Hello, and welcome everyone to our Capital Markets Day 2022 at Heidelberg Materials. My name is Christoph Beumelburg. I'm running the IR and communication function at Heidelberg Materials, and it's really lovely that you could all make it to Heidelberg. I've seen many familiar faces that we haven't seen for over two years now due to the pandemic, and we're excited that you could all make the trip to Heidelberg. As it is customary these days, we have a hybrid event, so a warm welcome to everybody who watches us from their screens at home or from the office. Thank you very much for following us over the next couple of hours. Take, what's our motto of today, concrete promises.
We will take you on our sustainability journey and explain to you how we lead decarbonization of our industry, and at the same time, which is important, drive value for you as our shareholders. Let's just take a look at the agenda for today. We will start with Dominik von Achten's keynote. We will then have a presentation from Nicola Kimm, who tells you how we drive sustainability to the next level, and this will then be followed by three deep dives. The first one from Jon Morrish, our Board Member responsible for our Western and Southern European business, who will explain how we drive value for our customers through sustainable solutions.
The next one from Wolfgang Dienemann, our Head of R&D, who will explain how we drive sustainability through innovation, and this will be followed by Jan Theulen, our Head of Technologies and Partnerships, who will give you the insights into deep decarbonization through CCUS. We will then have a short Q&A, 15 minutes Q&A, which should focus on these technical aspects of ESG before we embark on a 15 minutes break. Then René comes on stage, wraps it all up with his financial update, and tell you how we drive value for you as our shareholders. You may wonder how, when you see the presentations. Well, we deliberately decided to not put them up front, and release them before the event. We will tell you the story first, and then we will upload it on the website at around about 4:15.
In case you're wondering, after René's presentation, you will be able to download the presentations and also the press release. Before I hand over now to Dominik, let me say a big thank you to all the teams that have contributed to this event. First and foremost, the IR team, Katharina, Samuel, Ozan, great job over the past couple of weeks. Also, the ESG team contributed a lot, the comms team, Astrid, Sebastian, and all the colleagues around the world who made this event possible. Thank you very much. Now with that, I wish you an insightful and fruitful and eventful two hours, three hours.
It's the nature of human beings to strive for progress, and also the desire to provide shelter and a home. That's why humans build. To advance their progress and their dreams, they have always needed building materials. For 1.5 centuries, our building materials have been an enabler of human progress. These materials have helped people to be mobile and to connect the world, provided them with a home for living, learning, working, and protection. Where there is life, you will find our building materials. More than 50,000 colleagues in more than 50 countries contribute to this every day. Now it's time for the next step, to lay the foundation for our future. To achieve our goals and to continue being a partner for human progress, we have to rethink our ways of working.
We have to evolve our organization and work more closely together to develop sustainable solutions for our customers and the environment. There is one concern that drives us all, across all countries, all over the world. We must protect our planet. We think and act long-term. Our future needs solutions that last. That's what we offer, reliable and sustainable materials. We want to be the leader that turns our industry CO2 neutral once and for all. This is what we can be and how we will be material to build our future.
Liverpool, 24th of May, 2030. To be more precise, just across Anfield Road Stadium. Victoria and Jürgen, who just retired, have their grown-up daughter, Emmy, for Sunday breakfast. The kettle is boiling to get the water hot for good British tea. Victoria and Jürgen just moved into their new house, very stylish new house, printed fully out of concrete. Emmy, who is visiting her parents for the first time and has studied environmental science and having been a climate activist until 2020, suddenly turns to her father, Jürgen, "Dad, a great house. I love the design. But Dad, it's fully out of concrete. That makes me furious. You know that I've spent half my life fighting this product, given its CO2 footprint." Jürgen felt pushed back, but found himself back, saying, "Emmy, listen. I have followed well your journey over the past many years fighting this topic.
You have actually helped me understand that these cement producers reduce their carbon footprint by 15 kg of CO2 per ton of cement per year. You have made the calculation that this would take them 40 years. 40 years to get to net zero. That made you angry. Right so." Jürgen leaned back into his chair, started smiling, and said, "Emmy, when Mom and I were looking for the most sustainable building product out there to build this new home, the builder said, 'Use concrete.' I was so stunned that I said, 'How do we make this happen?' He said, 'I'll show you.' I took Mom, and we just drove 20 miles southwest from here, just across the water in Liverpool, to see in action the cement plant that made it happen at Padeswood.
Emmy, you are sitting in one of the first fully carbon-free cement and concrete house in the world. By the way, Emmy, over the lifetime, this house will even consume additional CO2 from the atmosphere. Here, Emmy, is my Environmental Product Declaration with all its credentials. Emmy, having been quite offensive over that discussion, suddenly started smiling, getting up, hugging her dad, Jürgen, saying, "Dad, well done." The world is changing fast. We know that the pandemic has just been behind us, so here we go. The pandemic is just behind us, hopefully. The war in the Ukraine, the dreadful war in the Ukraine is still going on. On the back of both, we see spiking fossil-driven commodity prices. There is massive change, not only in Liverpool, there is also massive change in the world itself. Heidelberg Materials is also changing.
Otherwise, we would not be able to fulfill what you just heard in the story, building the first carbon-free cement and concrete house by 2030. With that, a warm welcome from my side, from the whole team that will present today. I'm so glad to see you here, see the many familiar faces again, as Chris was already pointing out. Fantastic to have you back, and also, obviously, our community following online. I would like to take you now through how HeidelbergCement is changing. As Chris was alluding to, we are focused on sustainability. The key message for today is sustainability only. We deliberately decided to put a clear focus on this, not to dilute the message. In order to be very specific, we have decided to take the concrete lead.
In order to get there, we summarize it up in very specific five concrete promises, and let me take you through those five concrete promises. Promise number one, we stay razor sharply focused on heavy building materials and their application. We simply focus on what we do best, and there are quite a few good reasons for that. Reason number one, the underlying demand for heavy building materials is absolutely intact, and it is more and more intact also in a sustainable way. Look, more than 80% of the global GDP is already committed to net zero targets. Go back a couple of years, that was fundamentally different. The population globally continues to grow very, very fast. We will add another 2 billion people in the next more or less 20 years. Up until 2045, there will be 6 billion people living on the planet.
On the back of that, the growth rate for the next nine years will be high, more than 35% growth just until 2030. If you look at that in terms of geographical spread, there's been a lot of discussion about portfolio. How do you know, does it make sense to be in some of the key markets globally? We absolutely believe it does because the growth rates are quite different from emerging markets on the one hand and mature markets on the other hand. But especially in mature markets, there is big tailwind coming from the massive infrastructure projects and the massive infrastructure packages that have been announced. You see those four. Australia just recently voted a new government. AUD 120 billion additional spend in the infrastructure program.
The U.K. after Brexit, almost 340 billion GBP fueling the infrastructure. Europe, you know the, recovery plan and the Green Deal, EUR 750 billion. Always last, but aiming for the highest, the US $1.2 trillion in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Absolutely, there is tailwind on the infrastructure side. Residential demand continues to be strong, and also the non-residential piece, there is a shift in demand. With all the eCommerce going on, we are also confident that the non-residential market is still enjoying underlying growth. What people tend to forget, while concrete has a couple of disadvantages, it has a lot of advantages also in terms of sustainability.
I think it's fair to say the product has been around. You see this great picture, famous picture, for more than 2000 years. You know, this is one of the most widely spread products on Earth, and it will remain so if we make it sustainable and even more sustainable. It has good characteristics already. It is very locally made, and it is locally sold, so very limited transportation involved. When we talk about Scope 3 emissions, very limited footprint in that respect. It is in essence 100% recyclable. It is long living. I don't have to tell you. I think that's undisputed. It's sound absorbing. Some people don't even know that. I think that's something that's attributed to concrete. It's non-flammable.
Talking about 3D printing, it is customizable and also flexible, and under sustainability aspects, also very attractive. It has an attractive life cycle cost. It's fair to say it has two key disadvantages. One, it is CO2 and energy intensive, and two, I would call it is recyclable. There is a lot of recycling going on, but it is low value recycling. If you have a high ambition on the circular side, we are not satisfied with that. We would say that is a disadvantage from today's perspective. There is low value recycling going on. We strongly believe if you solve those two disadvantages, the sustainable products down the road will be the game changer for profitable growth. We will show you during the day why we believe that's the case.
