many cases, we're not making pure carbon steel, given the extreme environments in which our tubes must perform, but we frequently are creating alloys using sophisticated metallurgy. From here, these billets are pierced, rolled, and elongated to create the seamless tubes. This process requires a high degree of manufacturing precision, and parameters across different products can vary significantly. So here, process control and quality controls are key. As you can see below, the value creation tends to increase as we move further along the supply chain, the value chain, sorry. Heat treatment capacity is really where we further premiumize the tubes. Heat treatment is a process of cyclically altering the steel's temperature to impart specific product characteristics.
Producers that can do this accurately, reliably, and at scale are quite limited. Finally, many of our pipes move to the threading process, where the end of these tubes are machined to allow connections between pipes. Vallourec and the VAM brand, in particular, is the industry leader in this threading process, which we will discuss, shortly. Across every step of the manufacturing process, there's a lot of inspection and testing involving cutting-edge technologies like ultrasonic testing, electromagnetic inspections, X-rays, chemical analysis, metallographic inspections, et cetera, et cetera. Each and every pipe that exit the process has over a thousand data points characterizing its properties and performances. Here we explore our key competitive advantages and how they show at each stage of the production process.
In steelmaking, our vertical integration, including state-of-the-art steel shop in Brazil, allows us to design fit for purpose grades for customers, supported by material selection services that we offer. In rolling, our modernized tube mills are highly automated, with large capabilities for diameters and wall thicknesses. The wide network of locations with rolling mills in the U.S., Brazil, and China allows product specializations and development of meaningful expertise. Heat treatment, remember, that's where a lot of value add is created, and following the implementation of New Vallourec plan, we will have one of the highest levels of heat treatment as a percentage of our rolling capacity in the world, as presented by Philippe previously. Our extensive know-how and experience here allow consistent creation of premium tubes.
Finally, in threading, again, our ownership of the VAM connection family, which is the reference in the industry, gives us the largest and most performing portfolio of premium connections for all applications. Here you can see the size of the major seamless tube markets that we serve. On the left, you have the two major oil and gas markets that make up 90% of our current volumes. Oil country tubular goods, abbreviated OCTG, and project line pipe and process, PLP. Demand in these markets is generally driven by the level of capital expenditure by oil and gas companies, particularly those in the upstream. As discussed earlier today, we are substantially scaling down our service of the industry market, though we do expect it will compose about 10% of our sales. Here, broad industrial demand for automotive, agribusiness, construction, and other industries drives the demand.
On the right, we highlight our position in new energies, a market with significant structural growth ahead. We will provide more details on this market later with Ulrika, but for now, I will comment that many new energy solutions like carbon capture, utilization and storage, geothermal or hydrogen, will demand our technology. Moving to the supply side of our industry. We think that many investors tend to underestimate how consolidated our market is. While global seamless tube production is in excess of 20 million tons per year, most suppliers do not have access to the global premium market that we serve. There are effectively three global players in this upper-end market, with Vallourec, Tenaris, and Nippon Steel Corporation. To be clear, we encounter other players in select situation.
For example, some of the regional Western producers compete with us in select markets like the U.S. or some specific niche segment like chrome and alloys. However, they do not have the global reach to serve oil companies' global offshore portfolios. Meanwhile, the Asia and CIS suppliers are very cost competitive and tend to dominate the low-end tubular markets in their home regions. However, due to various trade restrictions and their general inability to compete on premium products, we do not tend to directly price versus these players' offerings. Another critical area of differentiation is the connection technologies we offer, as I alluded to previously. Our tubes are often connected in strings, several thousand meters long. This means that not only the integrity of the tube itself is important, but the connections between tubes are also critically important.
The VAM connection family is the industry standard for advanced connections. This brand has been in service for nearly 60 years and has a 30% market share in the markets we serve. It's such a standard today that we license it to other pipe manufacturing companies, or we license it to oil field service companies that manufacture accessories, and we get royalties out of it. We have more than 30 product lines protected by 80 patents, and there's only really one player globally that can compete with the breadth of our offering. It may seem hard to understand how connection can be a sustainable competitive mode, so perhaps the example on the right can illustrate this for you. This is the evolution of a common connection type, the threaded and coupled, abbreviated T&C, connections.
VAM TOP was introduced in 1993 and quickly became the industry standard for premium T&C connections. After 20 years on top of the industry, we created the VAM 21, the direct descendant of VAM TOP, which was the very first connection that offered strength equal to the body of the tube itself. So while VAM 21 was an excellent solution for many applications, becoming a standard, we went further. In 2020, we created a purpose-built connection for Shell application called VAM SPRINT. That's the strength of the VAM portfolio of connection. It offer both versatile products that can be used in many different applications, often becoming standards, but also tailor-made products for very specific cases. So you can see now how the constant innovation is itself a barrier to entry.
While low-end competitors may catch up to our early generation products, without establishing the DNA for innovation in their organization, they will always remain a step behind industry leaders like ourselves. That's a great segue into the how we keep this continuous culture of innovation core to Vallourec. Vallourec research and development is a bilateral customer relationship that entrenches us with our customers early in the process as key problem solvers. This technical intimacy with end users allows us to design solutions that solve problems found in various applications, and that's why many of our products become standards in our industry. In the meantime, we use the same expertise to create fit-for-purpose products.... helping our customers pushing the boundaries of depth, length, pressure, temperatures that they encounter.
This helps us defend our core business via the process of continuous innovation I discussed a moment ago. But beyond this, we can develop new revenue streams. We have added new services and accessories, such as inventory management, robotic inspection tools, pre-installed wire protectors on our tubes. We are also well advanced in qualifying our products for new energies application with hydrogen or carbon capture and geothermal. And we have developed innovative concepts for hydrogen storage, and you will hear more about it. So finally, we have developed entirely new types of solutions for our markets, like the use of additive manufacturing or 3D printing, or custom steel applications. So I hope you've enjoyed this introduction and ride on the technical side of the business, and I'd like to leave you with the following key takeaways.
We operate in a demanding premium market with a small amount of direct competitors. We add value through our industry-leading R&D and production processes. The portfolio and the brand, VAM, for premium connections, is a strong competitive differentiator. Actually, you will hear more about it as I turn it to my friend, Laurent, who will tell you more about the OCTG application.
Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Laurent Dubedout. I joined the group in 2002. Since then, I occupied various positions in product development, production, and sales, located in Europe, U.S.A, and Southeast Asia, in Singapore, where I was vice president for the region. Since 2022, I have served as a Senior Vice President for OCTG, Accessories and Services, and joined the Executive Committee of the group. Given my operational responsibility of Eastern Hemisphere sales, I am now based in Dubai. Our largest product line within the two businesses is Oil Country Tubular Goods, or OCTG. OCTG is used in the drilling of oil and gas wells. It is used to provide structural support to these wells and allow the production of hydrocarbons throughout the life of the well.
As you can see on the right, OCTG is placed from the surface down to the oil and gas reservoir in concentric strings of increasing depths to ensure well integrity and isolation of geological zones. The casing provides reliable mechanical support and isolate the production strings from the ground and vice versa. The tubing allows to bring the oil and gas to the surface, requiring reliable sealability and resistance to corrosion at high temperature. The VAM technology, as introduced by Jacky earlier, has become the standards to connect tubing and casing. The oil and gas industry is drilling well several thousand meter depth in the earth, and when offshore, sometimes in several thousand meters of water. The steel products that can survive in that environment for decades are technically highly sophisticated.
As a result of the data point, Philippe previously discussed, market observers forecast a strong level of upstream CapEx, a good proxy for our demand for the next several years. You can see early evidence of this with a near-term project pipeline set for final investment decision in 2023 and 2024, likely to exceed the level seen for the past 10 years. Generally speaking, project approvals in 2023 and 2024 will drive OCTG demand in the 2025-2027 period, so this speaks for a healthy demand outlook. Meanwhile, if you consider aggregate global CapEx, you can see that Standard & Poor's expect a substantially higher level of spending in the 2023-2027 period, compared to what was observed for the past eight years. The results of the underinvestment that Philippe was alluding to earlier.
All this points to a robust OCTG market ahead of us. OCTG is a meaningful portion of the upstream CapEx, usually around 10%-15%, and the demand for OCTG will follow a similar path to what you can see here. With this demand forecast, let's now dive further into the OCTG market. The seamless OCTG market is not a single market. Rather, they are premium and lower-end products. We define this based on the connection or threading technology, but also the grade or type of steel. Proprietary connections tend to be used for more demanding applications. Some applications require very specific grades, resulting in significantly enhanced corrosion and mechanical resistance. We assess the global market at about 9.6 million tons per year, of which proprietary market is about 4.2 million tons. The API market is 5.4 million tons.
For reference, API stands here for American Petroleum Institute. These are commoditized connection called BTC or buttress, and some grade of material. As you can see, 85% of our volume is in the proprietary segment, while only 15% of our tubes address the lower-end segment. We therefore tend to earn a premium versus broad market prices. A proprietary grade, which we define as having a semi-premium connection or higher, can be expected to sell for approximately $1,500 per ton or more, sometimes even twice, when combining premium connection and proprietary grades, as I will illustrate in the coming slide. We have spoken substantially about premium tubes, but it's worth demonstrating what we are really talking about. Here is a chart showing the selling price of an OCTG product mid-2023.
At the low end of the market, a commodity tube with an API connection could market for something like $1,500 per ton. We largely do not participate in this market. Referring back to the set of premium tier one players Jackie showed, you can see an immediate step up in the market price we are able to access, with a price doubling to around $3,000 per ton. With more sophisticated technology required to handle the extreme pressure and highly corrosive reservoir, market prices could move up to even higher to the $4,500 per ton level. As we stated in the prior section, we are an industry leader in this type of tubes and production processes.
With our new pricing policy adjusted to maximize value and the fact we focus our capacity on premium production, our value over volume strategy leads us to push our mix to the right side of this graph. Here, we have a look at the major global OCTG markets. A few key conclusions should be apparent. First off, you can see the markets we serve, which are in various shades of blue. These are markets where customers prefer proprietary connections and grades, and pay for premium products. The largest of these is North America, followed by the Middle East, both of which being key markets for us. The markets in South America, Africa, and Europe are smaller, but they have a heavy bias towards premium products, which makes them both high-priced markets and markets where we perform well.
Finally, you can see that we do not play heavily in the CIS or China markets. The local players tend to serve these lower grade markets at prices we do not find attractive. That said, we do play somewhat in the Asia Pacific region outside of China, where there are some more interesting premium markets, such as Indonesia, where we benefit from local content advantage. Here is a bit of a deep dive in the three major markets we serve. In North America, our largest market, we serve major independent exploration and production companies. With their heavy focus on factory drilling, they demand high volume of fit-for-purpose technology with just-in-time deliveries and supply chain reliability, which are highly valued. Our premier, premier domestic production capacities is a must on this market. In the Middle East, meanwhile, we largely serve national oil companies.
