Good morning, and welcome to the quarter presentation of Horisont Energi. My name is Bjørgulf Haukelidsæter Eidesen, and I'm the CEO of the company. With me, I have my two colleagues. Please.
Yes, good morning. My name is Dan Jarle Flølo, and I am the CFO in the company.
My name is Siri Melberg. I'm responsible for communication and branding in the company.
Thank you. I will take you through the first part of the presentation, and then Dan, my colleague here, will take you through the financial results. Our agenda is as follows. We will start with an introduction, then go through the operational highlights for this quarter, the financials, and then give a status update on the projects, and then end with the Q&A. There is a Q&A board that you can use to post your questions. Please do so. Let us get started. To remind you all, Horisont Energi, we are a clean energy company, and we are developing projects in the fields of clean ammonia and carbon storage. We are in many ways in our field a pioneer developing projects for the low-carbon future.
The operating highlights from this quarter on the Barents Blue, we have more or less completed a design for the plant, and we now see that we have a best-in-class life cycle carbon footprint. We are down to 50 g of CO2 per kilogram of ammonia achieved through carbon capture in excess of 99%. We have had a concept study ongoing, following the work from the initial concept study with Saipem and Topsoe to finalize and optimize the design in all aspects, both in terms of energy, in terms of carbon footprint and sustainability, and in terms of efficiency in other aspects also. We are also in a permitting process for the Markoppneset site for the plant, which has been ongoing since early last year.
We had an impact assessment program approved prior to 2022, at the end of the year. We have had the program approved, and we have had the impact assessment studies ongoing now for quite some time, and they are near their end. Having completed all of the impact assessment studies to really get into the details of what kind of impacts the plant has. This is a key milestone now in the permitting work, nearing its completion. We also had a very, very positive feedback from ESA. This came in September when we have got formal approval for Barents Blue as one of the 35 IPCEI hydrogen projects. This is a special part of IPCEI hydrogen, now known as Hy2Use, which deals with decarbonization of European industry.
Now we are a formal part of the European hydrogen value chain. We are very proud because this is the first time Norway is part of IPCEI, and there are two IPCEI projects in this first wave of IPCEI where Norway is attending. This also approves our grant that we got from Enova back in 2021 of NOK 482 million. Furthermore, moving on to Polaris, the CO2 storage. This is the key part of the Barents Blue project, and we have completed many offshore campaigns for Polaris and got a lot of positive results that we can use for the further impact assessments and for the concept studies of the various parts of the facilities offshore.
On the Array project, Array project is a project we announced this quarter, and we have also signed an agreement together with Neptune Energy, which is our partner in the Array project. We have set up a joint project organization together with Neptune, and we have also worked now to shortlist and finalize the selection of site for the onshore terminal. Furthermore, we have announced that we will apply for the license, which has been made public, and the deadline for this license application is third of January 2023. We have worked a lot with this project and started already back in 2021 with all the subsurface work. It's a project we are very proud now to be able to announce, and this will be a key part of our planned CCS value chain.
On the CCS value chain, we had this business development, very good progress. There's a growing demand for CO2 storage all over the EU, and we see that our European end-to-end value chain with E.ON is progressing as planned, with the aim to offer a complete CCS service. All the elements of the value chain are being worked and developed and Array is an important element, but so is also the CO2 terminal, which is developed by Koole Terminals in Rotterdam, where we'll be able to develop a large CO2 hub where we can source CO2 to Norway and to Array, and to future storages that we will develop. We are targeting European and domestic third-party customers with our service.
E.ON has a large customer base of more than 50 million industry customers that will be able to benefit from this service offering, as well as new customers to the service. Moving on. On the project agreement with Neptune Energy, it builds on an MoU that was announced thirtieth of August 2022, where we announced that we would cooperate on CCS and this first project that we do together will be, as we see it, one of the first really large scale commercial CCS projects in Norway to come forward following Northern Lights, which you probably know. What we see with Neptune Energy is that we are able to move fast.
We are able to now tap into the substantial interest of CO2 storage in the European industry. I guess we all know that there is a sense of urgency now in achieving climate targets. At the same time, we're able to deliver more energy in the European system. We have been able to move quickly to formalize this agreement and moving quickly to help and support Europe with CO2 storage in the years to come, together with Neptune . Now moving on to financial results, and my colleague, Dan, will take you through that. Please, Dan.