Promise number two, we commit to generate 50%, 50% of our revenue from sustainable products by 2030. That's more than double from today. 50% of revenues from sustainable products by 2030. How do we get there? Key 2 drivers. One is the CO2 reduction, and eventually it's reuse. Our ambition clearly down the road is also to rethink in a circular approach to reduce our CO2 footprint, but to also reuse at some point the captured CO2. Then, especially focused also around the aggregates business, the reuse and the reduction of materials in a truly circular approach. With that, also a much higher content and a much higher percentage of value recycling, how I would call it. If you draw a line below these points, we strongly believe that commoditization will come to an end.
We will also explain to you during the presentations why. That's why the sustainable products will be, from our perspective, the key differentiator for the industry, for our customers down the road. There is significant customer demand out there. It is rapidly increasing, and also the regulatory changes are really moving. Some of you may have followed the recent decision of the European Parliament. The German government, actually, a couple of weeks ago, changed their standards, how they would fund projects. In Germany, you would not believe five years, even two years ago, that the government says for certain industries like cement, carbon capture utilization and storage is something they would continue or start to fund in order to make the transition possible.
We strongly believe with that increase in sustainable product demand and the green procurement criteria that will also be set by the governments down the road, there will be a premium for sustainable products down the road, and that will drive our top line. Not so easy to understand, but we'll again try to take you through that, the carbon regulation. While many think, "Ooh, how dreadful. Why do we have a carbon regulation?" We strongly believe for us as HeidelbergCement, the carbon regulation creates a clear opportunity, in fact, a high incentive to change and to make the European operations even eventually a blueprint for the change within the global company. If you make that happen, clearly, and again, we will show you how we do this, we strongly believe that there is also margin opportunity coming with it.
The growth in combination with margin will drive our profitable growth down the road. 50% sustainable revenue is nice, and Nicola will take you through some of the details how we define that 50%. The ambition goes even higher. Going back to my little story, our clear ambition is that we will be the first company globally that offers carbon-free cement and concrete at scale. Not just pilots or here a ton or there a ton, at scale. Truly game-changing. Promise number three, we will reduce our CO2 emissions by almost 50%. 50% down to 400 kg of CO2 per ton of cement by 2030. Again, 50% reduction down to 400 kg of CO2 per ton of cement by 2030. With that, we clearly, and we know that, and we want that, we clearly set new standards in the industry.
We have thought long and hard about this, but we are fully committed to this 400 kg target because we have the speed, the knowledge, the technology, the partners, and the people to make this happen. We know we are early movers, but we strongly believe that's an advantage because we will create out of this a cost advantage, eventually a margin advantage, and also a growth advantage. Thirdly, the sustainable products, especially those who have a zero carbon footprint, will be a clear differentiating factor in the customer offerings, and they will also be able to demand a different price point. We will take you through the details how we get to the 400 when we look at products, processes, and CCUS later during the day. You can look at this 400 kg also from a different angle.
While we took 32 years to get down 25%, we now target to get another 30% down in just 8 years. In the next 8 years, we want to do more than we've done in the last 32 years on a percentage basis. Promise number four, it's all nice to talk about sustainability targets. It's all nice to get to 50% revenues on sustainable products. It's all nice to get to 400 kg, but it's useless from a shareholder perspective if you don't make it a successful business case. We knew that all along. That's why promise number four, we will make it, this transition, a successful business case. The good news is we stand on a very strong foundation.
We have, for this transition, from our perspective, a perfect portfolio that is centered around Europe, North America, and the emerging markets. We have strongly, together as a team, improved our financial performance over the years. Just to pick one example, the ROIC jumped up from 6.5% just three years ago to 9.3% last year. We will be, and have already worked a lot on being the leader in decarbonization in the industry, and again, we'll take you through the details. We will not talk, deliberately not talk today about digitalization. Some of you may be disappointed, but that's a deliberate decision. Why? Because we will focus the next Capital Market Day solely on digitalization. We've decided to split this in order to really make sure to focus on one topic next to the other one.
Last but not least, very importantly, we focus on shareholder return. For the first time in the company's history, we've returned EUR 1 billion to our shareholders in a combination of dividends and share buybacks. Why is this CO2 transition a viable and very viable business case A, the sustainable products in the end will enable both revenue growth above market, also margin additional potential because they will carry a premium, as I said, especially if they go down to zero, and they will lower at the same time our carbon costs. In that respect, especially if you have an EU ETS environment, Europe turns into advantage, and that's also deliberately done so by the politicians. If you talk to the politicians, they would like to set incentives for those companies who move the fastest. It's absolutely logical from our perspective.
We won't forget the cash flow. It's very important for us to have a strong cash conversion. The new CapEx targets that René will explain to you later on will now, going forward, also include all CO2 measures, including the CapEx from our perspective, necessary to get to the 400 kg. We know this was a question out there for a long time. We have taken our time to get the figures right, and we will present them to you today. Here are the new overall targets. Revenue, around 5% per year like for like up. As I said, probably more on the pricing than on the volume side.
EBITDA margin target will stay at 22%, but we said, "Guys, we wanna be realistic what we present to you." You know that with the current inflationary environment to deliver this in the next year may not be all that easy. That's why we said we stay very focused on getting to the 22%, but it's realistic to say it may be below, between 20% and 22%. But again, we stay very focused to get to the 22%. ROIC, we target to get above 10%. Cash conversion, above 45%. Leverage, we decided to stay at the 1.5-2, because we strongly believe below 1.5, it becomes capital inefficient. In that respect, 1.5 and 2 is, from our perspective, a comfortable corridor.
I shared with you already the 400 kg per ton, the 50% sustainable revenues, and also the 50% circular concrete. That's what Nicola will also go through with you in even more detail. The whole transition on sustainability and on the business case makes only sense if we create in the end stakeholder value. From our perspective, that's promise number five. In the end, customers like Victoria and Jürgen, our shareholders, many of you here in the room or online, our employees, more than 50,000 today and future employees, and our society, represented by Emmy in my little story, has a right that we get this right. We want to be the leader globally to get this right. We know that this is a long race.
Whether it's a semi-marathon, whether it's a marathon, we can discuss over the beer tonight. We make it a relay today for you. I will hand over the baton now to Nicola. She will then be followed by Jon, then Wolfgang, then Jan, and last but not least, René. With that, Nicola, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Dominik. Welcome, everyone. We are driving sustainability to the next level, and we're leading the transformation of our industry. Both of these things will create value for our stakeholders. We heard Dominik speak about population growth, about climate change, and about resource challenges. Solving these issues are critical for global prosperity. Society needs resilient, smart, livable buildings and infrastructure. We drive the transition to sustainable construction. Sustainable concrete is needed for sustainable development. It's the foundation of more sustainable buildings, bridges, infrastructure like wind turbines and dams. It can't be beat in terms of durability and recyclability. We already have a strong basis built on four pillars. Material to build our future is our purpose, and sustainability is at the core. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals shape our strategy and commitments, providing a framework for us.
With our sustainability commitments 2030, we drive progress through actions and accountability, especially on carbon, where we link carbon reduction to thousands of bonuses of employees. We collaborate across our industry with partners and thought leaders with a special focus on the 1.5-degree pathway. Leading in this industry requires a special mix of essential capabilities. It requires knowledge and technology, and it requires the right partners. These capabilities will enable us to have the right speed to lead this transition. What do we mean with lead? Well, we'll be the first to provide carbon-free concrete and cement, and we'll lead with circular solutions. Now I'll explain how we get there. We'll close the loop for carbon and materials, focusing on our core business, making concrete, cement and aggregates the most sustainable building materials. Carbon and materials are our most important sustainability topics.
Closing the loop means reducing materials and carbon on the one side and reusing them on the other side. For carbon, we're already quite advanced in reduction measures like clinker substitution, alternative fuels, and process innovation. On the reuse side, we lead with developing new technologies like CCUS and carbon mineralization, both of which you'll hear about from my colleagues, Jan and Wolfgang. We're reducing the amount of materials through high-performance concrete, 3D printing, and digitalization. We're reusing materials by putting recycled content into our products and reusing materials and elements, like with precast. This enables us to set new benchmarks with our commitments for 2030. We'll cut our emissions by almost half versus 1990 to reach 400 kg per ton of cement, by far the lowest in our industry.
