Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. This is Capital Markets Day 2020 via webcast. This time we are organizing the event as a virtual meeting from Espoo, Finland due to the travel restrictions caused by the evolving coronavirus situation. I'm Juha-Pekka Kekäläinen, the Head of Neste IR, and I will be moderating the event. Let's now have a look at the program. We're going to have an exciting agenda today, which is divided in two main parts. First, you will hear presentations on group strategy and on the renewables businesses. After that, we are going to have a 30-min Q&A, during which you can ask questions through the conference call line or the webcast chat box. After a 15-min break, we will continue with the presentations on Oil Products, Innovation, and Financials. Again, followed by a 30-min Q&A.
We are scheduled to end the program after Peter's concluding remarks at 3:30 P.M. U.K. time, 5:30 P.M. Finnish time. As always, please pay attention to the disclaimer, since we will be making forward-looking statements in the presentations. Now it's a great pleasure to introduce Peter Vanacker, Neste's President and CEO. Peter.
Thank you, J.P. Happy to be here. Of course, difficult times as you all know. The coronavirus is spreading around. I do believe that it is very important that we also talk about our strategy, that we have this Capital Markets Day. Therefore, I would like to thank you also for your flexibility to join us through this webcast. Of course, we are looking forward to quite a lot of questions that I am sure you will have. Now, let me maybe start with a little story. About some 10 years ago, I was together with a small group of people on a journey where we traveled through India. This was organized by INSEAD and Leaders' Quest. Whilst we were going through the country, we developed a slogan. This slogan was, "Doing better is good. Doing good is better.
Doing best is if we do both. That is exactly what we have been doing in 2019. We have been doing better. Look at our financial results. I will talk about them. Jyrki will go into more detail. We have also been doing good. If you look at how we helped our customers in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. 2018, it was 7.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions that were reduced. In 2019, we were close to 10 million tons. You know, we will talk about that, we have set ourself a target to go to 20 million tons of greenhouse gas emission savings by 2030. One may say that in one year time, since the last Capital Markets Day, we are ready or halfway to achieve that 20 million tons by 2030. Let's have a look also at the speakers of today.
As said, due to the fact that we do have this crisis ongoing, the WHO talks about the pandemic crisis already today, we do have a couple of speakers that will stay home. They will be available for the Q&A, but they will not join us here at the webcast. Of course, as a company, we do have quite a lot of business continuity plans that we have put in place and very travel heavy restrictions that we have put in place. One of the participants, ExCo members that will not be here is Mercedes Alonso. She is working out of the Düsseldorf office. She is running our business unit, Polymers and Chemicals. Carl Nyberg will also not be here today because he is working from a remote location as well, and he is running, as you know, the Renewable Road Transportation.
These presentations will be taken over by ourselves. I will talk about Polymers and Chemicals, and Matti Lehmus will talk about Renewable Road Transportation. As said, both people will be available for you at the Q&A through their voice that you will hear. In addition to Matti, happy to present to you then also Thorsten Lange. Thorsten has joined us, and he is running the Renewable Aviation business unit. Thorsten has spent his entire life in the aviation industry, really looking forward and hopefully you have a lot of questions for him as well. We have Marko Pekkola, who will talk about the Oil Products business and what we intend to do with that business. I believe there are very good plans that we have ahead of us to make that business also more sustainable in the future.
Lars Peter will talk about innovation. As you know, innovation is core for the company. Innovation is what brought us to this point in being so successful. Innovation is in the DNA of our people. Very happy also that Lars Peter will be able to talk to you about the future plans we have in innovation. Of course, Jyrki will talk about the financials. You're very familiar with Jyrki, so happy to have him today also on board. Let's have a look also at our purpose. Our purpose has changed a little bit over time. We have redefined it. The purpose was leaving a healthier planet for our children in the past. Today, we're talking about creating a healthier planet for our children.
It's a lot about the creativity that we have in our company, but also in creating, it says we have a leadership position that we are undertaking as one of the most sustainable companies in the world. We've done quite a lot during 2019, and let me maybe highlight a couple of things. This has been a huge transformation, the next step in the transformation in 2019 that we undertook. On one hand side, we sold our Russian business, we sold non-strategic parts of Neste Engineering Solutions. Remember, these are about 1,500 people that left our company during 2019. On the other hand side, we have added to what really is delivering to our purpose, creating a healthier planet for our children.
We hired about 1,200 people in those areas like Renewable Aviation, Renewable Polymers And Chemicals, ramping up our innovation resources, expanding also in the Renewable Road Transportation business, as well as, and Matti Lehmus will talk about that, starting to prepare for the next investments in our Renewables Platform. Quite a lot of things happened in 2019 that maybe are not that visible from the outside. What else have we been doing in 2019? We have expanded our business. Remember, when we were talking about at the beginning of 2019, about our business, our business was mainly focused on the northern part of Europe in oil products, marketing and services, as well as in the renewables part, and in California.
Today, we have opened new offices to collect, aggregate, specify waste and residues in China, mainly for used cooking oil, as well as for New Zealand and Australia. On the other hand side, we have of course also made great progress in starting our investment project in Singapore. Matti Lehmus will talk in detail about that. I can already say to you we're completely on track despite everything that is happening around us, and this is a major undertaking for our company. In addition to that, we have opened our office as well as legal entity in Germany. That will serve as the global head of the headquarter of our Renewable Polymers and Chemicals business. Also in Amsterdam, we have opened an office where we are running our global Renewable Aviation business.
We are confronted with aviation from that office every day because we are looking, when we look out of the window, immediately at the airport of Schiphol. How close can you be to your customer? Closer is almost not possible. Now of course, we have not finished yet, and we've just embarked on setting the stage, the second wave, as I talked about during the last Capital Markets Day, the second wave of transforming Neste in being a global leader in renewable and circular solutions. What does it now actually mean in terms of Renewable Road Transportation? I talked about already the fact that this business was mainly focused in the past on the potential we have in the northern part of Europe, as well as in California.
You remember when we talked about the results in Q2, that we were talking about we have started preparing new markets. These are geographic markets that we started to prepare. Now we have prepared them. We are in those markets. Our business model has changed in Renewable Road Transportation from the northern part of Europe, California, to now being present in different countries in Europe and Norway, as well as in different regions, parts of North America. Today, our Neste MY can already be bought directly at the pump, not just in Finland, but also in different countries in the world. We have more than 200 tank stations where people can actually buy our Neste MY, and we will continue to expand, of course. Renewable Aviation. Last year, I talked about we will move from feasibility to execution, making this a true running business.
That is exactly what we did in 2019. In 2019, we moved from that feasibility, now we have a running business. It's fully operational. We have not just 100,000 tons of capacity made available, but in addition to that, the entire supply chain is set up, as well as have we very strong teams, both in Europe as well in the United States. As I said, Thorsten will talk about that a little bit more in his presentation. Let's also look at the Renewable Polymers and Chemicals. Also here, we talked about a feasibility. How can we move that into creating a new business? In 2019, that's what we promised, also that's what we did.
Quite a lot of activities that we're undertaking, not just in aligning along the value chain with waste collection partners, but on the other hand side, having really broken the ice. We were the first one, together with LyondellBasell, that were able to create polyethylene and polypropylene together based upon renewable raw materials, waste and residues. Never been done before on the planet. Also very pleased with what we have accomplished in Renewable Polymers and Chemicals. As said, Mercedes will not be standing here in front of you, but I will take that presentation over from her. Now, let's have a look at our KPIs. As you know, safety is extremely important in the kind of business that we are. I'm pleased that we have made also in safety very, very good progress.
We were not, as you may say, distracted by focusing on the implementation of our strategy. We were also focusing on the ongoing business, on the action items that we have in place to make this a very safe environment to work in. On one hand side, our recordable incidents, we were able to repeat an excellent result from 2018. On the other hand side, in process safety, extremely pleased with that. The best ever result that we have achieved since Neste has been created. If I compare that, for example, having spent so many years in the chemical industry, if I were compare the occupational safety results at Neste with the process safety results at Neste, this is one of the safest companies to work in the entire chemical atmosphere across the world. Of course, the work has not been done.
We will continue to work upon that. Of course, also here, Matti as well as Marko will talk about that in their presentation. Now let's look at the financial results. Most of you, of course, are very familiar with that. This has been a tremendous year. We talked about the stellar performance that we had in 2019. We almost reached EUR 2 billion in comparable EBIT. EUR 2 billion. You may say, "Yes, but you got the contribution also of the Blender's Tax Credit in the United States." There was a lot of hard work by our people to get to the point that the Blender's Tax Credit was being granted, on one hand side.
On the other hand side, if you eliminate the Blender's Tax Credit, we still would have, on an equal to equal basis between 2019 and 2018, we would have made more than EUR 300 million more comparable EBIT in an existing manufacturing asset capacity situation. It was mainly due to the fact that we were able to creep our capacity. Quite a lot of hard work by smart people on one hand side, and also excellent margin management during 2019. Our share performance, 433% higher compared to 2015. If you compare that to the share performance of a group of peers, they had an improvement of 62%. I think that is a very convincing story that we also have here. We are, of course, as you can imagine, very pleased with that development.
Also our comparable earnings per share, EUR 2.04, which is substantially higher than in 2018. Also here, very pleased with that result, and Jyrki will talk more about that during his presentation. What does that mean for the investors? It means that we will have a record high dividend that we are proposing at the AGM to be paid out, EUR 783 million, which is exactly EUR 200 million higher than in 2018. That will be our proposal at the AGM. Per share, it will be EUR 0.92, and that EUR 0.92 is related to the results we made in 2019, and then an extraordinary dividend of EUR 0.10, which is related to income we generated in 2019, but actually did come out and actually belonged to 2018. Let's talk about our people.
We have developed our values and said, "Look, where we are standing right now in the implementation of our strategy, what would have to be the right values moving forward?" We had more than 2,500 of our own employees that were participating. They expressed their opinion in what values would they like to see. These values are we care, we have courage, and we cooperate. What is a big differentiator, I do believe now, having spent a bit more than one and a half years at Neste, a big differentiator is our people. Business is being made by people. Innovation is being made by people. Our people are extremely passionate about creating a healthier planet for our children. I talked about the 1,200 people that we have hired.
More than 50% of those people, when we ask them, "Why do you join Neste?" It is, they said, "Because we are inspired by your purpose, of your values that you have in the company." I think that is extremely powerful. We had some crisis in 2019. You remember we had an IT crisis. You remember we also had in Finland, there were some discussions and disputes ongoing with the unions. Our people pulled together. You almost didn't see any difference in how we were running our business, and that is the passion again that our people have. That is a very important differentiator if I compare ourselves with other companies.
Our new vision is leading the way towards a sustainable future together, and it does say leading the way because with the track record that we have, and if we talk to people, to our customers, if we talk to the Commission, to regulators, they see us as a leader. We say for ourselves, this is our vision. We can lead in this world. We can bring the parties together. It's all about the value chain. It's about partnerships. It's about innovation, and we can set the tone for a more sustainable future together. Our climate commitments as a result, we have also changed. On one hand side, you remember the handprint, which is we want to help our customers save their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20 million tons. Has not changed compared to last year.
We have changed our footprint with a very clear commitment here that we want to reach carbon neutral production by 2035. We will talk about that a little bit later during the presentations. We've also enhanced our innovation, whereby today we have clearly decided what are our markets that we want to serve. We expanded from Renewable Road Transportation to Aviation and Polymers and Chemicals.
We also, in terms of innovation, have said, "Look, we will continue to invest in our NEXBTL technology, but we will also start preparing new sources of waste carbon that will help us to grow also in the future beyond 2030, 2035, and I would also say 2040." Lars Peter will talk about that more in his presentation because there is a lot of waste carbon on this planet, and if we are a leader in renewable and circular solutions, we should tap into those additional sources of waste carbon that eventually do not fit to our NEXBTL technology, but that will fit with additional new technologies that we are developing. If I do a first summary, I think excellent track record that we had in 2019. Our people did their utmost while we were making big progress in implementation of the strategy.
We are extremely well-positioned now because we are in the Aviation business. We are in the Polymers and Chemicals business. We have ramped up our innovation resources in going into new areas, and you have seen a lot of the announcements coming out during the year, but also most recently during the last couple of weeks. Very pleased to have you on board. We will continue to create profitable growth through renewable and circular solutions. With that, now I want to give the floor to Matti Lehmus, and Matti will talk about the future of sustainable road transportation. Matti.
Thank you, Peter.
You're welcome.
Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon on my behalf. It's great to be back at the CMD, and I have the pleasure today to talk to you about the exciting business of road transportation and Neste's approach to it. I also, when reflecting back a year to our previous CMD, I think it's clear that the commitment towards sustainable road transportation has grown, and this is visible in a number of new announcements, new commitments that have been made, not only by countries, but actually also by cities and companies. I will start with a simple statement of saying that the global road transportation is on a clear growth path all the way to 2030.
I will illustrate this point by a couple of examples. So the first one is that in spite of all the efforts undertaken to come up with higher fuel efficiency, with alternative transport technologies, there is still an expectation that road transportation fuel demand will grow by 10%, from 2 billion tons to 2.2 billion tons, by 2030. Yes, it is true that electric vehicles, the penetration is growing, and there is an expectation that from the 8 million today, we will see growth to around 150 million electric vehicles by 2030. Substantial growth in electrification. At the same time, it's important to realize that it is still less than 10% of all passenger cars, and also in other segments like heavy duty, the penetration will likely be much lower. I come to an illustration, which is very important for the renewable diesel industry.