Thank you, Bjørgulf. Yes. See some of the highlights for the Q3. The result for the third quarter is in 2022 a loss of NOK 15.8 million. The company has currently no activities generating income. The expenditures are according to projects plans. Costs incurred in Q3 are fully expensed, except for capitalized right-of-use costs related to lease of offices. The company has received refund for VAT from beginning of 2020 until June 2022. The amount amounts to NOK 16.6 million and has reduced operating costs. Without this effect, operating loss would be NOK 35.3 million for this period. During 2022, Horisont Energi has expanded its organization in order to have the right expertise and capacity to further develop our large scale industrial projects.
Our expenses reflect this. The company has a total of NOK 443 million in cash as of September 30, and expects there's sufficient funds to bring Barents Blue, including Polaris and the new CCS project Array, up to investment position. Regarding the funding of the projects in the investment phase, Horisont Energi is maturing its financial plans in close dialogue with a number of providers of additional capital. We can move on to the accounts and a little bit more on the details. Horisont Energi has a net operating loss, just as Bjørgulf Eidesen recently said, of NOK 18.7 million for the third quarter. This includes the VAT refund of NOK 16.6 million. The company has a net financial income of NOK 2.9 million for the period.
This adds up to a net loss of NOK 15.8 million for the third quarter. Regarding the year to date figures, Horisont has an accumulated net operating loss of NOK 87.5 million and a net loss after financial items of NOK 81.8 million krona. Some comments to the balance sheet. We can move on to the next point. As previously stated, we have capitalized right-of-use related to the office rental, in addition to some minor IT equipment. Total receivables amounts to NOK 22.6 million. Our main asset is a total of NOK 443 million in cash. On the equity and liability side, the company has a total of NOK 41 million in current and non-current liabilities. Our total equity is NOK 434 million krona.
For further details about our accounts, please see our published Q3 report, which is available. That's the comments I would like to make this morning. Thank you.
Okay, thank you, Dan. We also want to give a few updates on things that we have presented earlier, especially things we presented back in early 2021, that we want to give a short update on. Barents Blue is expected to be Europe's first large-scale clean ammonia plant, still is. With that is looking to give us leading position in clean ammonia market. We are through, as we will update you very soon on, through a design that we have developed for this project, really setting the standard for clean ammonia. We see that with our ammonia production, we are 90% below specified limits of CO2 emissions in EU Taxonomy for hydrogen manufacturing.
We see we have a very, very energy-efficient plant with a gas consumption per ton of clean ammonia. We said minus 15% when we had the IPO of the company. We now see that, compared to that benchmark we had then, we are at minus 16.4%. We have awarded exploration license for Polaris, as was also part of the IPO presentation and the guidance, which is a key part of the Barents Blue project. We also have said earlier that we have been committed to comply with EU Taxonomy for our projects. We will now give you an update on this for the Barents Blue project. We also stated that we plan to be the first pure CCS company of Norway.
As of now, we are targeting to become operator of Array when it comes into operations. We are also where we said we will be in this aspect. In terms of the IPO, we also stated that we will enter into agreement with the major European utility for development of CCS, end to end in Europe. We have done so, and we have entered into joint development agreement with E.ON to realize the joint European CCS business. But the cooperation with E.ON also extends into clean ammonia. Overall, I think, we are leading the way to a carbon-free future and the things we said we'd do at IPO has been mostly delivered upon. Over to the project status.
For the Barents Blue, as we stated in the highlights, now formally an IPCEI hydrogen project, we are very, very happy with this, and have then a formal approval of the grant as provided by ESA and, I mean, by Nova earlier back in December 2021. The extended concept study performed by Saipem in cooperation with technology licensor Topsoe is soon to be completed. On the next slide, I will give an update on what has been achieved. The ongoing impact assessment studies where we cooperate with Multiconsult and many other suppliers are soon to be completed, which is a very important milestone in the permitting process. Permitting is moving forward as planned.
The next study phase will be the FEED studies following the completion of this phase of studies. We will give an update on that in the next annual report. To focus on what we have achieved in the studies together with Saipem and Topsoe, we have previously stated that we wanted to set a standard for clean ammonia. We have put a very high ambition of above 99% carbon capture, and this has been achieved. We have a carbon capture rate above 99%, and we see now that we have best-in-class greenhouse gas emission standards for the plant.