We'll drive a circular economy for our industry, transforming our portfolio over time, offering alternative circular alternatives for our portfolio. We'll build on our current sustainable portfolio. We'll measure sustainability over our product portfolio. We'll track sustainable revenue alongside our financial results to double these to 50% of our total revenues by 2030. We're strongly positioned to meet all these three commitments. Now I'm gonna explain to you how we're gonna drive each of these three commitments, starting with sustainable revenue. Today, we're launching a new umbrella program called evoBuild. This program helps to explain what we mean by sustainable revenue, helps to transparently measure sustainability across our product portfolio, and it helps drive our sustainable revenue. We'll generate 50% of our revenue from low-carbon and circular products and solutions by 2030.
This is our commitment to customers to help them on their sustainability journey, but it's also our commitment to other stakeholders to show how we'll create value for our company, for our investors, for our other stakeholders. What sets our evoBuild program apart is that we have a transparent definition based on a clearly defined benchmark and strict criteria. To be included, a product must fulfill either our low carbon criteria or our circularity criteria. For carbon, this means 30% less CO2 than a CEM I-based product. By using a recent starting point, we go beyond all the improvements made in the last decades. For circularity, we include products which have either 30% recycled content or have 30% less materials to help close the materials loop.
Customers already play a strong role in driving carbon and materials reduction in our portfolio. Globally, customers are asking for these products. We have fantastic examples of how we make our customers more sustainable, which my colleague, Jon, will take us through later. I'd like to stress that our ecolution program enables us to scale up what we've been doing around the world to have a consistent and credible approach, and to drive changes in our portfolio and measure our progress. Now I'm gonna talk about how we'll lead the decarbonization of our industry. It's our commitment to accelerate deep decarbonization to reach 400 kg CO2 per ton of cement, by far the lowest in our industry, and we know how to do it. We've successfully reduced our carbon emissions by 25% over the last three decades with clear, tailored country road maps.
We focus on three levers, product, process, and CCUS. For products, we've reduced our clinker incorporation from 82% to 73%. On the process side, we've increased alternative fuels from 3% to 26% by using industrial byproducts like slag and fly ash and optimizing our product portfolio. In our process, we've increased our alternative fuels from 3% to 26%. On CCUS, we started early with feasibility studies and pilot projects. We've continually reduced our carbon footprint, and now we'll even accelerate. We're confident to reach the 400 kg by 2030. Building on the success from the past, we know how to use reduction levers to accelerate decarbonization. We'll reduce our clinker incorporation. We'll increase our alternative fuels and biomass. You'll hear more about this from Wolfgang.
We've already committed to capture 10 million tons cumulative CO2 by 2030 through CCUS, and you'll hear more about that from Wolfgang. We're confident we can do this as leader in CCUS, and our targets are in line with the projected 1.5-degree pathway for the cement industry. Our speed will enable us to be the first to reach game-changing milestones to secure the front-runner position in our industry. In 2026, we will be the first to offer carbon-free cement and concrete. We have a 2030 ambition, which is EU taxonomy-aligned. With our accelerated pace, we expect to reach net zero before 2050. Now I'd like to talk about how we'll drive circular economy. We'll offer circular alternatives for our products, and we'll help drive the circular economy for our industry.
Our circular ambition is realized through three levers. We'll work towards closing the loop for concrete and asphalt. It starts by developing and offering circular alternatives for our products, aligned with our sustainable revenues definition. It relies on collaboration with our customers, offering them take-back scenarios. On the process side, it means ensuring that when we have returned materials, we process them to retain value, and we utilize the inherent recyclability of concrete and asphalt. For cement and aggregates, we'll continue to focus on using SCMs and recycling. With our three new commitments, we demonstrate how we drive sustainability to the next level. We'll grow our revenues for sustainable products to 50% of our total revenues. We aim to achieve the lowest carbon footprint in our industry, and we'll drive circular economy to develop circular alternatives for our products.
Now I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Jon, who will tell us how we lead sustainability together with our customers.
Thanks, Nicola. Good afternoon. There seems no real doubt that sustainable materials are or will be the future. As we've outlined earlier, we see this as a real opportunity for our growth. Construction markets are now really embracing sustainability. Heidelberg Materials are leading this change. There is now a real strong, fast-growing demand for sustainable building materials. Why is this? If we look at the hot topics in construction at the moment, clearly, there's CO2 and its reduction. We're talking a lot about that today. But there's also the resilience in infrastructure design to deal with the impacts of climate change. Recycling, as we've outlined already, and upcycling, so that we make maximum use of the materials. An increased focus on local supply chains instead of global supply chains, and a widespread recognition about fire resistance.
All of these tend to favor the use of concrete, but in particular, sustainable concrete. If you take government procurement, this has long been outlined as a real driver for change for the use of sustainable materials. Now it's really happening. Take Europe with the recovery fund that, Dominik mentioned, EUR 750 billion of spend over the next five years. With that spending closely aligned with the principles of the Green Deal, so it's aligned to sustainability criteria. If we move across to, the U.S., the Biden administration is harnessing the large power of the federal government spending plans. Annually, that's $650 billion. Again, along sustainability criteria, set out in the Buy Clean initiative.
Taken together, this and other things are driving real strong demand for sustainable materials, and we're seeing a real growth in the demand for sustainable concrete. Equally a thirst for sustainability information and advice from companies like us. In a recent survey of 1,200 global sustainability professionals, 42% of them think their businesses will be mainly focused on green buildings by 2024. That's a large increase in a short amount of time. Change does seem to be really happening, but it's not passive. Heidelberg are really driving this agenda, firstly by political engagement and with changing government policy to set the framework for the use of sustainable materials and to also drive this government procurement. This is really making a difference. We think our country structure really helps.
Our country general managers are directly engaging with their national governments, and many of them, well, most of them actually, lead and chair their national trade associations. Myself and a number of my colleagues regularly pound the pavements in Brussels, Strasbourg, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. to try to affect government policy change, and it seems to be working. I don't think it is a stretch to say that HeidelbergCement are genuinely setting the agenda for national, regional and global industry associations and for sustainability institutions that we're involved in. We're also driving demand along the value chain with our customers' customers, those who specify, engineer and pay for the buildings that are being constructed. We do this by promoting design in concrete and sustainable concrete, by the correct use of building accreditation systems such as LEED and BREEAM, and by the right use of tools.
Dominik touched on Environmental Product Declarations, Life Cycle Assessment too. A recent good example of this is our EcoCrete product launch in Germany, where our focus was on developers, architects and engineers, and that's creating a real interest in the material and a pull-through demand from our concrete business. We're seeing a real increase in the demand for sustainable concrete, and our customers are really embracing this change, our direct customers. We recently asked 900 of them what they thought about sustainability, and the answers were quite interesting. Almost a half of them said, "Yes, it's a hot topic for us," but only a quarter of them said they had a real plan to deal with it, and even less if they were ready-mix concrete customers. But three-quarters of them told us that they needed our help to try to navigate this new world for them.
They also said they were willing to pay more for these materials and pay it now. We see an increased demand for sustainable concrete, advice and information. Our customers are embracing this, and we see this as a real opportunity for us to deliver genuine, sustainable value for our customers. How are we doing this? Firstly, by delivering information and educating our customers and again, our customers' customers along the value chain. We're really pleased by the success of our sustainability academies. We launched these last year, and we're now rapidly rolling them out around the world. Indeed, in the examples here from the Czech Republic, the UK and in Poland, we've welcomed 2,000 attendees in this year alone through the doors. That's a real surprise to us.
At these events, we inform about our materials clearly, but more importantly about how they're used and how they're applied. We educate about our production processes along the supply chain and about how we'll go about and how they should go about decarbonizing, including such things as CCS. We've also experimented, and it's really working well with topical debates being held at these events with influential thought leaders who are driving change in sustainable construction and in the circular economy. This is really changing the nature of our conversation with our customers, and we're establishing ourselves as the go-to company for sustainability advice. Hear what Andy from Saint-Gobain said about his recent visit.
We've got a major focus on our Scope 3 emissions. It's really important that we engage with our supply partner, Hanson, to really understand what they were doing to reduce their overall carbon emissions. When Hanson announced the Let's Talk Sustainability event, we viewed it as a great opportunity. It also set a standard for what we expect to see when we engage with other top suppliers, particularly in terms of transparency and the overall content of that plan.
As well as providing sustainability advice and information, we can't live off that alone. We're supplying many sustainable materials through our tailored product brands around the world. We do it this way because we think our country teams know their customers best, and we tailor those sustainability product brands at national level. We're doing that in Europe, clearly, in North America, in Asia-Pacific, and also in Africa. Here are a few typical examples. Firstly, in cement. In the U.S., our EcoCem product range, and in Italy, our evoBuild product range, take a similar approach by replacing high-carbon clinker material with lower carbon cementitious materials such as limestones, pozzolan materials and GGBS. By doing that, they reduce the carbon footprint by up to 25% in Italy and up to 50% in the U.S..