The heavy duty transportation fuel demand is expected to grow by 15% by 2030. That means a growth of 100 million tons to 840 million tons. Of course, primarily this is driven by diesel, which is the heavy duty transportation represents 70% of the global diesel demand. Clear growth segment in heavy duty transportation. What this means is we all also have a challenge. Because of this growth, the expectation is, and this is an IEA estimate, that CO2 emissions from the road transportation segment will grow by 1 billion tons by 2030. While we have a growth segment that is very interesting, it also means there is a very big need for sustainable road transportation solutions. This is what I would like to talk about next.
It is very interesting that during the last year, we have seen an increasing number of announcements and targets around carbon neutrality. If you look at the entire EU and the year 2050, this is an important year because the EU has set itself a target to be carbon neutral by 2050, and it has actually launched the Green Deal program to get there. What is more, we see a number of mega cities that have set themselves carbon neutrality targets for 2050. For example, Berlin, London, New York City. I think there is another message here, that beyond these mid-century targets, we have a number of examples where the carbon neutrality targets are much more ambitious in terms of timeline. For example, looking at countries, we continue to have a very high ambition in Nordic countries. Norway 2030, Finland 2035, Sweden 2045.
Reaching that carbon neutrality ahead of the EU. It's not only countries. There are cities, and this is again a new development, that have set themselves carbon neutrality targets. It's noteworthy that, for example, Melbourne already today is certified carbon neutral. Copenhagen, the first capital in the world, has set itself a carbon neutrality target for 2025. Building on this trend, what you can see on the slide is that we have also an increasing number of companies that set themselves carbon neutrality targets. A few very interesting ones. Schenker, a big logistics company, has set itself the target to be carbon neutral in all city traffic already in 2030. A very big company, Amazon, has recently announced a carbon neutrality target for 2040 for all its operations. I think the picture I'm painting is a very clear one.
There is a clear move towards carbon neutrality because there is a need for more sustainable traffic. Let me then discuss how this is reflected on the regulatory side. What is already clear and what has been confirmed during last year is that, for example, the European Union has a very clear program to reach carbon, or CO2 emission reductions. The new Renewable Energy Directive II has been confirmed, and it sets a clear target of 14% emission reductions by 2030. What also continues to be in place and what actually has been confirmed during last year is that a number of the Nordic countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, have confirmed very ambitious targets for CO2 reductions. You can see that, for example, Norway has already defined an ambition of 40% renewable energy by 2030, Sweden all the way almost 70% of CO2 reductions.
What is perhaps new is that during the last year we have also seen other European countries set themselves very ambitious ambitions. I would like to take a couple of examples from this slide. For example, the Netherlands is already at the moment at 16.4% renewable energy content and continues to drive this towards 2030. Another noteworthy example is that, for example, Spain and Italy have set themselves an ambition to grow the share of renewable energy all the way to 28%, in the case of Spain, by 2030, or 22% for Italy. Very clear signal also other countries are raising the ambition.
An interesting comment is that there is a number of emerging markets where, also the ambition is growing, and I would like to take the example of North American low carbon fuel standards. Like we all know, California has had a high ambition for a long time, 20% carbon intensity reduction by 2030. We are now seeing also other states, for example, in the U.S. West Coast, moving in this direction. For example, just yesterday, Oregon announced a target of 20% carbon intensity reduction by 2030, and there are some other states who are considering it. I think it's a clear signal of the direction that also many states are moving towards in North America. What does all this mean for the demand of renewable diesel in road transport? It's interesting to note that we have a clear growth both in Europe and in North America.
When you add the numbers, it is clear that renewable diesel demand will continue growing, and this is just based on the regulations already in place or that have been announced. We clearly see that the global demand for renewable diesel will exceed 20 million tons by 2030. There is also another interesting message in this slide. While if you look at the European side, the Nordics continue to be an important market segment, the rest of Europe is expected to also show significant growth by 2030. Another important message in this slide is that beyond the numbers that you can see, there is actually potential for further growth. What has not been shown in the slide is that, for example, areas like Asia-Pacific or South America may also add to the demand by 2030.
The demand outlook in this segment is quite robust when we look at renewable diesel. What does this then mean for Neste? I think what many of you who have followed Neste over the years know is that we have a very important customer segment in wholesalers and retailers. This is a segment where we have built our own sales force to serve the global customers, and where we have done systematic work to move beyond the molecule to actually offer our customers sustainable solutions. One example I could state is that we are not only offering the molecules, but we are taking care of the greenhouse gas reduction mandates for our customers. It's a very customer-centric approach, very solution-oriented approach, which is important in this growing segment.
Importantly for Neste, as our base is global, we also have the flexibility to optimize across this global customer base. A very important thing is that next to this important customer segment, there is also another one, which is the progressive cities, the municipalities, the fleets, and the brand owners. This is a growing segment. Neste has developed a clear approach to also serve this segment. It's based on a branded offering. The Neste MY brand is very important, and it's also very typically based on strategic channel partners who can serve this growing segment in a very efficient way. I would like to talk a little bit more about this approach, because we feel it's a very important one for the future. In the center of this approach is that we have identified a number of strategic customers.
For example, the cities, the municipalities, the fleets that we want to serve in the best possible way. The other thing is that in the center are our partners, our channel partners, whom we have selected because they have the ability to serve this segment in the best possible way. From our perspective, rather than building our own sales force, we have started to build a network of these partners. It's quicker, it's more flexible, and it's also a better approach to serve the customer segment in an optimal way. If you have followed our news, you have seen that we have taken this approach, for example, in Sweden, in the Netherlands, in California.
What we are now doing at the moment is that we are at the same time building a very systematic and sophisticated approach to data-driven marketing to create market insight that supports also our partners to serve this segment in the best possible way. As you can see, I'm very excited about the work done on the sales side, and I want to summarize this presentation by reiterating that Neste has actually a very unique position in this road transportation segment. We are, first of all, uniquely positioned to optimize across global markets. We have a very customer-centric approach that is based on offering sustainable solutions to our customer, and we are now increasingly building a branded offering with a data-driven approach. I will conclude my presentation here and hand over to my colleague, Thorsten Lange, who will now be talking about the sustainable aviation fuel.
Please, Thorsten.
Thank you very much, Matti. I'm very grateful to being here and to being part of the journey. I welcome you to the world of aviation fuel. A world, as Peter stated earlier, that had been my home for the last almost 20 years. I think I know what I'm talking about, and I know what that aviation industry means, not only to us, but also to you. You behind the screens that are basically flying every day, hopefully will continue to be flying in the future. If I may say, talking about greenhouse gas emission, not flying is the problem. The greenhouse gas emissions are the problems, this is the thing we have to tackle. Let's think about a moment of the business itself. You see that wonderful aircraft here that stands on solid ground.
You see an aircraft that is consuming fuel. Just to give you an idea, we're talking about 330 million gal that are consumed currently or that had been consumed in 2019, and it's growing. It is a business of $ 200 billion. It is a business that is run by very smart people, by enthusiastic people, and it is a global business. It is a business that is connecting people. It's a very, if I may say so, personal business. Me, coming from the business, knowing almost all the fuel buyers around the world, know exactly what it means to having to buy that fuel on a daily business. 330 million tons means more than 4,000 of those supertankers you see sometimes crossing the oceans. If you just line them up, it is more than 12,000 football fields, just to give you an idea.
Those 330 million tons, and if you only take 2%, if you would just think for a moment, 2% of that would be sustainable aviation fuel. We're already talking about 6.6 million tons. That clearly comes with a responsibility, and we are ready to taking this responsibility. We have built up a team that is very knowledgeable, that's actually coming, like me, out of the industry and understands the business from A to Z. We are ready to supporting an industry that definitely needs the help, and that, at the end, needs something they can touch, something tangible. Here we are. Although the greenhouse footprint is not even 3% of the worldwide emissions, we all know that the airline industry is in the limelight. We all know that the airline industry has something to do, and I think, and I know, the airline industry understood.
It is a growing business. I'm very sure that it will also survive the problems it is in now. The airline industry always has a problem and always comes as phoenix from the ash, even better than before. We want to be part of that story. Air travel will increase or will almost double within the next 15-20 years. Even though everybody is flying, and I'm very sure you are amongst those, more than half of the people do have concerns about the greenhouse gas emissions, which is understood. Are we ready? Are we prepared to go that way, and are we ready to help the industry? Are we prepared for this exciting journey? We are. As you heard last year, Renewable Aviation business has been ramped up. We started production. We checked the logistics. We were talking to first customers.
If I may go even 10 years back, Neste was the first one who operated more than 1,000 flights with Lufthansa those days to proving the case between Hamburg and Frankfurt with no incidents. This was the starting point. Since then, we are in the game, and we will be even more in the game in the future. After having ramped up, we now, if I may use the aviation word, we took off and we're flying. We were able to conclude our first deal with Lufthansa, as you know, one of the most important partners when it comes to aviation, one of the biggest ones. Followed by KLM, another European carrier that is playing a role and that also takes its responsibility for sustainability very seriously.
We are proud to being the supplier, together with our partner, to providing sustainable aviation fuel to all the business jets that were flying into the World Economic Forum. As you know, sustainability was one of the key topics during those meetings. We helped them all, and we had been very well perceived from them, and it was a very successful story. It also helped us to showing that we have the important stakeholders on board, because wherever we bring our product, we have to convince the stakeholders and the shareholders, the storage companies, the transporters, the governmental authorities. Everybody has to be on board, and we did that in Zurich.
We have them all on board, and they're all happy, and we showed that we can deliver not only the product, but also the service to answer all the open questions that the whole industry still has, because there is kind of uncertainty, and we have to help the people to better understand. We also announced to going just across the ocean, our partnership with JetBlue, who will get our product as a blend later this year. I may proudly present our partnership that you learned about last week already with Finnair and Finavia in our home turf. One would assume this is a given, but it takes a while to convincing people to have people on board. They are on board and they're all happy, including Finnair's customers, which is also an important thing. Talking about customers, we take their ideas seriously.
What you see here is the things that have been announced. There is actually more in the pipe. We respect our customers. We respect their wish to telling the people when they want to go online. I think that's just fair. What do we need? What would help us to accelerate the business? What do we need that would support our business case? You cannot take success and profitability for granted. Regulations are the key. We're basically talking about two different kind of regulations, just in a nutshell. There is the mandates. You have the so-called opt-in schemes. What is the biggest difference? On the mandates, you can de-link yourself from the road transportation business, of which Matti has just been talking before. Mandates would only apply and just apply to the aviation business. They are slowly kicking in.
You can see that Norway started, this is the dark blue now, with 0.5% in 2020. There's more countries to follow. The light blue indicates what countries we are talking about. We also have the so-called opt-in scheme. This is where we're making use of mandates that are already in place on the road transportation side. Where aviation can benefit from that. This is something that will kick in in Europe, that will be part of the RED II implementation in 2021, but this is also something that, and now we go again across the Atlantic, that will take place or has taken place in the U.S., and will most likely take place in 2021, also in Canada. What is the market we are talking about currently? It's a big market. I told you it's 330 million tons.
If you just look into the most important markets I was just referring to, it's 60 million tons in Europe, and it's almost 90 million tons in the U.S. A big market. If you just look at the slide and you just think a moment about what are the possible scenarios, you see what potential we have and what potential we are willing to serve. It's a range between 2%-3%, up to 14%, which would mean we're talking about 2.5 million tons, up to almost 10 million tons in 2030. Can we deliver that? Most importantly, is this something the airlines would go for? I was at the Brussels A4E summit last week, and I heard all the CEOs talking about the different measures they're taking. I think you have been experiencing what measures have been taking.
Not only that the aircrafts that are flying above your head are less noisy, but they're also more fuel efficient. If you're sitting down on your chair, you're sitting on thinner chairs because the aircraft has to be lighter. The airlines doing a lot to helping, but it comes to its limits. On the other hand, we have CORSIA, we have ETS, if I'm just talking about the European area, which also helps. Compensation measures are part of the equation, and they are important. There is the middle. There is the gap that we have to fill. I can just tell you, we are ready to fill that gap. Where do we stand and how do we think to fill that gap? We heard already our capacity currently is around 100,000 tons. This is just the start.
Business will become material for Neste in 2022 when our Singapore refinery is ready to providing renewable jet on a larger scale, and this is important. Also, we had already heard that we're doing a feasibility study to increasing our capacity in Rotterdam. 450,000 tons could be made available in 2022. Always having in mind that we are keeping our optionalities. It cannot be taken for granted. The business case has to be supported, but the capacity and the capability will be there, and this is what the aviation industry needs, and this is what will make us where we are already, but we are and will be the number one on renewable jet. This is not where we're stopping. Our way goes further on.
Matti will later be talking about our plans on the production side. I'm very proud to being part of that game here where I see what capable people we have on the production side, not only talking about production creep, but also about all the fancy ideas, some would say crazy ideas they have, but I can tell you those ideas are the future and will be a good solution for the future. Innovation is another thing that is important. You will learn later that day from my colleague, Lars Peter, in what we are involved and what we are planning. I can just tell you, me only being in the business for two months, I'm overwhelmed by the capacities, by the interest, by the motivation of the people, by the knowledge.