We have a level of 290 g of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen, which is 90% lower than the taxonomy requirements of 3 tons per ton of hydrogen for clean hydrogen. We have for the ammonia only 50 g of CO2 per kilogram of ammonia, an extremely low carbon footprint, all inclusive, exiting the factory gate of the plant. We only have 30 MMBtu of gas per ton of ammonia, which is significantly less than many conventional ammonia plants. To the benchmark we came up with at the IPO, it's 60.4% less than conventional ammonia plants, which use 36 MMBtu of gas per ton of ammonia.
This energy efficiency includes all the capture and all the sustainability aspects of the plant, so it's an all-inclusive energy use. Only in addition, there is 35 MW of renewable electricity per ammonia train, which is a very limited amount of electricity for such a plant. We also have sustainability aspects in terms of use of water, where we use about 50% less makeup water in the process compared to steam methane reforming plants and an above 80% reduction of steam footprint in the plant. When we calculate the carbon footprint of the plant, it includes all the direct emissions, all the materials for construction, all the electricity, all the chemicals, the natural gas. It's an all-inclusive life cycle assessment of Scope one and two.
Transport to market is not included, but there we plan to use green shipping with clean fuels. We are very happy about these results, and it demonstrates that we have a best-in-class blue ammonia design that is at the level of carbon footprint equal to green ammonia plants, which was our initial target. On the Polaris Project, we have completed pre-surveys offshore. As you probably know, we got the formal approval of the license back in late June. This has been an important milestone also in the development of the carbon storage sector in Norway. Polaris was actually the second carbon storage following the Northern Lights project.
It was the first nomination of carbon storage license acreage following Northern Lights. It will establish then a CCS activity in Northern Norway, which is expected to be beyond the use of the ammonia plant. Let us move forward. We are very proud to announce the Array project in this quarter. It is also the start of a very good cooperation together with Neptune Energy to develop CCS business, and we have put out a MoU and also followed by a project agreement in October 2022, and set up a joint project organization. In this project, we are developing an onshore terminal, and this will be the first terminal following Northern Lights at the coast of Norway.
This will be a large CO2 terminal with expansion opportunities beyond 8 million tons and all the way up to 60 million tons in the future phase. Furthermore, there will be a pipeline from the terminal out to the offshore acreage, where there will be templates and wells for injection of CO2. In the first phase of the project, we plan to store up to 4 million tons and then extend up to 8 million tons later on, and then going on to additional injections following. This project is targeting both European and domestic third-party customers, and we see for sure a growing demand in for CO2 storage in Europe.
We also announced in this quarter that we have a development in the value chain, where we are developing a lot together with Koole Terminals and together with E.ON, a large CO₂ terminal in Rotterdam, where we can gather CO₂ from Germany, Netherlands to source by ship to Norway for permanent storage in the Array. In the future also, carbon storages that Horisont Energi will develop. We have a green ammonia project in Northern Norway, which is in its shaping phase, putting together project elements in order to complete the shaping of a green ammonia project. This is a cooperation with St1 Nordic Oy, the Finnish company and the Norwegian branch. The plan ahead is to produce ammonia from renewable nitrogen.
That is nitrogen taken from the air and hydrogen produced using renewable electricity based on electrolysis. We have worked a lot with finding industrial sites for this plant, and we have now shortlisted to a very few amount of sites which we are studying more into detail to be able to finalize the shaping of this project. Looking at the Barents Blue project and this project now, which we have named the Star Project, we are developing Northern Norway as a key hub for ammonia, for clean ammonia going forward. I think we have really put Northern Norway on the map, on the clean ammonia map globally with these projects. To summarize, we have now presented to you the results of the work for the Barents Blue design. The design is nearly complete.
It's a best in class life cycle carbon footprint. It delivers on sustainability in many aspects, and circularity in terms of water use and in terms of recirculating and reusing waste streams. We also have the above 99% carbon capture rate, which is a record high carbon capture rate for this type of plant. We furthermore say that we are now near complete for the impact assessment studies, which brings the permitting forward, and it's a key milestone for the project. We also see good results, but these results will be presented later. We are developing a complete value chain from carbon capture to storage together with E.ON. Now we also have Neptune Energy on board in our value chain together with us.
We have planned a development of a new CO2 terminal in Rotterdam with Koole Terminals, which is also a key partner for us in setting up the CO2 value chain in Europe. We are targeting European and domestic third-party customers, where we see now a growing demand for CO2 storage. We are part of Neptune and Array and are very proud to announce this new CO2 storage project in Norway together with them. This will be a key element in our CCS value chain, and we have shortlisted onshore sites for selection, where we will have the CO2 terminal located. This will be made public later when we have finalized the selection. We have now sufficient funding to bring the Barents Blue project and Array up to the investment decision.