Two good examples of concrete, but they're typical, though. One is in EcoCrete in Poland, and the other is our Ecotera range in Australia. These materials are fully recyclable. They use 100% local materials, increasingly using recycled materials. Because they use low-carbon cements, they have a significantly lower carbon footprint than a standard concrete mix. In fact, up to 60%-66% lower. By selling these materials in our product brands around the world that are tailored to local needs, we're absolutely confident of being able to reach our target of 50% sustainable revenues by 2030. Typically, though, we don't supply these materials on their own. We supply them as part of a full-service supply chain package, including technical service, logistics management, where we pull together materials from different parts of our national business to build major projects all around the world.
I've taken just a few examples. If we move across to Seattle on the West Coast of the USA, this is a cutting-edge place for sustainable design and the use of sustainable materials. We're proud to recently finish the building of a new headquarters for a globally recognized tech giant based just outside Seattle. I'm sure you can work out who that is. That project used 200,000 m3 of concrete, much of it low-carbon concrete, and the brief was to maximize the use of local recycled aggregates and sand. This resulted in a 60,000-ton CO2 saving and 120,000 tons of locally used recycled materials.
If we then come back across the channel to the U.K., we're at the final year, I think, of a four-year program of building the U.K.'s largest nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point on the far western tip of the U.K. This project had very high technical criteria. Clearly, it's a nuclear power station, but also high sustainability criteria, and the logistics were pretty complicated as it's an isolated place. Over a four-year period, our team have delivered by road, rail, and sea to take vehicles off the road, around 1.4 million m3 of concrete, reducing the CO2 by 350,000 tons, and with a very satisfied highly technical client, and also happy local residents with the amount of trucks that we've taken off the road. Moving to our third example in Sweden.
Our local colleagues in Sweden have established a really strong working partnership with a major national contractor called NCC, whose business target is to reduce their CO2 footprint by 50% as quickly as possible. They're doing that by partnering with us for our technical advice, and they build using our Bioconcrete range of low-carbon concretes. By doing this, they're going to reduce their CO2 footprint this year alone by 1,500 tons. You may say that's not quite the same scale as Hinkley Point. No, it's not. But the point from this example is this is becoming normal daily standard business for our Swedish colleagues. Then if we go all the way down to Melbourne, Australia, our colleagues from three businesses, Aggregates, Asphalt, and Recycling, have been working closely together to collaborate to build a new highway there.
They're terming it the greenest freeway, a 9 km stretch of high-quality road delivered on budget ahead of schedule and importantly with 250,000 tons of recyclables in it. Hear what a few of our major project customers think of us.
Sustainability is moving towards a more holistic future. Cadman has been a trusted partner on some of our most significant and major projects.
Their integrated approach with the way they manage logistical and technical requirements for projects is second to none really.
You do need to be on top of it today. Fortunately, we're dealing with an international company that's up front. Lehigh Hanson is leading it. You know, we're acquiring and looking for
guidance and help, and they're doing all the work, and which is perfect. Perfect partnership.
Their ability to drive carbon reduction in our supply of concrete brings direct benefit to our clients' goals of reducing the use of carbon in our build project.
If we can set the foundation from day one, we hope to be able to build buildings 100% environmentally friendly.
We are very glad that Italcementi is very interested in this subject, and I think that now we are ready to catch all the opportunities and projects respecting sustainability.
Okay. By moving our business in this sustainable direction, we are very confident of being able to reach our sustainability targets as set out before. They're ambitious by 2030. Equally and probably more importantly, also improve our margins. I took a few examples, here we are, of currently achieved existing concrete margins from our sustainable product brands around the world. As you can see, we're already achieving between a 5 and 11 percentage point EBITDA improvement in those businesses. This is just at the early part of this journey. To pull this together and wrap up, construction markets are now genuinely embracing sustainability. HeidelbergCement are leading this change in two main ways. One, by political change and political policy change, and two, by increasing and pulling through the demand along the value chain.
This is giving us a great opportunity to deliver genuine sustainable value from our customers in three ways. We're establishing ourselves as the go-to sustainability advice company. We're supplying materials around the world with our tailored sustainability product brands, and we typically do this by providing full service supply chain solutions to build major projects around the world. This gives us great confidence that we will absolutely be able to achieve our sustainability targets that we've set out earlier today. As we do it, importantly, we'll improve our margins. Thanks. I'd now like to hand over to my colleague, Wolfgang Dienemann, our Head of R&D, who is now gonna take you through his key projects in sustainability. Wolfgang.
Thanks a lot, Jon. Yeah, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and also very warm welcome to all of you here in the room and those on the screen, for this session, where I'm delighted to show you how we are driving sustainability through innovation. I will do that by guiding you through three areas of activity. The first one, I wanna show you how we advance cement formulations, towards our way to carbon-free products. Second point, I will show you how we are implementing groundbreaking recycling and CO2 mineralization technologies, and finally, how this is enabled by a strong team and strong collaborations across the whole value chain.
Before I start going into the details, I would like to reconnect to a slide or illustration that you already saw on Nicola's presentation with the overall target reaching 400 kg of CO2 per ton of cementitious materials. You saw the three levers already in the very first presentation of Dominik as well. I will certainly focus on the product optimization because I believe that's the key lever to drive sustainability. Nevertheless, allow me also a few words on the process optimization. This has been a very strong focus of HeidelbergCement over the past decade or maybe even more, by looking into clinker replacement materials, by implementing alternative fuels, alternative raw materials, implementing biomass in our kiln systems, and more recently, also with accelerating utilization of separate grinding technologies.
These separate grinding technologies allow for a higher clinker replacement, so they kind of build a bridge towards the product side. That's what I now wanna continue to show, how we, as I said, advance the formulation of cement all the way to carbon neutral. You saw on the earlier slide of Nicola that in order to achieve the 400 kg, we need to reduce clinker incorporation to below 68%. What does that imply? We need substantially higher volumes of supplementary cementitious materials. We will close that gap to a large extent through use of our own limestone. Yet we also need reactive materials that contribute to strength development. Here, researching these clinker replacement materials is the key to reduce the CO2 footprint of cement.
We have a clear set of criteria against which we evaluate the available materials locally, plant by plant, looking for materials with pozzolanic or hydraulic properties, so materials that actually contribute to the strength development. Preferably, we are looking for recycled materials and waste materials from other industry to, at the same time, drive circularity in our sector. Of course, it's important to identify reserves that have sufficient volumes to ensure lifetime and that have a cost-effective, and at the same time, CO2-effective logistics. I wanna show you now three examples of activities in this field to give you a little bit of an impression and more detail or more evidence behind this claim. The first one is a project on natural pozzolans in Iceland. You might ask yourself, natural pozzolan and innovation? You are right. You saw the picture of the Pantheon in Dominik's presentation on the Pantheon.
Pozzolans have been used by the Romans 2,000 years ago. The very first cements that were made on this planet were actually pozzolan-based pozzolans. What makes this project innovative or different are two main points. First of all, the industrial scale, and secondly, the quality of the material. Normally, pozzolans are volcanic ashes, or most of them are volcanic ashes. They stem from eruptions of volcanoes, cool in the air, and with that retain some glassy structure, which is reacting in the cement paste and contributes to the strength development. What makes this project different is that here we have a volcanic eruption under a glacier. The cooling was much faster. You get a denser structure of the material with a high reactivity and avoiding the disadvantage many other pozzolans bring with them, the water demand.
The water demand is also much lowered. We have secured access to 100 million tons estimated volumes of this pozzolan, and are in a feasibility study to build up a plant with a capacity of 1 million ton per year by 2025, maybe 2026. From there, we will supply the markets. The plant is directly at a harbor, or will be at a harbor, supply the markets in Scandinavia and Northwest Europe. Let me come to the second core element of our SCM strategy, and that definitely will be calcined clay. I guess it's not the first time you hear about clay, calcined clays, but we are systematically screening potential clay sources for our plants on a global scale. We have identified quite a few.
Not all clays are equally suitable, so we really have to deeply investigate not only chemical composition, but mineralogical composition, do grinding trials in order to understand how big can the replacement rates be. Typically, what we see with good quality clay is that we can replace up to 50% of clinker in combination of clay and limestone. You might have heard last week the announcement of our joint venture in Ghana with CBI, where we will build the world's largest flash calciner ever at least being announced so far. It will be built in 2023-2024, but this is twice as much as the biggest installations that are active at this stage. Finally, we also look into new materials coming from the steel industry.
