Good morning everyone. My name is Even Lund, and I'm the Investor Relations Manager at Norske Skog. We are very happy to welcome you all here today for what is Norske Skog's first capital markets day since 2009, we believe. Quite an historic event for the company. A lot is happening at Norske Skog, and we have invested both time and money over the past few years to build a company for the future. We are now on the cusp of seeing the financial benefit from all of this activity. What timing could be better than to have you all here today, both in person and virtually, to give you an update on everything that's happening. [Foreign language]. Norske Skog will remain a reliable supplier of publication paper for a long time.
Svein Ombudstvedt, our CEO, will talk about how we look upon the current publication paper market and its outlook, and also offer some thoughts to the longer term potential that may arise from being an owner of massive industrial sites across the world as we embark on the green shift in a big way. Tore Hansesætre, SVP Strategic Projects, and Marleen van den Berg, VP Containerboard Sales, will update on the packaging papers. Marleen will talk about containerboard and why Norske Skog will be perfectly positioned in this market when we enter in just 12 months. Tore will talk about our projects more specifically and why our capacity will be highly competitive in this market.
We will have Lars Sperre, SVP Corporate Strategy, and Hugo Harstad, MD CEBINA and CEBICO, give insight into our exciting bioproducts and energy projects, as well as give some comment to the exciting and promising outlook we see for our green portfolio of projects. As you can see, a lot is happening at Norske Skog. Rune Sollie will explain why we expect to maintain a strong liquidity position throughout the ongoing investment phase before Sven at the end gives some concluding remarks. There will be Q&A between each main segment, as well as briefly at the end, and midway, we'll have a short break and a snack. With that, I leave the word to Sven.
Thank you, Even, and also from me, good morning to all of you. It's very pleasing to see so many of you here in person when, on the 17th of June 2020, we announced the containerboard projects, it was not that many here. So, most of you had to see and hear that online. We still obviously hope and think that a lot of people follow us online as well, so we will try to be quite strict on the timing according to the agenda. As all of you, I think, know by now, Norske Skog is departing from its publication paper business only model that has been forced upon us for many years. Despite that, we will, as Even said, remain a reliable supplier as long as there is meaningful demand in these segments.
We think that there can still be a good possibility to harvest very interesting cash flow from operations from our Norske portfolio of publication paper. However, today's sort of main theme is the progress report, if you like, on the Strato project, which is our packaging project. In addition, we also have interliner. We are testing this year interliner from Skogn, which is an intermediate layer used in packaging, mainly in China. We think it's interesting for us to have about 200,000 tons of paper, which is equivalent to one of the smaller machines at Skogn into this segment over time. That is a market which is there to stay, and we think that can bring sort of also useful diversification to the portfolio.
On the energy side, we have had for many years biomass and green energy into our furnace mix. We also developed, as most of you know, biogas facilities at the three larger European sites. Two of them is our own, one is an external company. Also an interesting usage of something which in reality is a waste stream. Nature's Flame at New Zealand pellets business was acquired out of a bankruptcy. We have upgraded that from 45,000 tons to 90,000 tons per annum. Now we're embarking also on a project bolt on to 150,000 tons of project. As you know, we have announced that we are in the sales process for these assets as after the Tasman closure, this is a little bit too small and a little bit too far away from the rest of our business.
There's limited synergies for us to harvest, but in and of itself, it's a very interesting business in the growth markets. On energy, the biggest project we have is the waste to energy boiler in Bruck, which on a standalone basis is indeed quite interesting as it is replacing gas-fired power production with waste-fired. It's solving a waste problem. At the same time, it's also solving an economic issue for us as it replaces more expensive energy with cheaper energy, hopefully over time, and also reduces about 150,000 tons of CO₂, which also has a meaningful economic impact. Finally, if you saw when you came through the doors, you could see two tins of which there was a CEBINA mark on side when you came in here.
This is the top products, and here we are talking more about the cans and kilos than tons, but higher value bioproducts coming out of our main processes, in conjunction with the processes or separately. This offers an opportunity to be part of a bio energy value chain. We call CEBICO is the biocomposite product. CEBINA is the microfibrillated cellulose products, and we will hear more of it from Hugo Harstad later on today. We are quite excited about the developments, and they have been reconfirmed over the last weeks, months, and years. Finally, Circa, just a word on Circa, who reports their own quarterly report today, which is also something we are supporting despite the somewhat disappointing news that came out about the delays to the French semi-industrial pilot plant and the possible cost overruns.
We remain not only supportive, but also an instrumental large minority shareholder who will not allow Circa to do, let's say, stupid things with their capital structure. Another thing which has been important for many, many years in the paper and pulp industry has been to reduce emissions of all kinds. This is something that we have been working on since at least the early 1980s. This is knowledge that sits very, very deep in the industry and inside Norske Skog indeed. More recently, this is just an illustration on CO2, that we have had targets for many years, and we reached quite early the 2020 target. We set new targets in 2015 with a 40% reduction from 2015- 2020, which was reached.
We have a new target, 2020- 2030 or -55%. There are two important factors here. One is that the base year is not distant history, it's recent history. The second is that we have projects to back it up already. We are exceedingly confident that we will indeed reach these targets. We're also then on the way to a zero ambition, and probably we'll also be part of the solution for the carbon emission issue. The Bruck waste energy boiler, as I mentioned, is one aspect of that. Something which will become more apparent through the day is that there will be a new biomass boiler also at the Golbey site from the second quarter 2024, which will change the energy mix and the CO2 mix at the Golbey site as well.
Looking a little bit into sustainability and circularity even further, almost all of the wood we use are certified. The reason why it's not more than 90% is simply that the Australian system is slightly different. There's not less requirements on what we source in Australia. Quite the contrary, it comes out of professionally managed forests, and some of it used even to be our own until recently. I think we could say that all our wood is sourced from sustainable sources under certification. Also, when it comes to the products we use, we have said for many years that everything we are producing is recyclable and reusable many, many times over.
