Welcome, everyone, to this Q2 presentation for Nel. Welcome, everyone, to everyone in the room, welcome everyone that is following this over the web. We will do our normal presentation as usual, we'll finish off with some questions, you can also pose your questions through the internet. As normal, I will go through the presentation, let us take a quick look at the content. We'll go through the highlights, obviously. We'll talk a bit about Nel in brief. We keep adding additional shareholders, we need to keep some of the basic information also. We need to touch upon the Kjørbo incident. We'll try to keep that brief. We have gathered all of the other developments under a category called key developments. We'll talk about what happened in the quarter, what happened also a bit after the quarter.
We will touch upon the new location that we secured now and that we've been working on for quite some time. Then we'll finish off with a summary and outlook. Let me start by talking about the second quarter highlights. The top-line development was in line with expectations. Not great, but as communicated, and it takes a bit of time before we get the orders translated into revenues. We have said that we expect more in the second half of 2019. The fueling business developed very nicely and grew quite nice, but as I said, it takes a bit of time before orders translate into revenue in the electrolyzer piece. On the other hand, we closed a lot of orders in the quarter. We have now all-time high order backlog at NOK 568 million. That does not account the two orders that we announced this morning.
That is approximately 40% higher than at the end of the first quarter. That obviously give us a very good foundation for rest of this year and also going into next year. We had a busy quarter related to all range of these announcements. To summarize very quickly, we received a purchase order from Shell for two additional stations for heavy-duty applications. We received a PO for a 4.5-megawatt alkaline electrolyzer for Hybrit. We received six stations to Korea, plus two this morning. We received a PO for the first station in Canada. We made the contract with Transport for London on buses, and we established the H2 Bus Consortium. We were awarded a NOK 2 million grant to develop mass production technology on PEM electrolyzers. We launched a new A1000 electrolyzer on alkaline. We closed the agreement with Everfuel and signed the sales and service agreement.
We were proposed for funding together with Nikola that we cooperate on next generation heavy-duty applications. We signed an agreement in ammonia, we added another two POs this morning, we have secured a new location at Herøya, and we will touch on all of these things a bit later in the presentation. Financial highlights, as mentioned, largely as communicated. We expect a more aggressive revenue growth in the second half. As mentioned, EBITDA was negatively affected by the Kjørbo incident, and we've taken a provision, a one-time provision of NOK 35 million related to that. It was also negatively affected by the more normal, I would say, even though it's non-recurring, is related to ramp-up and non-recurring costs, so underlying EBITDA in the range of NOK 26 million. Strong cash position, close to NOK 700 million worth of cash.
We, therefore, should be in a good position to execute on the strategy and plans that we have in the pipeline. We now have roughly 24,000 shareholders. That has grown, just in 2019, that has grown by 7,000 shareholders. After the Kjørbo event, we even added another 3,000 shareholders. In comparison to 2018, where we added about 2,000 shareholders. That's also why I need to talk a bit about some of the basic elements. For the ones that knows Nel, this will be a bit of a repetition. What makes Nel unique is the integrated position that we have. We do cover electrolyzers and fueling stations. We have a range of different products in the electrolyzer piece, and we also have fueling stations for multiple applications.
We do develop these in-house, we produce it in-house, we can then design a very nice integrated solution that's what sets us apart from everyone else. We also are becoming an increasingly global company. We have our production facilities in Connecticut, in Norway, and in Denmark. We also have people and organization in relevant markets like California, Korea, Japan, and China. We are the world's largest electrolyzer manufacturer. We have produced or delivered more than 3,500 systems in slightly more than 80 countries. We are also leading on fueling stations. We are working on station number 50, and country number nine. As mentioned, these are the three locations that we have. We have Wallingford, Connecticut in the U.S., PEM electrolyzers, slightly more than 40 megawatt capacity. We have our facilities in Norway, Notodden/Herøya now, which we'll talk about later.