Guess you are all aware that also the steel industry is looking for decarbonization, undergoing transformational processes, which implies to us that the most used SCM on this planet up to now in the cement industry, ground granulated blast furnace slag, will fade out over the coming decades. Instead, new materials will appear in the new steel and iron-making processes, where we are investigating their suitability and together with partners, we have 7 or 8 partnerships right now with different steel producers to make sure that we can utilize those future waste streams in our products. One of them, in principle, the only one I can talk about is a BMBF-funded project. The others are under NDAs, SAVE CO₂, which is a German-funded project together with thyssenkrupp, which we already started last year and which will be finalized in 2025.
My belief is that this transition in the steel industry will start considerably in the second half of this decade. I guess we have also here kind of early mover advantage. With these three examples, and there are some other more, let's say, pragmatic approaches with the use of quarry dust in Africa, as an example, we are pretty sure and confident that we can fill the gaps or the additional volume needed for the additional clinker replacement moving forward. Now let me move to a second main point of my presentation, and that are the, or is the implementation of new advanced recycling technologies and CO2 mineralization.
In order to explain that, I ask you to go a little bit on this sketch, where we start with natural carbonation in the middle of the schematic. Concrete is a material that naturally carbonates. Throughout the life, service life of a building, of an infrastructure, of a pavement, whatever you want, it's absorbing CO2, which, and there is clear scientific evidence, leads to an overall CO2 sequestration during the lifetime of the concrete of already 23%. Our approach now is to use this natural process and accelerate it in industrial environment. In order to do that, we need to start obviously with urban mining from the top. One first really important point here is the selective separation, not just crushing material down, but selective separation of the original constituents, so sand, aggregates, and the recycled concrete paste.
Come to a little bit more detail in a moment. The recycled concrete paste, point number three, we can then use for CO₂ saving processes in cement, in clinker production. That's maybe the king's path, we can use it as a CO₂ sequestration substrate. Recarbonating the old concrete paste, which then leads to the formation of a new SCM, that can again be upstream, then used in cement, and finally fresh concrete. With that, we are really closing the loop, both of materials and concrete, in the concrete life cycle. On this last path, I showed you this, SCM formation after carbonation of the, CP, the concrete paste. We have filed five patents, some of which are already granted. Shortly on the details of this process or processes.
On the separation side, we developed new technologies which don't crush the concrete all the way down and then leads to down cycling as it's normal practice today. We developed kind of low pressure grinding technology to clean the surface of the aggregate, to regain the RCP on the one hand, with the side effect that we have much higher quality sand and aggregates which can replace virgin materials in new concrete to 100%. The sand typically today is all landfill, so can't be used at all or in very few legislations only. And on the aggregate side, we talk about typically 30%. With that technology, we can do 100%.
We built a first pilot of such technology in Germany last year, and we are now in the erection phase or construction phase of a more advanced technology for a second pilot in Poland. With that, I will come to the next part of that whole concept, the utilization of the recycled concrete paste. In principle, three options. We can utilize the RCP for clinker production. As you saw, this RCP was already calcined in the first phase of its life. So it essentially comes not really carbon-free. The recarbonation, of course, the 25% are there, but comes with only 20% of the CO₂. We could use, and that is the simplest case, the RCP as a filler in fresh cement production.
As said, the most attractive part is in the carbonation of the RCP, which leads to a pozzolan. Here we already did a very first industrial scale trial in our plant in Brevik, where we carbonated around about 50 tons of that paste in a, as I said, industrial scale trial. The proof of concept is there. But we are clear that we further need to develop and optimize this process regarding energy efficiency, amount of material to transport it, and so on and so forth. Here we have a very clear path forward, which I will talk about in a moment. I ask you for a little bit of imagination.
If you combine these points, starting with the clinker based on RCP to a maximum extent, fired in an electrical kiln with green energy, you end up with an extremely low CO₂ footprint of that clinker. If you then add 30%-40% of this RCP, which is even a CO₂ sink, it comes carbon negative, then it's possible to generate not only carbon-free, but carbon negative cements. Is it possible today or tomorrow? Certainly not. Can we do it in 10 years? Absolutely. We have a very clear roadmap in that regard with a kind of intermediate step where we wanna install two commercial scale pilots, so talking about a couple of 100,000 tons of recycled materials, as a starting point by 2025. Of course, these achievements are not possible without a strong team in the back.
We have in our facility in Leimen, just 5 km south from here, a very agile R&D team, but we are of course embedded in a network of partnerships, internally with our operations, with our competence centers on cement, on aggregates, on concrete, ready-mix concrete, but also a wide range of external partners from academia as well as from industry along the whole value chain, starting with the equipment manufacturers. Our, let's say, progress and achievements are also recognized publicly. Just last week, we won the German Innovation Award for Climate and Environment from the German Ministry of Environment. This is, first of all, makes us proud, obviously, but also a strong confirmation and a motivation to further advance on this path.
You can imagine that this came with a little smile getting as a cement company an innovation award on climate innovation from a green-led ministry. With that, to sum up, I showed you how we are advancing formulations of cement, laying the foundations to move towards carbon free cement production, how we are implementing these groundbreaking recycling and CO₂ mineralization technology, and how we can build on our agile R&D team and trustful collaborations with our partners. Thanks a lot. I hand over to Jan Theulen to guide you through our carbon capture initiatives. Go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone, and maybe good morning or good evening for those who are online in another part of the world. I'm Jan Theulen, working 30 years now for HeidelbergCement. The last eight years I've worked on CO2 matters, and I want to take you the next 15 minutes along this journey. I'm heading now the Technologies & Partnerships department. As was said before by Nicola, it's all about technologies, but also all about partners. This is what will become clear, I guess, in the next couple of minutes. Wolfgang covered already two of the topics of our track to 400, so I concentrate on only one, the CCUS part. The CCUS part is really fundamental to get to the 400 kg.
That's where we are differentiating, and it's also fundamental later on to get to our net zero path. CCUS has to make the difference there. Let me start with where the CO₂ comes from again. You know, when we have our clinker manufacturing process in the kiln, looking at the right side of this slide, we start looking at the emissions from our fuels. Typically, one-third of the CO₂ comes from our fuels. Traditionally, we are working for a long time to improve the energy efficiency of the kiln so that we can use less fuels. And those fuels that we use, we replace by waste-derived fuels with a biogenic content. That means this CO₂ is still there, but it's a carbon-neutral CO₂.
However, the majority of all our CO₂ emissions come from our limestone. It's our raw material. When we calcine it, the CO₂ will automatically arise. This CO₂ from the limestone and from the fuels, they come together in our flue gas at a concentration ratio of around 20%. The first challenge is to bring it up to 95% purity at least, and this is what we do with carbon capture installations. With this purified CO₂, we can then basically go two directions. We can either use it, the so-called CCU technologies, or we can safely store it, and then we call it CCS. Obviously, combination of two is possible as well. In order to deal with this, we have developed a large portfolio of new technologies and also scaling them up fast now. What is important in capture technologies?
It's very, very important that they are resource and energy efficient. We have an energy-intensive process, so if we add anything to our technology, this is what matters. This is why we look at three different technologies as the major ones. They interact in a different position in the clinker production line. The clinker production takes material from the left to the right, limestone from the left, passing the kiln and leaving the kiln at the right side as clinker. The gas stream is the opposite. The gas enters the kiln from the right side, passes through the kiln, and leaves through the stack. The Amine technology is at the back end of the kiln for the process, for the gas side, just before the stack.
The Oxyfuel technology is at the beginning of the kiln line where we burn the fuels, and the LEILAC technology is positioned in the middle in the calcining process, where the CO₂ is released from the limestone. That's the different position in the kiln line. They have also different performance and different maturity level. Amine technology is by far the most mature technology. However, it comes with additional energy use. In several cases, we can compensate this. Like in our Norwegian plant in Brevik, we can use waste heat for this additional heat. This is not everywhere the case, and that puts pressure on the cost efficiency. That's why we develop also Oxyfuel technology.