These customers invest in very long cycles and have different needs. They require support for large multi-year programs, and typically have a rigorous qualification process for vendors. There is frequently a preference given for in-country value creation, like what we offer in our Saudi Arabia facility. This market has been very constructive for us in the past several quarters, and we remain positive on the long-term potential here. In South America, Europe, and Africa, we are serving offshore areas and tend to work with both international oil company and national oil companies, though we also serve some independent E&P company in Europe. Here, the high demand of the offshore operating environment plays into our strengths. We offer customized, highly technical solutions and technical support. Additionally, our strong project management capabilities are highly valued, as the cost of delays in those offshore projects are significant.
Let me give you a tangible example to help you understand how we win with our premium products. Here is a case study of our performance in U.S. Gulf of Mexico. As you may know, the deepwater Gulf of Mexico is one of the most technically demanding basin to operate, and operators continue to push the boundaries of wells and field designs. An example you may be familiar with, if you follow the rig contractors or equipment manufacturer, is a move towards 20K, 20,000 PSI, wells and pressure control systems. In addition, the U.S. regulatory regime is very strict, and operators must maintain a high margin of safety in their operation. As such, they need an industry partner that can serve their specific needs and guarantee a high degree of performance from their products.
Historically, we had a decent market share in the Gulf of Mexico, but not at the level we felt our product warranted. Consequently, we worked directly with customers to identify a critical industry need for the latest generation, high performance, semi-flush connection. This solution is particularly well suited for high collapse application our customers in the Gulf of Mexico demanded. You can see the results on the right. In the course of three years, we have tripled our market share in this high-value market. This is a direct monetization of our R&D efforts and an example of why technology matters. I will leave you with few takeaways. First, there is a strong upstream oil and gas fundamentals, which point to a multi-year upturn for the OCTG industry. Our focus on the high-end OCTG market allows us to charge a meaningful premium versus much of the market.
Last, we are well positioned in global OCTG markets that value and pay for premium products. With that, we will take a look at our next largest business in tubes, our PLP, Project Line Pipe and Process business. Let me hand it back to Jacky to discuss this.
Thank you, Laurent, and happy to be back with you all. So, as he said, I will now introduce you to the second largest portion of our tubes business, which is the Project Line Pipe and Process Tube business line. So as opposed to OCTG products that are used downhole and vertically, Project Line Pipe, that we often call PLP, is used mostly horizontally to transport fluid above the surface of the earth, but sometimes beneath the surface of the ocean. Process pipes, meanwhile, refer to the tubes within an actual fluid processing facility, such as refineries, LNG plants, FPSOs, or more recently, biofuel facilities. The technical requirements for this type of tube are generally different than OCTG, starting with the fact that pipes, although seamless, are butt welded to one another to constitute a line.
So the products are generally less complex, but we focus on specific market segments that require substantial technology and or where we have a privileged market position. The stylized picture of an offshore field development at the bottom left of the slide will likely allow you to see how there can be substantial technology in a project line pipe. So you see most of pipes along the ocean floor and rising up to the floating production vessel or facility are all products we would produce. Here, the pipe is the single barrier between the fluid that it is transported and the environment. So it's highly critical, and quality and reliability are, are of utmost importance.
While these pipes will have to withstand for years large amounts of cyclic stress and motions from pressure, currents, water depth, again, up sometimes to 2,000-3,000 meters depth, vessel motions, et cetera, et cetera. This calls for highly premium tubular solutions. Following on the point from this prior slide, you'll understand that we tend to focus on offshore line pipe. This distinction is evident in the market structure shown here. The onshore market is fragmented, with many players capable of supplying low-end tubes that are often non-heat treated. Meanwhile, offshore, the number of suppliers that can play in this market is a small handful and the same as what was said a few slides ago.
So in diameters below 20 in, welded tubes are generally not viable substitutes, and premium steel grades are required with tight geometric and metallurgical requirements. We are generally selling directly to engineering, procurement, construction, and installation suppliers, EPCIs, like Saipem, Subsea 7, TFMC, and the likes. The volume per order is usually high. We're talking 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 tons per order. So these sophisticated contractors demand capacity, but also project management skills and reliability in the delivery, which we offer, and which many smaller players cannot. Over the past few years, we have increased the focus and the supply from our Brazilian plant to this product line, and it's actually very well suited for this type of, of products. And it help us grow and sustain a market share of over 30% on this offshore PLP market.
Now, we transition to the process market, which is somewhat a different animal than the PLP market. As compared to the onshore, offshore PLP market, the process market is generally demands lower tech pipes. We tend to sell through distributors, and this market tends to be volatile. So demand is generally driven by process facility CapEx, CapEx, so think LNG, refining, petrochemical plants, biofuel plants, and we know this can be highly cyclical. However, geography is important in this market, both in terms of import restrictions in the U.S. and the significant cost advantage we have with our local production facilities in Brazil. The price potential is huge at times, and therefore, companies will pay a premium in tight markets.
But it would be fair to say that compared to the long cycle PLP business, process tends to be much more of a spot business. We note here that we focus solely on these areas where we have a geographic advantage, the U.S. and Brazil. Although the selling cycle is far different for PLP and the process, we think ultimately the best indicator of demand is the overall project activity in oil and gas industry. Process will have a bit more bias towards the downstream and midstream, which is included and showed on the right graph. On the left graph, you can see the level of offshore project sanctioning, and we tend to get PLP orders as these projects reach final investment decision, FID, and then we deliver over the next 12-24 months.
After a major lull in project sanctioning over the past cycle, activity has picked up heavily, and importantly, a lot of this activity pick up is occurring in our core markets. Our Brazilian production footprint gives us a privileged position on the areas that will see the greatest growth offshore: Brazil, Guyana, Suriname. To give you an idea, it is forecasted that over 40% of FPSO vessels, so floating production, storage, and offloading vessels, that's where a lot of the risers and PLP are hanging and then continuing on the sea floor. So 40% of the FPSOs to be awarded until from now until 2030 will be for Brazil and Guyana. Meanwhile, back to the process graph on the right, you can see that the total onshore and offshore facility spending in the Americas is sustainable.
So, robust investment in LNG, biofuel, and major upstream project. There is a major investment cycle underway that will create a robust process market environment for the next several years in particular in Americas, where we have geographic advantage. I want to share with you a success case, and I suspect most of you are familiar with Exxon's development program in Guyana. This is the world's most significant oil discovery in the recent years, and it is, and will be a multi-year major development project for this core customer. So seeing this potential, Exxon sought out significant partnerships in the service and equipment value chain.
On line pipe, chief among their considerations were technical know-how to manage large, big project, including projects where field development concepts and products were still unknown at the design stage, and so suppliers that could be long-term committed partners for this major project. Vallourec offered several key assets and technology that made us a preferred supplier. Our ability to serve a broad range of products from our advanced Brazilian tube production assets, a full suite of digital tools, and perhaps most interestingly, the ability to offer and trial a new grade, a new technology to serve this project. So that's another interesting example, similarly to what you heard about VAM SLJ-II, but on the grade side. So here you can see a new product at the earlier development stage. This is a new grade called X80.
It is the strongest steel grade introduced for offshore line pipe. So higher strength, less wall thickness. It reduces the weights of the string while maintaining performances, which is an enabler, especially in the very deep water, where the weight becomes a great concern. Exxon is trialing the product as part of their overall engagement, and we are today the only player in the world capable to supply it and having it qualified by a major such as Exxon. So while this is a new product for us, it highlights how major customers trust us to deliver new technology in some of their most premier assets. We think over time, it could become a more meaningful differentiator, actually an enabler for offshore line pipe needs, especially in very deep water.
So looking more broadly at our relationship with Exxon here, we have a ten-year long-term agreement with Exxon to support them in Guyana, which gives us quite a substantial base load for PLP demand for the next several years. Thus far, we have booked and are delivering over 90,000 tons of PLP orders, and there are many more opportunities to come with Exxon and more broadly in the region. So let me wrap up this section with some key messages from the PLP and Process business line. We have a strong position on the PLP offshore market, thanks to our technical differentiation and our Brazilian production unit that sits where the growth is expected. On Process, we also have a privileged geographic position in the Americas, namely U.S. and Brazil.
For both business lines, Process and Line Pipe, the high level of project CapEx create a solid demand for several years. So now let me turn it over to our newest business line and introduce Ulrika Wising, who will tell you more about this. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Considering I'm standing between you and a break, I'm gonna try to keep this interesting. My name is Ulrika Wising, and I'm the Senior Vice President, Energy Transition at Vallourec. As such, I'm responsible for the New Energies business, and I'm also sponsoring our own decarbonization journey. I joined Vallourec in May last year, and I have worked in the energy transition space my entire career, most recently at Macquarie and Shell. Today, I'm intending to give you an overview of our New Energies business, where we stand today, and what our ambitions are for the future. So New Energies is one of our most exciting growth business at Vallourec.
Whatever the energy future holds, we believe that there will be a need to move liquids and gases through tubular products with low tolerance for failure, whether that means using hydrogen as an energy carrier, extracting geothermal energy, or capturing carbon to address hard-to-abate sectors. So let's dive into the key areas where we play. Across the board, you can see our tubes are best used for casing wells and supporting transportation solution. Additionally, an area that we are very excited about is our opportunity in hydrogen storage that I will be describing a bit later. Where these markets differ materially is why they require premium tubes. In geothermal markets, our product must stand up to significant heat, whereas in carbon capture utilization and storage, CCUS, CO2's corrosive effect on steel requires premium steel grades.
Finally, in hydrogen, the extremely small molecule size means that the tubes and connections must be engineered to extremely tight conditions and address standards to the meaningful safety risk that hydrogen represent. Across the bottom row, you can see that our tubes and connections are already validated and in use across all of these applications, and we have identified additional drivers of potential growth. We will take a look at each of these markets now. So let's start with geothermal. First, it might be worth looking at the different ranges of geothermal solutions. Today, the geothermal built is mostly conventional geothermal and heat pumps. In conventional geothermal applications, our customer drill wells into high-temperature reservoirs to capture the heat and use that heat to produce power. We expect to see a meaningful demand growth, growth in this business where our tubes are needed.
Some of the areas that offer more game-changing growth potential are enhanced geothermal systems and advanced geothermal systems. We are participating in both of these type of projects, most recently providing tubes to Eavor for an advanced geothermal project in Germany. We've also made a direct investment in a, in GreenFire, an advanced geothermal systems developer. So let's look at the Vallourec specific opportunity. On the left, you can see Rystad Energy's forecast of geothermal wells to be drilled per year over the next several years. The growth is meaningful as many new developers are entering in this space, and capital is flowing, as well. It is also expected that we will continue to push into hotter reservoirs with this incremental development.
With hotter reservoirs, the steel tube used to case the wells will experience meaningful expansion, which means that the tube itself and the connection needs to withstand substantial pressure. In other words, it will require more premium tubes and connections. For the purpose of sizing the market, we would note that between 500-750 tons of tubes are required in a typical conventional geothermal well, and we expect to take at least our usual premium market share of around 20% here. An area of significant upside is if enhanced or advanced geothermal projects accelerate substantially, which early market signals are showing. We are participating in several of these projects, and in addition to the need of our premium tubes, we believe our Thermocase vacuum insulated tubing is ideal for closed-loop geothermal systems. Let's move on to carbon capture.