We have our facility in Denmark, relatively new capacity to produce 300 stations per year. We have a very long history in each of our respective areas, and that's also one of the key elements that I think sets us apart. We have 20, 30 years experience in PEM. We have more than 90 years experience in alkaline, and we have around 15 years experience in the fueling station business. We have a lot of products sitting out in the market, so obviously a lot of references for our customers to go and see, and that we see is also a benefit when we talk to new customers. Now let me move over to the Kjørbo incident, and this was covered in great detail at the end of June or throughout June, in multiple releases. We try to keep this to a minimum.
That does not mean that we do not have more details. If you require more details, you're more than welcome to go to our webpages. We there have updated Q&A. We have the presentation that we gave at the end of June, you will find all the details covered at our webpages if you think what we do here now is a too short summary. On June 10th, we experienced something that we never thought would happen. Very sad event, fortunately no one was seriously injured. This is an overview of the Kjørbo site with the various components and technologies and how they were arranged. This was the first station of its kind installed in Norway with onsite production of hydrogen. It includes both core technologies, our core technologies, and technologies which are non-core, which are delivered by sub-suppliers.
Our core technologies are highlighted in purple. It's the dispenser or the customer interface. It's the H2Station. It's the electrolyzer solution. The item highlighted in red is the high-pressure storage unit. That was the cause of the incident. This unit has also been certified, like everything else inside has been certified by third-party agents. Even the site in total has been certified before it was allowed to open. Now we have a clear ambition in Nel. There should be no incidents at sites that has Nel equipment. We've been working with hydrogen for many, many years, as you know. It's not something that is very new to us. All of the equipment is designed around the fact that it should be safe. As I said, the equipment is third-party certified. Even the high-pressure storage unit was certified by Bureau Veritas.
There are a number of other standards and regulations on this slide which we need to comply to when we build stations in Europe. We experience something that we did not expect, a very unfortunate event. I'm not going to drill more into what happens and why. That you will find on our webpages in great detail if you want that. I'll go straight to what we are now doing to basically get the stations up and running, and to ensure that something like this never happens again. Point number 1, first of all, we need to inspect all the high-pressure storage units in Europe. This is a unique design which relates to Europe. It's a different design in the U.S. and in Korea. This is European-focused for the time being.
We need to verify that the plugs, which was the cause of the incident, are okay, and we need to check that all of the plugs is installed in the correct way on all of the European stations. In addition to that, to make sure that this does not ever happen again, we obviously have already changed our routines and procedures for assembly of these type of systems. We have introduced aerospace standards, in terms of verification of torque, documentation of torque, and double witnessing of torque with markings on the various plugs to ensure that we don't see this ever happening again. Now we also want to add additional layers of safety. We also go through and look at leak detection. How can we be able to detect smaller leaks even faster? That has to do with how we tweak our software.
It has to do, in some cases, maybe even adding some hardware, but mostly how we basically tweak and how we work with our software. Finally, we look at the site. Is there things we can do with the site? Can we move things around to make sure that we add even another layer safety buffer? This we will do on all of our stations, and that's also what we have done in the U.S. and in Korea. Now, all of the learnings that we have taken, and many of the learnings is not really relevant even to this incident. When you work at this very intensively with extremely qualified people, you do gain a lot of learning. We have a long list of learnings, which we will obviously spend time integrating and working on over the next period.
We will also share these learnings with the industry to make sure that nothing is lost. As I've said a few times already, maybe the only positive thing you can say out of this event is that you learn a lot, and if we waste that, then it's all been a waste. We need to take care of the learnings and share it with the industry. We are now reporting on the timeline to reopen stations in this format, and the stations in Denmark are back in operation. That happened relatively quickly. We're still working on, I believe, one or two stations in the U.S., but the majority of the stations are back in operation. All the stations in Korea have been cleared out, and the trust in Nel technology has been restored, as can be seen from the order that we got this morning from Korea.
The stations in Europe are in progress. We still have some homework to do in terms of checking the sites and working at the high pressure storages. In Norway, in particular related to ASKO, we are working together with them to get that back in operation as quickly as possible. The rest of the stations in Norway, we still have some homework to do, and we also need to coordinate and prioritize these activities together with our joint venture partners. Here I will need to come back at a later point in time in terms of exactly disclosing what and when. I hope that's enough on the Kjørbo side. If you need, as I said, more information, please refer to our web pages. You will find plenty of information there and plenty of details.