That goes all the way from innovation to production, but also when it comes to regulations, the understanding of the business. As you can imagine, this is not an easy business. This is a business that need people that understand what they do. Customer and partners understood what we do, and they understood what we are able to deliver. I was earlier talking about Lufthansa, the KLM, the JetBlue, and all the others. It also refers to airports, to regulators, but also to corporates. Corporates have seen that they have to take their responsibility, and this is also something we have to have in mind and we have an eye on, and we are working together with our customers on developing a sustainable business. All this with keeping flexibility and being able to optimize our production.
I'm very confident that I'm a part of a very successful business, not only this year, but for a long time and with a very bright future. Thank you very much, and with this, I again hand over to Peter. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Thorsten. I think that shows the huge potential that we have in the different markets. Matti talked about Renewable Road Transportation, he gave a projection of a market that is being created to 20 million tons by 2030. Thorsten talked about Renewable Aviation, whatever scenario that you want to follow, it's somewhere, if it is five million tons or 10 million tons in demands that could be created by 2030, it's huge. We have a lot of potential to continue to grow with our NEXBTL technology. Now let me talk now about polymers and chemicals that will add to the potential that we have in order to grow. You see that this optionality that we're building in our business model is starting to really create, being shaped, and taking place.
I said at the beginning that in Polymers and Chemicals, we are creating a new market. This has not been done before by anybody else in the industry. Having spent so many years in this industry myself, I have never seen the excitement, I have never seen the pressure. I have never seen that actually people do mean it. People want to make the plastics and chemicals business much more sustainable based upon renewable solutions on one hand side, but also circular solutions on the other hand side. It doesn't just come from one source. It comes from all the different sources. If it is the consumer. This generation, I have a 21 years old, I have a 19 years old, they do care.
They are looking what they are buying, and if the product that they are buying, for example, the packaging, the perfume, my daughter, if that is also sustainable. There is the pressure coming from the consumer. There is also the pressure that is coming from the regulator. I talked at the beginning about the Green Deal. Now, we spend a lot of time talking to regulators, and you see that this is on top of their agenda. They want to make this world much more sustainable in the future, and that is a big driver to create demand. Also, if we talk about the big brands, and these are not small niche brands that we are talking about. We have a couple of examples. There are many more than that. If you talk about Unilever, if you talk about Henkel, they really mean it.
They have put sustainability in the core of their strategy. They don't just stay at talking about sustainability, but they have clearly defined and articulated targets. One of the examples that we have here. You saw the announcement that we just recently brought out in cooperation with the manufacturer of the polypropylene, Borealis. We are serving now Henkel, because Henkel wants to make its packaging sustainable, 100% recyclable by 2025. That's five years from now, 2025. You see that demand is really being created right now from all angles. We get lots of questions. We're highly visible. We get the recognition as well. If I look back one year ago, when we started thinking about entering this market, we were not yet being seen because this is really transformational for Neste.
We have always been in the fuels business, so we expand into aviation now, but this is a new field for us. At the end of last year, being quoted by the Bioplastics Association that we are one of the 10 most important game changers is a really important recognition, and brings us also into that very complex value chain as a solution provider. If we look at the demand that is being created, plastics is still growing in terms of demand on a global basis by about 3.5%-4% per year. If you look at the different projections that are coming from IHS, McKinsey, et cetera, then you see that also in Europe, there is still a growing demand in terms of plastics. More importantly is that the demand in terms of bioplastics, renewable plastics, is growing substantially towards 2030.
2018, there was about 5 million tons of demand, that was mainly based upon mechanical recycling. Solutions that came out of mechanical recycling of waste plastics. That has its limits, because you lose your properties and in addition to that, you can actually not serve the food industry with these grades. You cannot serve the pharmaceutical industry. What is our solution that we have? I have talked about that also during the last Capital Markets Day. There are two solutions how we go into the market. The first solution is the one that we have ready, which is based upon our NEXBTL technology. We are producing renewable hydrocarbons based on waste and residues, as you know. We are supplying them to production partners that are producing the plastics raw materials.
The second solution is that we are developing, and this also together with innovation partners, but also together with start-up companies, new technologies that are used for chemical recycling. Taking waste plastic and recycle it in a chemical way. Let's have a look again at this value chain because, and even if I showed this to you last year, I think it's important to again look at that, because this is a highly complex value chain in the polymers and chemicals world. To show you also a little bit, how do we enter this value chain? The first solution, based upon our NEXBTL technology, is going as a renewable hydrocarbon, the product that we are supplying, to a cracking partner. These are the well-reputated companies that are producing the different grades in plastics, polyethylene, polypropylene, polyurethanes, et cetera.
They are in that polymerization, then supplying to compounder, distribution, converter, to end up at the brand owner. What do we do? We build up traction in the market by having a clear understanding, what is it what the brand owner is expecting. Henkel, Unilever, P&G, et cetera. These are all brand owners. IKEA, one that we have announced also our partnership with them in the past. That's the first solution. The second solution, which will probably be completely ready to go to the market three to five years from now, is this so-called chemical recycling. That's the other blue part that you see in the value chain, whereby we cooperate with waste management partners. We then take that waste plastic and go through a liquefaction step.
After the liquefaction step, the upgrading step, then it goes back into the cycle to the plastics producers, the polyethylene, polypropylene producers. That is what is really interesting for the brand owners, because they don't just want to have one solution. They want to have a partner that actually can support them with the waste and residues that we are using for our NEXBTL technology on one hand side, also they want to have a partner that takes then the waste plastic and recycles that back into the entire cycle. Here we are, Neste. We have a unique position because we do have the competencies to address both sides. Let me talk a little bit more in details on the first step, which is the NEXBTL renewable hydrocarbon technology we use for renewable diesel and renewable aviation fuel.
You see the achievements that we accomplished in 2019. LyondellBasell, Borealis, these are the big names if we are talking about thermoplastic producers. These are not the small ones. We have aligned with LyondellBasell, an excellent relationship. We have aligned with Borealis. We are working also with other plastics players. We have also aligned with chemical players. Some of them already have it into execution. Clariant is one of the specialty chemicals players. They have today, based upon our renewable hydrocarbons, already 11 new additives that they have launched in the market. IKEA talked about it, this collaboration. They have clearly articulated that they want to also make their products more sustainable. Cofresco, very important in Germany. Henkel. In this area, this thing is happening. That means that the market has been created.
We are supplying on a continuous basis to the plastics producers already as we speak now. That is the big transformation that we made in less than one year. From that, we can continue, of course, to ramp up. Let's look at the second step. The second step, the chemical recycling step. As I said, it's a highly complex value chain that we are talking about, but we do have a very important differentiating factor. We have a lot of history how to upgrade low qualities of waste and residue to high-quality products. That's our core competency, and that is what we are using to develop these new technologies that are needed for chemical recycling of waste plastics. Take low qualities of waste plastic that nobody can use, that cannot be used for mechanical recycling, that otherwise would end up on the landfill.
It's a good source of waste carbon, we use that as a component to then liquefy and then go into the value chain, as I explained before. Here, this is also starting to happen. You saw the announcement last years. In Europe, two of the major waste companies, Remondis and Ravago. Remondis, German company. Ravago, Belgian company. They are having a very strong position in waste management. We have partners with them, we are working now very intensively on the next step, which is the liquefaction step. You saw the announcement that came out just recently, a couple of days ago. We are using also venture capitalism. We are injecting equity into what we believe could be the winning chemical recycling technologies, the liquefaction technologies of the future.
We made the first announcement, which is with a company from the United Kingdom, Recycling Technologies, that has a small scale unit. They have tested it, and now this is being ramped up to produce the next unit. This will be a field where you will hear also for the next year, quite a lot of our activities that we are aligning then also with other startup companies, as well as developing, of course, our own technology. You see that in this area of polymers and chemicals, a lot is happening as we speak. We have created the entrance in the market. We are a partner now of the plastics and chemicals players, the big players across the globe. We are receiving the recognition as well. We're supplying on a continuous basis already the raw materials, the renewables to those players.
You see from the milestones in chemical recycling, we are setting up our value chain. We're setting up the stage so that in three to five years from now, this could be also quite substantial for our company. With this, let's now have a look at Renewable Road Transportation, Renewable Aviation, Renewable Polymers and Chemicals. What does it actually mean for our manufacturing platform, and what does it mean also in terms of waste and residues collection and the whole supply chain that we are expanding? With that, I give to Matti again.
Thank you, Peter.
You're welcome.
Ladies and gentlemen, good to be back on stage. What I would like to start with is, let's take a year back and remember the strategy that we announced for our renewables. I think it's clear that what we announced in last year's CMD was a very ambitious growth strategy for our renewables business. What I can state today, one year later, roughly, is that I am extremely pleased with the progress that we have made, both on the feedstock side and also on the production side, to grow our platforms. I have to state that today, the feedstock and production platform that Neste has is absolutely unique in the industry. I would like to now, in the next 15-20 minutes, really take you through three core areas of our strategy.
One is operational excellence, the other one is the feedstock platform growth, and the third one is the production development we are doing. Let us start with the excellence part. Again, a year ago, on a group level, we announced a very ambitious target that by focusing on operational excellence, we will improve the company EBIT by at least EUR 100 million by the end of 2022. What happened at that time is that we started also in the renewables, a very systematic effort to improve our operational capabilities in selected areas. Again, what I'm really pleased to state today is that already in 2019, we were able, in the renewables, to create more than EUR 100 million comparable EBIT improvement through this work. It's really an impressive achievement. There were two areas that we really focused on.
The first one is the capacity creep of our existing facilities. We moved from 2.7 million tons to the current capacity of 3 million tons. What that means is more than 10% increase of our nameplate capacity. How we got there was not through major investments, but actually by focusing on reliability, small investments, continuous improvement of our operating procedures. Everybody will understand that this has been a very important driver of our operational excellence. There is another very important message here. We are targeting, and we are confident that we will be able to further drive this capacity creep by another 200,000 tons by 2022. There was also another very interesting area that we focused on in this work, and that is the catalyst lifecycle optimization.
What actually has happened over the last year is that we have developed a very sophisticated model through which we can optimize the very complex combination of the catalyst lifetime, so how long we run between the turnarounds, the optimal feedstock mix, and then the capacity utilization, so how hard we operate the units, and this whole thing to really maximize the end-to-end value. Why is this so important for us? The fact is that last year, by doing this systematic improvement, we were able to create EUR 25 million value in 2019 alone. It is clear it is another area that we are focusing on.
While operational excellence is fundamentally important to the business and there's a lot of potential, I would now like to move to another topic, which is the long-term supply and demand balance for the entire renewable diesel and aviation fuel industry. As you heard from my colleagues, the demand outlook for renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel is very robust. We do expect that to exceed 20 million tons by 2030, and this is driven by the regulations that have already been announced or the ambitions that have been announced recently. If you look to 2023, you can see that already in this time period, we expect the demand to grow towards close to 15 million tons. Let us turn to the supply side.
I'm sure many of you have followed the industry very closely. There have been a lot of announcements of projects in the previous years. When we combine all of these projects that have been announced, and we make the assumptions that 85% at least of those will materialize, which have not yet been confirmed, we actually note that the capacity will grow to close to 16 million tons by 2023. I think here is a very important message when we look at this from a helicopter perspective. We are clearly looking at an industry where, yes, there is going to be supply growth. At the same time, we have a robust demand growth outlook, and on a high level, it looks relatively balanced all the way to 2023. I would like to make two very important observations here.
First one is on the supply side, 40% of the capacity growth that has been announced is not yet confirmed by a final investment decision. That is more than 6 million tons. What this means in practice is that we will see some changes. We will see postponements, cancellations, potentially like we did last year. Of course, there is also a chance going forward that we will see new announcements. The other very important observation is that on the demand side, there is also, and especially in the longer term, upside potential, whether this is in new geographies or in new applications. For example, the Renewable Polymers segment that Peter talked about represents such long-term upside.
From this picture of the global supply and demand, I would like to move to the very important discussion around feedstock, because feedstock is obviously a fundamental driver for the renewable industry. Last year in the CMD, we updated you with our view that the current availability of waste and residue is around 30 million tons. Today, with a lot of the analysis we are doing, we can see that there is a clear growth outlook to over 35 million tons waste and residue feedstock availability by 2030. I think this is a very important message. Ourselves, but also other industry players, are doing a lot of actions to drive improved aggregation, improved collection, but also improved technologies, for example, in pretreatment to go to lower qualities. This is driving the growth of the global waste and residue feedstock pool.
There is also another very important message on this slide, and that is that if you look at the longer term, we do expect significant growth potential in new technologies. This could be lignocellulosics, it could be algae, it could be municipal solid waste. This, because we do see significant potential in this area, is exactly the reason why we also as a company are putting a lot of focus in this area, and you will hear more from my colleague, Lars Peter, later about our efforts in this area.
Well, from the global picture, let us move to what is Neste doing, what did Neste do in 2019 to drive the supply of waste and residue? I'm very pleased to state that with the systematic work we are doing, we were able to grow the supply of waste and residue to a record volume of 2.9 million ton in 2019. This is quite significant, because it does represent 20% growth from the previous year, and it also means that we are by far, the largest user of fatty waste and residue type streams globally. The picture that you can see actually nicely illustrates how our efforts to drive the continuously, the expansion of our global aggregation and collection, is now showing that we are covering very broadly, the globe in many countries from where we are sourced.