On this slide, you have a simplified carbon capture value chain. Effectively, carbon is captured at major emitting facilities and transported via pipelines to either sequestration sites or used in industrial processes. It's important to note that pipelines and injection wells require high-grade tubes to resist the corrosion that CO2 causes in tubes. Add in the uncertainty of what other substances, such as SOx and NOx, might be coming out of these industrial sites and captured in the future, and you have a strong argument for high-grade metallurgy or tube coating technology. You can also see the direct similarities with the current hydrocarbon industry, where we have a strong share. The needs of a carbon pipeline and sequestration well are, in general, in line with, if not higher than those of an oil and gas pipeline or production well.
In other words, we think that this is directly related to our current expertise. Here we've summarized our opportunities in CCUS. Clearly, CCUS is an emerging market with very few facilities in place right now. However, there is an extensive array of projects in the planning phase, and we are seeing strong engagement from our customers. You can see public data from the International Energy Agency that demonstrates significant potential growth, with total storage capacity expected to move from 42 million tons per year today to nearly 350 million tons per year by 2030. Even if not all of these projects come to fruition, there is substantial growth opportunity here. We have done extensive work sizing the overall market, including the level of sequestration wells required, the amount of transportation line pipe required, and the ultimate mix between welded and seamless tubes.
As a rule of thumb, you can note that one injection well typically allows for the sequestration of between 1 and 1.5 million tons of carbon per year, and one well requires 300-600 tons of tubes. The line pipe demand is also likely to be quite significant, though much harder to quantify with a rule of thumb, given the complex routing assumption one would have to make. In terms of seamless versus welded share, we think that seamless tubes are a virtual no-brainer in injection wells, but we do assume some competition for line pipe. So far, seamless has been the highly preferred option in the industry, as project developers have been generally risk-averse and have avoided moving down the quality spectrum.
We also have some interesting solution under development, like an MOU that we announced with Evonik, where we are working on a unique coating technology using a polymer. This would increase the flexibility of the transport infrastructure, lower the cost, and allow for more corrosive gases to flow through the pipes. This development is still early, early stage, but is showing great potential. Finally, we've come to hydrogen, and in many ways, I've saved the best for last, as we have quite an interesting opportunity here. On this slide, you can see a simplified hydrogen value chain. Today, hydrogen is produced from methane in a steam methane reformer, which is typically located within a refinery complex. This is called gray hydrogen. When you add carbon capture to this process, it creates blue hydrogen.
In the future, the industry plans to wrap up its production of green hydrogen, which is hydrogen produced using renewable power and an electrolyzer, which converts water into hydrogen and oxygen. From either of these processes, hydrogen would then need to be distributed for its end uses. In this global system, substantial inventory will need to be held throughout the global production chain, from production to intermediate storage, to distribution and actual usage sites. And those actual usage sites also include hydrogen refueling stations. The parallels to the current value chain for oil and gas should be obvious. At its largest scale, this requires storage in salt caverns. Today, our products are used in all of the salt caverns under development in Europe, but where we see the greatest opportunity is what we call mid-scale storage.
Mid-scale storage, you can think of as the storage required at production, liquefaction, industrial usage sites, as well as large hydrogen refueling stations. To address this market, Vallourec engineers have developed a proprietary, innovative solution, and we've launched our own startup within Vallourec to develop it. We are currently finalizing our first installation at our R&D center in northern France. And I'm now going to show you a video, that explains this concept on how this solution would look. Now that you've seen the concept, let's take a minute to address why we think this is an excellent solution for the market that we are addressing. The first is the advantage of the below-ground vertical system. Most storage solution introduced to the market thus far use above ground, horizontal storage system.
By burying the tubes in the ground, we mitigate risk of potential incidents, and we reduce the footprint.... This matters when you are considering putting storage in a densely developed industrial or commercial site, just like in the video. We also think that our cost per unit is substantially lower than other storage solutions. As you extend towards the low or the high end of the market, we see some competition, but in the mid-scale, we think we are highly competitive. And then the final point is scalability. This is not a difficult project from a civil works perspective. It is similar to construction, constructing a ventilation shaft, and our teams can then handle the installation of the storage solution. Since we've announced this solution, we've seen substantial engagement from all of the major players in the hydrogen space, such as industrial gas companies, hydrogen project developers, EPCs, et cetera.
So putting this together, let's look at the market environment. On the left, we have presented the capacity expected in the International Energy Agency Hydrogen Facility Database. As you can see, there's a huge amount of growth anticipated in global hydrogen production by 2030, and more beyond this point. The development of green hydrogen is the most important driver of storage demand. By virtue of being produced by intermittent power sources, it requires higher storage levels. We are largely focused on these mid-scale storage solution in our market forecast, and believe over time we can develop a storage-as-a-service model, which could drive meaningful, recurrent, high-margin revenue streams. We are expecting a EUR 20 million-EUR 50 million revenue opportunity for each storage system implemented, and each storage system is capable of storing between 10-100 tons of hydrogen.
As you are probably aware, there's been substantial positive tailwinds in the public and private sector for new energies. In the EU, the Fit for 55 and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the CBAM, provides significant opportunity, in some cases, explicit targets for carbon capture. The CBAM implicitly provides support for projects outside of the EU for importers of carbon-intensive goods. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act provides substantial subsidies or tax credits for CCUS and green hydrogen production. At the same time, we see that in private industry, that the investment in energy transition was equal that of fossil fuel investments in 2022, and this is the first time in history for which this is true. We are also capitalizing on this momentum.
Over the past year and a half, we have made major strides in qualifying our products for high-end geothermal applications, carbon capture, and hydrogen applications. As mentioned previously, we've invested in GreenFire, a developer of advanced geothermal system, and participate in one such study so far. We've begun development of potentially game-changing technologies, like corrosion-resistant carbon transport technology with Evonik and our vertical hydrogen storage concept. In other words, we are moving quickly to create the foundation of a substantial future business. We've done extensive work sizing our potential market, and we see significant opportunity, opportunities across all three of the technology we have described here. In geothermal and CCUS, our core products are extremely well-positioned, and as such, we see our share as likely to be similar to our market share in premium tubular solution for the oil and gas industry.
Meanwhile, hydrogen will require more work to build this type of market share, but the market size more than compensate for this. This market can be addressed with our existing production capacity, and with that in mind, we are targeting growth in new energies so that by 2030, it comprises 10%-15% of our EBITDA. So to summarize, we have a great potential to grow a significant business in new energies that is based on our existing expertise, industrial footprint, and competitive advantage that we have in OCTG and PLP. We are already showing significant progress in this space, and I'm looking forward to sharing more about this journey in the years ahead. So that's all for me. Thank you for your time. We will be taking a short break now, and I'll hand over the floor to Connor for more details.
All right. Thank you, everyone. So we're right at 2:10 P.M. right now. We'll take a half an hour break, and we'll resume at 2:40 P.M. Coffee, refreshments are same place as lunch, behind you in the hall there. Thanks, everybody.
Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the little coffee break and are ready for U.S. update. So my name is Bertrand Frischmann. I've been with Vallourec for 20 years in various roles. I started in controlling, then spent 10 years in manufacturing as plant manager, both in the U.S. and in France. After this deep dive in our industrial processes, I switched to the commercial side of our business and led our oil and gas business unit for the North Sea before taking responsibility for our OCTG product line globally, encompassing product strategy, VAM R&D, commercial strategies, and the development of our service offering. Since 2020, I'm in charge of North America region, establishing Vallourec as one of the two major players in the U.S. market and delivering financials post-COVID that we believe are on par with our best peers.
Since last week, I'm the Chief Operating Officer for the Americas, also in charge of our South America region, with one clear mandate, and that is to accelerate our New Vallourec transformation plan. Here you can see our industrial footprint to serve the U.S. domestic shale industry. We are vertically integrated from steelmaking to finishing operations, and we are positioned as a high volume production system. We have developed highly competitive manufacturing routes with excellent access to the primary shale basins, such as Permian, Eagle Ford, and Haynesville in Texas, Oklahoma, and Northeast, mainly for gas. Looking at our assets, our main upstream manufacturing hub is in Ohio, where we operate our own steel shop with an electric arc furnace, so-called EAF, in Youngstown, which gives us an extremely low carbon footprint due to our use of scrap steel and nuclear power.
We also have two very modern rolling mills on site. Regarding our downstream operations, namely heat treatment and threading, we have five different locations, ideally located close to the points of consumption, again, in the Northeast, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana for the Gulf of Mexico. As you can see from the numbers, our capacities are well-balanced, and even though we have a higher rolling capacity versus our steel shop, I would note that we have third-party sourcing agreements in place for billets to complement our own production. Regarding finishing, we have three heat treatment lines that can process the vast majority of the pipes that we roll, whereas our domestic competitors farm out work to processors. And heat treatment is absolutely critical to manufacture premium products.
So to sum up, we have a very efficient domestic footprint to serve the U.S. shale industry with two key competitive advantages. The first one is our ability to offer very short lead times, and the second one is our premium product offering, tailor-made for U.S. markets, both onshore and offshore. Moving to the markets we serve, it is worth noting that we are heavily focused on the U.S. market, the two markets on the left. The U.S. onshore market is a high-volume market focused on factory-style shale development, whereas the offshore market is a long cycle market with some of the highest technical requirements in the world. We are the number two player onshore and number one player offshore in the U.S. For both markets, we have developed tailor-made connections, and that is VAM SPRINT series for U.S. onshore VAM SLJ-II for the Gulf of Mexico.
Some of you have a small scale sample of that connection. There are significant barriers to entry in the U.S., I insist, with strong trade measures. It started with Section 232 back in 2018, and also, of course, technological barriers for the Gulf of Mexico due to the high performance requirements from both operators and authorities, especially since Macondo. In Canada and Mexico, on the right of the chart, the slide, our presence is more limited, but we focus on very profitable niche segments such as Canada offshore in Newfoundland. Now, zooming in on the U.S. market, you can quickly note that U.S. is the largest single OCTG market in the world. In 2022, it alone was a 5 million ton market.
In 2022, seamless made up about 60% of the demand, and we expect this share to range from 55%-60% going forward. Of the seamless market, slightly more than half is composed of semi-premium and premium connection technology. For the supply side, it's quite consolidated. There are effectively three major domestic players: ourselves, of course, Tenaris, and U.S. Steel. Our market share, seamless market share, is about 18%, thanks to our strong domestic presence. Now, a closer look at the key markets here provides an understanding of how we focus on the higher sense or technologies. Offshore, what you see at the top, we are serving customers, exploiting complex reservoirs with very high safety requirements. At the leading edge, this is moving towards reservoirs that require qualification of equipment that can withstand extreme pressures, the so-called 20K psi projects.
Our premium solutions are well positioned here, VAM SLJ-II has become the standard for Gulf of Mexico. As we move into onshore, bottom of the slide, there is more differentiation in products demanded by application. In general, we focus on what is called casing, which are the tubes that provide the structural support for wells, as opposed to tubing, which is solely used to provide a flow pathway for oil and gas. You can see our focus increases as you move up the intensity curve and as the demand on the products increases. VAM SPRINT connections have been developed to meet the high torque requirements from our U.S. onshore customers.... When looking at the production casing segment, our sweet spot in the U.S., this is a market that is heavily dominated by seamless products, with semi-premium or premium connections and largely served by domestic mills.