Let's go to the key developments of the quarter and also some of the things that happened after the quarter. The first thing that happened was that we received an order from Shell for heavy-duty applications. This is a station solution that can fuel both cars and trucks. Shell is working together with Toyota in California. This station will fuel the Toyota cars that arrive from Japan empty. They will be loaded onto the hydrogen truck. This is a hydrogen truck that Toyota has developed together with Kenworth. The station will also fuel the trucks, and the trucks will then carry the cars up to the dealers and the distributors. It's a very nice setup and a nice showcase for what can be done.
Total value of more than $7 million, it underlines what we talked about a number of times, the underlying trend that we see, increasing focus on heavy-duty applications. That's also one of the reasons why we earlier this year announced that we will step up technology developments in this area. We were awarded a PO in Canada, the first fueling station from this market and opening up a new market for us with HTEC. HTEC is a leader in the region, and they have the target to build several stations in this area. This is in Vancouver, and Vancouver is on the West Coast and relatively close to the team that we have on the West Coast in the U.S. This team will then help to service and maintain and support the development in this area.
We will keep working with HTEC to see whether we can support them also for additional infrastructure in the area. Korea has overall expressed great ambition in terms of fueling stations. They have said that they want to have more than 300 stations up and running by 2022. They are probably the country in the globe which has the toughest ambitions in terms of rolling out infrastructure. We have made quite some progress in 2019. So far, we have received 10 orders, or orders for 10 stations, including the ones that we received this morning, with a total value of around about EUR 11 million, which we're very happy about. Earlier in the second quarter, we received a six-station order from KOGAS. KOGAS is the Korean Gas Technology Corporation.
If you follow this closely, you will maybe notice that KOGAS has expressed that they will invest more than $4 billion into equipment related to hydrogen, because they're really betting on taking a position in Korea within the area of hydrogen. We also decided to invest in HyNet. HyNet is a cooperation between Hyundai, Nel, KOGAS, and a number of other leading players, and it's very nice for us to be actually part of it. We are sitting on the board and we are also a part of this, and we are then participating together with these big leading companies. This morning, we received the purchase order for the first two stations going to HyNet for the Korean market. Obviously, we are very happy that the trust as for Nel, as an equipment supplier, has been restored.
We've been working for a very long time related to getting this in place, and we finally were able to announce the H2Bus Consortium. Here, all the relevant parties are represented. We have Ballard on fuel cells, we have Hexagon on tanks, we have Wrightbus on buses, we have Nel on production equipment for renewable hydrogen and for fueling stations, we have Ryze and Everfuel as owner-operators of equipment. We're trying here to establish something that makes it easy for the bus operators. They don't have to then worry about buying and sourcing all of these pieces of equipment and getting everything to work. They can simply order hydrogen delivered in their bus depot from a dispenser, exactly like they do with diesel today. We hope that this is going to be an attractive solution for many of these bus operators.
The initiatives here will also be supported by the funding that we received and announced last year. We also then closed the agreements with Everfuel, where we will remain a minority investor. Everfuel will then have other investors as main shareholders. We have put some of our most competent people to take this forward, and Everfuel will become an owner-operator of many other countries around in Europe. The package with Everfuel contains also a service and sales agreement with potential value of up to EUR 100 million. We obviously hope that they will kick off some of these projects very soon, and we will do whatever we can to support that venture moving forward. The initial bus project in Europe actually happened in London. It was announced in May. It was an agreement with Transport for London.
As you may know, buses operate at a slightly lower pressure than cars. They operate at 350 bar. Cars operate at 700 bar. When I say that we are accommodating our technology, we are basically making sure that it fulfills those applications in an even better way. We believe that the market has started to recognize what we're doing here to basically tweak our products to better adapt these various pieces. We want to make our technology ideal for these different purposes with the same base technology. The interesting piece with London is that the mayor of London, Mr. Khan, clearly has stated that London does not have the electricity grid to carry or to basically implement battery electric buses. The grid is not there. They need to produce the energy or the hydrogen outside the city, based on renewable, and move it in.