In order to illustrate the efforts we have been doing this, I could give you some examples. For example, that last year we opened six new terminals for the collection of waste and residues. We also, for example, in the field of used cooking oil, that is very important for us, we tripled the number of suppliers during last year. The other thing that we did is that we also pushed for a continuous expansion of our geographical footprint by going into new areas and closer to the partners in those areas. I think the examples here would be China and Australia. In both countries, we opened a new office, established a local team, to have the ability to go closer to our partners to accelerate the development of the aggregation of collection. Let me spend a little bit of time on our feedstock mix.
Those of you again who have followed Neste know that we have for a long time put a lot of effort in having a broad range of feedstocks and the flexibility to use different types of feedstocks. This is clearly still in place, and we take pride in the fact that we are using more than 10 different feedstock types. With the efforts to really grow the supply of certain feedstocks such as animal fat and used cooking oil, we can today state that the largest categories in our feedstock mix are, first of all, animal fat, secondarily, used cooking oil, and as a third category, residues from vegetable oil processing. I think it's again, an important signal that by the systematic work we are doing, we are able to grow the volumes of these very important streams.
This is indeed the order of our most important feedstock categories in waste and residues at the moment. Well, let me move to our focus areas in 2020. I think it's very important to note that the demand for waste and residue has been growing. We are looking at a tightening market in 2019, so the efforts in this area are a very important driver for our competitiveness. If I first reflect a little bit on what has happened in the market. Already in early 2019, we started observing a trend where the prices for both animal fats, used cooking oil, went on an increasing trend. In the second half of the year, also, for example, palm oil clearly showed an increasing trend.
I now look at what has happened in 2020, I can see that the increasing trend has clearly continued for waste and residues such as animal fats and used cooking oils. Palm oil, in the very recent history, we have seen a clear decrease, which follows from the overall situation around the coronavirus. In the last two months, we have seen actually a 25% drop for palm oil. Still, we see a tight market for animal fat and used cooking oil. That underlines that our efforts in this area continue to be extremely important. What are the most important areas in 2020? First of all, it's continued organic growth in existing markets. We continue looking at opening new terminals, making our supply chain more efficient, and examples would be, for example, China or the United States. Another area is, again, geographic expansion.
We do see opportunities in areas such as South America and also Eastern Europe, where we intend to go closer to our partners. Finally, we keep working on M&A opportunities to strengthen our strategic positioning in the most important supply chains. Here I'm pleased to give you an example. We were just able this week to announce that we have acquired a used cooking oil collector in the United States called Mahoney Environmental. I would be happy to give you some background on this acquisition, as it's a great example of that work we are doing on the acquisition side. Mahoney is the third largest collector of used cooking oil in the United States. It serves 37,500 customer locations in the Central and Eastern United States, has a broad range of services and solutions.
To give you a flavor, it has seven processing units, almost 300 employees. Why is this such a good strategic fit with Neste? I would highlight three areas. First of all, it ensures that we have access to a substantial volume of used cooking oil in the United States. through the existing activities of Mahoney. Secondarily, it's obviously for us, a platform for growth. We will be driving a growth of the activities in North America in order to be able to grow this platform for the future. Finally, there will be interesting opportunities to, for example, look at the whole supply chain and to drive for even better lower carbon intensity in order to create value. This is a great company, and we are very excited about the opportunities to cooperate and develop this and grow this in the future.
Let us look at the longer term feedstock strategy of Neste. Again, it's for me very clear that for a long time, Neste's feedstock strategy has been based foundationally on the fact that the feedstocks need to be sustainable, and we have also been driving for expanding waste and residue share for a number of years. Both of these trends are very clear, and they are driven by both regulatory developments. You could take, for example, the crop cap in the European Union or the Annex IXA advanced feedstock requirements. It's also customer preferences that drive into this direction. We have now spent a lot of time on our long-term feedstock strategy, and we are able to clearly articulate the concrete ambitions we have now set ourselves for the long-term feedstock strategy.
I would highlight, first of all, that we expect that the waste and residue share will grow to 100% by 2025. This is a very ambitious target, but we are confident that Neste, with all the capabilities we have globally and technologically, we can reach it. We can get there. The second very important strategic target is that by 2030, in the longer term, we expect the share of new types of feedstocks to grow. Again, I emphasize that this is a very ambitious feedstock strategy, and at the same time, we are in a unique position to make it happen. There are three pillars that we are focusing on to get there. The first one is that we continue the work of expanding our waste and residue availability, exactly with the program I explained to you earlier.
The second pillar is that we are looking at the diversification of the feedstock pool, going to new types of feedstock, either in the Annex IXA feedstocks or some totally new technologies that we look at in our innovation portfolio. There is a very interesting third pillar, that is that we have started the development of novel vegetable oils from agricultural concepts that target zero ILUC, zero indirect land use change impact. What this means in practice, as an example, it could be crops that can be grown on degraded land, which cannot be otherwise used. We are confident that this is an area which also has substantial long-term potential and will play an increasingly important role in our portfolio longer term. Well, I've now covered extensively our feedstock strategy, and I would like to move to the production side, which is very important in our growth roadmap.
Like you know, we have a very major project ongoing in Singapore. This is a 1.3 million tons expansion of capacity that will go on stream mid-2022, and that has the capability to be flexible between renewable diesel and renewable jet fuel up to 1 million tons. My very important message is, and our CEO already said it also, I'm extremely pleased that with this complex project, we are on track, both what comes to schedule and to budget. At this point, I would like to share you a short video so that you can actually see what the site looks like at the moment. It is a very big site, like you can see, we have moved from the soil preparations to actually build on the ground. You can start to see first tanks, first buildings being built.
We have already today 1,800 workers on this site, and this will grow to 6,000 at peak. What I'm particularly happy about, we have already 2.7 million safe working hours. Very well managed project. Another very important part on our roadmap is the fact that we are on good track, and we are already quite far in a feasibility study for an aviation fuel facility at our Rotterdam refinery. We are targeting 450,000 tons, again, not additional capacity, but flexibility to produce either renewable diesel or aviation fuel, and this to be online by 2023. This is a very important part on the roadmap to create our renewable, Sustainable Aviation Fuel capabilities. The other important message is that in parallel to working on the Singapore expansion and on this Sustainable Aviation Fuel project, we are already today working on our capacity growth projects beyond Singapore expansion.
Like we promised in our Capital Markets Day a year ago, we are not waiting to complete that project, but we are already in parallel working on the engineering studies to enable the next wave of growth after 2022. I want to now give you some insight on what our concept is here. Firstly, we are of course, already committed to the capacity creep and to the Singapore expansion project to reach 4.5 million tons by 2022, mid-2022. That is already a 50% growth. Very importantly, we are today already in engineering studies for several different world-scale site options, and this includes both existing sites, such as Porvoo or Rotterdam, but we are also looking at selected new sites in new locations, for example, in the U.S.
What is important here is that we see that the concept we chose for Singapore expansion is a very good one. Whether you look at the size, their 1.3 million ton, the flexibility to optimize between aviation fuel and diesel, these are the same design parameters that we are also taking into the engineering work for the future sites. Of course, we will then have to slightly modify locally, but this is a very important basis for the engineering. This engineering work, which is happening already for some time, will enable us, going forward, to compare these options both with commercial and technical criteria, looking at CapEx, permitting timeline, availability of utilities, feedstock access, all these criteria. We are then targeting to make an investment decision by end 2021, and to have the next production start up in 2025.
Very pleased with this development, which is an important part of our work to maintain our leadership in this field. I want to complete by having a short discussion then on our unique business model that we have in the renewables. This is based on the global footprint in production, in sales, in feedstock, that enables us to do a continuous sales margin optimization. Like you all can observe, we have a very volatile market at the moment, and this also means that we have the possibility to optimize our global system according to the market, the target always being sales margin optimization. The capability we have is to adjust our system not only on a quarter or a monthly basis, but if needed, even to make adjustments on a weekly basis.
You can see in the chart last year that in an environment where, for example, feedstocks were growing, we were still able to reach a very good sales margin development in 2019. What we are working on is to also have the ability to do a strategic sales optimization. Today, of course, the road transport is the biggest share of our sales. In the future, we will increasingly have the possibility to optimize between the different segments, aviation, road, Renewable Polymers and Chemicals. Finally, very important comment, we are also doing margin hedging to reduce the volatility. We have, I would say, a relatively straightforward system where we have typically a duration of approximately one year, for three to four quarters, where we look at using vegetable instruments, selected oil product instruments, and then hedging roughly 50% of our sales exposure.
The comment that I would add to this one is this is there to reduce volatility. It's not a perfect hedge. You can see from our feedstock base that there are no instruments to accurately hedge, but it smoothens the market volatility, depending always on how good the correlation is between the instruments we are using and that we are actually then using as feedstocks and sales. Let me now then complete the whole overview of the renewables. We have discussed that there is a clear growth outlook in this business. The three areas that we are working on is that we are systematically working on growth of our, and a diversification of our feedstock pool. We are in parallel looking at maintaining our global leadership in the growing renewables market, both what comes to sales, but also what comes to production.
Finally, we are continuously working on improvement of our operations to drive substantial value creation. With these words, I will complete my presentation, and we are now ready for the Q&A, so I would ask my colleagues to join me here on stage.
Yes. Thank you. We would now be ready for the questions.
Zero one on your telephone keypad.
In the meanwhile, before the lines are clear, I have a question from Michael Alsford from Citi. How much of the current waste and residue feedstock market can you access today based on your existing sourcing capabilities?
Very good question from Michael. I would ask Matti, if you can answer.
Yes. It's a great question. We haven't actually quantified that number exactly. Like you could see, the global waste and residue pool is around 30 million tons. What Neste has been doing, we have been continuously increasing the footprint that we have, looking at growing the number of countries that we active in, growing the number of supply partners that we have. We are actually driving an increase of our own supply potential continuously. I unfortunately don't have an exact number how much that is out of the 30 million tons, but it is something we are continuously growing.
I'll take the next one over the web. You have previously talked about the 40% market share in road transportation. Does this target still hold? The question come from Nick Constantakis of ExxonMobil.
Yeah, thanks for asking the question, Nick. That does still hold. You clearly also said in your question already, 40% on Renewable Road Transportation. That is still the target that we have in Renewable Road Transportation.
Our first question is from Josh Stone from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Josh, can you hear us? Can you please take us on off mute?
Hello? No.
Joshua?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
You can hear me? Yes. Hi. I've got two questions, please. Just on the feedstock, are you able to say how much used cooking oil supply your acquisition of Mahoney gives you access to? Related to that, as competition's growing for feedstock, how much more vertical integration you think is required to counter that risk? My second question, you presented a chart showing the supply and demand forecasts for renewable products. It was quite noticeable, 2019, you've got what looks like an oversupply of renewable diesel, and yet you printed record margin. To what extent, are you able to explain that, and to what extent are supply and demand important for your margin? Thank you.
Okay, Joshua, thank you very much, and maybe I give to Matti.
Yes.
Thank you, Joshua, for both questions. I will start with the question on the used cooking oil. What I said is, it's a substantial volume. It's 37,000 collection points that this Mahoney operation brings to us. We are not giving the exact volume that that brings. I think the more important message is that for us, this is a platform to already take the access to that substantial volume today, but also to grow it over time, because this is obviously something that is important for Neste's strategy. I think it's a combination for us, when you ask about how important the strategic access is. We have very good connections to our partners today. We continue developing our partner network globally.
In parallel, we are looking for these kind of opportunities where we can also structurally ensure the access to a strategic stream and then grow it over time. It's really both and. The other question was on the supply and demand balance. I would say, of course, supply and demand balance is important for us. I think the important message I wanted to convey is that if you look at the next five years, for example, that we actually have a relatively balanced situation. That we have both demand growing quite strongly, but we also expect supply to grow through the new projects. The important thing is that they are roughly balanced. There is, of course, a level of detail of when exactly an operation starts, so you cannot say exactly on an annual basis what that balance means.
The key is that over time, we see them to be quite balanced.
Let me maybe also add to that, Joshua. This acquisition that we are making right now, Mahoney Environmental has a very strong footprint in the United States. This is not a small acquisition we are talking about. The fact how they have developed this over what, about 30 years, is quite impressive. We were impressed how they have been able to do that organically as well, to take quite a lot of smaller acquisitions to add on to that. When I read from time to time the comments that came back to us when we announced this acquisition, some people thought this is a minor acquisition, and this is a bit bigger than what I have seen in the analyst reports.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question is from Thomas Otto from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead, your line is open.
Good afternoon. Just wanted to talk about the new projects that you're considering for FID before the end of 2021. You're looking to do them as usual at 100%, and if so, is it fair to assume that you're going to develop these projects, and you've mentioned several projects. Is it fair to say that you're going to develop them in sequence as opposed to, say two at, in one go like you've done in the first cycle with Rotterdam and Singapore? Secondly, maybe just more on the near term. A nice chart on the feedstock price evolution over the past 12 months, and clearly, cooking oil and animal fats has a limited correlation to what's happened to the crude oil markets. Diesel prices, which is a substitute to, or the a competition to your product, if your renewable products has massively collapsed.