Pricing here tends to exceed market averages over time. Here, we provide a look at our U.S. business model as it is unique relative to our model in the rest of the world. So U.S. is the only major market where we rely heavily on distributors. That said, we do serve some of our major customers directly. We think it's worth understanding, though, that even when we work with distributors, we still interact directly with our end customers, both in terms of pricing negotiations as well as providing, of course, technical support. This business model allows us to differentiate our products and, more importantly, control our pricing, but also is more balance sheet light with a faster cash cycle than a direct-to-customer model.
Given the substantial volumes at play in the U.S., as well as the very high volatility in demand, we believe this is a superior model as it is more cash effective and maximizes return on capital employed. As you may know, in looking at the charts on the right, the U.S. has one of the most fragmented upstream oil and gas sectors in the world, with some of the highest degrees of private producers. So while we address all the major portions of the market, you can see our major focus is large public E&Ps, and they represent 60% of our sales. There are three main reasons why we target large public E&Ps. The first one is that they are U.S.-focused and among the most resilient players through cycle.
The second reason is that their safety and reliability requirements make them focus on premium products like ours. The third reason is that they value greatly the surety of supply that our domestic footprint provides. The U.S. market used to be one of the most volatile markets in the world, with an extremely erratic supplier response. Everyone remembers the so-called shale boom post-2008 and the crisis that followed in 2009, in 2016, and more recently, during COVID in 2020. But our market landscape has changed. First, because U.S. operators have enforced a true capital discipline, leading to more stable drilling activity. Second, and this is what we show here on the slide, because we have seen significant consolidation among domestic mills, Tenaris acquiring TMK IPSCO in 2019, and U.S. Steel indefinitely idling two plants, so Lone Star and Lorain mills, during COVID.
But also consolidation among distributors, as you can see here, on the chart, I'll not enter into detail. And last but not least, as I commented on the previous slide, new trade barriers have been implemented to protect the domestic steel industry against unfairly traded imports. It started with Section 232 quotas and tariffs in 2018, and more recently, the famous OCTG trade case against Argentina, Mexico, Russia, and South Korea, with very significant anti-dumping duties of 45% for Mexico and 78% for Argentina. So putting all this together, we think that the supply side in the U.S. is substantially more consolidated and rational versus last cycle and previous crisis, which should drive more sustainable returns.
We are ideally positioned in that environment, thanks to our domestic footprint and our product offering, as I commented earlier, and we now expect more stable activity along with more sustainable returns than previous cycle. Now, let's look at demand trends in the U.S. Obviously, demand has been fading somewhat, with the rig count falling in the recent months. However, the trend that is important to observe is a demand trend for OCTG relative to the well count and rig count. Because our customers are drilling longer wells and rigs are drilling faster, our demand outpaces these broad market measures. We expect this trend to continue over the next several years. You can see this dynamic on the left, where, although volatile, there has been a consistent trend of increasing OCTG consumption per rig since 2014, so for the past 10 years.
On the right, you can see how the market has evolved over time.... This has increasingly become a market where domestic U.S. seamless capacity makes up the base load. This is what you see in dark blue bar at the bottom. With imports and overall welded supply making up more of a swing factor. We think that the combination of these two trends gives us a broadly resilient demand outlook for the next several years. But now, what about the short term? So despite the ongoing market correction, we have lost about 130 rigs year-over-year. We expect the U.S. rig count to grow from early 2024 for two reasons.
The first one is that oil and gas prices have been rising quite significantly, with WTI up 30% since the second quarter and gas up 50% over the same period. Simultaneously, we have seen well cost falling due to the reduction in oil field services pricing and other input costs versus 2022, and of course, this includes pipes. As a result, we expect to see some green shoots with select private operators bringing rigs back online. Those same private operators who have dropped most rigs over the past 12 months, so, part of the 130 rigs I mentioned earlier. The second reason is that structural factors point to an increased activity need in the U.S..
Due to steeper decline curves of the wells, shale well productivity has decreased over the past few years, and current activity levels in the low 600 rigs are not sufficient to grow or even maintain U.S. oil production. The chart on the right shows that the actual well count, so like in light blue, is getting below the number of wells, this is the dark blue line, number of wells required to maintain stable the oil production. So you see the two lines, they cross. Now, maybe the most important question: What does this mean in terms of pricing for pipes in the U.S.? In the short term, we believe prices will reach a bottom in the coming few months.
First of all, as I just explained, because we expect drilling activity to rebound, U.S. rig count started to increase last week, +1 , but also because the supply side has corrected, as you can see, on the right, chart. We have seen imports drop by 50% compared to late 2022, early 2023 levels, and the latest figure we have for August clearly confirms that trend. End users and distributors inventories have started to normalize, and indeed, our order rates have increased significantly versus the second quarter trough. So this is for the short term. In the medium term, we expect OCTG prices to stabilize at higher levels than prior cycles. First, because pipe manufacturers will pass recent cost inflations to customers, and this amounts to several hundred $ per ton.
Second, because pipe maker shareholders expect higher returns, but most importantly, because our market landscape has changed to allow more sustainable returns for domestic producers. So what are the key takeaways for North America? First, our premier domestic manufacturing footprint is one of the industry's best-placed assets to serve the U.S. market. Second, a substantially improved U.S. industry should allow more sustainable through-cycle industry returns. And finally, the near-term supply-demand fundamentals are improving, and the U.S. market should stabilize in the coming months. Thank you all. Now, let me turn the floor back to Laurent Dubedout to discuss the Eastern Hemisphere region.
Hello again, Laurent Dubedout. I'm now going to go deeper with you on the Eastern Hemisphere region, which I am managing with my colleagues on top of my product line global responsibility. Similar to what we have seen in North America, we now take a look at our industrial system in Eastern Hemisphere. In contrast to Americas, we are not fully vertically integrated in our primary rolling mill operation in China, but we operate a very modern rolling mill, and our cost of raw material supply is highly competitive due to the abundant steelmaking capacity in the Chinese market. We have procurement agreement with selected, qualified iron supplier for that. We operate three rolling operations, so a mass production unit in Tianda, China, and then two specialized tube manufacturing operations in France and China.
This makes higher margin, lower volume products for very specific applications. We then have a geographically diversified set of finishing operations, with the potential to heat treat green pipes and thread premium connection in China, in Saudi Arabia, and in Indonesia. France has also a meaningful role to play, effectively acting as our primary threading satellite for our Brazilian operations. Next, we will take a look at the major Eastern Hemisphere markets. Here, you can see that the Asia and CIS regions are the largest, but in our view, the most commoditized market in this region. We have extremely limited presence in China, and we are not in Russia. We are a key player in Indonesia, where we are a local player benefiting from local content advantage. In the Middle East is the largest market we serve in the region.
As usual, we focus on the premium end of the market. There is a global competition, but our customer understand and pay for high quality product, and also to secure, to ensure security of supply. Meanwhile, in Europe and Africa area, we tend to focus on offshore applications with high technical demands. This is a smaller market in terms of, volume, but due to its focus on premium products, it is generally a strong market for us. If you look at the trends in a project sanctioning, you can see that we are in the midst of a strong upswing in producer activity that will drive spending growth for the next several years. The Middle East has been very active for 2021 and 2022 in terms of project sanctioning, but there is also a potential in Africa and Europe over the next several years.
We serve all the major national oil company, and together with the IOCs, this make up the majority of our activity in the Eastern Hemisphere area, as you can see on the left. So we expect to enjoy a healthy share of this project opportunities moving forward. Let's look closer at the Middle East now. This is a core region for us and a significant opportunity for us over the next few years, as player here are heavily investing in new oil and gas production capacity. Notably, this capacity investment is heavily focused on offshore, which implies likely a mix shift towards more premium products. We have an industry-leading position in Saudi Arabia, where we operate heat treatment and threading capacity.
We have signed a 10-year frame agreement in 2022 with Saudi Aramco, and we have since booked another $300 million order on top of this LTA to serve this strong demand of the market. In the second largest market in the region, the UAE, we also have a great position. This is a heavily premium market, where we also provide value-added services. Here, we have also a five years long-term agreement with ADNOC, with a two potential option years. Our lone remaining mass rolling capacity in the Eastern Hemisphere is in China. We are significantly altering our strategy here. This was an underutilized asset base historically, largely because it was focused too heavily on low-end production in the domestic market. But this is a modern, highly capable asset, and we are changing our strategy.
We are going to maximize our premium production volume, increase the percentage of product we export, and continue to reduce costs. We think this asset can become another premium production hub within our portfolio, and we expect to see the results from this restructuring in 2024. Let me finish with a few takeaways. So again, we focus on select higher value markets in the Eastern Hemisphere, where we have a defensible position. Our position in the Middle East is very strong due to solid customer relationship and domestic capacity. And the outlook for investment in the Middle East is robust, as most major producer look to grow capacity. Now, to walk you through the final region, I will pass the floor again to Bertrand.
... So, hello again, everyone. As I said in my introduction, I'm currently the acting head of South America, so let me take you through this region as well. As you may recall, Brazil is one of our two major export hubs and will serve much of the demand that Laurent just discussed in the Eastern Hemisphere. We have a world-class industrial system in Brazil. Here, we operate a vertically integrated production system that is heavily focused on manufacturing of premium products. Compared to the U.S., we start higher in the value chain in Brazil with our mine and forest, which gives us flexibility to use iron ore in addition to scrap steel in our steelmaking process.
Beyond our mine, we operate a premier steelmaking facility in Jeceaba, which, similar to the U.S., is a very low carbon footprint facility due to its use of hydropower and low-carbon charcoal from our forests. We operate three rolling mills, with the one in Jeceaba focused more on producing casing, while Barreiro has a wider range of capabilities. We have meaningful heat treatments and threading facilities in Brazil, but it is also worth noting that as an export hub, our global network of heat treatment and threading facilities can also handle finishing closer to our customers' demand centers as well. Recall that our Brazil assets are unique due to our operation of the Pau Branco iron ore mine. For those in the room who are less familiar with this process, we have here a simplified diagram of the mining process.
Starting on the left with our pits, we extract both waste and unprocessed ore, called run-of-mine or ROM. The ROM moves through our processing at the top, our beneficiation plant, where the sellable products are separated from the tailings. The iron ore products are dispatched and sold largely to external customers, but also internally to our tube making operation. Meanwhile, our tailings go through a further processing step to remove the water, this is what you can see in the middle, before being disposed alongside the waste from the mine. This water removal process is a key differentiator for us, as it means we do not need to use a wet tailings dam, which presents substantial risks to the community in the event of failure.
I want to provide you an update on our operating principles for our mine, which have evolved over the past few months. As you know, we had a landslide in our waste pile during the rainy season in 2022. Since that time, we have spent significant time and money to meaningfully re-engineer and rebuilt the pile. But that was not enough. We also undertook a significant safety and operational review, and have concluded that some changes are necessary. Our review highlighted the need to further prioritize safety and our environmental responsibility. We have implemented major changes to our waste pile management procedures. These result in higher cycle times and thus lower our annual waste disposal capacity, but in our view, the cost is worth the benefits.