Therefore, hydrogen electric buses are much more relevant in this market. In the U.K., Ryze is our partner. Ryze is the owner-operator. They are also working on other cities in the U.K. This particular project, the first one, has a total value of EUR 2.5 million. We also applied for DOE funding, Department of Energy funding, in the United States, together with Nikola, and we were proposed for award. Here, we will basically develop next-generation heavy-duty stations that is even better adapted to what Nikola wants to achieve. Basically, very fast fueling of trucks. We are currently working to finalize agreement with DOE, and we have a very good dialogue with Nikola. We are working to define the exact rollout plan of their stations. It will still, we believe, take some time before we kick off POs related to the full-scale commercial stations.
Now let's move away from mobility and over to industry, because the opportunities within industry may be even bigger than we see within mobility. Let's start with the Hybrit agreement. Now, 7% of the world's CO2 comes from steel production. Steel producers today burn coal to remove oxygen. Instead of burning coal, they can burn hydrogen, and then they can make water instead of CO2. We are therefore extremely excited to be able to be part of this early phase development by signing a contract with Hybrit. Hybrit is a joint venture between SSAB, LKAB, and Vattenfall, and they are really pushing and taking the first step into producing CO2-free steel. Now, SSAB is a leading steel producer, very advanced in technology, and have a portfolio of advanced steel products in the market. Hybrit, the joint venture, is then developing a pilot in Luleå in Sweden.
They will base that on renewable hydrogen produced out of our electrolyzers, and then they will test and verify the technology downstream in terms of producing CO2-free steel. Obviously, the potential in this industry is enormous, and we have talked about that already. If we look at our 360 MW capacity, we will have to run that flat out for 2,650 years to be able to cover only the steel market. It is a huge, very large market, and that tells us two things. It tells us that the potential is there, even though it will take some time, but it also tells us something about our existing capacity. It's not very big, and we need to think maybe even bigger if we're going to address these markets going forward. Last week, we also announced another great piece of news we think.
We've been working very hard for a long time to get all the details in place related to Yara. We signed this last week. Yara has clear ambition to produce CO2-free ammonia and fertilizer. This project, we will implement, we will develop the value chain together. We will obviously focus on the electrolyzer. Yara will focus on the downstream pieces. Here we intend to develop the next generation alkaline electrolyzer, which is addressed for even larger capacities. It will hopefully address even a lower cost level, it will have higher flexibility, and it will be installed at Herøya, in Yara's facility at Herøya. We will have a relatively close proximity also to this facility, which is nice. Now, this electrolyzer unit will only represent 1% of the demand of the Yara's Herøya plant.
You can see that there's quite a lot of potential on this plant, but obviously also thinking wider about the ammonia market longer term, there's a huge potential in that market. More than half of today's hydrogen produced on fossil-based goes to ammonia production, and obviously this needs to change. It is very important for Nel to be part of these early developments in steel, in ammonia, and in other of these early moving markets because we want to learn and we want to be able to tweak and adapt our technology to make it fit perfectly for the end customers. I need to cover another piece of news from this morning. We were able to secure a future location even better suited for low cost production and high capacity for electrolyzers, which we are very happy about.
We now have been working for some time trying to get this in place, and we want to think big, and we wanted to really find the ideal location in that context, to be able to manufacture even larger scale. Why do we do this? First of all, we get access to a world-leading industrial complex with state-of-the-art infrastructure in place. We have very competitive terms. We have proximity to big partners like Yara, but also much easier logistics. We are then located in an area with decades of industrial production experience, so it should be attractive for current and future colleagues. We have a facility that provides us with the opportunity to go bigger and to scale up to more than 1 GW. The initial target would still be to start with 360 MW, and obviously, ramp up will be aligned with customer requirements.