I'm wondering how pricing sensitive some of your customers are. I know Europe is mandates-driven, but maybe if you can talk about North America and what you're seeing in terms of potential risks to volumes in the near term. Thank you.
Thanks for the question. Excuse me. I will make a couple of comments on the first question. I will give to you, Matti, if you have additional comments, and as well also on the second question, if you can take that. We have said we want to have 40% market share by 2030 in the Renewable Road Transportation market. We talked about the opportunities we have in aviation. We talk about the opportunities we have in polymers and chemicals. We have embarked immediately after the CMD in February last year, in looking at all the potential opportunities that we have. We did not exclude M&A, we did not exclude partnerships. The plans that we now have in place after having done that part of the analysis is clearly going to make own. That means we do our own investments. Matti alluded to that.
We have a very good setup. In Singapore, we have quite good engineering on that. We have a lot of new technology that we have included in the Singapore plant that we are currently building up. It's the approach you have to look at is like cloning and adapting to the local needs of what we are building in Singapore. These kind of things, let me highlight that as well, they do take quite a lot of efforts and quite a lot of time. That's why we have said we are not going to just focus on doing the studies on one side. Like Matti also said, we're doing the studies simultaneously in that first phase, Rotterdam, Porvoo, different sites in the United States.
Does that mean that we will build only one plant, or does it mean that we will build several plants at the same time? That is not a decision yet. That's too early in the process in order to take that decision. We said by the end of 2021, Matti said it in his presentation, this will be the FID. Of course, as you know, there is a lot of work that actually goes on before you get to an FID. If we get the FID, as we said, by the end of 2021, that means that we have Singapore, the current plan by the middle of 2022. That means that you're fully ramping up until the end of 2022. We have the full capacity of Singapore in 2023. Now, two years later, we have the next plant up and running.
Imagine the capabilities that one needs to have in an organization to do that simultaneously. We believe we can do it. Yeah. That's why we said we're going to start with, immediately after the last Capital Markets Day last year, start doing all the engineering work. Quite a lot of people who are already working on that engineering. I give the Matti, if you have any additional comments to this or?
No, I think that covered that one. There was another question. Shall I?
Sure, please. Go ahead.
The other question you had, Thomas, was on the impact of the short-term situation that we see on our renewables business and on the demand. What I would comment is that, yes, of course, from the demand side, like you know, this is largely driven through the existing mandates. We don't see a short-term immediate volume impact that much. I think what is of course clear to say that if you, and I'm sure you follow the commodities market, we have seen very big price movements of several commodities in the last weeks and months. If you take an example, let's take gas oil prices, for example, have gone down by more than 40% since the beginning of the year. Palm oil has come down less, but still around 25% from the beginning of the year.
I think it's clear that, of course, there are impacts also on the renewables business from these very quick and abrupt price movements. I think it would be fair to say that the main impact will be that, yes, we do expect short-term negative impact on our sales margin in the first half of this year. Then longer term, of course, it will be depending on the scenario how this evolves. We have commodities which move faster, others which adapt bits more slowly. That we will then see in the coming months.
Perfect. If I may, just another question. If I remember correctly, several quarters ago, you talked about generally your 60% term and 40% spot. Can you kind of explain why you have the spot exposure? I'm just a little bit puzzled about that. Thank you.
The spot exposure gives us, you can say this is an exposure. On the other hand side, you can also say, this can be opportunistic.
Yes.
It gives us also room to maneuver where we are not locked into certain term contracts to optimize also the value. For 2020, we started the year 2020 not with a 60/40, and we said when we had the Q4 call, that that percentage of term is actually higher than 60%. We're more around, let's say, 70%+ now in term.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Our next question is from Peter Low from Redburn. Please go ahead. Your line is open
Oh, hi, thanks. On the feedstock, you've identified 35 million tons of waste and residue to go after. Can you give us an idea of what proportion of that is already being used today, either for biofuel or in fact, by other industries? To what extent the inflation that's been seen in feedstocks is structural, and therefore we should assume that it continues going forward. The second question was that you talked a bit in the presentation about Neste's competitive advantages your global feedstock mix and sales optimization, et cetera. What are the barriers to entry that prevent a competitor building out similar capability over time? Thanks.
Yeah. Very good questions, as usual. I would give the first question again to Matti, because it's about waste and residue, and you're very close to that.
Thank you. Excellent question. Again, it's not something we have exactly quantified, but how you can look at it is that today, the identified market for waste and residues, the current streams we have given that estimate of around 30 million tons. Of course, today's world, waste and residue means it finds some use. This is typically used either in high-value uses like we are trying to do, or we are doing in renewable diesel, but you could also have energy use, you could have use as a feedstock into the chemical industry in some applications. What I think is very important is that the work we are doing and also some other industry players is doing to actually improve the collection and aggregation of these waste and residues.
The growth of these pools, this is actually really important work also from the angle that these type of streams, at least to some extent, are today probably ending up in an uncontrolled way. I think it's a combination of really replacing waste and then replacing lower value uses.
Your second question, can other people do that as well in other companies? We believe, I cannot talk, of course about the other companies, and we don't have the insight, of course, in what they are doing. What we are doing is actually that we are having this global footprint. You see it on the acquisition of Mahoney. We're expanding that global footprint, not just organically, also through M&A. The closer we can get in waste and residue to the market and educating the market also that there is a lot of waste and residue, just like Matti said, that is not being recycled yet, is not being used yet. In addition to that, of course, on the innovation side, the more we do the next step in going to next pools of waste and residue, waste carbon.
I talked about chemical recycling, and later on, Lars Peter will talk about the other sources. We are at the forefront. We are unique because of having this worldwide set up. It's up to us to make sure that we continue to be unique in the next five, 10, 15 years.
Good. Thank you.
Our next question is from Artem Beletski from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi, this is Artem Beletski from SEB. Three questions from my side. The first one is to Peter relating to 2030 target of reducing CO2 emissions to customers by at least 20 million tons. Could you actually in reality exceed this target by a fairly big margin, just looking at the market outlook for road transportation with changed market share, what you expect in new initiatives in aviation and plastics, and also comments relating to supply side. The second question is to Matti, on road transportation and sales channels. What you described, basically wholesalers, retailers, warehouses, cities, municipalities and so on. Should we expect any big shift when it comes to mix of these two customer groups? Are there any, should say, bigger opportunities, how you see the market there? The last one is on aviation to Thorsten.
Could you maybe talk a bit about what type of contracts you are discussing with your potential customers or have in place? Is it pretty much the same structure as in road transportation or are you also looking at longer-term offtake agreements? Thank you.
Okay, excellent questions. Let me take the first one. Of course, you're raising the bar, but you heard what we said, at least 20 million tons. Yeah, I would say it's not so much the concern. You see from the presentation, there are huge opportunities that we have in the market. It's not so much the concern around the market and how much can we help our customers. It is more how can we deploy yet the resources to build up the additional capacities to support the market? On one hand side, it is assets, steel and iron.
Yeah.
It's on the other hand side, of course, also capability of having the right people on board that can run these facilities. In addition to that, it's the whole setup in waste and residue, because the 35 million tons that we currently have identified, we need to, of course, get access to them. They need to be recycled. They need to be specified. They need to be qualified. They need to be certified, then aggregated, collected and transported. I think these are the focal areas that we put a lot of emphasis on in order to make sure that we actually are exceeding that 20 million tons by 2030. I hope that answers your question. Then, Matti, the next was for you.
Yes. Thank you. The other question was on the relative size of these two major market segments, customer segments that I described. Perhaps a couple of comments I would make. What is typical for this segment of municipalities, cities, companies, is that they have requirements which are not only mandate, but they may have other requirements. Something that typically goes hand in hand with this segment, and I explained that in my presentation, is that we actually use an approach of having a branded offering, MY Diesel, also then using these partner sales channel partners. You get a flavor for the size if you look at what we are actually giving out every quarter, what the size of this segment is, where we are selling MY Diesel branded volume. It has been somewhere in the 20%-25% range, for example, last year.
I think important here is to see probably we don't see any huge quick shifts. It is more important to look at it from a value perspective. This is, of course, a segment where we also see, and we want to develop it in a way that there is potential for value creation over time.
I think we have Carl Nyberg also on the line. Carl, if you want to add something to that because this is your business unit.
Yes, thanks, Peter. I hope you can hear me. Yeah, maybe to build a bit on what Matti already was saying. It also is a great way to build even more resilience into our Renewable Road Transportation business in the sense that it gives us new segments, new markets to further optimize and drive profitability of our business. At the end of the day, I think an important thing to note is that the margin, of course, remains the key driver in our optimization.
Great. Thanks, Carl. The aviation question, of course, to Thorsten.
Yeah. Artem, thanks for the brilliant question. What are we doing? I think in my presentation, I made already crystal clear that this is a partnership business, which automatically would end up normally in long-term contracts. We want to de-risk, we want to have our business secured, but we also have to be careful with just running around and saying, "You have to take it." It's a partnership that has to grow. It is a partnership where we have to build trust, and it's a partnership where we jointly have to develop also supply chain. You cannot do that on an ad hoc basis. You have to have an agreement on which you can build and stagger the volumes and growing more into larger volumes. Our partners on the other side know exactly what they're talking about, and they know what they want.
They also understand that we can now not bring the product to every single airport around the globe, that we have to think about smart concepts. Those smart concepts would only fly, if I may use the word, if we have a long-term agreement. Certainly, there is things in between. I was referring earlier to the thing about the Zurich Airport, where we had something on spot to just proving the case. This is not what I call sustainable in an economical way. That has to be a long-term partnership that we are aiming for, be it with airlines, be it with distributors, and also with corporates.
That's the kind of contracts we currently already have in place.
Yes
With leading airlines.
Yes.
This is not spot business.
No.
This is contracted business for a longer period of time.
Yeah.
All right. Excellent. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Our next question is from Sasikanth Chilukuru from Morgan Stanley.
Hi. Good afternoon. I've got one question left. I was just wondering, when you talk about your expansion of your carbon sources, you talk about lignocellulosics and municipal solid waste becoming more prominent over the next 5- 10 years. My question was, when you actually move more towards those kind of carbon sources, are you looking to use your existing refineries or would it require additional investments for you to actually go and produce more using those sources?
Let me first of all put it into context, and of course, later Lars Peter will talk about the innovation side around it. We do believe that there is sufficient waste and residue, triglycerides, fatty acids available for us to continue to grow based upon our NEXBTL technology. That's very clear. Last year, we identified 30 million tons of these kind of waste and residues. We have moved closer to the sources, and we have already found that there is actually five million tons more of that. As you know, 35 million tons of waste and residue gives you approximately close to 30 million tons of potential renewable diesel or jet fuel capacity. This is one pool, we do believe, with the track record that we have made, that we need to go to the next step.
The next step is other sources of waste carbon. Those sources of waste carbon you cannot use based upon the NEXBTL technology. There needs to be a process technology that is developed.
Again, referring to what Lars Peter later will say, that needs to be developed, that actually fits to that particular source of waste and residues. Waste plastic is waste carbon source. You need this liquefaction technology and specialty refinery technology to upgrade it to come back to a renewable hydrocarbon, and then it goes back into the pipeline. Lignocellulosic, it's a rigid material. It has a lot of oxygen in it, that demands a special process technology and so on also for the other things. We'll talk a bit later about our equity investment that we did in Sunfire.
If you talk about CO2 out of the air as a potential source for waste carbon, then you need electrolysis technologies, and that's where Lars Peter will talk about it, that we have partnered up with an equity investment in what we believe the leader in the latest technology development in terms of electrolysis technologies. Clearly, to your question, we have enough waste carbon coming out of the current sources for the NEX PTL technology. We are committed to developing new technologies with the respective new investments that will come to that so that we can continue to grow also beyond 10 years from now.
Thank you.
Just as a reminder, if you do wish to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad. Our next question is from Henri Patricot from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hello, everyone. Thank you for the presentation. I have two questions, please. The first one is on the forecast that you show around supply-demand for renewable diesel and aviation fuel. Wondering if you can give us an idea of your expectations for aviation fuel specifically and what you expect, particularly between Europe and the U.S. You show a case example for Europe but not for the U.S. Do you expect to see faster growth in Europe rather than in the U.S.? Secondly, on the new capacity, the new project, you mentioned that the Singapore model is a good one in terms of size, the optionality, et cetera. Does that mean that it's the only one, so we should expect probably new projects, something along this line in terms of capacity and cost? Could you be perhaps some of smaller project quicker to develop? Thank you.
Your first question, I will give to Matti.
Yes. Thank you, Henri, for the question. It was a question on the supply-demand balance and how aviation is included. What I mentioned is that when we did these projections, we used for the demand side, the announced regulation, or if it's a very clear, communicated ambition. There is already in those numbers, some aviation demand included. Like Thorsten was explaining, we do already have mandates in place, and the opt-in schemes in the Renewable Energy Directive, but it is not yet a very substantial part. We were quite cautious still not to include too much potential because this field is still evolving.
Polymers and Chemicals is not included.
That one is not included. Clearly there is potential, like I also mentioned, beyond 2025, through new applications or of course, also new mandates being defined.
The other question.
The second question.