We still have a little bit of landfill, but we do have activity that is mainly ash from the boilers, and we still have activities to make ash into useful products. This is more a sort of a regulatory process which is slow rather than that there is no need for the product or demand for the product. This can be used into roads or concrete pavings, et cetera, which there is definitely demand for in all countries in Europe and throughout the world. Since most of our products can be reused, the same goes for energy. We have electricity, a big part of it, but we also have biomass boilers and energy recovery, which is a significant part of the total gross energy use in our mills.
The last part here, which is the fossil part, as you have understood by now, a significant chunk of that will also be reduced when the Bruck mill will operate this waste-to-energy boiler in early parts of next year. The only remaining fossil part is then a small part in the Boyer mill in Australia, and over time as well, that will also be changed, but that is probably towards the end of the next decade. I think also the paper and pulp industry is indeed part of the solution when it comes to the green shift. It's difficult for me to see that the EU or indeed Norway will reach its target of -55% to 2030 and zero emissions in 2050 without the forest-based sector.
This is partly because obviously wood is absorbing CO2 in the growth phase and can also sustain it in the building materials. Also importantly, our mills, in this case, the Saugbrugs and Skogn mills, are ideal places to test new technology for CO2. Not only capture, but also usage of CO2 and eventually creating a value chain for CO2. You can see on this slide there are two examples. This is what's called Borg CO2, which Saugbrugs is a key participant in. This is a CCUS, capturing carbon and usage and storage, where we will use tests from CO2 Capsol, which is in the making now. Again, it's difficult to see exactly how this value chains will play out, who will be the winners and who will be the losers.
I think as in all parts of industry and the way we operate, you need to be competitive and you need to find the most competitive solutions. I'm not sure if all the solutions which are out there today are competitive, but we will certainly aim to find out either through the Borg CO2 initiative or what we do at Skogn, where we are supporting Ocean GeoLoop with their technology. This is a bit different than where you pump the CO2 into a reservoir underneath the sea. This is actually using the sea to absorb CO2. Quite interesting. Quite a long development time has passed us. This has been in development since 1997 and is now being tested.
If you go into the central Norwegian areas, you may see something that looks like a submarine, which is out in the fjord. This is Ocean GeoLoop testing how CO2 can utilize the natural flows of the ocean and the pressure differences between the depths of various oceanic material, and then recreate algae materials which can then be used for other purposes. Quite a clever methodology and something that we indeed aim to support and to, we think, find very, very cost-effective ways of abatement and eventually usage of CO2. Value chains again are in development. We think that both the Skogn mill and the Saugbrugs mill are in perfect positions to take part of that.
I will then do as Even promised, I will go a little bit into the publication paper markets, and share with you some of the views of the day, what we see. Starting with the demand, all of you know that COVID took a big chunk out of the market in 2020. You could almost read week by week the circulation figures dropping from week 13 of 2020, and roughly 20% went out of the market during the first year of COVID. Since sort of April, May of this year, we have then seen demand coming back into a growth trajectory.
While 1.8%, as we illustrate here, and the last 12 months growth doesn't seem like it's sort of an enormous comeback, this is also hampered by the fact that most players today do not have the capacity to deliver more. We actually think there is a higher underlying demand than what this figure indicates. This will become more and more apparent through the fourth quarter as more and more producers are also reducing capacity because of gas costs. Marginal producers have faced both an increase in recovered paper and in gas cost, which means that there has been even less deliveries to the market. Again, demand, underlying demand is now stronger than this figure indicates. We can also say that there is a sort of more stability in demand.
We do not expect this to be a growth market and beyond sort of 2022 into 2023, we expect sort of the more traditional 5% decline to continue. This does obviously not mean that this market is disappearing. It means that there will be meaningful demand for many, many years to come. It's not only us who believe that. Also our customers obviously are quite positive indeed to the future. They are in today's market looking for long-term supplies of paper. However, obviously the main point again in this industry, as in many other industries, is the supply demand balance. Since the second half of 2020, you can see that a very, very large chunk of paper capacity has been closed in Europe.
This graph illustrates the European closures, and we have seen significant mills going out of operations. We have seen companies, significant players leaving this marketplace altogether. Significant markets like the U.K. are now left with very little down to sort of one player in newsprint with domestic capacity. All in all, this means that, particularly for Skogn but also for Saugbrugs, their positions in these markets have been solidified, and there is every reason to believe that they will have a long-term future in this market, despite the fact that again, there will be demand declines beyond 2022. What is also a bit different now than in the past is that we have a certain transparency on the future.
If you look at the 2022 and the 2023 period, there is already a significant amount of capacity that has been announced out of the market, again for conversions, and two of those are our own, our Bruck and Golbey machines. Also Sachsen in Germany and Laakirchen in Austria have been announced in this time period. We expect the market to continue to be tight for the foreseeable future. If you look a little bit at the industry split, you can see that, our current capacity is a little bit less in magazine compared to the market and a little bit heavier on newsprint. 65% of our capacity is today newsprint, while the industry and the demand is more 40%.
This will obviously change, relatively speaking, when the Bruck and Golbey mills are being converted, so we will be closer to the market. However, today it's not bad to have an overexposure to newsprint. As I said, we expect that to continue. Another observation you can make is then the stock levels in the industry, which is here on the left-hand side and we express it here as a relative size compared to deliveries. We are now far below one month of deliveries. The October point is down to 20 days roughly across all grades. I think the newsprint figure is probably closer to 10, 11 days, and we can see it ourselves. We practically have no inventories apart from what is absolute minimum needed in order to maintain deliveries.
This is clearly a sign that the market is tight, and the market will continue to remain so. If you look at the capacity utilization on the right-hand side, we are now at 92%. Traditionally, we say above 90% means that there is a pressure upwards on pricing. That is clearly the case now. I think 92% is in principle flat out. We don't really see a lot of capacity that is not being utilized, apart from temporary stops for cost reasons of gas and recovered paper. That means that pricing should come up, and we've shown this before, where the newsprint in Hong Kong reacts first, then the United States, and then Europe. We've had three rounds of price increases since the first of July.