Meanwhile, also, we have also undertaken a comprehensive review of our permitting process and the near and long-term expansion plans we are contemplating at the mine. When putting these priorities together, we have decided that running the mine at 6 million ton cadence will allow us to maximize our recovery rate, production stability, and most importantly, safety. In addition, I'm pleased to announce the hiring of Jun Muto, who has an extended experience in managing complex operations in the mining industry and agroindustry business in multinational groups. We're excited about the potential he brings to drive further financial returns in this excellent asset. So here is a summary of how we plan to operate this asset, both near and long term. As I stated previously, we are now targeting about 6 million tons of annualized production.
This is down slightly from the approximately 7 million tons we'll produce in 2023, and a good bit below our prior thinking that we would produce 8.7 million tons per year in the mine. Again, the emphasis on safety and sustainability is driving this change. As you may know, we use approximately 1 million tons to support our own tube business, which still leaves ample volumes available for external sales. We have a substantial contract book with other miners and local steel producers that on average price at 40%-45% of the so-called Platts index. And consistent with this year, we expect our production cost to range between 20-25 EUR per ton. Let me talk for a moment about our extension plans as well. We alluded to some near-term extension potential in our second quarter earnings call.
This is shown here as phase one, on the right table. Our phase one extension is a relatively near-term, low-cost extension that will allow us to exploit some somewhat better quality reserves than those we are exploiting right now. And by virtue of this improvement in reserves, we can add about EUR 20 million in annualized EBITDA versus the EUR 100 million run rate you should expect in the near term. But we have our eyes set on a larger project, our phase two extension, which is a much longer-term project, but also a significant value driver for our company. We have already signed the related lease agreement with the landowner, which is directly adjacent to our property. While we refer to our mine and forest, we do not frequently discuss the impact our forest has on our overall business.
It is truly a hidden asset within Vallourec. We own and operate a 164-hectare eucalyptus forest in Minas Gerais, Brazil. These assets offers two key benefits. First, it's a major source of decarbonization. We're able to produce low-carbon biomass charcoal to supply our blast furnace. This both reduces our cost and decarbonizes our operations. In addition, we have the potential to reduce all our methane emissions from charcoal production by advancing a new technology I will discuss in a minute. But we see further potential for this asset. In addition to potentially selling more charcoal on the open market, we have the potential to license our unique charcoal-making technology, which I will discuss now. In effect, the technology we use to make most of our charcoal has not advanced in hundreds of years.
Wood is put within a kiln, lit on fire, and eventually charcoal is created. We have invented a novel, patent-protected solution to bring this process into the 21st century, which we call CarboVal. CarboVal is a continuous process, process you see on the, on the right, that creates better, cleaner charcoal, again, with zero methane emissions. The reason for this is a novel process design recirculates process gases to power the process. The charcoal product itself is better for use in a blast furnace due to the steady, even process flow, and the process also creates sellable byproducts like tars and oils. We have put our first unit into operations two years ago, and we are working to build several more, what we call reactors.
Now that we have a proof of concept, we are also actively engaging with other forest operators who could license this technology and contribute to our bottom line. We'll update you more on this as we move forward, but I would note we already have two fully operational reactors and are deploying more. Our conversations with potential partners have been very encouraging. While, of course, this is small in the size of our overall group, we think it's an excellent, sorry, example of how we are constantly on the hunt for potential value creation opportunities. Now that we have discussed the mine and forest, let's move to the tube business. The objective of New Vallourec plan is to make Brazil the best-in-class production hub for premium tubular products globally. Here, you can see the markets served by our South America assets.
In 2022, oil and gas makes up 80% of our total volume, whether it's export or domestic. We expect this share of exports to increase in the coming years. Both in South America and outside of South America, we focus on premium markets with high technological barriers that demand premium products. We are number one player in Brazil, number two in Guyana with Exxon, and number two exporter to premium markets from South America. With the growth in our product capabilities we are enacting with New Vallourec plan, we expect oil and gas export to make up a major growth driver for this business going forward.
I will spend a moment on the industry business in South America, which is what you see on the right, as it is worth understanding why we view this as a strong business versus the industry business that we are leaving behind in Europe. In Brazil, we have a very strong market position. We are the number one player in seamless tubes for industry.... Our local cost advantage makes it extremely difficult for others to penetrate this market, and as such, we enjoy very healthy margins and expect this to remain the case. Let's now look briefly at the market environment in Brazil. As I stated previously, we are the number one player here. The outlook here is in many ways the best it has been in years. Brazil is the heavily offshore-focused oil and gas market, which demands premium tubes.
We are the number 1 player in serving offshore, which makes up about 70% of the local demand, though we are also quite strong onshore as well. The offshore market has been quite slow for some time, but we believe we have reached the end of this downturn. Petrobras has a substantial five-year investment plan, and other IOCs are increasing activity as well. You can see on the right charts this is the expected offshore well count, so which, after being stuck at less than 60 wells per year from 2017 to 2020, is now set to see nearly 100 wells per year for the next several years. Certainly, we are in a very favorable position to capture this demand, both with Petrobras and IOCs.
Now, it's worth understanding why we are so excited about the potential of our asset base in Brazil. For governance reasons, which were explained earlier by Philippe, the full potential for Vallourec was untapped. Now, as part of New Vallourec plan, we're investing heavily in both Jeceaba and Barreiro. A total of EUR 110 million over 2022 and 2023 are invested to expand our production capabilities and debottleneck our critical assets. Now, the stage is set for higher volumes and better profitability from Brazil. Let me expand on these two objectives. First, to maximize our output, we are working to simplify our production routes, and we have already deployed capital to debottleneck some of our critical assets, as I said earlier. But we are also reengineering our supply chain processes and streamlining our product portfolio.
On this particular point, we have already reduced our SKUs, so stock keeping units, in our industry and process products lines from more than 20,000 down to about 3,000 SKUs. In addition, and this is the objective on the right, we are working, of course, on maximizing margins. The first step is to complete the transfer of the few oil and gas SKUs that used to be produced exclusively in Germany, getting qualified by customers and benefiting from our lower cost base in Brazil. But from there, we'll optimize mix and routes to maximize the value generated by our Brazilian assets. And finally, we are currently working on a plan to reach benchmark level on process, productivity, energy efficiency, logistics, as an export hub, safety, and quality.
So to sum up on South America, first, our mine and forest will continue to contribute to our financial performance and will be a key lever to further decarbonize our operations. Second point to mention, the global export opportunities and a strong domestic market drive a favorable outlook for our South America assets. And finally, we have taken major steps to reposition our world-class Brazilian assets for significant profitability growth going forward. Now, I know many of you in the room are eagerly waiting for the final section today, our financial overview, so let me now introduce our CFO, Sascha Bibert.
Thank you, Bertrand. And, especially thank you to you all for coming. Once again, good afternoon or good morning to the U.S.. In case you are listening, we really appreciate your attendance. Now, I have joined Vallourec in April 2022, just before we kicked off New Vallourec plan. i started in the capital markets as a buy-side analyst and portfolio manager, and more recently spent 10 years in the energy space working as a CFO, but also leading functions like accounting, controlling, and investor relations. I've also worked with private equity in the past, and, I very much appreciate their relentless focus on value creation.... Upon joining, I saw a huge potential in the company, an opportunity that we have now made transparent and that we are harvesting bit by bit.
We all truly believe that the New Vallourec is becoming a different company in a market that has also changed to the positive. Based upon the operating environments and action plans you have just heard in my section, I will now lead you to the potential this company has with respect to generating superior shareholder returns. However, before looking forward at the potential, let's remind ourselves about Vallourec's past. In the tubes market, in up markets, we generated a margin and a return lower than peers, while in down markets, we made losses. This also impacted the group, though in certain years, the company was then saved by high iron ore prices, leading to the perception that we are rather a mine operator with an attached tubes business. Still, on average, we lost EUR 200 million per year in cash and finally had to be restructured.
I think it's very clear that this past cannot be the guide for our future. We do need to improve returns, and we need to become more robust against weaker environments. This requires the fundamental actions my colleagues have laid out to you, summarized by New Vallourec plan. these actions, which we combine in our New Vallourec initiatives, they follow a simple philosophy: We do not accept underperformance. We change things either way. We've talked a lot about the closure of our European facilities, radically shifting the manufacturing footprint of Vallourec. However, let me also give you two other examples to demonstrate that indeed, we walk the talk. Vallourec Umbilicals, located in France, 51% owned by Vallourec, manufactures welded stainless steel, super duplex tubes for umbilicals for the offshore oil and gas markets. That is quite a niche market with no connections to our other operations.
Since inception in 2010, this company has been facing difficulties due to lack of demand in a market characterized by overcapacity and also the dependency on a single customer. As a consequence, the EBITDA margin has been significantly negative for years, and the company consumed cash. We started a process at the end of 2022 that finally led to the wind down of the company. This process was not only time and resource-consuming, but also required a lot of political management. Nevertheless, we stayed on course until the end and finally shut down the business while treating our employees fairly. So the message is: if it cannot be fixed or sold, we close the business. We simply have no acceptance for ongoing losses. Now, the second and far more positive example is China, which was briefly presented by Laurent just a second ago.
Vallourec made investments in China starting in 2006, and then continued for the next 10 years. The idea was to serve predominantly the local market. Not fully surprising, we met low-cost competitors in this highly commoditized market. Accordingly, our financials were always around breakeven, diluting the overall group returns. Now, we have significantly changed course, taking out costs and refocusing the operations towards premium products and markets to complement our Brazilian operation as an export hub with a very competitive cost base. The required customer qualifications are very advanced, and we will soon also be able to serve new major national oil companies from the Middle East and Africa from China. First fruits of this transformation are becoming visible. In 2022, we had the aforementioned breakeven EBITDA. This year, we expect a 10%+ EBITDA margin.
So therefore, we are well underway to generate a nice turnaround due to a focus on value with lower cost and a clear positioning towards our target markets. So going back to the group level and having this new philosophy in mind, you can see that the profitability has clearly improved, whether you look at the tube segment, the group margin, or cash generation, resulting in a reduction of net debt, which we target to continue.... While higher profitability and positive cash flow leading to lower net debt supports our strategic goal of making Vallourec cycle-proof, we also aim to close the gap to peers. Looking at the past, at the left-hand side of the chart, we always fell considerably short relative to the performance reported by peers. Since the start of the New Vallourec, we are, however, making visible progress.
In the U.S., and, Bertrand alluded to that, our margins are likely already in line with best-in-class peers. However, elsewhere, many of our initiatives are still ongoing, and we have not yet reported our full potential. Now, I have understood from the various discussions and the broker research that this section is actually of interest. So, let me do the very best to at least explain what we did, and then you can judge what you do with it. So we're talking about the cross-cycle earnings power. When setting our assumptions, we do look at past cycles. However, we have also taken a view on how things have changed in order, in order to then derive a simulation of the future, rather than using a simple average of the past years.