On the Singapore icon.
On the Singapore investment and then future investments. We have not yet talked about the Oil Products business. Marko will talk a little bit about that as well. We alluded to that also in the last Capital Markets Day and studies that are ongoing. Is there a potential to make our existing refineries in Finland more sustainable in the future by doing investments in co-processing or by retrofitting some of those assets? What I can say is these studies are currently ongoing, and then you will hear a bit more from Marko on that. To your question, yes. The answer is yes. We're not just looking at building up a copy-paste, so to say, Singapore HVO investment, but we're also looking at what other opportunities do we have in our existing sites.
We have one final question in this session. Actually, this concludes the session. Thank you very much for the excellent questions. We will now take a break and come back exactly at a quarter past. Thank you very much .
[Break]
Thank you for coming back. We are moving to the next set of presentations, and I would like to invite Marko Pekkola to discuss the strategy and opportunities in Oil Products. Marko.
Okay. Thank you, J.P. Thank you. Well, first of all, really nice to be here in the position that I'm holding today. Today, in front of you only virtually. Would like to meet you in person, the times will come for sure. I'm also pleased to take you through Oil Products as a business unit. Let's get it going, let's get started. I think in case of Oil Products, we can certainly show proven track record for solid cash generation in a very volatile and a changing market environment. Also, like already referred in the earlier presentations, interesting further transformation opportunities in the near future. Let me take you through what do I mean when I say solid cash or proven track record for solid cash generation. A good basis for our competitiveness is built on, well, two main ways or main paths.
It's by the strategic investments or the investments what we do with our assets, and it's also the improved operational performance within our units. If we a little bit go more through on the strategic investments, we've been mostly focusing on the bottom-of-the-barrel products, and then also then the investments or the strategic ones are related to the market dependency. If I little bit open the picture and take a little bit historical background, if we go back to in case of Porvoo, in 2007, we invested to the production line, or production line number 4. We added even then the reduced even the bottom-of-the-barrel products or the share of the bottom of the barrel there with an SDA investment taken into use in 2016, taking the asphaltenes out and then making more higher profitability products there out of the bottom of the barrel.
The market dependency when the latest investment in 2017, in case of Naantali, when we made the configuration change. Now we have the one refinery model where basically Naantali, in case of a refinery, is mostly feeding Porvoo with the feedstock. With that way, we are able to decrease the market dependency for the feedstock that we're using with our assets. It's also then the transformation. It's also at the parallel time. We have taken also the action on improving our operational performance, and then partly of our already reconfiguration our assets. Now what we are aiming to do is, of course, the climate commitment, aiming for carbon neutral production by 2035. I will come back a little bit later on more to that.
Like already said, during the Q&A session on the possibilities to replace crude as a feed for our refineries. Meaning in the ways of co-processing or either liquefied waste plastics or then the renewable feedstock. It was already mentioned here that the new HVO production, where the next location, it could be also in Porvoo. Then we are also taking the look at the shorter-term period on retrofitting of some of our assets, and that's under investigation. Let's take next look on the market position. On purpose, I've taken here a picture here on the screen on the left, where the bars are showing our refinery margin or actually total margin. The blue part, the dark blue part, this is representing the reference margin. The light blue is representing the additional margin.
The most important thing that I would like to highlight is the graph or, sorry, the line which is on green here, which is representing the global average capacity-weighted reference margin. If we take a look on from 2015 to 2017, we've been able to be on the same development comparing to the global average. Latest now, especially with the investment or the configuration change in Naantali, when the global average refining margin has been decreasing from 2017 to 2019 by 25%, in case of us, the total margin has been only dropping less than 10%. We've been able to improve our profitability of our units. With a good confidence, we can certainly say that we have a top quartile refiner when it comes to the net cash margin and also with the configuration, what we have in our hands.
On short-term, the margin improvement potential is really with existing products. It's not only the 0.5% marine bunker grade, but it's also the change what is also taking place in the market at the same time, where we are able to benefit with our configuration. The material improvement is also where we have been validating them with the Neste Excellence Program. I will come back on that a little bit more in detail. Really interesting opportunities there. In the co-processing, like already said, that's what we are studying now, what could be the ways, either on the recycled feeds or the renewable feeds. The HVO expansion and by retrofitting some of our assets would give a better basis for us, improve profitability with our units or with our refinery set up. Also at the same time, helping our customers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Let's look a little bit deeper on what Neste Excellence means then in Oil Products. We have been doing a full potential analysis, both in case of Naantali, and then especially in case of Porvoo. Based on the identified potentials, we see a potential to capture more than EUR 25 million comparable EBIT improvement by the end of 2022. By end of 2030, even more than EUR 50 million. Why I'm confident also in saying that we are very confident to say more than EUR 25 million and more than EUR 50 million is, of course, based quite much on our proven track record on the earlier taking steps. That already come through with the safety results. We've been also improving very much on there.
It's also for our customers, the customer delivery performance on time, in full, almost some months in during 2019, we were already on 100% level. We are able to serve our customers. At the same time, we have been able to improve also our unplanned production losses to a very good level. 75% of the identified potential is actually lying on these three boxes or the three areas. It's about the supply chain optimization, it's about the availability of our production assets, and it's also about the maintenance efficiency, what we do. If I were a little bit more open on those areas. In the optimization, it's about the crude basket, what kind of a crude grade or what kind of a crude we use in the feed of our refineries.
It's also about the continuous refinery unit optimization, the system level optimization of the supply chain planning and the production plan. On the availability side, it is really about improving our, one part is the turnarounds, what we are doing. It's really what will be the schedule of them, how fast we are able to execute them. It's on the other side, the process control improvements, what we are able to take and do, and with the good results. The high margin units, what we have already within our assets to even improve or reduce in that sense, the process variability in there. On the maintenance side, one of the three buckets in front of us.
It's all about the maintenance planning and the tool time improvements, how fast we are able to do it on our own, and also with our contractors together. One big element is also the contractor management, what we do also there. With this bridging, I would like to take you to the thing what we are also doing this year or planning to do, and we are progressing according to the plan. Why do we take these major turnarounds? It's of course, it's only on the continued competitiveness of our assets. Of course then the actions what we do are also related to the reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and the CO2.
The majority of the focus of the EUR 450 million estimated CapEx for 2020 is mostly focused on the investments, and it's also then on the maintenance work, but also including the catalyst changes and also being able to execute the whole turnaround. The estimated financial impacts are still on the same level communicated earlier. The duration is expected to be 11 weeks. I would like to take you also in one important topic of coming back to our climate commitment. Same rules apply also for Oil Products as a business unit. It's about reducing the handprint. Reducing the handprint, so what does it mean?
How we are able to help our customers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The ways what we have already communicated when it comes to the volumes, we want to use more than 1 million tons of recycled and more than 1 million tons of renewable feeds by 2030. By that means help our customers reducing their CO2 emissions. We are participating also for an interesting study that is actually taking place to be able to utilize the refinery excess heat. That would then, in a district heating here in the Helsinki capital area, that would reduce even the greenhouse gases or the CO2 emissions from the current setup more than even 25%. A very interesting study that we are participating in, not only us as Neste, but with our partners.
The other side of the picture is the carbon neutral production and coming back to our commitment. There we are the aims or the focus areas. We are switching already. We have already communicated on the power purchase agreement, 20% of our electricity will be renewable. It will be wind power. We are searching for more opportunities and aiming that to be 100% soonest. The same things we are also taking in the steam production or producing the energy. We are doing also the actions when it comes to energy efficiency. The things we have already been doing, we will continue doing them as part of our turnarounds is one way to do it. Also, the unit turnarounds taking in between the turnaround cycles. Then we have a massive or we have a really big roadmap to reach the carbon neutrality targets.
That's, of course, on the areas I know my colleague, Lars Peter, will open in his section a little bit more on the capturing the CO2, storing it, and especially Lars Peter will open what we are able to do with the captured CO2. There we have already in small scale, we have already the capture in case of Porvoo already taking place today. We are able to continue also that way, an important area for our footprint on our own production footprint. With these slides, I would like to summarize my part. As said, solid proven track record for solid cash generation in a volatile and a changing market environment. How do we do it? We do it with our top quarter refinery, with the material improvements, what we are doing then in case of turnarounds.
It's also with the potentials validated or identified there in through Neste Excellence. Also then the interesting further opportunity is to transform our assets. That's where we are taking the study to changing the conventional refining business, being more sustainable and also more profitable. With these words, thank you. I would like to hand over to my colleague, to Lars Peter, and talk about the innovation.
Thank you, Marko.
Thank you.
Welcome back, all of you also on my behalf. It's really great to be here today to talk about innovation. I would like really to share some insight with you on the exciting world of innovation in Neste. It has played a crucial role shaping Neste for decades. I think you heard that already from my colleagues earlier today. I think you heard also from them that it will, for sure, play a crucial role for us going forward as well. Since our R&D center was founded in the early 1960s, we have been developing environmentally preferred solutions of highest quality to the markets. We have a long track record of successful innovations. In the 1980s and 1990s, we were among the first companies in the world to bring lead, aromatic, and sulfur free fuels to the markets.
Since then, we have been developing a vast number of technologies and new solutions. In the recent years, we have brought low sulfur bunker fuels, and of course, the entire family of renewables featuring the technologies and solutions that today shape our existing renewable businesses to the markets. We can truly say that innovation is in our DNA. We have actually more than 25% of our group's people working for innovation. This has provided us with impressive brain pool of more than 1,000 professionals who work in this value chain from ideation, R&D, to sophisticated engineering, design, modeling, all the way to erecting the new plants. This value chain provides a cornerstone in our creative, innovative environment. Another underlying driver for innovation spirit lies in the fact that our company has its heritage in refining, not, for instance, in exploration and production.
This has naturally resulted in the fact that we, in order to make money and good margins, we need to be able to upgrade low quality, cheaper feedstocks into highest value products. This can only be done by a high level of technology content and innovation. With the revised strategy that we have, we are further increasing our efforts and our focus on innovation in this company. The way of working, however, is to be simplified, quite similar to the past, in the sense that we are focusing on building up broad ranges of low quality, preferred low priced feedstocks, and utilizing these with high flexibility, converting them through world-class technologies and knowhow into sustainable drop-in solutions of highest quality on the market.
One example from the past is, for instance, utilizing Russian crude oil, converting it with high competence and knowhow in our refinery into gasoline components that were very well appreciated on the Californian markets. A more recent example is, of course, our utilization of wastes and residues, converting them by our own proprietary NEXBTL technology into these highest quality My Diesel products that we are now utilizing in Road Transportation, Aviation Fuel, and Polymers and Chemicals. The role of innovation is actually twofold. First of all, we are enabling the existing business units to grow according to their strategic targets. We are working very closely as one family to make sure that we together meet those targets. Secondly, we are also responsible for creating these new business platforms for growth, which are based on renewable and circular solutions.
As Peter also mentioned earlier today, this is also for growth beyond NEXBTL. We are convinced we will meet our objectives, both supporting the current businesses in their growth and also developing the new solutions and growth platforms by doing the following things. First of all, we need to focus on the scalable and sustainable waste carbon and required technologies. We are working together. We are working together within the company, but for sure a lot of these new solutions we are looking for require extensive collaboration with research partners, but also other businesses, other companies, and value chain partners. We need to be courageous. We need to dare to seize opportunities through investing in first-of-a-kind plants and equities in startups.
In the startup field, last week, we have announced already two examples of this, the Recycling Technologies that was mentioned earlier today, which is related to the field of waste plastic conversion, and then the Sunfire company, which is then in the field of renewable hydrogen production, which I will come back to later. Now, we believe that the future is about bio and circular economy combined, utilizing waste carbon in an efficient way. Therefore, our roadmap is linked strongly, and our strategy is based on continuously broadening the utilization of waste carbon in an efficient way. As you are aware, we have a great competence in utilizing wastes and residues, fatty acids in our existing renewables business. As you heard earlier, this volume is continuously growing, and we will continue to strive for higher volumes in this segment.
As we see more opportunities in the future, this will not be enough for us. We are continuously also now striving to increase this waste pool to include, for instance, waste plastics, lignocellulosic wastes, municipal waste, algae, and carbon dioxide. These feedstock sources together provide a huge volume potential for combating climate change. In this picture, we have illustrated this vast potential in volumes. You can see here at the core, we have the waste and residue oils and fats, which is a circle or a bubble that will grow continuously based on our and our competitors' efforts. On top of that, we have the new pools of waste carbon that we are continuously now working with. These new feedstock pools can multiply the greenhouse gas reduction impact in fuels and chemicals.
With new technologies and business models, we will be able to capture opportunities based on the new feedstock pools. In order to accelerate the development, we have initiated three business platforms. The first business platform is related to the lignocellulosic wastes and residues from agriculture and forestry. The second business platform is related to scalable aviation feedstocks. It includes the areas of algae and municipal solid waste. The third business platform is related to utilizing carbon dioxide that Marko was talking about, and renewable hydrogen to Power-to-X. In the first business platform, the lignocellulosic fuels, chemicals, and materials, it is all about utilizing vast volumes of forestry and agricultural waste. We can see that there are technologies, they are emerging, and some of them are already quite mature. We see now that it's time to commercialize these technologies.