In Europe, we had somewhere between EUR 40 and EUR 80 from the troughs in July. Then we have imposed two further price increases, one effective from the 15th of October and one from the 1st of November. The two latter mainly motivated by the rapid increase in energy markets but also recovered paper markets. You can see this is what I'm talking about here, significant increases in recovered paper. I think the recovered paper market has stabilized a little bit around EUR 180. This was somewhat higher than where I thought it was going to stabilize between EUR 160 and EUR 170. There is sort of proof to what people can pay even today for recovered paper. On the pulpwood side, the price in the Nordics have been different.
There is an upward pressure here as well, but it's much more insignificant compared to the other cost components, where obviously electricity and gas, particularly in continental Europe, have gone completely through the roof. You can see the German and the Nordic electricity price and the European gas price on these graphs, and most people are obviously aware of this. If you could say in terms of gas per megawatt hour, we started, and most of the people started the year at EUR 13, and we end the year closer to EUR 100. Obviously something has to happen, and what has happened in our case is the fact that there has been significant price increases on the customer side, as a lot of other industries have seen. A few words on the cost picture.
This is probably also not new for a lot of you that fiber and energy is our two largest cost components, and then distribution is around 10%-11%, and then other cost of materials is the large bucket then in terms of the variable cost. The fixed cost is about 25%, of which a little bit less than half is annual maintenance, and the rest is then salaries and people. Again, variable costs, so this means that the operational gearing is quite high to particularly to increasing prices. We buy today about 3 million cubic meters of wood in terms of sawdust and logs, and then about 630,000 tons of recycled paper.
This will change as we go into the containerboard projects, where we then will reduce our wood purchases, and we will then significantly increase our procurement of recycled paper. The good thing is that we already have, both in France and Austria, as indicated on this graph, a presence in this market. We have local contract with municipalities, and we have the organization required to source recovered paper. I'm not worried at all about the availability, quality, and pricing of recycled fiber for the box projects. In terms of energy, again, this is the 7.7 TWh that we in a normal year consume, of where the Bruck boiler is the most significant change that will happen to that before, also the new boiler in Golbey will be operational in 2024.
On the customer side, despite all the havoc in the printing industry during COVID and even pre-COVID, the names are relatively familiar for those of you who have followed us for some time. It's a wide variety of both publishers and printing houses and even companies like retailers like Lidl and others. But again, we have longstanding relationship. We have quite a diversified customer base in Europe and also now Australia with Boyer, the only mill left. It's a reasonable mix between publishers and magazine and catalog printers. I briefly mentioned that also our customers are reasonably sort of optimistic now about the short-term future. Clearly this is still the fact that our customers still make their money from print.
You can see on the left-hand side that 82% of publisher revenue still comes from print. This figure used to be 90%, and for many, many years we talked about 90%. It is coming down, but it is not coming down very rapidly. Over many years, it has reduced from 90% to 82%. Yes, it will probably come down even further, but it means that our customers will still fight for the printed product as much as they can. Even if global circulation is coming down, we still see the resurgence of some catalogs. We still see that people who left catalogs during COVID come back to them, for instance, in Australia, where they see a direct link between their own revenue and the usage of printed material.
Then on the right-hand side, the cost of materials is not the main factor for publishers. The total print production and distribution is around one-fifth of an average publisher's cost picture. If you look at the newsprint side of that or the paper side directly, we are between 5%-10%. It's not a major cost factor, which is important to bear in mind when there is now a significant inflation on the paper prices. Leaving the markets a little bit now and talking about the portfolio as such, and Even alluded to the fact that we think that we have a quite an interesting portfolio, which we will explain in more detail in the coming speeches here. For me now, I think it's just important to stress that there is a lot of activity around our mills.
We think that these are well-invested hubs, and for Golbey and Bruck, we now obviously have the two packaging projects. There is definitely an opportunity in both in Golbey and in Bruck to further invest in conversion of two more machines. I'm quite certain that will happen over time. We have to be a bit mindful that we don't put too much capacity into the market at the same time. Obviously, the organization also needs both human and financial resources to do it. But looking towards 2030, I think that's the direction of travel for Golbey and Bruck. In terms of the Norwegian mills, there is a different direction of travel. There is more high value fiber and energy products, and there is more long-term view on what we will use. If this is biochar, if it's biofuels, et cetera, we don't know.
We have done significant research into these areas, and we have concluded that both Skogn and Saugbrugs has a significant potential for, let's say, future more green investments. So our job now is to make sure that will happen. We will develop then products you will hear more about like CEBINA and CEBICO. We will develop the CO2 value chains, and we will develop the energy and fiber value chains. The good news is that Saugbrugs and Skogn will still have many good years as, significant cash contributors to the group with the publication paper machines that we have today. Australia is a little bit different.
The direction of travel for Australia in our sense is, let's say, similar in the sense that we want to develop long-term industrial footprints, but a bit different in the fact that we have now closed our Tasman mill in New Zealand and will sell Nature's Flame, which I mentioned is in the markets presently. That leaves us with Boyer. Boyer will have many good years as the sole supplier in this area of paper, but is also an interesting hub for renewable energy. Tasmania, with its water resources, with its wind resources, should be ideally placed to be one of the Australian hubs when they are delivering on their green policies. To conclude my part, I think we have said this many times , publication paper is still and will still be a main cash contributor.
We invest clearly less than depreciation, which is an indication of cash flow. I know that 2020 and 2021 thus far has not seen great cash flows. Yet over time, when we look at this from 2016 with this portfolio, even if we look forward, I still think that my words from the past of 1 billion EBITDA over the cycle, that still is correct despite the havoc that COVID created. Obviously, our job is to expand on this. You will hear about the packaging projects in more detail in a minute, and you will hear about all the projects which illustratively on this graph should also increase the EBITDA significantly going forward. One of the projects, the power plant at Bruck, is the closest one of those, which today looks significantly better than it did when we made the investments as an example.