However, let me be clear, and I'm sure we come back to that in the Q&A, these cross-cycle or mid-cycle earnings do not, and I repeat, do not constitute an outlook, a target, a forecast, or more generally, any kind of guidance for any particular year. I think that should be obvious given our 2023 outlook, which we are confirming today. But instead, those mid-cycle earnings, they represent, you could say, an abstract view of an average across very different environments. So starting with the tubes business. The tubes business is in the midst of a strong upturn. While pricing in the U.S. has begun to normalize to lower levels, overall, pricing remains strong, and international pricing has followed through on the strength we have observed in the U.S. So on the left, you can see three series.
You see U.S. market prices, rest of the world market prices, and a weighted average based on our sales mix in these two arenas, and that leads to the dotted line. A first point that should be made on the right-hand side of the slide is if you look at the reported selling price of Tier One players, i.e., ourselves and other key premium players, we out-earn the market through-cycle due to the premium products and other services and accessories we offer. To give you examples, these include services like rig preparations and field services. In other words, when setting a normalized price, specifically a normalized ASP, we need to take into account this premium, which has been consistently generated and reported, and which is an integral part of our customer proposition.
Next step: when setting the cross-cycle price for a Tier One player, like Vallourec, we should also acknowledge how industry costs have changed. Looking at the left side of the slide, you see that industry costs have moved up considerably compared to the 2017, 2018 period, due to raw material inflation, labor cost, energy, and a variety of other factors. Therefore, it is not sufficient to look at drivers like scrap only when assessing costs. Our conclusion is that it would be wrong to simply take an average of historic prices while keeping the current cost constant. To avoid this mistake, we have reframed the Tier One ASP to assume a constant industry cost structure over time.
When you do that, the resulting cost-adjusted price moves up by $300 from an average of $2,500 to $2,800. Now, we are putting the factors together to come up with a normalized or mid-cycle EBITDA for our tubes business. We assume that based on our current capacity, we can produce 1.7 million tons per year. Tier One players like ourselves have historically, on average, earned $2,800 per ton, as derived on the prior slide. Supported by improvements in both our business, an example could be our new pricing policy, and improvements in the overall market, an example could be industry consolidation that Bertrand talked about in the U.S.-... This will translate into a realized price in the high $2,000-$3,000 per ton range.
This is clearly below the levels we are currently experiencing, but it would be above levels seen in the prolonged industry downturn from 2015 to 2020. I think it's very important to note that this implies market pricing in the low- to mid-$2,000 per ton range, to which the Tier One premium described before then needs to be added. We then, I would say, conservatively assume that our costs remain elevated versus history. In aggregate, the resulting EBITDA per ton is EUR 450 for a total tubes EBITDA of approximately EUR 750 million. Now, let's do a similar exercise for our mine and forest business.
We assume that in a normal year, we can produce 6 million tons, and consistent with prior guidance, this assumes our ASP to range between 40%-45% of the relevant Platts iron ore index. Additionally, we assume that our total cost per ton will be EUR 22, resulting in an EBITDA per ton of EUR 21. This then leads to a mine and forest EBITDA of around EUR 125 million. Please note that this does not consider the phase two extension that also Bertrand talked about to come. I would also say that this is a rather conservative approach for normalized or mid-cycle earnings. Similarly, we do not assume any income from the external sales of charcoal or from a potential CarboVal licensing.
Now that we have derived mid-cycle earnings, I want to show you how those could translate into a very compelling shareholder return proposition. Our capital allocation priorities are crystal clear, ultimately all geared towards generating a reliable shareholder return based upon a cycle-proof balance sheet. We depict them here in phases, knowing that in reality, those phases will overlap. Priority number one is to execute the New Vallourec initiatives, which result in CapEx, but also restructuring cash out. For 2023, this sums up to over EUR 400 million of cash out, as already communicated. However, as cash generation picks up, we now have increasingly turned our focus to priority number two, which is to reduce net debt to zero by 2025 at the latest.
This will result in a fundamentally different balance sheet, incomparable with the past, and thereby also substantially contributing to our strategic objective of cycle-proofing Vallourec. Net debt zero from a practical perspective will not be a point landing, but it will be interpreted and it will be managed as a corridor. So depending on the cycle and opportunities that we have, we will then flex leverage within a tight range. Once we are sufficiently advanced on that journey, we will then turn to sharing our excess cash with shareholders. So now I'm turning the mid-cycle EBITDA simulation into an illustration of total cash generation, to then derive a shareholder return based upon a payout level in line with the highest ratios in the market.
Next to EBITDA, we assume about EUR 175 million of average CapEx, which includes some project CapEx for the extension of the mine, and around EUR 50 million of financial cash out, which does imply a lower gross debt than we have today. The cash tax is then the result of the weighting of our regional tax rates. In total, this leads to a cash generation of EUR 450 million. Contingent upon reaching our deleveraging target, distributions could amount to 80%-100% of the total cash generation. Naturally, any actual shareholder return then needs to be approved by our board, as well as eventually by you, our shareholders, during the AGM. So, to sum up, we operate according to a different philosophy. We no longer accept losses and underperformance. We fix, we sell, or we close.
Our initiatives are expected to lead to a better mid-cycle profitability based upon encouraging results we have to date and clear plans for more to come. Our shareholder proposition is resilience with a significantly delevered balance sheet and the aspiration to return a significant amount of our total cash generation to you, our shareholders. Let me now turn back to Philippe to sum up today's presentation.
Thank you, Sascha. So we'll do a quiz after to see whether the whole logic flows. Let's turn up to the near-term outlook now. In tubes, we expect U.S. volumes to bottom in the third quarter, with lower market prices continuing to affect our fourth quarter pricing. International tubes volumes and pricing will remain resilient due to strong demand in our core markets. In our mine and forest, we expect second half production sold to be around 3.6 million tons. Production costs are expected to remain at the high end of the recent range. In summation, we reiterate our group full-year outlook. We expect EBITDA to range between EUR 950 million-EUR 1.1 billion in 2023. Total cash generation is expected to be positive in the second half of the year, excluding any benefit from asset sale.
Finally, we expect our net debt to further decline in the second half of 2023 versus the second quarter 2023 level. Let me now return to the key messages we laid out for you at the beginning of the presentation. First, Vallourec is a mission-critical supplier of complex steel tubular solutions, supported by industry-leading research and development and world-class production facilities. As Jacky described the Vallourec advantage, you have no doubt begun to understand the substantial technology we deliver to our customers and no doubt the premium prices we charge, which are evidence of this. Second, we are making Vallourec more profitable, more resilient, and more cash generative while delivering on our ambitious ESG targets. We discussed the substantial changes in organizational culture and operating behavior that we have implemented.
While we have near-term benefits from New Vallourec plan, rest assured that we will by no means stop here. Third, we see multi-year tailwinds across oil and gas and new energies markets that will drive significant demand for our products and services. You have seen the favorable backdrop our oil and gas customers face and the significant pipeline of opportunities we have in OCTG and PLP. In addition, Ulrika and her team are working tirelessly to capitalize on the wealth of opportunities in the nascent new energies market. Fourth, we aspire to be one of the most shareholder-friendly companies within our peer group. In particular, we hear your desire for cash generation and cash return.
Within the framework that Sascha has laid out in the previous section, and subject to the board and shareholders' decision on dividend policy, we currently believe we could begin our cash distribution to shareholder as early as 2025. Depending upon reaching our deleveraging target, distributions could amount to 80%-100% of the total cash generation. Naturally, any actual shareholder return then needs to be approved by our board and eventually by you, our shareholder, during the AGM. We now are ready to take your questions. Connor, could you please give us instructions?
All right. Thank you, everyone. We're gonna take two minutes to set up the stage here. But just for those in the room, we have mics that will be coming around to you. Because we do have people on the webcast, please wait for the mic to reach you before asking your question. And just for the purposes of the management team, please identify yourself and the firm you represent. For those on the web, there's a form that we are able to monitor your questions that you input. We'll ask those, time permitting, based on the question levels in the room. So give us one or two minutes to just reset the stage here.
... Okay.
Try again. Yeah, good afternoon. It's Mick Pickup here from Barclays. Firstly, thank you for that. I'm a bit confused, if I may, just on your mid-cycle pricing assumptions. So just what I'm trying to get at is that you show a chart where you're currently above mid-cycle, but you also show a chart where international is around mid-cycle, and you've done a presentation where you told me that the U.S. will structurally be higher than it ever was at low cycle. So you're telling me the U.S. is bottom and international is at mid-cycle. So are you above mid-cycle or below mid-cycle at the moment? 'Cause I would suggest your mid-cycle calculation includes a U.S. business, where you should never see those prices again.
Okay, Sascha, I let you answer this.
Yeah, I would say, first of all, thank you, Mick, for the question. We probably take it as a team. I'll go back to the calculation of mid-cycle and what it means. And maybe Bertrand also then wants to take a little bit on how we feel about the U.S. market, which is another angle of that thing. So once again, we could have provided you with a multi-year outlook today. I think if we would have done that, it would have been a pretty optimistic outlook, given all that we see in the market and given all of the changes we are making at Vallourec. The disadvantage of such a multi-year outlook is that the risk of being wrong in a highly cyclical market is simply pretty high.
So for that reason, we have not done that. But what we have done is, on the one hand side, we shared that optimism in the near mid and possibly also long term with you, and again, colleagues can speak about that. And then we have given you a simulation, which some of you may want to use, possibly for the valuation of the shares, which we certainly think are highly undervalued. So in deriving those mid-cycle earnings, yes, sometimes we have differentiated between U.S. and international pricing, and certainly when it comes to the U.S., while that has been normalizing as of last, relative to history, the price level that we currently have is still a good one. And with that, maybe some to you.
Yeah, maybe you can comment on U.S. prices.
So as I commented in my presentation, we expect first the U.S. market to tighten, so pipe market, because of the rebound in rig count. But also, of course, because the supply side has corrected. I commented on the drop of imports, which is a major factor. And also I could mention the recent acquisition of Republic Tube by Tenaris, giving them access to more heat treat capacity, which is absolutely critical for premium products. And doing so, it will remove access to this capacity to importers. Most of the imports into the U.S. are what we call green pipes, so to be heat treated in the U.S.
So for all those reasons, we expect the market to tighten in the coming months, and this should have a positive impact on prices.
Okay, and can I follow up on the New Energies business? Where does that sit in your model simulation? Is it just part of tubes volume or is it incremental on top?
No. I would say similar to today, i.e., reporting-wise, it is in tubes. I would say if we see the strong growth that we expect over the years to come, at some point in time, we can debate whether that even should get its own segment, but it's certainly too early. And then it's part of the total tubes volume, with Ulrika saying she has the ambition to drive that with the team to about 10% of the group. However, always with the current capacity that we have, no? And we have given you the guidance of... Well, not the guidance, the assumption of mid-cycle outlook, 1.7 million tons, so it is embedded in there.
Yeah, but the hydrogen development is not included, obviously, in this number.
Yes. Good afternoon. Kevin Roger from Kepler Cheuvreux. When I listen to presentation, I have more the feeling that we are chasing an upcycle rather than anything, because you are mentioning that there will be strong demand, increasing CapEx, et cetera, and you are giving us a guidance for mid-cycle, a simulation for mid-cycle. Is it fair to assume basically that in the coming years, we can assume that this is an upcycle, so you should be above that? And you said also that you want to fill the gap with the peers. Historically, you have shown the chart where you see the EBITDA of the peers moving from $300 on the downside and $700 per ton on the upside, is in the kind of range that we can assume here again.