Furthermore, we see a very attractive outlook for regulatory support. For instance, fuels produced based on these lignocellulosic wastes belong to the advanced biofuel subtarget under the European RED II. We are investigating a project in La Tuque, in Quebec, in Canada, which is of high interest to us, where we are looking at converting lignocellulosic waste material into renewable fuels. La Tuque is a city in Quebec, which has the size of Belgium, and with unutilized forestry wastes. Furthermore, renewable electricity is available, and there is a very strong local and federal support for a project of this kind in this region. As we speak, we are preparing for doing the environmental impact assessment. We are also discussing with the technology providers and building up cooperation networks in order to then enable us to be successful on this journey.
We are also looking at business opportunities and locations globally at this point in time, because it's important for us to make sure that when we are making the selections, that we are selecting the locations properly with good sites and good technologies. As you heard from Thorsten earlier, the aviation is growing rapidly. The need for sustainable aviation fuels is also growing at an increasing pace. In the second business platform, the scalable feedstocks for aviation fuels, we are building this just for the reason of the growing need for sustainable aviation fuels. Algae and municipal solid waste have an interesting common feature. They are scalable feedstock sources detached from land use. Fuels based on these feedstock pools belong to the advanced biofuel subtarget under European RED II, as well as did products based on the lignocellulosic wastes.
In this field, we are developing partnerships aiming for scalable business models covering the entire value chains. In the field of algae, for instance, it means that we are in the process of valorizing the algae biomass to fuels and beyond. It means that we need to master the whole ecosystem from utilizing algae for production of fats, proteins, and omega acids, and make sure that the whole ecosystem is profitable. This is what we are looking for partners and building up these systems. In municipal solid waste, we have several pilot projects under investigation as we speak with partners globally. Here, of course, we need to build also the entire value chains.
We can feel there is a lot of energy in the air in the fields of both algae and municipal solid waste, and we believe that this is areas that will be successful in the future. Finally, the third business platform related to renewable hydrogen and Power-to-X, is based on the seen rapid growth and cost reduction in renewable electricity, which drives the development of renewable hydrogen and Power-to-X. Power-to-X and renewable hydrogen enable production of sustainable fuels and chemicals, which are totally detached from biomass utilizing carbon dioxide as a feedstock. The carbon dioxide is the crucial feedstock in addition to the renewable hydrogen, the carbon capture and storage and utilization is also part of this business platform. Here we work very closely together with the Oil Products and Marko's teams.
As you have heard, last week, we announced that we have acquired a stake in the Sunfire, which is a leading technology developer of high-temperature electrolysis. High-temperature solid oxide electrolysis is a very promising opportunity when coupled to refinery environments with excess heat. It gives us the opportunity to produce synthesis gas directly from steam and carbon dioxide. This synthesis gas, as you probably know, there are many different technologies available by which you can convert this synthesis gas into valuable chemicals or hydrocarbons. We are also active in the MultiPLHY EU project, which has been started now in the Rotterdam site, where we are demonstrating renewable hydrogen production and integration to refinery site.
This project receives support from the EU Horizon 2020 and from France, Germany, Finland, and Luxembourg. Then, of course, as Marko mentioned, we have this study initiated for carbon dioxide reduction in Porvoo, and this is also an important area for us to look at. All in all, these business platforms and the related feedstock pools, they will play an important role in reducing dependence on crude oil. In this picture, the blue area represents global oil demand for transportation in 2040. You can see in this picture that the role that these new feedstock pools will play when converted into valuable products is a big one, and it will have a big impact on combating climate change. To summarize, we are taking a broader and bolder approach to innovation. We'll do this by scaling up our activities based on our long track record of successful innovations.
We are enabling existing businesses to grow and building new platforms for growth. We do all of this converting scalable carbon sources into preferred solutions. Thank you very much. With this, I will hand over to Jyrki, who will take us through the financials of things.
Yes. Thank you, Peter. Good late afternoon, dear audience, wherever you are. I think you have heard now the last two hours presentations by our CEO and talking about also things relating to our business units and innovation. My task is now here to go through some of the financial topics, especially relating to group level things. It's about things what we have achieved. I think the important thing here is when thinking about the overall headline of my presentation, sustainable high-margin growth and cash generation, exactly the same as last year, February in our CMD. Reason is very clear why it's untouched. This is exactly what we want to achieve going forward as well. These are important points going forward. If you think about what is there for Neste going forward, I think it's important to see the next steps. What have we truly achieved?
If you look the last five years' development, we have two financial targets. Those are the same also going forward, return on average capital employed and the leverage. Both are in outstanding levels. If you think about our two major KPIs, comparable EBIT and free cash flow, they have more than doubled in five years. Finally, thinking about the dividend, also the dividend policy to our shareholders, it's also untouched, minimum 50% of the comparable earnings per share. You see the figures, it's roughly three times higher than 2015. That is, of course, based on the AGM decision later this year. Basically, these are the elements why we are saying it's important for high margin and cash generation. If we look first what it means with high margin. This is a comparison between the years 2014 and 2019.
I have selected the 2014 because 2015 was a year of turnaround in Porvoo. These are more comparable years. You see that we have created EUR 1.4 billion more EBIT during this period, and more than EUR 1 billion has come through margin management, higher margins, not just with renewables, but also from OpEx. Matti Lehmus talked earlier about how we have increased our capacity. During this period, the capacity has been increased from 2.1 million tons to 3 million tons, and you can hardly see the CapEx figures in our balance sheet and cash flow. That is basically the volume effect. If you look the margin then, let's take first the OpEx, Marko Pekkola's business. This has come more through own actions, not so much about the market development, how we have improved our additional margin during this period. It's a great achievement.
Then look the big one, the margin effect coming from renewable products. You can divide that into two parts. First is the Blender's Tax Credit effect. U.S. federal decision by the end of the year 2014 and also 2019. It is not a Christmas gift. You have to do things to achieve it. You have to promise something, you have to deliver something, and you have to behave as well, like a good Christmas present. The point there is that BTC is only 1/3. 2/3 is coming out of the fact what the team has done in renewable products. It's about improving margins, it's about feedstock, it's about the supply chain. Everything what is around your own operation. That is EUR 850 million, and 2/3 of that is coming out of our own things, how we have managed the business. It's a great achievement, absolutely.
That's how we have basically landed to the level of close to EUR 2 billion EBIT 2019. The other side of the promise is then the cash. We like cash. Everybody likes cash. This is a matter between EBITDA and how the cash flow has in the beginning. Our comparable EBITDA is nearly double between this period, and we have basically able to keep roughly EUR 0.95 out of this as cash coming out of our cash flow. This is a great achievement. Also shows we are a net debt-free company today, but we are focusing on cash, how we are focusing CapEx, how we are focusing working capital, and certainly like you see how we are managing the EBITDA. This kind of level, EUR 0.95- EUR 0.90, it's a good measure to show how we have done our work with cash management.
If we move one step further, cash allocation policy, we have a very simple policy. It is not a science. It is just saying two words, invest for the future and keep shareholders happy. You have seen like 2015, EUR 700 million CapEx and dividends. Last year, or based on last year's activities, that is EUR 2 billion, from EUR 700 million to EUR 2 billion. We are investing for the future, like also Marko Pekkola and Matti Lehmus told. The path there, the blue one, it will be on the high level going forward. We have plans going forward, talk more about those when we are there 2021, as an example. Important to understand that this is the use of cash that Neste is focusing on. Investment, going one step deeper, we have three kind of investment. Maintenance is pretty solid for us, EUR 200 million-EUR 250 million a year.
We are talking of turnarounds, the green ones. Every five year, a big thing in Porvoo. The biggest thing during this period has been investment on productivity and strategic investments. What we promise about high margin growth, investing for the future, you see from this figure that is exactly what we have been doing and continue to do going forward as well. How do you finance it? If we go back to 2014, our leverage was 38%, so it was below the 40% already at that point of time. If you look the development during the last four years, we have become net free negative. If we would have invested last year to a certain project, we could have took EUR 4 billion debt, and we would still be below the 40% target. All this means we have project for the future.
We have a good, strong balance sheet. We can deliver it. This is example, again, what we have promised about the leverage and what we have promised about the CapExes going future as well. Shareholders. Important thing here is to think, go back 10 years or go back even to years 2013, when I joined the company. The ownership of the non-Finnish owners in Neste was around 10%, 10%-15%. We saw the change in this matter taking place basically 2016, when the ESG thing started to be more and more apparent in the marketplace. Today, more than, let's say close to 40% of the owners are non-Finnish. Neste has been found as a company that has strong roots with the ESG approach.
If you look the free float, taking out the Finnish state ownership, that is kind of the anchor owner certainly for Neste, out of there, 70% is non-Finnish. That gives you a very strong feeling that Neste has been found really as a company, the third most sustainable company in this planet, also in the eyes of the investors. I want to summarize the things what also Marko Pekkola and Matti Lehmus talk about on Neste Excellence. We brought this as a topic in our capital markets day last year in February. What we have done basically during the last 13 months, let's say that way, is that according to strategy, we have been faster, bolder, and together. We have delivered more than we promised to reach already by 2022.
We have delivered EUR 225 million. The target was EUR 100 million. We are very proud to say that we can go beyond 2030, go to above EUR 300 million EBIT impact. It was EUR 200 million earlier. All this is coming from safety, productivity. It's coming from cost management. It's coming out of different angles of quality management in the background. This is part of the story. Again, what we are promising, we are delivering. Keep that high on the agenda when thinking about these actions, what we are going to have going further. Summarizing all this thing into one page. Four elements. We're already coming back to the high margin growth and the cash generation. We want to grow profitable. It means you have to invest on the business and the figures providing the high numbers. We like cash. Focus on cash flow.
It means project, it means working capital, it means CapEx is keep that high on the agenda. We are not just investing organically, we are also investing in M&A. Like the recent announcement this week concerning Mahoney in the U.S.A. Let's keep our shareholders happy, meaning dividend that are having a positive impact in the marketplace. If you think about these four targets on a profitability way, for me, nothing else matters. Thank you. Now it's time for our Q&A, so welcome my colleagues here.
Yes. Thank you. As said, we would now be ready for questions.
Our first question is from Josh Stone from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Good afternoon again. I've got two more questions, please. You've left your dividend payout ratio policy unchanged. In a scenario where earnings were declining this year, does that imply you'd be willing to pay a lower dividend year-on-year? My second question on CapEx, is it on your new projects, you had a CapEx a ton, typically at around $1,200 a ton, I tend to think. What are you assuming on the new facilities you have announced? Is it something similar or do you think that could be falling? Related to that, are there any upper bounds on what you're willing to spend in CapEx organically? Thank you.
Joshua, as usual, good questions. Thank you very much. I can make a couple of comments on the second question. On the first question, I would ask Jyrki to have his views and eventually I can add.
Yeah. Maybe I can talk about the dividend first.
Yeah.
A little bit elaborate. Of course, our target is, or the policy is very clear. It's a minimum 50% of the comparable earnings per share. If you look back the history, we have always done at least that. That is kind of a guiding light going forward as well. That is the only policy that we have, and that is basically how we are going to follow it.
Absolutely. With regards to the investments, we are in an engineering stage, but that is in our early stage to, let's say, already start speculating on what is going to be the right CapEx that we are going to invest. On the other hand side, we did say, our approach is copy-paste.
Yeah. Then adapt to the local needs. That may give you a little bit of an impression in how we are looking at the investment numbers, because the capacity is going to be the same copy-paste, 1.3 million tons. As Matti explained, with the right optionality, just like we have in Singapore. You can, I think, Joshua, you're smart enough, yeah, you can make your assessment, where would it be approximately in terms of CapEx.
Okay. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Our next question is from Artem Beletski from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi, this is Artem again. A couple of questions, maybe more detailed one. First of all, to Marko, relating to co-processing opportunities in Porvoo, could you maybe provide some color, what could be the timeline if you take some initiatives on that front? Because I guess, for example, fast pyrolysis technology starts to be fairly well-developed at this stage. The second one is to Lars Peter relating to green hydrogen usage at Rotterdam facility. Is it really the case that basically your, so say, lifecycle emission reductions for end product won't be changing if I look at, for example, European Regulation RED II and so on?
Okay. Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think a good question in that sense. Relating to like I was presenting there on the asset roadmap, we are planning to finalize it during this year. When it comes to the co-processing, I'm expecting the timescale be within three to four years, hopefully sooner. Those are the things with our engineering minds and what we are doing at the moment and finalizing out. By the end of the year, I think we will be much better to communicate about that time.
Mm-hmm. Yep, absolutely. This may be, of course, as I said already in earlier conferences, this is quite complex, quite a lot of engineering that needs to be done. It may be a combination of things that we do in the future. It also may be that we say, you know what? We want to go just in building a pure HVO plant and not doing the other parts. All these things are still open just to manage the expectations. We do our homework step by step in that regard. Lars Peter, second question.
Yeah. Related to the regulatory framework around renewable hydrogen. I think that our approach is really that we want to be among the companies that are leading the way and exploring the opportunities to utilize renewable energy in producing this renewable hydrogen and thereby also renewable hydrocarbons. The regulatory framework, we believe, will follow once we see that there is a huge potential to commercialize these viable solutions. Whether or not it will have an impact in the present framework easily, that is, for us, maybe a secondary thing. We are looking at this in 2030 and beyond, and we believe at that point in time, if we are successful in developing these technologies and utilizing renewable sources, for sure, there will be an interest from regulators for this.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Okay. Very clear. Thank you for your answers.