I think it's important to state also here and today that we will remain a producer of publication paper as long as there is meaningful demand. I don't think a lot of paper companies can say that they have been reliable suppliers this autumn. I'm absolutely sure people will say that we have been that, and we will continue to be that. Exciting times. I think you all agree. I think we now stand, Even said, at the cusp of, I will say, at the start of or the beginning of a very interesting journey. Hopefully, you will see from the team also that we are very enthusiastic about the projects that are coming up and what is then better than to introduce the packaging projects. Then you will have the Q&A first?
Yeah.
Okay, we'll do the Q&A. You will have the microphone, Carsten.
Yes, thank you. Any questions from the people here? Yes. If you say your name and introduce your questions.
Sindre Sørbye from Arctic Asset Management. Obviously, there's some. I mean, publishers are talking about the shortage of newspapers. I mean, I can't recall when that last happened. In order to, let's say, avoid a potential boom-bust cycle. As you're probably in a very good negotiating position, would it be a possibility to enter into longer term contracts at this stage in order to, let's say, flatten out the prices for the next year or two?
No, I think in general, we've had long-term contracts, particularly in Australia. We've also tried that in Europe, and in general it's very difficult to make them work with the pricing. It's easier to make the volumes work than the pricing, so there is generally pressure on it when if your sort of market spot reference moves too far away from what is in the contracts. So, I'm not sure if we can successfully use long-term contracts to avoid the problem you're alluding to, but I'm absolutely sure that we could sign longer term contracts now. We have seen requests for proposal, which goes out till 2028 now, so I'm sure that we could do that if we wanted to.
Okay, interesting. Just a quick follow-up. The last price increases, are they contract wise defined as energy surcharges in the sense that if the gas prices or electricity prices are turning down, you actually have to lower prices?
No. They are motivated by increases in costs of recovered paper and energy. That's also why there is a slight difference between European mills and the Norwegian ones, but they are not directly linked. There is no link to a possible falling energy price as such. The market and the supply-demand balance will dictate the pricing in 2022. For that matter, we see a stronger 2022. The start, at least the first half of 2022, we will see higher prices. What happens thereafter remains to be seen, but as we indicate, the tightness of the market seems to stay as there will be capacity coming out during 2022 as well.
Okay. Finally, the last price increase, that was early October, right? We will see it more or less the full impact in the third quarter numbers, sorry, fourth quarter numbers?
Yes. The effect comes in. The two last price increases, one was the 15th of October, and then the final one from the 1st of November, which will all be reflected in the fourth quarter.
Any other questions? Yes, from here.
Hello. My name is Nils Foldal. I'm from Manara. I just wondered about your conversion projects are all based on recovered paper. My question relates to could you explain a bit why it's so, the price increase is so strong in relation to pulp? Does that endanger your project and your profitability if there is a limitation in the market for going forward for the Golbey and Bruck conversion?
I think we will definitely come back to this in more detail, but I think the short answer is that they are based on recovered paper because that is the recycled containerboard market. That's the market we're entering into. There is, that is, the largest part of European packaging is based on recovered paper. There is a different segment for kraft paper. The reason why recovered paper has increased is indeed because a very strong demand for containerboard based on recycled fiber, but that is to a certain extent plateauing now. There's no reason why there should be less recovered paper because there is more production of sort of new containerboard as well. I don't think that there is a real shortage long term for it.
The margin, as you say, has expanded also because there is cost pressure on other things than recovered paper, but the earnings in this segment now is higher than what we sort of base our long-term investments on.
Then just one question related to COVID. You, in your presentation, you show COVID effects on demand. What about, I don't know what wave we are in right now, but maybe wave four, let's say. Do you anticipate any demand will be reduced as effect of what, where we are now?
No, I don't think so. I think the main effect came in the, in sort of the most severe effect was certainly in the second quarter of 2020. There was definitely an effect throughout 2020 as well, and then from sort of even from the start of the year, we had a recovery in demand, and we will see that still continuing today. We haven't really seen a demand effect of COVID in 2021, which is sort of more than what we saw in 2020. Quite the contrary, there's a little bit of a growth in the markets today.
We also got a question on the chat from Morten Normann. He wanted to comment on, I think. You have had three rounds of surcharges in Q4, if I remember correctly. First EUR 50 per ton in Bruck, then EUR 100 per ton for all mills, and finally EUR 100 per ton for Bruck and Golbey. What has been the real outcome from these initiatives?
Yeah. I think first of all, the first one is different from the two latter, so there were price increases in the summer. Bruck one maybe a little bit later because lightweight coated prices a bit later than newsprint and SC, which was done on the first of July. Leaving the summer price increases aside, those we have seen coming into our figures. It's the two other price increases, which is correctly referenced by Martin. It was EUR 100 across the board from the fifteenth of October and then another EUR 100 for Bruck and Golbey paper from the first of November. I think we can say with the market tightness now that this has come through.
Any other questions? I think this concludes the Q&A session.
Very good. We move to the packaging paper, which I tried to move to already. Again, Tore, it's a pleasure to welcome you then for the next part of the presentation.
Okay. Very good. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're very excited to talk about the packaging paper projects that we have ongoing. I'm Tore Hansesætre, Senior Vice President, Strategic Projects, so I'm heading the transformation journey we are doing into the recycled containerboard market. I will talk more about our projects and what we are doing at the mills, the competitive edge we have in some minutes. First, I would like you to meet Marleen van den Berg, who is Vice President, Containerboard Sales. She is heading the commercial part of the entrance we have into the recycled containerboard. She has several years of long experience in paper and packaging.
Also introduced an independent supplier of 400,000 tons of containerboard in this market before, so she has the commercial experience of doing the journey we are doing here. Marleen will start, and then I'll come back later.