Even though that it is less mature, we are working with pilots to get to raise the maturity level as the energy use will be lower, and then by definition, the cost efficiency will be better, and it suits our industry. Finally, the LEILAC technology can do the whole capture without an energy penalty. We are working hard to bring up the maturity level, I will show you in a minute, and it's a bit too early to assess what will be the overall outcome of the costs. Of course, we want to do this in order to bring further the costs down. What have we done? Already in 2014, we did the first pilot in Norway. This was before the Paris Agreement.
We already put up an AMINE reactor, let it run for 7,000 hours, and look how it reacts. A few years later, with support from the EU, we have erected our LEILAC facility in Belgium, learning how to do it on a much bigger scale than the Amine at that time. It's still a demonstration unit. We are now preparing the Oxyfuel and LEILAC -2 plant to scale up to get things going. The demo is, of course, all in function of a large scale. The Amine technology, we are now confident that we can apply it in large scale projects. We know what we are doing, it's bankable investment, and it will deliver that what we expect it will do. In Norway, the project of Brevik is based on this technology.
You can see it took us 10 years to bring it from first demo to full implementation. Of course, this is not only a technology development time, it's also getting the funding in place, getting in dialogue with your stakeholders, getting acceptance, getting your partners established, et cetera. That is what we have done in the last 10 years. When we look to Oxyfuel, we expect to make the jump to a full scale faster. While we are building the pilot, the large scale pilot, we are planning a full scale project in 2028 in an Eastern European plant. Instead of a time gap of 10 years between demonstration and full scale, we are able to reduce it to 4 years.
LEILAC, which is the most innovative technology, will take a bit more time before we can really apply it full scale, but all efforts are aiming for that to happen. As mentioned, in Brevik, we are building the first large scale CCS project in the world, and it's in full construction now. We will be operational in 2024, and the CO2 will be sent to the partners of Northern Lights. Northern Lights is a consortium made out of Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies, and they have worked also for years to develop the storage location to make the financial side of that work. They have started construction as well. They're fully lined up and the Norwegians are behind it, and they have given it a proud name of Langskip.
It's like the Vikings are going to do this job for us. 40,000 tons of CO2 will be captured per year as from 2024 onwards. It's not only there. You need a portfolio of projects in order to make it happen, a portfolio of large-scale projects. I want to give you two examples how we develop such projects. In Alberta and Canada, we have started to explore what is the potential of storage in the region, and we identified there's good opportunity. There's also a government very much focused on it. There are already a couple of CO2 storage projects ongoing, so the stakeholder acceptance is less critical.
Therefore, we were able to go rather quickly from scanning into the initiation phase, teaming up with partners, building the capability, and get the feasibility study done. We have done our homework. The feasibility study was also funded by the government as the government really needs such projects in their program. They have a carbon tax, they have a lot of money, but they need good projects to have this money well used. This is what we are going to do and having it up and running in 2026 as the first full-scale CCS plant and industry, and cement industry in North America. In Bulgaria, we run through a similar exercise. Maybe not so obvious. We were the very first to bring up in the dialogue in Bulgaria to store CO2.
There is a depleted gas field in the Black Sea, which is an excellent storage location for CO2, and our cement plant is just at the site of this location. We introduced this to the ministries. Our local teams have talked with every ministry, and the doors were very open because this project will be able to contribute to the targets of Bulgaria to meet the European expectations of decarbonization. They need these projects and we need them, and that's a good fit. We have done our feasibility studies. We have teamed up with the oil and gas partner, and we have concluded our application for funding, and we are ready to get it going up in 2028.
We will take a few more years than in Canada because of the permitting and regulatory efforts are more when you are the first in a new market to do it than when you are already some activities done. Let's look at CCU, another important pillar. We can turn CO2 into materials by mineralization. We convert it into fuels or hydrogen using the fuels or chemicals using hydrogen, or we can use biological conversion. All of that is possible. You have seen from the presentation of Wolfgang what you can do with concrete to absorb CO2, but you can also use other materials. We have lined up a project in Belgium using steel slag and CO2 from our LEILAC reactor to produce paving bricks, which will be supplied to the market. A commercial project.
We have lined up a couple of these after that. Looking to the fuels. The fuels and chemicals. This is part of our Oxyfuel project. We have planned to use a part of the CO2 we capture to turn it with hydrogen into e-kerosene. Finally, since 2019, we operate an algae farm in Morocco, where we're using CO2 from our flue gas and sunlight to grow microalgae and make fish feed out of that. It's at a small scale for the moment, but it shows that it's with entrepreneurship, you can get also outside of Europe, CCU going.
It's clear that until 2030, the bigger reductions will come from CCS because the CCU is not yet at that large scale available, while CCS, with the preparations we have done, we have significant volumes. However, in the next decades, CCU and CCS will be needed to complete our full path to net zero. All that makes that we can be confident to capture 10 million tons of CO2. It's not anymore a wish. We have the projects lined up. We have the teams behind. The countries are working on it. We have the support teams on the group functions. Educated, they are aware, very motivated people. This is giving us confident that we will make it happen. This is the list of projects that will do it. Most of them I've addressed already during my presentation so far.
The project from Antoing was not addressed yet by me, but it's there. It's the Padeswood project in the U.K., hidden under the name HyNet. Why HyNet? Because we are leveraging on a blue hydrogen project, where blue hydrogen production and CO2 capture from hard-to-abate industries comes together. We can leverage on this hydrogen developments. Finally, an important project is Cementa in Sweden. It's the biggest capture project of our group, where our customers really are waiting for this to happen because we can serve a large part of the Swedish market with carbon-free cement. That brings us to my final slide. As you have seen, the technologies are there. The initiatives globally are on track, and this is why we can promise to capture 10 million tons until 2030.
Good afternoon, everyone. A warm welcome from my side to the people joining virtually and to you guys here sitting in the room. As you know, this is the first time I speak in front of this audience, and for this great occasion, I brought you something really special. As you know, we are the clear leader in decarbonization, which, by the way, my colleagues, just confirmed a few minutes ago. Most of you might wonder what the economics are behind our CO2 transformation. I will give you some data points, which I think is the first time in the sector for our CO2 transformation. What I will share later in the presentation is an inflection point which should support you to think totally differently about our valuation. As you have seen, the whole management team is super excited. I hope you are too.
Let's dive into this. Okay. Where do we start our journey? As you've seen with our 2021 financials, our financials have reached record levels on RCOBD, on ROIC. We have a very strong balance sheet, so the company is as strong as it has never been. On the way to create shareholder value, we started the first share buyback in 2021, which we accelerate or have started the second tranche in 2022, returning roughly EUR 1 billion to the shareholders in 2021 and 2022. I guess this is a good progress for the company. One of my clear targets for today is that you understand and take home with you that CO2 is a business opportunity for us, it's not a fear. This is not a slogan on that slide. I will show you some evidence later in my slides.
Now I give you some high-level CapEx and OpEx implications for the things we have discussed and seen today. First, CapEx for the CO2 roadmap, so the conventional measures which Wolfgang has explained, yeah. That is, reduce clinker incorporation, increase alternative fuel rate, get plant efficiency up, so reducing thermal energy.
What will that do? That will obviously improve cost efficiency or energy cost efficiency and lower our CO₂ exposure. Number two, in terms of CapEx for CCUS, how much do we need to spend to capture the 10 million tons? I guess that's, what you're all waiting for. As I said, or as we all learned, we have a clear first mover advantage. We are a few years ahead. The CCUS will clearly reduce our need to purchase CO₂ allowances in Europe. Will allow us to sell products which are clear differentiation because we are the only ones offering zero carbon cement or concrete. In terms of OpEx, yes, we need to spend money for the CCUS, for capturing, for transporting and for storing the CO₂.
What I will tell you is that the cost we need to spend per ton is much lower than the current CO₂ price. This is, as you know, this will be a marginal opportunity in addition. OpEx for EUAs, I will explain what that means for us. Yeah, there will be, in my view, in our view, clear market consolidation because the whole industry at some point of time needs to buy certificates and that should lead to increased pricing power and due to our CCUS projects, our need to purchase CO₂ allowances will be much less than our competitors. Okay, CapEx for conventional CO₂. Two years ago, my colleague Jon Morrish, he explained to you that we need roughly EUR 50 million per annum CapEx to get to a CO₂ target of 500 kg in 2030.
Now you've seen we've upgraded the target to 400 kg, and we need to upgrade our CapEx for this to EUR 100-EUR 150 million for clinker incorporation reduction, alternative fuel increase, supplementary cementitious material projects, and to get more efficiencies in the plant. As you know, we have a clear bottom-up roadmap for each plant where we need to spend the CapEx to get all these efficiency measures done to lower our conventional CO₂, let's say, footprint. What I present you later, this EUR 100-EUR 150 million per annum will be included in our net CapEx guidance, what I give you in a few minutes. Now, next slide is CapEx for CCUS. Okay, CapEx for CCUS.