So that's going to be the, the first part of the question. You are talking about upcycle, so does it mean that also for the coming years, it means upward on, on the EBITDA? And the second one is, I may just coming back on the question from Mick on, Mick, on the average price that you used in the mid-cycle. You used something like $2,800, but in the presentation also, you say that the price of the OCTG premium that represent big part of, of your rooms are between $3,000 and $4,500. So how can we reconcile those price with the $2,800 that you mentioned? Thanks.
Well, Sascha will complement the answer. But yes, this year, clearly we are above the mid-cycle, and we'll see next year and the year after. But it's clear, today there is no indication that we will be not above the mid-cycle simulation we just shared. But again, you know, geopolitics is what it is. I have no crystal ball like anyone in this room, so I just have to make assumptions. Keep in mind that in this mid-cycle assumption, we maybe didn't insist enough on it, but we want to make this company cycle-proof. So we don't want to be in a situation when volume will, would decrease, if they decrease at some point, to burn cash. So that's part of the equation, too.
That's why the reading of this mid-cycle should be, even beyond the midpoint, what we can generate, obviously, on the upcycle and what we can generate when volume decrease, at level that they have they may have been in the past. As for our closing gap with competition, that's clear. It's, it's, it's one of our key, key objective. You've seen the... Yeah, you've given the range of, peers, and we have shown it on, on our presentation, so we need to close that gap. That's for sure, and we have potential to do it. Keep in mind that Germany was a loss-making operation. We get rid of it. Next year, it's over. There is no more losses in Germany. It's over. So that's part of the equation.
As we have explained, and as Bertrand has explained, we have a huge potential in Brazil. This asset has been under-managed, has been under-managed. When we look at our footprint starting next year, okay, there is no reason not to close that gap. Okay? No reason.
And then just coming back on the price quoted on certain charts versus mid-cycle assumption. I think the smaller answer to your question is, obviously, in mid-cycle, we have also implied a certain mix of business normalizing, and then the price ranges on prior charts, I think they are more reflective of the current market environment, while once again, in mid-cycle, we have looked at the average of the past across cycles. So it's simply two different price points.
Guillaume Delaby, Société Générale. Two questions, probably more specific than my colleagues, and a wish or a prayer, call it whatever you want. My first question is on the mine, and basically, I might have missed something, but I was remembering that you had a 8.7 million ton production capacity. So basically, the phase two, is it to go back to this 8.7, which had disappeared? So maybe if you can clarify for me this point. Maybe the second question, so it will be rather for Bertrand in the U.S.. I've hearing that a potential rebound in North America can be, I would say, constrained by the lack of available premium land.
I would like to know whether you have heard things like that, which could maybe reframe a potential recovery for 2024? Last point, which is a wish. Basically, you have you give yourself some flexibility for net debt going forward between -0.5 to +0.5 times EV 0.5 EBITDA. My wish, please, please keep some kind of a net cash position and do not distribute everything just to prepare for the next cycle, please. Thank you.
I fully acknowledge your wish, and, you know, I've been in turnaround all my career, and, I'm very conscious that having a strong balance sheet is absolute priority. So don't worry. I think the whole team and the whole company in Vallourec knows that this is top priority. Going back to the mine, through phase one and phase two, and mostly phase two, we will increase volume, but we may not go back to 8.7 million ton. That's clear. Close to, very close to, but not 8.7. You have to keep in mind that, there was a landslide in January 2022. At that time, I was told when I joined that it may take me years to restart this mine, because that's what happened with all the mine operator after such event.
We managed to resume partial operation in May, full operation this year, but in the meantime, we are learning, and you've seen a very interesting diagram on what it means to operate a mine in 2023. You manage a mine by your ability to manage waste and tailings. What we have learned through the landslide is that to properly manage the tailings and to pile them up, you need the right level of compaction, the right level of humidity. It takes more time. When on top, it's combined with poorer ROM, it adds to the constraint. So all this, obviously, we are learning it as we go, but in front of it, we have plans, and that's by the way, we are entering a permitting process.
And hopefully, given the relationship we have built through the resumption of production with our mine after the landslide, and the fact that we have really acted as a very responsible, professional mine operator, hopefully, this will happen in a reasonable period of time. So to answer your question on the mine, yeah, it's a great asset, but has to be managed in a very, very professional way. Now you want to answer on the-
Yes. So on the U.S., you are raising a very valid question. So yes, a vast majority of the premium acreage has been drilled already. But with WTI above $90, there is a very strong incentive for U.S. operators to maintain or even grow U.S. oil production. And to grow U.S. oil production with less productive wells, you need to drill more wells. So more wells, more pipes. It's very simple. So I see indeed the reduction in the premium acreage available as an opportunity for us to sell more pipes.
Hi, Ash Nadershahi from CreditSights. I've got two quick questions, but the first one is: Can you tell me which basin Vallourec's North American operations are most sensitive to in terms of volume and profitability? And then the second question is: If you look at your mid-cycle assumption, it assumes that the 8.5% unsecured debt is completely sort of paid off. What are the plans for that particular bond? Are you looking to... It's callable now. Are you looking to take the bonds out now? Is there a potential refinancing on the horizon?
Should I start, Sascha, with the easy part, so the basins? So, when I look at our large, the large, E&Ps that we are supplying the U.S., they are mainly present in the Permian and in Eagle Ford, Texas, so this is mainly oil. When it comes to gas, our two main basins are Haynesville, again, Texas or Northeast, so close to our Ohio manufacturing hub. Gas is our premium connections. Oil, it's mainly semi-premium, but those are our four main basins in the U.S..
With respect to your second question, I think today we made it clear or even clearer once again, that we want to drive down net debt. And if we want to do that in an efficient way, at some point in time, we also need to touch the structure of our debt. That said, there is absolutely no hurry to do that. The maturities are sitting in 2026 and beyond, so we will carefully prepare. We will look at market opportunities and then discuss with our banking partners.
Maybe what I could add on your question on basins, when we look at our customer base in the U.S., and we look at what happened with rig count over the past 12 months, so it had reduced by about 130 rigs coming from the low 700, so 20% reduction. When we look at our top customers, they've reduced their rig count-
... by about 12%. So our customer base in the U.S. have proven, has proven to be much more resilient than the overall, market, especially in those, key shale plays.
Okay, Simon Poggioli from Melqart. So maybe based on what you've said, if you could help us how to think about, you know, 2024. Obviously, you know, on the one hand, had to come. You have the costs in Germany that are going away, Brazil that's improving, seems to be improving. EMEA, probably same. U.S. OCTG kind of seems the more wild card, but as you said, you're seeing maybe an improvement in trends toward Q4, so that should flow through Vallourec numbers sometimes in 2024. Could you bridge 2024 for us and, you know, hopefully a range? Maybe I'm, you know, asking for too much, but...
No. Nice question, but we are in the middle of the budget exercise for next year, and I'm not going to give you any number for next year. Nevertheless, yeah, there will be plus and minuses. You said losses in Germany, over. U.S. market, we had a very strong start in H1. What will be next year? We have to make our assumption, but okay, likely we will not have the kind of numbers we had at the very beginning of this year in 2023. You said it, Brazil, potential is there. Less outages, because we have outages this year to perform all the CapEx plan, you know about. Price increase in the rest of the world, there is a time lag when you increase price, it takes a few months to see it in the P&L.
So there are many moving pieces. At the end, what will be the net of all this and how it will compare to 2023? I will tell you more in due time.
Are you comfortable with consensus at the moment?
I never comment consensus.
Just a small one to add, so there are indeed a number of positives, and then there are possibly some negatives. I think we have been almost explicit on one of the negatives today, and that is the year-on-year for the mine. So for the year 2024, we are telling you, expect EUR 100 million, then to be increased to around 125 before going back to up to EUR 200 million in 2027. If it is indeed EUR 100 million based on the assumption for 2024, there would be likely a year-on-year decline.
Thank you. Thanks.
Just based on what you said earlier about the restructuring in Germany, is it right to think that you seem like you're a few months ahead of schedule on that? I thought some of it was going to go into next year. I know the payments will, but is it a bit ahead of schedule?
Slightly ahead, yeah. One month ahead-
Okay.
- of schedule, yeah.
In terms of the debt, what is, like what do you need in terms of cash? Like, what... Because you have some French—there are some loans that were state guaranteed, and there's some other bank debt you probably have to take out or would wanna take out before the bank, before the bonds. Is that something you're intending to pay into year-end, or you wanna wait until the final restructuring cash goes out in January? And then finally, if you hit mid-cycle, if you're above mid-cycle, could you—would you consider using some of that cash to buy back stock or pay dividends, you know, in earlier than 2025?
Okay. When it comes to the balance sheet, once again, today, no indication on timing of our actions. But what I think is clear is that as part of this potentially new arrangement, at some point in time, we will have a prudent level of liquidity, and that liquidity is likely to be made up of cash on balance sheet, as well as other liquidity facilities that we also have today, be it an RCF, be it the ABL facility that we have. When it comes to the usage of cash, I mean, the framework is pretty clear. We are moving towards net debt zero after we have expensed the New Vallourec CapEx and restructuring cash out. And as we are getting closer to target, we will then very closely contemplate sharing the excess cash.
The faster we are, the faster we can have that discussion.
Thank you.
Hi, John Dye from Ruffer. Just a question on the framing of the mid-cycle and CapEx. You've given us a kind of a maintenance CapEx or steady state CapEx number in that. Would shareholder return be based on that number, or would CapEx... I mean, you've obviously got other CapEx needs that may crop up. Would or would that be the figure that shareholder return would be based on? And just to follow up on that and to the last question, in terms of framing shareholder return and appreciating we're not there yet, are you thinking along the lines of kind of fixed plus variable on excess cash, dividend plus variable buyback, or something along those lines?
If for one second we assume we are in a given year, so we now consciously deviate from the mid-cycle concept, we then apply our dividend or shareholder return distribution aspiration. Then technically, it's very clear, since it is 80%-100% of total cash generation, it is the cash that is left after spending the CapEx. So we would have wiggle room between 80%-100% and the leverage range, but it is post CapEx. And now I've forgotten your second question.
There's a fixed and variable.
Ah! I think as of today, neither management under Philippe's leadership, nor board, nor anyone else has really decided in which form we would then return money to shareholders. Message of today is, once we are reaching our targets, we want to share that to a very high degree with you. And then we have to see where are shareholders located. Do, do they have a preference for X or Y? I'd say we are largely indifferent.
Indifferent? We are all shareholders, eh?
Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for the presentation. Stephane Kovatchev from Bloomberg Intelligence here. I had two questions, please. So the first one on the ratings and the other one on M&A. So after your recent upgrade at S&P, I was wondering if you have a target or a credit rating in mind, maybe closer to investment grade or closer to your biggest peer. That's question number one. And question number two on M&A: Could we expect maybe some acquisitions on the back of the positive free cash flow you are now generating? Or, conversely, maybe, could you be willing to divest some further assets on the back of the strategy that Sascha was mentioning to fix, sell or close? Thank you.