Thank you, Tore. Well, before I begin my story, I'd like to tell you what we're going to talk about. There are two terms in this business and in the presentation that you will hear a lot. That's containerboard, and that's corrugated sheet. This is a corrugated sheet. We've all seen it. It's part of a box or a display. This is actually part of a big corrugated sheet. This is what our customers will make. I will pass them out because if you look at them at the sides, you will see that they consist of layers of paper. That paper, actually quite contrary to the word, is what we call containerboard. Here you see indeed, for example, two layers of waves or flutes. That's actually a double wall sheet, and it consists of five layers of paper.
You also have here a double wall sheet. This is single wall sheet. Also a single wall sheet that only consists of three layers of paper. Again, the paper is containerboard, and the product as such is a corrugated sheet. We will enter this large and fast-growing market in the fourth quarter of 2022 when Norske Skog Group will start producing paper. Basically, looking at packaging products, we have them in our hands several times a day. There are three main segments. The first one is containerboard, and containerboard is used to make, for example, what you have in your hands, parts of boxes, but also displays, and for example, also pallets. IKEA, for example, decided a few years ago to transform all their wooden pallets into containerboard pallets.
Well, you can imagine what that means in terms of the demand of paper. These are used by e-commerce, by traditional retail. They're used in transport, but also think of packaging for industrial products. Think automotive. It's a true commodity with defined specifications, and they're usually based on recycled fibers. Now, it is a bulky product, so basically you sell this around the chimney. Today, demand in Western Europe is about 26 million tons. The second segment is carton board or solid board, and that is more frequently used in consumer goods. Think of food, pharma, cosmetics. Thinking of these end products, you can imagine that that is a more complex product to make. It also has things added to it, like barrier coatings, for example.
The third remaining segment, well, basically that's a collection of all other packaging products that we know. Think of bags, pouches, labels. That's basically a very wide variety of products made with both virgin and recycled fibers. We will enter indeed the container board market, the lightweight recycled container board market, both very important words, lightweight and recycled. Why do we do it? Well, first of all, our machines are extremely suitable for producing these lightweight products. Today, they produce lightweight products, and of course, in that sense, technically they are very well suited to produce lightweight container board as well. Secondly, the experience that we have in today's paper production is relevant for this business because it's basically the same production process. We don't have to master a new technology or another process.
Thirdly, most important, it's a fast, fast-growing market as opposed to today's business. It has been growing for decades and will continue to grow. Now, what does the market look like? Basically, there are two main players in this industry. One, independent players. You see there the value chain. Independent players are active basically in one part of the value chain only. So, they either produce paper, or they produce corrugated sheets, or they produce boxes. We will be an independent player, an independent paper producer, and we highlight that when positioning ourselves. I'll come back to that later. The second group of players in this market are integrated producers. Think of DS Smith, Smurfit Kappa. They are active across the value chain.
They produce paper, they produce the corrugated sheets you have over there, they produce boxes or displays or what have you, end products, and that's called integrated players. Now, mind you, these players do not produce enough paper themselves to produce all the end products they put in the market. What they do is they swap with amongst each other. DS Smith swaps paper with Smurfit Kappa, and that can be for grade reasons or for logistical reasons. They also buy paper on the open market with the likes of Norske Skog, basically for the same reasons. You see, this value chain is a bit different from the one that Sven just described in the graphical business. There, we are in direct contact with the end users, retailers, publishers. Here, we basically produce a raw material for an end product.
Now why do we highlight our independence? Like I said, we position ourselves as an independent producer in this market. Well, because it's a huge advantage to be an independent paper supplier. We are not active downstream in the value chain, we do not compete with our customers. Obviously, that is why integrated and independent producers like to buy paper from an independent paper producer. As you can see in the table on the right side, this is the top 12 of European paper producers. Most of them are integrated. Only two of them are independent, Heinzel and ourselves. By introducing 760,000 tons of containerboard in this market, we clearly show that we are committed and that we are ambitious to become a leading supplier of containerboard in Europe.
Now, containerboard is a commodity, like I said, but end products certainly are not, and there's a lot of innovation taking place, pushing demand for containerboard for the paper. When corrugated packaging was invented, late 1800s, beginning 1900s, it was all about boxes. Just boxes to put stuff in. It's remained that way for decades, and to a certain extent it still is because it's the basic business for most of our end customers. Because of innovation driven by consumer demands, driven by changed consumption patterns, driven by social developments, but also of course good old-fashioned costs, corrugated products have become so much more, and you see a lot of examples here on the pictures. They've become pallets, like I just described, IKEA.
They have become displays, they have become parts of furniture, sometimes they even have become furniture, and of course, still old-fashioned boxes as well. Today, a box is not a box. A box is designed around the product, so it's not the simple standardized square box anymore. It is designed around products. Packaging suppliers, and specifically those big integrated ones I just mentioned, are very active with their end customers, OEMs, e-commerce, retailers, to design packaging around products. By doing that, they innovate and push demand for paper. In other words, containerboard, our product, is very much a commodity, but the products that's made with our product is not, is very much becoming more innovative, very much appealing to sustainability, et cetera. In that way, driving demand big time. Now, who will be buying our products?
Who will be our customers? They will be corrugators. The companies who make those corrugated sheets that I just passed around are called corrugators, but also the machines they make this product on are called corrugators. Quite confusing. You see over there a corrugating machine. We will supply three reels of paper. They will put that on the corrugating machine, they will guide the fluting type paper over a cylinder that has the waves or the flutes formed, and then it's glued to a top layer and a bottom layer, forming a sheet. That's basically the process. There are about 650 of those corrugating machines around in our target markets, and another 20 installs are announced till 2024. Now, mind you, these machines consume quite a lot of paper.
These 20 alone, and those are only the ones that are announced, will add to the demand about 700,000 tons of paper annually. They're big consumers of paper. And again, this is announced capacity. Only two days ago, a medium-sized family-owned company in Germany announced a strategic investment plan of EUR 700 million to invest in machines like this. It's fast-growing business. On the right, we are at the moment traveling around Europe introducing Norske Skog, introducing our project to the customers, and it is a commodity, so but we have decided to brand our products. Why? Because we are new, and we want to form an identity and create an identity in this business so customers get to know us.