On this slide, you see the split of the CapEx we need to spend for the seven CCUS projects we have mentioned. This will be roughly EUR 1.5 billion until 2030. This fits to our 400 kg target. This spend is aligned to get to 400 kg. You see from 2022 to 2024, there's relatively low CapEx spend. That is mainly for our plant in Brevik and the first spend for Edmonton. As you know, Brevik, we get funded a lot of money to a certain extent from the government. Then it's accelerating from 2025 to 2028. Here you see a difference.
In the yellow box, it says seven CCUS projects. On the right, we have six projects capturing 10 million tons. This chart already includes a project where we have CapEx here, but it starts only capturing in 2031. This is a little bit of a bonus because we already spent money and then we get the benefit in 2031. For all these projects we are mentioning here, we have already applied for funds, and we are pretty confident that we will all get this through. You see EUR 1.5 billion in nine years, we can very comfortably fund from our own cash flow. Okay, OpEx, how much does it cost to capture, transport, and store the CO₂?
It's roughly on average, you see the orange bubble in the middle is 60 EUR per ton. You see other green bubbles, you might ask, "Well, why is one at the bottom left, one in the middle, one top right, one bottom right? So what does that all mean?" Yeah. This has two reasons. First reason is the cost obviously depend fully on where what is with the plant location. Is it at the sea? Is it somewhere else? How is structure regarding transport, logistics, whatever. That's reason number one. The other bigger reason is for each of the projects, we have different funding mechanisms with the governments in place. Yeah. Some fund just OpEx, some fund just CapEx, and some do just both. Yeah.
That's why you see there's a bubble where it says zero-zero cost for us. Yes, because there's a mechanism where the government looks at funding as well a lot of our OpEx. Yeah. So that is the reason why you see this scattered landscape. If you look at today's CO₂ prices, EUR 82- EUR 81 per ton, and this costs us EUR 60 per ton. So there's already a cost differential in 2022 of EUR 20 per ton. You might imagine a number, what that can be in a few years' time. Yeah. That differential will probably grow. Next slide. This is, I guess, quite important. This is for Europe, and I'd give just the assumption for this.
This is under the assumption that the European Commission proposal introduces CBAM and the EUA allocation, so the CO2 allowances will be reduced starting 2026 by 10% until 2035. You see the gray line over there, that is our CO2 certificate balance if we assume we do nothing. We don't invest EUR 100 million-EUR 150 million in these conventional measures, and we don't use CCUS. That's a steep into negative territory. Now, due to our conventional CO2 measures, we reduce the requirement to purchase EUAs by 24% already. That's, if you look at 2030, that's a material amount. This one, probably the whole industry can do. The one better, the other one, not as good, but that's what everybody can do, conventional measures.
Now we introduce CCUS, and we are able to reduce the requirement by another 21% compared to the do nothing scenario, to the conventional measure scenario. The total is reduce our need to purchase certificates by 45%, which is, I guess, a very remarkable number. Cumulative, you see, the CCUS will avoid cost for us roughly EUR 800 million. Under the scenario that we get a 10% allocation reduction starting 2026. I guess this is a material cost advantage which we have in the whole industry, and we are the only ones. If we go to the next slide, why is this a clear margin opportunity? I'm very convinced that it is. This chart shows you why.
If you look at the black line, that is the cost to produce one ton of cement, yeah? That will go up during the time starting 2025, it will accelerate. Why? Because the whole industry needs to buy certificates because they are taking away each year 10%. Yeah? The whole industry cost level will go up. We assume, okay, to cover the additional cost, there will be price increases, and that is the green line. You see the prices are increasing and we just assume, okay, the price increase to increases just to cover the additional cost. Now that's the assumption because the whole industry needs to buy. If you want to keep your margin, prices need to go up. That's the picture for the industry. Ours looks different.
Now, as I said to you, our requirement to purchase certificates is 21% lower compared to the than the industry because we have CCUS and capturing 10 million tons. The orange dotted line below the black line is our cost base per ton of cement compared to the industry, so it's lower. The little Delta is our additional margin, yeah? Because prices have to go up for everyone. Second margin opportunity is that curve. We are the ones who can offer carbon-free cement, which as Dominik, Jon, Nicola, everybody has alluded to, we're the first ones. That's a clear differentiator in the industry.
That's a premium product, and you can be very sure that comes with a totally different price from the normal pro duct because we are the only ones who can offer that product in several countries already, yeah? So if you add those both together, there's significant margin opportunity for us, especially in Europe, because we have the CCUS advantage, which nobody else has. Okay, just to wrap it up, what does it all mean? From a CapEx perspective, we say EUR 100-EUR 150 million conventional will be included in our net CapEx target. We upgraded this by EUR 50-EUR 100 million compared to two years ago. CapEx for CCUS, EUR 1.5 billion for our company in nine years, very digestible, that will have no impact on any cash allocation.
OpEx for CCUS, I said already, prices cost for this lower than to purchase one certificate. OpEx for EUAs, I said, here there's no fear for the company. We are happy with CBAM. We are happy if CO2 prices go up. There's a competitive differentiation because we have a product which nobody else has, and we are saving 21% CO2 certificates, which the others need to buy. Okay. How do we align this, the financing of the company, with the sustainability targets? The next slide shows you our pathway to more than 70% sustainable financing by 2025. How do we do this, yeah? Last week, we renewed our syndicated facility. We made it green. We reduced it from EUR 3 billion to EUR 2 billion. We have taken the covenants out, so a very favorable outcome for us.
We have linked our syndicated facility to green targets, and that is already done. That means by today, we have 23% sustainable financing already. What do we plan for the rest of 2022? We will issue a sustainability-linked bond, and we will make our commercial paper program green. That means by the end of 2022, we have 50% sustainable financing, which we will ramp up by 25 to above 70%. If you now look CO2, 400 kg / ton, sustainable financing above 70%, I guess that is a clear benchmark in the industry. How can you do this? We need to have a sustainable financing framework in place, yeah. That will be published in the internet or it is already published.
We link our bonds, for example, to KPIs, and the first KPI is the 400 kg / ton and/or the 10 million tons we cumulatively capture until 2030. Here you can see the quote of the second party opinion. "Heidelberg's targets are leading, have set the benchmark for the industry and outperform the level of ambitiousness of the sector." Yeah, as I said, clearly leading in the industry. What as well is remarkable here, our targets are aligned with taxonomy. The 400 kg net means 468 kg / ton gross. 469 kg / gross, which is under that the EU taxonomy threshold, which I think is as well leading in the sector. Now, how do we wrap this all up into financial targets and what does it all do with our numbers?
First, I want to illustrate a little bit our EBITDA development and cash generation, yeah. At the top you see our EBITDA like for like organic growth over the last 11 years. Here you see I wanna raise only two points. The first point is the volatility of our EBITDA development is quite low. If you take out 2018, which was an outlier, the volatility is quite low, which is, I think, a good sign. Secondly, the GDP growth in this period was 2.7%. Our EBITDA development per annum was roughly 5%, which is, I guess, a good sign that the company's growing above GDP. At the bottom, you see our cash flow generation in absolute terms.
You see, in the last few years we were a little bit accelerating, and therefore we want to upgrade our cash conversion target from around 45% to above 45%. Now you might say, "Okay, guys, on the bottom right, you have achieved 47% already in the last four years. Why do you do only above 45%?" The answer to this is pretty simple. In 2020, we achieved 58% cash conversion rate, but this was driven by Corona. We put a very strong cash saving plan in place, yeah, where we reduced the CapEx heavily and moved tax payments into 2021. That is obviously a little bit an outlier. Therefore, I say the above 45% is a pretty good target for the company. Now CapEx.
New CapEx target now including CCUS. The headline is we reduce our core CapEx materially by EUR 250-EUR 300 million and shift the CapEx to the green transformation because that's what we need to do to achieve our targets. Overall, the number does not go up. I'll guide you through from left to right. The left number was EUR 1.2 billion, which we've announced two years ago, which was EUR 50 million CO2 conventional, and the rest, let's say, the core CapEx, which we need to run the business. The core CapEx we reduce by EUR 250-300 million and increase the CO2 conventional by 50-100, so that you come to a like for like number compared to two years ago of EUR 1 billion.