Notodden will remain for everything else than production. As you know, that area, there is a lot of engineering competence. At Herøya, there is a lot of production competence. We're basically drawing the best from both areas. That makes a lot of sense. I also want to underline that we have received a lot of good support from Notodden Municipality in these discussions. We've had good discussions, good support during this challenging process, and I want to thank them for very constructive process in that context. This is the building that we are talking about. It's a relatively new building. It's a very complex building in terms of the infrastructure which is available. It was originally constructed by REC for production of large volumes of solar wafers. We have all the chemical-related, power-related systems already in place.
It has been sitting there idle, waiting for us, and it really is ideal for our purpose. We will start by focusing on the part which is furthest away. It's basically two factories which are next to each other, so we will start focusing on the one which is further away in this picture. We also have an option to take over the piece which is closer in this picture. We've been through our pre-project and preparations. We've been working with suppliers to see how much capacity would we be able to fit inside of these facilities. As you can see, we should at least have room for three production lines, which should be equivalent to more than one gigawatt of production capacity. Now, we're also working on opportunity to adapt the production line to even more advanced production.
This could potentially allow us to take out a lot more than the one gigawatt. Here I will have to come back to you guys. It's not very often that I say that, but we have to come back and talk more about the details related to that potential plan a bit later. With that, I think we have covered some of the main important topics. I'll try to summarize with a brief summary and outlook before we open up for questions. Focusing on a rapidly growing billion Norwegian kroner company, building that, we have introduced a new key parameter, obviously, leading in safety. That means that we need to highlight this even more going forward. We should not see any incidents with Nel equipment, or sites with Nel equipment.
We still maintain that we want to have a technology leadership, both related to OpEx and CapEx, and we want to continue to launch products like we did in the second quarter to drive demand in various areas. We want to maintain our cost leadership, and basically cut production cost as fast as we can. That will, number one, protect our future competitive position, but it will also open up new markets when cost is basically driven out. We want to be the preferred partner. We want to be trustworthy. We want to be reliable, and want to be able to offer unique services and products to the customers. We want to obviously maintain a robust financing, and that's why you see that we use the opportunity to ensure that that is in place when we have the chance. We are working to develop a global market presence.
That doesn't mean that we should be everywhere, but we need to be in the relevant markets, where there is a lot of momentum on hydrogen. In terms of outlook, many of these initiatives, growing the company, adding more capacity, adding employees, training new people, will obviously cost money, and we have said repeatedly that will have a negative effect on EBITDA. We continue to develop now state-of-the-art safety procedures, and we continue to work on our 10X electrolyzer capacity development. We are leveraging on heavy duty, the trends that we see in the market to really tweak our products and take steps in technology development there. We are working on next generation alkaline electrolyzer. We're also working on very exciting new things on the PEM side.
We are engaged in a large number of tendering activities. We have a very strong backlog. The pipeline is also extremely strong. The pipeline is basically what are the projects that people are working with, that can later turn into orders. That is obviously an important for us to constantly monitor and look at the pipeline and see how that is developing. That is currently very strong. We obviously continue to develop the Nel organization to ensure that we're capable of executing on all of these plans. With that, I think we have covered the formal part of the presentation. We have the ability to take questions both here in the room and over the web. Please feel free. Bjørn has the microphone. Wait for the microphone, please, before you
Any questions in the room, just raise your hand and introduce yourself before you ask. Okay. Let's start with some questions from the web. We have a question here from [Knut Lotzen]. Question is, "What timeline can be expected for the next generation electrolyzers under development?
We have, together with Yara, a plan to get this into operation during 2022. We obviously already have, and I believe I showed a picture last year, we have a smaller scale unit that has been running. The big scale unit will be implemented in 2022.
We have a question from [Philip Sites]. He asks, "Why is the Nikola order not included in the backlog?
What we said with related to the backlog is that we only include orders that has a fixed price and a fixed order point. That is basically, we take a cautious approach there. We do take where the price is defined with all the terms and conditions defined, all the penalties, delivery terms, everything is defined. That's what we put in the backlog.