The brand name we have chosen, rather selected, because it has been invented by one of our colleagues, is Strato. Strato means layer in Italian. Of course, that refers to the end product, which consists of layers of paper. Of course, it also takes your mind to the stratosphere, wrapping and protecting the Earth. That is why we chose the word Strato. By offering customers Strato, we promise them a couple of things. First of all, we promise them a 100% recycled and recyclable product produced with a large share of green energy, and we offer them lightweight paper, lightweight recycled paper. By that, doing that, we basically target two major forces driving this business: e-commerce and sustainability. First of all, e-commerce. Well, Sven talked about the pandemic.
Of course, it has played an important role in this business as well, but then quite the opposite. Due to the pandemic, e-commerce has boomed, and many analysts say it has taken a five-year frog leap. By now, nobody believes that we will go back to pre-COVID figures when it comes to this business because consumers all around the world have gotten used to the convenience, basically, this business has to offer. Research by various parties and from various angles show that the share of e-commerce in total retail sales will continue to grow to an interesting 25% by 2025. Now, this has huge consequences for the packaging industry, and you can kind of see that from the picture on the right side. You see the traditional value chain.
A product is bought in the store, so it goes from the manufacturer to the retail store to the consumer. When you talk about e-commerce, it goes from the manufacturer to a fulfillment center, then to a sorting center, then to the delivery guy in a small truck, and then it comes to your home. There's a lot more in that supply chain. There's more and smaller units. There's more handling. It means dealing with returns, because that's also very inherent to this business. Packaging has to adapt to this new dynamic, and it has. Not only has it increased demand considerably, but one major consequence of this is the continuously decreasing weight of the average corrugated sheet of the packaging. Right now we are at 505 grams per sq m, approximately.
That is how we talk about the corrugated sheets in square meters. This means, of course, a huge increasing demand for lightweight papers. With our mills, we are really an enabler here. We play an enabling role in driving the weight of the packaging down. Now, mind you, the older existing paper machines in the world today, in our market today, are not able to produce these lightweight papers. That's certainly a big advantage of our new machines. E-commerce not only driving demand in general up, but also driving properties down. It brought about more, because we all became very much aware of our personal footprint. We saw boxes in our homes. We saw over-specified packaging.
When you buy something like this, you get it in a big box, and it's protected by all kinds of bubble wrap and plastic stuff. We became very much aware of the sustainability of this whole model. It made the call for sustainable packaging even louder than it actually already was. The call is heard. All e-commerce giants, and there's only a few of them mentioned over here. Zalando, of course, is very well known in Europe. We have Alibaba. We have bol.com. Many of these have a sustainability packaging strategy, and not only actually to address the concerns of their customers. It's also about national and international legislation. It's about lobbies from environmental organizations. It's about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It's a very loud call for more sustainable packaging. Keywords are recycling, recyclable, and of course, reusable.
Now, in 2020 alone, well over 80% of all corrugated packaging has been produced with papers made of recycled fibers. That will be growing tremendously. We think, or we know, that it will be a combined annual growth of about 11% in the next five years. If you combine the increasing use of recycled fibers and recyclable fibers with an annual growth of e-commerce, then it's easy to understand that the demand for recycled containerboards will increase tremendously in the coming years. New capacities like Norske Skog Bruck and Norske Skog Golbey are simply needed. Here's some more examples. Keywords, like I said, recyclable, recycled, and reusable, preferably fiber-based materials, minimize waste, recyclable, reusable, Nestlé, a variety of brand owners, e-commerce giants, retailers, of course, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, like I mentioned, legislation from the EU.
Everything points towards recyclable, reusable packaging. Like I said, the convergence of Bruck and Golbey are needed and a perfect fit with all these strategies. I can of course say that our new products are needed and that we need to convert these machines to address the increasing demand in the market, but the proof is always in the eating of the pudding. First of all, prices. As you can see, first of all, which is very important, the price of the end product is very much linked to the raw material, old corrugated containers, OCC. This is a graph from basically the biggest market in Europe, Germany, but this type of graph can be made for any market. Price is linked to the waste material.
It's very interesting to see actually what happens here because if you look at the volumes that were added exactly in that period, it's quite substantial. In total, 2.4 million tons were added to the market by various players, Burgo in Italy, Progroup in Germany, Prinzhorn in Germany, Pro-Gest Italy, Palm in Germany. Quite a lot of volume was added, and the prices only went up. In that sense, that is a clear signal for the fact that additional capacity is definitely needed, and our 760,000 tons will be welcomed in the market. This is also the feedback, by the way, we get from these customers when we travel around. Summarizing, we are entering a very strong growing market.
You can see over here in the graph the growth of demand during the past years. Of course, 2021 has been an exceptional year in many ways. Looking at the dynamic long term, we firmly believe in a growth, in a structural growth of 2%-4% annually. It is in need of additional containerboard supply. Major trends are driving this growth in demand, sustainability and e-commerce. Corrugated products haven't reached their full potential yet. You've looked at all the examples a few sheets ago. Innovation will continue, and there will be new applications for this product. We have a go-to-market strategy in place. We will sell around the chimney. Our customers are corrugators, independent and integrated, and we very much look forward to supplying them in future.
I hope to have given you a short impression of this market, and I hope that next time you go to either a supermarket or the IKEA or see the boxes delivered in your home, you will think of us. That's basically the end of my presentation. I'd like to give the word back to Tore, who will tell you more about the operational and technical aspects of the conversion projects. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Marleen. Obviously a very exciting market, and then I'm pleased to say that we are heading with full steam into this market with our two projects. Site preparations, equipment orders are underway. We have as of Q3 invested EUR 20 million of the total EUR 350 million that we are planning with the two conversion projects. However, of the EUR 350 million, a majority of this is contracted already with the main suppliers. We have a solid financial package for the projects, adding up to EUR 265 million. This is highly competitive financing package. It's backed by the German Euler Hermes export credit agency, but also other governmental institutions.