Now if we add a new category, CCS, CCUS, you need to increase. We will increase by EUR 100-EUR 150 million. Here I would like to explain, because what we try to do is from 2022 to 2024, we will try even with including with CCUS to be at EUR 1 billion because the CCUS for 2022 to 2024 is mainly Brevik and a little bit Edmonton, and we think we can compensate and can do 2022 to 2024 with EUR 1 billion. Then, as you have seen in my CCUS chart CapEx, it accelerates in 2025. Therefore, I say if you do the math and say in, on average, we probably need EUR 1.1 billion for 2022 to 2025. As I said, we will try to get it to EUR 1 billion 2022 to 2024.
What does it mean to 2025 and 2030? Don't be afraid, our CapEx will not explode. For CCUS, we need roughly EUR 200 million per annum for that period. But on the contrary, the CO2 CapEx for the conventional will probably reduce a little bit because at some point of time, you're coming to a limit where it makes sense to invest in CO2 conventional. There will be again a little bit of shift, but this message, the message is very, very clear. The CapEx will not kill the company. We can fund this very comfortably by ourselves, and there's no impact on cash allocation, even with CCUS, to reach a 400-kg target. Okay. ROIC target. Dominik presented this in his presentation at the beginning.
We will move up to above 10% and have beaten the guidance of 2020 of clearly above 8% already with 9.3% in 2021. Why was this? A few reasons I wanna explain. First, operational performance of the company was good in the years 2020 and 2021. Driven as well or supported by low energy cost until H2 2021. Good portfolio optimization. You have seen the U.S. West disposal is $2.3 billion. Then efficient capital management, so that we were able to move the number up to 9.3%. This now we upgrade to above 10% in a heavy building materials industry in a difficult environment. I guess that number is as well a good number for the company. Now let's come to leverage.
As well, no change in leverage target. Yeah, we wanna keep the 1.5-2. We reached 1.3 in 2021, but we are very comfortable with that leverage target. That gives us a little bit flexibility. We have achieved our investment grade rating BBB already in 2021, so there's no need to touch that target. We are very comfortable with the target we have already announced two years ago. Cash allocation. What do we wanna do with all the cash we are generating? First, we want to grow the company in a profitable way. You see here on the left, we have spent roughly EUR 1.5 billion in the last 4 years for bolt-on acquisitions.
We want to accelerate this number because the clear target is we want to grow the company, but in a profitable way. What does that mean? Key criteria, obviously, that needs to fit to our portfolio and our targets. That's very clear. ROIC needs to reach 10% after reaching the acquisition's full potential. It's not what does it do now, it's a little bit what is the target able to do, yeah? Then it should obviously support our sustainability and transformation targets, yeah? Here we want to see a clear acceleration on bolt-on acquisitions. Shareholder return. On the left side, you see how much cash did we generate the last years. Roughly EUR 10 billion split into EUR 6.7 billion free cash flow and EUR 2.8 billion divestments, mainly coming from the U.S. West Coast.
What did we do with the money is in the middle. We said we wanna achieve investment-grade rating, very solid rating. We needed to delever, and that we have done. You have seen the numbers. Debt payback was 55%. We started with shareholder return by starting the share buyback already last year. If you look at the 4-year average, we've given 26% return to the shareholders, and we have invested 19% into bolt-on CapEx. What do we wanna do from 2022 to 2025? Clearly, we don't need to further deleverage. That's clear, so therefore the gray bar goes next to zero. What we will do is we will still try to provide a nice shareholder return. Yeah, via progressive dividends, keep share buyback as a flexible option.
As I said before, we do want to do as well bolt-on M&As, and we will decide when the time is there, what we wanna do and weigh out, okay, what targets do we have in the buy pipeline? How do we wanna deal with shareholder return? This is a decision we will take when we're at that point in time. Okay. Now just a short summary of all our financial targets. What we promised you in 2020, what did we deliver so far, and what do we wanna achieve in 2025? Yeah. EBITDA margin, we said we wanna go up 300 basis points versus 2019. We have achieved 171 basis points by 2021.
As Dominic said, we still keep the 22% target, but give a Corridor because as you know, the current inflationary scenario is pretty significant. We don't give up on our target, we just give a corridor because we think it's more realistic than to provide unrealistic targets, which then in five years' time you say, "Okay, we have given you targets which are not achievable." I guess that's a fair statement. ROIC, we go up to above 10%. Leverage, no change. Net CapEx around on average EUR 1.1 billion under 25, including CCUS, versus EUR 1.2 billion excluding CCUS. Cash conversion, we move up to above 45 compared to around 45. Sustainable financing, I guess above 70% is a pretty good number. For dividend policy, we confirm our progressive dividend approach.
Share buyback, we wanna keep as flexible option. Here are the key messages. There are five. Don't read through them. I give you the three which you should take home. Number one, we will further grow the company in a profitable way. We will and we have given new financial targets for 2025. Number two, CapEx for CCUS is very digestible for the company and will not have an impact on any capital allocation of the company. Number three, CO2 for Europe is a clear, clear business opportunity and margin opportunity for us because we have a product which we can sell at a different price point because it's not a commodity anymore. We have a 21% cost advantage to the industry because of CCUS requiring less purchase of allowances. Thanks a lot for listening.
I hope this was an interesting presentation, giving you a few data points about our financial CO2 transformation. I will hand over to Dominik to continue the session. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thanks
Okay. Yeah, you saw a fired-up CFO. Getting all the stuff done that the five in front of him have basically shared with you. Now I just need to find the right wrap-up slide. Here we go. Before we go into the Q&A, I thought maybe it's good to just wrap things up into the key messages again and just remind, and also take a little bit the questions into account that many of you have had. I think it's become very clear, not only that we focus on what we do best, but hopefully it also came across that at least the six of us here are very much loving the products that we are producing and selling.
We are loving to be at a junction where a company is maybe only every 100 to 150 years. Because, you know, next year we celebrate our 150 years, and I think if you go back in history where such a radical change in terms of product delivery to the customer happens, you have to go a very, very long back. Not 2,000 years, maybe, but very, very long. I think everybody is very excited to be at that junction. Point number two, we have shared with you our ambition on 50% sustainable revenues, and Nicola has presented, I think, a great framework, how we will build that up, bottom up, and then also be able to report on this for your benefit quarter over quarter and integrate it with our financial results, very importantly.
I think within that, it's equally important that our main target is to get to the net zero as quick as possible by offering as soon as possible, carbon-free concrete and cement. That's very important in the second message. Third message, we commit to reduce down to the 400 kg. I think it was Harry's or Nabil's question. There is a huge range again on that. There will still be plants in the network that have 700 kg-800 kg emission. There will be an increasing number of zero-emission plants that will basically ramp up over time. Very important, I think, to keep in mind on point number three, on promise number three.
Promise number four, and I think René has, with a lot of energy, shared with you how we are making this transition a successful business case. I think that's been the whole cloud so far over the industry, and we are fully committed to dissolve that cloud quickly for Heidelberg Materials in terms of growth, in terms of margins, in terms of cash flow, in terms of ROIC, in terms of leverage. After René's presentation, I would say we should add a sixth one. That's the sustainable financing piece. Because also there, we assume that if you are in a hard-to-abate industry, you better move quickly to have all the financial means available that you may need in the future in order to get that at the most competitive pricing.
I think that's exactly what we are trying to do with the sustainable financing piece. Last but not least, promise number five. Yes, we do this for our employees, but we do it predominantly for our shareholders. Many of you. We do this predominantly for our customers, and we do this obviously eventually also for the society we live in. This is not just a marketing slogan. I know that most of our 50,000 employees across the world, and we had this discussion internally, whether it's mature markets, whether it's emerging markets, they all have the desire to solve this massive issue for society because one thing is clear. If we turn this into an opportunity and make it happen. Jan gave you the example of Cementa in Slite.
Just to be clear, in Cementa in Slite, if we get down to the 1.8 million tons, the zero emission in Cementa, we will contribute a 3% reduction of the Swedish total roadmap in their carbon reduction. There is a massive incentive for governments to support us on this transition. It will be a fair share. We don't over-demand. We wanna. You know, it's a fair balance between the stakeholders, but we are convinced it can be done. As long as we convince the governments it can be done, they will also open their pockets in order to support this. With that, I think thanks for an interesting listening exercise, and now we go into the larger Q&A that now also involves the financial questions.
I would ask my three board colleagues to join me up here and Chris to moderate the Q&A. Thanks.