I will take the M&A question.
So-
No. Okay. M&A. Well, first, our first number one priority is to deleverage our balance sheet. This come before any... Our second priority is to return cash to our shareholders. Second priority. The industry is already, already, as you have discovered through this presentation, highly consolidated. So there is no need for a, a big consolidation move to execute what we have shared with you today. And as far as new energy is concerned, I think on one hand, we sell tubes with our existing asset. On the other hand, we have another development, which again, use our technology and tubes, which is not capital intensive. So. And we don't need to buy any company at high multiple to execute the strategy we have with new energies.
So to answer your question, yeah, obviously, if there is a good opportunity to create much more value than what we have shared with you today, we look at it, but so far, not seen a deal. As far as continuing to be disciplined, and again, I've been very clear. The day I join, I've been very clear there is no room in Vallourec for structurally loss-making businesses. And by the way, the reasons why I kept two sites open in France is because we had a plan to make them cash generative. Because if not, I would have closed right away. So this discipline is there, but as far as I see today, I think all our assets are profitable. So I've no reason.
Then for strategic reason, maybe one may not be a core business as it may have been said in the past, and okay, I will, okay, decide on whether it's opportune or not to keep it, but okay. So what you've seen today, the footprint you've seen, all the asset we have described, okay? They have their logic.
We have a, a target balance sheet, that comes with a certain leverage. We do have the target, as you referred today, to make this company more profitable and sustainably profitable, and then we have a capital allocation framework. But we don't have a specific rating target that we are aspiring to. I would expect also the rating agencies to follow our progress, as they have done over the last periods, and currently, we are on a positive outlook, so at some point in time, that needs to be resolved. And hopefully, the journey is not over after that, but specifically, we don't have a rating target.
One from the web here while we're thinking of further good questions. Ulrika, I imagine this is going to you. What is the competitive environment like in the new energy space?
We see our traditional, well, our competitors in the traditional space, also in the new energy space. Different ones, depending on regions and applications. Of course, in the energy, you know, hydrogen storage space, it's not our traditional competitors that we see. To be honest, we see very little competition in that medium-sized scale hydrogen. But in geothermal and CCUS, we see our traditional competitors.
All right, we've got time for two more here, so we'll do them.
Yeah. I just would complement what Ulrika said. I think you have understood through the presentation our strategy. We don't want to be in commodity business. We want to have high differentiating factors in what we, we propose to the market, because that's the only way you can generate the kind of profitability we are looking for.
Thank you. Two questions from my side, Baptiste Lebacq from ODDO. The first one is regarding China. You mentioned that you were able to reach 10% of EBITDA margin versus breakeven last year. Do you have a figure in mind? Would you like to be able to have EBITDA margins in line with the group, or is it possible or not? The second one is regarding the hydrogen. Clearly, it's a new market or very different for you, maybe more risky. Can you give us some indication regarding the risks that you identified? Do you think you would be able to go there by yourself, or you need to find a partner or someone else to be able to develop this segment? Thank you.
Okay. Yeah, going back to China. China is a very interesting case where you go from a, yeah, loss-making asset to a profitable cash generative asset. Well, the 10% is just a data point on the plan, which obviously has as an objective to make this asset at least at the level of the other asset. But again, profitability of a given asset is a mix of what market we deliver to and what cost structure do we have. So this is a combination of the two. So when you compare assets, you have to take into account the portfolio of product you assign to this given asset. But yes, again, I go back to the previous question, all our assets are contributing to our EBITDA and will have to continue to contribute to our EBITDA wherever they are.
So on the hydrogen, I think the biggest risk that we see in hydrogen is the take off of the hydrogen economy. So whether or not that goes faster or slower, or whether or not it reached the amplifier that is projected. Because our technology is proven, we have, you know, a proof of safety standard by DNV. So from a technology perspective and product perspective, we don't see a lot of risks, but it's more on the evolution of the market. Now, partnering, of course, we are looking at partners for the civil works. We're looking at partners for the instrumentation and automation, and we are currently in discussion with market leaders in that space.
Romain at CIC Market Solutions. Two questions, please. One, about your asset sales. You have excluded those asset sales from the German real estate and other assets. When do you expect to close it? Maybe at 2024, I think. Second question, you mentioned a mid-cycle cycle earnings or EBITDA. Have you done the exercise to try to find out what will be a cycle through and what would be a cycle peak EBITDA?
Well, first, and I will hand over to Sascha. To be net debt zero by end of 2025, the latest, we don't need the sale of the land in Germany. So it's not part of the equation. Obviously, better if it happens, but not mandatory. First point. Second point, as I mentioned earlier, and I will hand over to Sascha, we are obviously. We have an objective to be cycle proof. So in the low part of the cycle, at a given assumption of volume and prices, our goal is not to burn cash, and we have ready plans in all geographies to flex our costs in order to not burn cash and even pay for our CapEx, obviously, in such circumstances. But that's, that's part of the overall New Vallourec plan.
Now I hand over to Sascha on your, your question.
Yeah. I'll, I'll go to the asset sales in a second. I think you also asked about ranges around mid-cycle, peak and trough. We debated that in the team, but ultimately we decided against that. I mean, we could run another time series for the past, but, no, we said, "We give you mid-cycle, but if you want a range, then, you need to do that yourself." Once again, the message from our mid-cycle, cross-cycle work is we truly believe that going forward, our average profitability will be more sustainable but also on a higher level. And from a different perspective, we also shared that as far as, we can see out, we are actually in a pretty good market, and that may then lead to a profitability higher than mid-cycle. We'll see. Well, just taking your second question.
When it comes to to asset sales, I think you, you may have noted that on one of the slides from Philippe, where he talked about the status of new, New Vallourec, we have used a slightly broader formulation just to remind you that there is more ongoing than the sale of the two sites in Germany. i.e., there are several sites that are affected by the restructuring of Europe... in Germany, but also U.K. and France. And we do have equipment that in case we don't scrap or use ourselves, we will sell at possibly an attractive value. So all of that is ongoing. Admittedly, the two single biggest transactions would be the sale of the German plants. At this point in time, it is progressing. We have not yet informed you that we have signed a sales contract with any counterparty.
However, I can assure you that demand from the for the sites is there. We just have to find the right compromise between buyer, seller, and also the needs of the city. So continuing to work on that.
Thank you.
Last one, Mick, so make it a good one.
It's the last two or three. Just following up on the China question from before. If I'm right, your plan in China is to lower volumes and go more premium, and to, of that premium volume, try and export more of it. Now, as far as I'm aware, that was the plan five years ago in China, to go to big exports. And so what is the hindrance to getting Chinese pipe out, even with your tech on the end of it? And what is the acceptance of that Chinese pipe in the international markets?
I will let Laurent answer, but yeah, when there is a will, there is a way.
Yes. Can you hear me? Yeah. No, what happens is that so, in the past time, we were selling a significant portion of our volumes from Tianda to the domestic market, whereas it was premium or API, and this is a market which was not profitable. So we have reduced capacity. So this side of the market, we don't address it anymore. So we kept only the premium that we are selling, or most of the time, in package with other product from VSB or from other mill of the group, going to Middle East, East Africa, and Southeast Asia in general. And these are more profitable market compared to the domestic market we were addressing with Tianda. Acceptance, we've been working on it. You know, this is...
We position Tianda really as a Vallourec plant in China, so it follows the Vallourec quality control. And this is recognized by our customer, because they can get a very good level of quality, even if it's a Chinese operation. And yes, we've been actively working on qualification, and I would say most of our frame agreement customer, they've been accepting Tianda, and this is why we've been quite successful, even if it's still a work in process on this premiumization of our Chinese operation.
Just, last comment. You've seen the organization. We are managing Vallourec today as a much more integrated company than in the past. We ensure, obviously, that we have the best practice deployed everywhere. One role, the role of Philippe Carlier, who is not here today and is in China, by the way, this week, is to ensure that we have the best standard deployed everywhere throughout the group.
Okay, and finally, when I'm thinking about cash, your business is going to be more premium, slightly lower volumes, better sales practices. What does that mean for working capital? I assume it's going to be a benefit.
Working cap. Interesting questions. Vallourec was almost bankrupt in 2021, and when I joined, I discovered that cash was not something people were focused on, and obviously, working cap is part of it. I can tell you that now we are managing working cap at tight rope on every element of the working cap: inventory, receivables, payables. We talk about T&Cs with customers. We, we have reviewed T&Cs with suppliers, too. Obviously, when you are almost bankrupt, well, suppliers obviously are knocking your door to ask you T&Cs, which, yeah, are not very good for working cap. So all this has been addressed, and on inventory, I think we are slowly but surely demonstrating that we can operate at a given level of tonnage produced and sold with a lower level of inventory.
This, yeah, this is obviously a significant contributor to our cash generation, and we'll have to continue, we'll have to continue to be so.
Today, we're having debates around cash and also return on capital that I think we didn't have in the past. Different metrics, different focus. I'm giving you two technical answers, and then maybe Bertrand can also follow up with a practical example. Technical answer number one, you will have noticed that in our mid-cycle simulation, there is no line working capital. So we have simply assumed, right or wrong, that the change of working capital is zero. However, if we were to go down from today's level to that mid-cycle, with the corresponding change in sales, you would have, technically speaking, a working capital release. So Bertrand, any example of what we're doing on the business side?
Maybe Laurent can comment as well. But in the past, we used to promote broadly open consignment terms to customers. I mean, we have stopped doing it. So this is one example of change in our commercial policy.
Which I would complement. We have had extensive discussion with our customer, I mean, especially when the market rebounded, with quite some success. So of course, open consignment is not really something we entertain. We've been also unsuccessfully managed to get down payment in some cases, also customers willing also to secure capacity, to to agree with down payment, and I think it was the case also, by the way, with PLP.
We're about out of time here. For those sticking around upstairs in the Pinafore Room.
Yeah.
is where we'll be hosting a reception. But let me turn it back over to Philippe for some closing.
Thank you, Connor. So, really, I sincerely hope that you have understood that New Vallourec means something, and that New Vallourec has nothing to compare with the old Vallourec. That, we are committed to continue to leverage on our past and our research and development, which allow us to really focus the company on highly engineered product for which we enjoy a real pricing power. I hope you have understood that we are managing the company to generate the max value with our existing assets, and there is no room for loss-making assets today in Vallourec. And obviously, that this, at some point, will translate in a much more resilient company. We obviously will pay careful attention to our balance sheet.
Don't worry, I think, the discipline I've shown since I joined will continue, again, we are here to ensure that we have a balance sheet, which, obviously is... We are in a cyclical business, is there to make us more robust. And last, that obviously, all this, at the end, will translate in shareholder return. I think the last dividend for Vallourec was in 2015, if I remember well. So, well, maybe 10 years, it will take 10 years to resume with this... And again, I hope you have seen that we do everything we can to make it happen and to be in a position to propose to the board and to the AGM, a dividend distribution in 2025.
Thank you very much, and obviously, we are available to answer questions during our cocktail. Thank you very much.
Thank you.