Do we have any questions from the audience? We have some extra from the web. There's one from [Thomas Kevis]. He asks, could you talk a bit more about the timing and share of Nel from the 100 stations planned by HyNet by 2022?
I think that we need to be a bit cautious in terms of trying to publicly say things there. Obviously, we are a part of a partnership, we do discuss these things internally, I think we need to leave those discussions between the partners. We don't participate there if we don't expect to get something back. We have strong ambitions in Korea because we believe that our product fits very nicely. We see that we have gotten quite a lot of traction in that market. We want to take a significant market share in that market, we have set up our organization with the sales crew, with the service and maintenance installation crew to be able to address that market efficiently, we believe so. I think that's as far as I can go in terms of this.
There is a question from [Thor Gyulver]. Is Nel involved in ongoing maritime projects in Norway?
There I can say that we are, definitely. We have our joint venture with Hexagon and PowerCell, Hyon. They have a long list of projects that we're working on. It's traditional ferries, it's fast ferries, it is fish farming, it is container ships, it is hydrofoil ferry. They are involved in two different PILOT-E projects. Yes, we are involved through our joint venture. Obviously, we are also involved in terms of talking to partners about production capacity of hydrogen, in what format and in what locations.
I'm Daniel from Pareto. I was wondering if you have any estimate or range on what a fraction of your OpEx goes toward things that could really be considered investments, such as R&D or brand building in terms of marketing or whatever? Thank you.
That's a good question. I think we are working on trying to find a format that basically elaborates a bit more on these things, because we do realize that we could spec our income statement a bit better to make this easier to basically do this kind of analysis. So far, we are trying to group what is non-recurring and one-off in a category called non-recurring and ramp-up costs. We have made a definition of that, which we use every time. There we, for example, include not branding and marketing costs. We don't include that because then we think that's a piece of normal business. Maybe we could isolate that.
We do include when we employ a crew early, before they start to generate revenue, we say that this is ramp-up cost because they will start to deliver, maybe they need three months, six months training before we deploy them in a particular area related to a facility that we're expanding. As one example. I think the format that we have now is what I can give you. We have made a note that we will try to split out and give a bit more information so that you can answer questions like the one you're presenting in a better way. Okay, Bjørn, do we take one more or should we wrap up?
I think we're going to have one more. There's a couple of questions here regarding the facility, the new facility at Herøya on the costs related to it. They're both regarding what we can say about the costs of moving into that facility compared to the initial plans.
Well, if I had mentioned anything about cost, if there was a big difference between what we said before, I would have mentioned it. There is no fundamental difference in what we said before and what we're saying now. I also said that this is attractive terms. Obviously, we believe that we have a very good support from Herøya Industrial Park. We've been working with them for a long time on this, and we think the total package is very attractive, including making things ready for us. Since in many ways, it will be easier because there is a building which is ready. It will be quicker and easier instead of doing reconstruction and integrating two buildings.
Since it's a separate site, you can actually focus on getting that up or running, and then you can keep what you need to have running until you're up and running here. The whole transition will be easier by doing it this way.
Okay, one more question from the audience here.
Hi, Svein- Erik from Norne. Could you say something a bit about how you plan to develop your organization going forward? A bit more details? Maybe can you quantify the number of employees you plan to be adding or similar?
This is a bit site-specific, obviously. We have a good, strong crew up in California. I need to take some examples. California is pretty much done, so we don't need to add a lot more. In Korea, we are still adding a few more people. Wallingford, so far, we have what we need, pretty much. We need to add some components, but not great. We have done a lot of recruitment in Herning, and we still do that because we see what is coming and we're preparing for that. The big numbers I've covered. When it comes to everything that we're doing in Norway, we have the big numbers ahead of us. We haven't added those people yet. We have obviously started working. We've added a lot of people, and we've added a lot of good people. Related to the scale-up, that will come.
That's maybe the area that we see now, which we'll see the biggest change going forward for the next foreseeable future. Okay, I think that's it. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to see you all. Thank you very much for following us over the web, and look forward to seeing you again relatively soon for the third quarter presentation. Thank you.