We have guided on an interest cost increase of EUR 5 million related to this, 265 million of debt, which is then proving the competitiveness of the financing and most importantly, the projects. We are entering the market with Bruck in Q4 2022, so that's less than 12 months from now. Less than 12 months after that, Bruck or Golbey PM1 is coming in early Q4 2023. All in all, 760,000 tons of recycled containerboard capacity with an expected EBITDA of EUR 70 million-EUR 80 million based on historical trend prices when these projects are fully ramped up.
Looking at the Norske Skog portfolio on the right-hand side, you see that this represent a huge transformation of the Norske Skog group from being today a capacity which is solely more or less around publication paper. We will have a solid place in the recycled containerboard business. I would also like to mention that we are, with the conversion projects, taking out 355,000 tons of newsprint capacity, so of course, this is also balancing the remaining capacity within publication paper for Norske Skog. In that sense, an extra strategic reason for these projects. Going a little bit more into the two projects and starting in France in Golbey, here we are converting PM1, which is today a 235,000 tons newsprint machine.
It will become a 550,000-ton recycled containerboard machine. The stop of the production of newsprint will happen in Q2 2023, with then a startup of the containerboard in the very early Q4 2023. The CapEx estimate for this project is EUR 250 million. On the site, we have our newest machine in the European portfolio, PM 2, which is a highly competitive 330,000-ton newsprint machine. That will continue to run uninterrupted by what's happening on the sister machine, PM 1. On the Norske Skog Bruck site, we are converting PM 3 from 125,000 tons of newsprint capacity to 210,000 tons of recycled containerboard.
We will stop the newsprint production in early Q3 2022, so only months left, and then we will start the containerboard production in mid Q4 2022. The CapEx for this project is EUR 100 million. Also in Bruck, we have the only LWC machine in our European portfolio. That will remain competitive and uninterrupted by the PM3 conversion case. We also mentioned that PM2 in Golbey and PM4, which will remain in the publication paper market, are also ideal candidates. We believe Golbey and Bruck will long-term be packaging sites. When thinking of the conversion projects, we have split it in a way, and there are 4 main packages that are delivered.
First of all, the main part of it is the installation of the production equipment and in within the existing machines hall. This is about transforming the existing newsprint machines into containerboard machines. However, we are also installing a new off-the-shelf recycled pulp facilities at the site using the OCC as raw material. However, due to the increased output and the need to serve our customers and have the service level they expect, we are also increasing the warehouse capacity at the Golbey site. For both sites also increasing the wastewater treatment facilities due to the increased output of the mills. We have the project teams, we have the main suppliers and the engineering companies at the sites in place. Majority of the investment is contracted with suppliers already.
Given that we are less than 12 months for the start of Bruck, more than 70% of the investment of EUR 100 is already contracted. A little bit less for Golbey, but still more than around 60% for Golbey. There is a lot of this CapEx that already is contracted. We have onboarded the best suppliers within the industry on these two projects. We have Voith responsible for the conversion of the machine and the OCC or the pulp plant in Golbey, and together with Valmet on the winder side. In Austria, we have Bellmer, the German supplier, responsible for the OCC plant and the conversion of the PM3. These are leading suppliers of publication paper machines, but also leading suppliers of containerboard machines.
They know both sides of the equation, where we are coming from and where we are going to. They have done this several times. We have strong competence process-wise and project-wise, locally. For instance, in Golbey, we have several of the team members also was part of building PM2 at the Golbey site. This is a project they very well know from before. We have worked with these projects for a very long time. We have scanned the European portfolio of our 10 machines, looking at how competitive could they be, and we have identified the two machines we are now introducing into the containerboard market as the two prioritized projects.
We believe they will be a first quartile producer, and that is also this leading European industry consultant placing our machines when scanning the European installed machinery. I think in addition to that, I would also like to point out, as partly also Marleen said, that, you know, there is a lot of machinery installed here already. The width of the machinery here indicate the capacity, and as you can see, it's a lot of older, smaller machines installed, which with the market development we see, especially in the lightweight containerboard, this will be very challenging for these machines to cope with. That's an additional, in a way, why we believe this is so well placed, these two projects. However, looking more on the competitiveness, both Bruck and Golbey are large industrial sites.
Golbey will, after the conversion, have around 900,000 tons of capacity at the site. Bruck around 500,000 tons. These are huge sites with the scale advantages, especially on the fixed cost side related to this output. 760,000 tons for EUR 350 million, these two projects represent the top brownfield conversion opportunities within Europe. We have the machines technically capable to meet the customer demands for leading lightweight containerboard. Both are centrally located in continental Europe, which is very important from an inbound logistics point of view, OCC and the outbound, how close we are to the corrugator sites.
We are also investing on the energy side with a new biomass boiler in Golbey and a new waste-to-energy plant in Bruck, which is giving these projects a competitive edge. I will now go more into these two items with more on the logistics side and more specifically on the boiler projects we have ongoing. When looking at Golbey and Bruck, as mentioned, they are placed well in the European market, within the core markets for recycled fiber and for corrugators. Golbey and Bruck are today established in the recycled containerboard or recycled fiber markets. We are using approximately 600,000 tons of recycled fiber today. We have an established organization and a supplier network of recycled fiber to these sites today.
That is the same basis we will utilize for gaining the OCC to our mills. The recycled fiber market in Europe is a huge market. It's 55 million tons of collected paper for recycling, and France is today a net exporter of OCC. Golbey will be placed well with the existing network to source the surplus of the French OCC market. It's also looking on the outbound logistic. A significant corrugating capacity is and their demand obviously is then within an 800 km radius indicated on the map here. Germany, Italy, France, Poland are major containerboard markets. Norske Skog, as Marleen also has said, will be an independent supplier, well-positioned to serve both integrated and independent corrugators.
Looking more on the energy side, especially starting with the waste-to-energy plant that we are building in Bruck, which is ready for startup in April 2022. This is a turnkey Valmet delivery for the boiler, and you see this here on the picture. This represents or will produce 400 GWh of annual production of steam. It will be ready in April 2022 on budget, and it's on time, in spite of the challenges we have had with COVID during the construction period. It will, based on trend prices, contribute, we have said, EBITDA NOK 200 million. These NOK 200 million is in a way coming from three main areas. It's coming from the gate fees.