The company has a total of NOK 433 million in cash as of September 30 this year. With that, I conclude the presentation and we open up for Q&A. I will then also remind you to post your questions in the questionnaire chat that is there is an ask a question button in the live web feed. There are a few questions here, so I will start. The first question is, what is the CO₂ emitted from conventional ammonia production? Conventionally, I guess the direct emissions from a plant typically is 1.7 or 1.8 tons per ton of ammonia, or 1.8 kg per kilogram of ammonia.
In addition, there is the life cycle emissions and also the emissions from the sourcing of gas and electricity, so Scope two emissions. This will bring probably the emissions closer to around 2 kg per kilogram ammonia. 50 g in comparison for this plant is an enormous reduction. It's a very, very low carbon footprint. What is the next milestone on the Array project? Is a question. In the Array project, we are targeting what we call a concept freeze around Christmas, where we will finalize the concepts for the onshore and the offshore to be able to really kick off all the permitting work. In addition, we plan to have a DG2 mid next year for this project.
Next question, is there a great interest for CO2 storage in general and for Array? We really see a growing demand for CO2 storage and more and more. More and more carbon capture projects are being developed and matured and moving towards important milestones. Finally toward FID. I think also we saw now in the last Innovation Fund announcement, there was 17 projects, the Innovation Fund. There was a large amount of projects that include carbon capture and that is in need of storage. But there's also many other projects out there that need storage. We see a very high increase in demand.
At the same time, we are lucky to have our partner, E.ON, which has over 50 million customers, where a large part of them is in need of carbon storage to decarbonize their operations and mitigate the financial risk of an ever-increasing ETS quota cost. For Array specifically, we will come back with an update on customer base. We are very happy with the customer base that we have for this project, but we will come back with further details later. Yeah. The next question is, what can we say about ammonia market? The ammonia market has really developed. I guess one particular thing that has happened is the crisis that we're in currently with the war in Ukraine, between Ukraine and Russia.
A lot of important commodities from Russia have been shut off from the market. Furthermore, Ukraine delivery of ammonia has been reduced. There's now a deficit of ammonia in the fertilizer market, so there's a huge demand there. Furthermore, with the REPowerEU initiative, there is a very clear and outspoken demand for hydrogen in EU. Most of the hydrogen will have to be imported as ammonia into Europe in order to make hydrogen available, both from Norway and from other European countries, and also from the rest of the world. We see then that with the ambitions of the first level of ambition was 10 million tons of hydrogen per year. That amounts to about 50 million tons of ammonia to be imported.
That has been increased to 20 million tons. Now we are at 100 million tons of ammonia equivalence to be imported to Europe, between various European countries. Furthermore, there are now legal action going on in terms of developing legislation for requirements for shipping companies in EU, to include a certain percentage of ammonia in their fuel mix. There's a lot of things happening that makes ammonia market really move forward. We will give an update on this in the annual report, what is going on in the ammonia market and how that is developing. Next question. Can you comment on the NOK 2 million IPCEI grants for Barents Blue, and how the grant is structured? How much of the proceeds can you use? Let me see.
Can you use in a different phase of the project? The grant is structured such that NOK 75 million can be used for the FEED phase, and the remaining, which is about NOK 407 or 408 million, is to be used for project financing at FID. The 75 million NOK will then be used as part of the next phase of the work. It will be structured in a way so that it will be awarded to a joint project company in between the partners of the project.
Okay, the next question is, and the final one at this point, can you comment on the latest development in the Barents Sea, and when do you expect more news on the ability to secure a long-term gas sourcing contract for gas for Barents Blue? I guess there are many things happening in the Barents Sea. I don't know if you're referring to the news about the Wisting field that was delayed. We don't have any particular comments to that, but I think there is a sufficient, more than sufficient gas sourcing for our project in the Barents Sea with Snøhvit and Gullfaks and Johan Castberg and also potentially the Aasta field, which is in development. There is a large amount of gas.
In terms of securing the gas sourcing, I think we are progressing more or less as planned and are able to give an update on this in the annual report. It is a development there on the gas sourcing is positive. We are on track with getting into gas contracts by, we say, the DG2 of the project. That was the final question. Thank you all for attending and have a nice day. Bye.