Our next question is from Peter Low from Redburn. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Okay, thanks. The first was just on the material fall in diesel prices that we've seen year to date. Are you able to give us any guidance on what proportion of your renewable diesel volumes have a direct linkage to diesel or gas oil, or is there some other rule of thumb to help us quantify the potential impact? I guess, as a follow-on to that, is there anything you can do to manage that exposure? I mean, given supply-demand for renewable diesel itself remains tight, does that not give you some degree of pricing power? Thanks.
Peter, a very good question. Of course, as everybody knows, this is an extremely volatile environment that we are currently in. I must say, maybe end of 2008 is something that I have seen that comes close to what we are experiencing right now, and it's moving, as you know, every day. Yes, we have the business continuity plans. We have them in place. You've seen the drops in crude oil prices. You've seen the diesel cracks. Yes, we have said also in the past that we have different business models in how we are placing our renewable diesel in the market. If you just look at California, in California, price buildup is actually diesel prices plus, in addition to that, you have the different types of credits, LCFS, RINs, PTC.
There is a direct influence, of course, that the fossil-based diesel prices have on our renewable products in the market. The second part of your question is also going towards, and we talked about term versus spot already earlier. It is clear, of course, that in the term contracts that are most of the time, let's say one year, that there we have a price stability. Yeah. Volume stability and price stability in those contracts. You don't have a lot of room to maneuver in these types of contracts. In spot, it's a bit different, of course. As said, we have a big part of our business that is actually for 2020 related to term business. It's difficult to really give a guidance, even if we are already that far in March, and almost Q1 is over.
Matti already talked about the fact that we do see that the crude palm oil prices have not yet immediately followed the reduction in crude oil prices, so there is maybe a delay. When will we see that? Will it still be in Q1 or not? Yes, we have, of course, some hedging, 50%, so trying to take some risk out of that, but it is not covering everything. On the other hand side, Matti also talked about used cooking oil, animal fat prices. We have seen used cooking oil already going up rapidly at the beginning of this year. Then yes, they went down a little bit, but it's not really, in my view, very substantial and animal fat has not yet reacted. We hope that that will react as well, and normally, if you look at history, it has reacted, of course.
It's not that easy to give a simple answer because there are so many different elements that do play a role. Let me be very clear, Q1 will, of course, we are not completely resistant to everything that is happening around us. This is really major for everyone across the planet. Yes, there will be an influence in Q1 that we will see, definitely.
Thank you.
Just as a reminder, if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. Our next question is from Henri Patricot from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes, I have one question for Lars Peter on the innovations, in particular, some of the new feedstocks and algae that I've sent that we've been talking for some year about this feedstock. Are there some progress that makes you more confident about your ability to scale up this feedstock as a viable one for your business? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you for the question. Algae has been on the table from now and then and in the history of last 20 years, actually. Now what has happened is that there is a more of a holistic understanding on the value chains and the ecosystem that you need to have to valorize all of these streams in one.
First of all, the algae species developed have been developing in a favorable way, so that we would be able to have the right proportion of proteins and fats in the product range. Now it's all about combining that with having the right valorization for the different streams. Beforehand, usually companies like Neste and other companies were looking for the fat alone, and now we see that this is an entity that we need to master. To summarize, yes, there has been progress made in critical technological fields in the algae sector, and on top of that, we are looking at this in a holistic way.
Okay.
Technology question. It comes from Antti Koskivuori of Danske. He ask about the Power-to-X. When do we expect that to be commercially feasible, and what are the major obstacles there?
Okay. Thank you for this exciting question also. It's a great opportunity with time to see if we are able to utilize carbon dioxide directly as a waste gas or from the air to make hydrocarbons out of it, utilizing the renewable hydrogen. That will then come from these electrolyzers. To your question then, the two things that we see evolving in a positive way are also still the challenges in the short term. It is the price of producing this electricity, and it is the scale of it. Because we will need a lot of scale to make enough power to make these hydrocarbons in the end, and the renewable hydrogen. That's why we believe that there will be still development happening in the coming decade.
I would say that during this time, as we are doing pilot projects such as the one, the MultiPLHY that I mentioned that we are doing in Rotterdam, they will generate understanding and trust in these technologies. With time, we will see that they will become more and more competitive. It's scalability and the price of the production that will need to go down.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
A question from Nick Konstantakis of Exane BNP Paribas. Could you please discuss what Porvoo conventional refinery potentially look like under co-processing versus retrofitting in terms of output, feedstock type, etc.?
That is a question, for Marko, if you can shed a little bit of light. As said, these studies are still ongoing.
Yeah.
When we have concluded the studies, we will of course, have more information that we can share with you.
Yeah. Like Peter you're saying, of course, we are in the middle of the studies now. If we start from the picture that it's 12 million tons of crude today used in case of Porvoo. We have the three elements co-processing. That would be then that we will have a certain share of renewable or recyclable feed or recycled feed there in replacing crude. That would take some part of it. Could it be 10% or 30% at that with the means. I think it makes, like Peter was saying, it makes it very complex.
It would be, let's say, copy-paste kind of a situation, copying the HVO plant like Singapore, 1.4 million. The easy way would be, of course, without investing anywhere else to reduce at with the same volume, would be of course, one way. Also the one way could be.
Like said, that takes time even. With the engineering mind, what we have, with the retrofitting, what of the assets could be either used in co-processing or then we would be using them as a pure feed, or then they could be even combined use there, as part of the HVO investment. These are the all kind of elements that I would say that we are studying at the moment and aiming to finalize it latest by the end of this year.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Okay, question from Iiris Theman of Carnegie. Are you going to have advanced biofuels classified by RED II available by 2025 in use?
That's a very good question, and of course, we are heavily working on that. Already today, yeah, we have some smaller volumes. The issue with Annex IX A is that these volumes are not yet fully scalable. They are marginal. Like we have been doing during the last 10 years, we will continue, of course, to work on those, like Matti was talking about it, Lars Peter is talking about it, so this continues to be core, in terms of our innovation power. Very clear, these are, again, small things that will grow over time, and will not be something that is completely changing the landscape that we are currently having or seeing.
Okay, thank you. Kasper Lunden has a question on Neste Engineering Solutions l ike the role and a big rationale for. D Ivestment we made.
Last year we took the decision. Remember the history of Neste Engineering Solutions, it was a joint venture with Jacobs. We had taken over completely Neste Engineering Solutions. We looked at during the integration, how far can we actually integrate it. Last year we also did then a very thorough analysis. What is core? What is non-core? How do we want to further develop Neste Engineering Solutions? That led to the fact that we said, "Look, there are certain offices that we have at Neste Engineering Solutions that are more geared towards capturing external business and not so much supporting our renewed strategy in moving, and being a global leader in renewable and circular solutions." That we took the decision that these offices would be sold. We found a very good partner, Rejlers, that intensified. We had a partnership with them already before.
That intensified also the partnership. All that is now behind us. That was closed last year, as you know. It enables us also to integrate Neste Engineering Solutions much closer to actually our core strategy at Neste. Really helping us, yeah, as one business, one team, one goal, to invest in, on one hand side, the buildup of the additional HVO plants. They are deeply involved also in the studies that we are doing on aviation fuel, the feasibility study in Rotterdam. They are deeply involved in the new HVO plant studies that we are doing, I mean, Porvoo, Rotterdam, United States. Of course, they have a very, very wealth of knowledge in terms of innovation and that part of the innovation, even if it is still in Neste Engineering Solutions, it's completely integrated as an innovation platform, and Lars Peter is leading that.
I think we have made an enormous amount of progress in having that integration of Neste Engineering Solutions as a core part of our business.
Okay. Alejandro Vigil has a question on the role of oil majors in biofuels. Biofuels are becoming a key area of investment for all the big majors. What are your margin expectations for the coming years?
Of course, as you know, we have never given a guidance on margins beyond the quarter that we are actually in. No guidance on margins for the future. Of course, I said it already before. We are a leader in this industry. We are the only one that is globally active. Look at all the elements that we discussed also today. You may say some of them are not new, the important thing is the progress that we have made in one year, in terms of implementation of the strategy.
We always need to be faster than anybody else. Again, it comes back to what I said. It's all about our people. This part of the business is not something that we are doing on the side. This part of the business is what is core of what we are doing at Neste, and gets all the attention and focus.
Tim Teikko has a question. Please confirm, is the plan to convert the Porvoo refinery to 100% renewables feedstock by 2025? This probably needs some clarification.
We have not said that we would transform, yeah, by 2025, yeah, our plans to renewables. No. What we have said is that by 2035, as a company, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions in our footprints, so the so-called footprint emissions, scope 1 and scope 2, that we don't want to see any emissions anymore. Yeah. These can be, we have about 50 projects that we have identified in order to reduce our own emissions. On the other hand side, of course, what we cannot reduce by that time, there are measurements like carbon storage, carbon capturing and storage, in order to compensate for the rest. The main focus, first of all, is in our footprints, whatever we can do with every turnaround that we have, these projects that we have identified, they need to turn then of course into execution.
Most of the time you do these executions every time you have a major turnarounds. Yes. That's that part. The other part in terms of the handprints as we call it, helping our customers to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. That is a study that is still ongoing in terms of co-processing or retrofitting, but this will never lead to the fact that by 2025.
We have completely changed our facility in Porvoo. It is simply technically also not feasible.
Okay. Monica Rajoria from SocGen has a question. How should we think about the new capacity that will be decided over 2021? Is there a minimum capacity to benefit from scale?
When we were designing Singapore, prior to taking the decision at the end of 2018, December 2018, there were two core principles that we were following. One core principle was building up optionality, because we wanted to go into three different market segments, road transportation, aviation, polymers, and chemicals. On the other hand side, we also said we want to make sure that we get the best point in terms of finding where your cash cost curve is actually leaning, let's say, to the optimal, in terms of investment costs. OpEx cash costs versus the CapEx that is being invested. That is how we designed Singapore. Maximum optionality on one hand side, markets, waste and residue also, lower qualities. On the other hand side, finding the optimal point in terms of how large is the capacity at the lowest cash costs.
That means with all the work that we have done during the last 10 years, we have found that optimal point. Does that mean that maybe you cannot win any more half a cent or EUR 0.01 or something like that by going beyond 1.3 million tons? We'll see in the future. At this point in time, 1.3 million tons for the CapEx that we are investing is the optimal point in terms of cash costs.
Final question come from Pablo Cuadrado of Kepler Cheuvreux. What are your basic plans to try to gear up your balance sheet, taking into account that you have showed that renewable capacity growth could be financed with own cash flow? Maybe speed up M&A in feedstock areas, consider share buybacks or higher dividends. Thanks.
Well, I can start, and then Jyrki can continue.
Yeah.
We have lots of ideas. Absolutely. They are not just going into organic growth, like with the investment in Singapore. I know we have just talked about all the work that we have ongoing and investments in future HVO plants or also coprocessing retrofitting. That is an important part of our strategy. We've demonstrated also in such a relative short period of time. We did an equity investment in Sunfire, P2X. We did an equity investment in chemical recycling with Recycling Technologies. Actually, we are signed to acquire Mahoney Environmental in the United States. M&A, as I said, also in the Capital Markets Day last year, continues to be a very important part in how we are further developing our business model. Organic as well as M&A.
I think that is more or less also what I said in my simple cash allocation policy, invest for the future, organic, inorganic, and keep the shareholders happy. Our balance sheet, like I mentioned, is EUR 4 billion we could have in our balance sheet at the end of last year, and we would still be below the 40% in the leverage. That's kind of a world where we are living. It's up to us with the projects going forward.
This concludes the Q&A session. Thank you very much for the good question. Now it's time to wrap up and go to Peter's concluding remarks. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for joining us at this webcast. As said at the beginning, of course, we would have loved to have you here in this room, or we would have loved also to have you in London. We truly hope, of course, that this whole volatility, everything what is happening around us, that you stay healthy, your family stays healthy. That leads me also again to the fact to repeat that we have this volatility in the market. We are robust, but of course, with everything that is going on around us, it is also hitting us. We have business continuity plans in place. We have very, very heavy travel restriction plans in place. We have not seen any influence on our operations, if it is in our Singapore investments or in the other operations that we have, Porvoo, Naantali, and so on.
Of course, it is a very unstable environment that we are navigating through. Of course, it is always good then to have this cash leverage to have a very stable company to maneuver through that. Having said that, I think you were able to see that today during all the presentations, we are building up optionality in our business model. We're coming in a short period of time. We're only talking about one year. If you see from what we were announcing during the Capital Markets Day last year towards everything that actually has happened. I must say, I'm getting quite a lot of information through my network that people are actually out of the industry. They are saying, "Wow. What are you doing there at Neste? What are those people doing there? This is going so extremely fast.
It is almost every day that you come out with an acquisition, with an investment, with this and with that. I think faster and bolder together is really part of our strategy, and that is only possible because we do have the people, we do have very passionate people. They make the difference. I said at the beginning, it's a differentiating factor that we have. We truly believe in that. That leads us to the fact, again, to repeat, our vision is leading the way towards a sustainable future together. Thank you very much for your attention, and looking forward to seeing you healthy very soon. Thank you.