With this boiler, we are offering 160,000 tons of incineration capacity into the Austrian waste-to-energy market. This is us getting paid for receiving RDF or waste material. Obviously, we have operational cost of running this boiler. There are some staff, some maintenance, etcetera. In net, you could say that these gate fees should contribute NOK 80 million-NOK 100 million annually. The second part is the energy saving. This boiler represent a step change in the Norske Skog carbon footprint and gas consumption. We will cut the gas consumption when this is up and running by approximately 700 GWh. We will also increase the electricity consumption by 200 GWh. Of course, this it depends on the energy prices obviously.
If you look here, we have illustrated the Q3 effect. This would have been an effect of approximately NOK 40 million in Q3 EBITDA with the average prices we saw on gas and electricity in this period. The third bucket is CO2. We will reduce the carbon emissions by 150,000 tons, which allows us in a way to have 150,000 more allowances to sell on the market. This will make also Bruck, or all our European mills, net receivers of CO2 allowances due to the competitiveness we have on emissions. The CO2 prices are increasing. In Q3, this would have meant NOK 20 million-NOK 25 million in EBITDA for the quarter of Q3.
We are today in or as of Q3, we have invested EUR 55 million of the total net EUR 72 million. We have drawn EUR 38 million of the financing, which is in place with total EUR 54 million. Here you see this boiler itself. On the left-hand side, you see the fuel storage. So this is where the trucks will back in, empty their bins. They're here. We have approximately 10 days of storage for waste material. This will then be stored, mixed partly, and then transported through the conveyor up to the boiler house, where we have this incineration capacity of 160,000 tons annually. As you can see on the picture, the outside part is done, so that's finalized.
Now we are working on the inside, and it's all ready for commissioning in April 2022. On this picture, you also see PM4 building and the PM3 building, which we will then convert from newsprint to recycled containerboard. As you can see, this project is fairly big. It's a new landmark in the city of Bruck, but we are very pleased that it's going on exactly on the plan we had contemplated for the project. EU has a clear goal of reduce landfill to maximum 10% of the waste generated in 2030. This means that there will be increased restrictions on landfilling, which obviously will then drive the need for increased demand of incineration capacity. This suits our project very well.
Especially, you have seen material being transported from the western to the eastern part of Europe for landfilling; that will no longer be possible, and we see an increased demand for incineration capacity. However, this type of project takes a long time to get a permit. We had the permit in place for this type of boiler, and this is in a way the opportunity we used when we decided in 2019 to build this boiler. This will have a huge positive environmental impact since we are then offering 160,000 tons of incineration capacity for material that otherwise, with a high likelihood, could have been landfilled.
We only have 5,000 tons of hazardous ash coming out of the boiler, which means that 97% of what's coming in here is actually used to produce energy, used to produce renewable, recyclable products at Bruck. I moved to France, and I would like to shed some more light on a huge, also very exciting project that we have ongoing there. Here we have Green Valley Energie. Green Valley Energie is a specially designed company building a new CHP plant at the Golbey site. You see it illustrated here at our site in France. Green Valley Energie was awarded a under the CRE tender, which is the French instrument of introducing new green electricity capacity into the French grid.
This was awarded in 2019. This means that Green Valley Energie will sell green electricity to the French grid to EDF for 20 years, on a 20-year contract, with a high feed-in premium price secured for 20 years. The steam from this CHP boiler will be going to Golbey, our site, for production of packaging paper. This boiler will start up in Q2 2024. It will produce 200 GWh of electricity to the French grid. It will produce 700 GWh of steam to our paper operations at Golbey, using 235,000 tons of biomass or waste wood sourced regionally around the mill. With us in this project, we have two other partners.
PEARL, which is the financial investor in this project, have done CRE projects before. We have Veolia. They will run the CHP plant for 20 years contract. They are in it for the operations, but also a 10% shareholder. The same position as Norske Skog, 10% shareholder. For us, this means an investment of around EUR 5 million. The big benefit for Norske Skog in this is that we will receive green, cost-efficient steam for our packaging operations. At the same time, we will secure the effectiveness needed in this CHP plant to have this high feed-in premium for the sale of electricity. This is, in a way, the fundament for the competitiveness of the energy side of our Golbey project.
We receive the good, cost-efficient steam with a limited CapEx for Norske Skog. Then we have guided on our EBITDA estimate of EUR 70 million-EUR 80 million for the two conversion projects when they are fully ramped up. You see on the left-hand side here the ramp-up curve that we estimate in tons here, when Bruck and Golbey are coming on. Obviously in Bruck, 2023 will be the first year of Bruck, the full year of Bruck operations. Then, Golbey will start in the last quarter of 2023. You see we will have meaningful, really meaningful volumes coming out already in 2024. We have said that it takes 2-3 years to get to the full capacity, and this.
Already after 1 year of operation, you get to quite significant volumes. On the cost side, as mentioned, OCC is the single biggest cost component, but also energy, very important, and of course, logistics is also important. It's a more volume product than what we produce today. We have touched this already on our competitive edge within these areas. The EUR 70 million-EUR 80 million is then based on trend prices for the main cost components. Prices for containerboard, but also for the cost side, have increased significantly in 2020 and into 2021. It's clear that the current market conditions are more favorable than the trend prices and the indications we have seen here.
I definitely concur with Sven's remarks saying this is significantly better than what we saw when we introduced this project in June 2020. To sum up, we are coming now with two containerboard projects which will be highly value accretive to Norske Skog. It will we are basing this on cost competitiveness. It will be highly supported by the investments which is done on the sites on the green energy production. We see a market that is in strong growth, 4%-7% the last 12 months, which is for a large market and a mature market in a way like this extremely high. This means 1-2 million tons of new demand of recycled containerboard.
We will meet this with the logistic for the e-commerce and the lightweight containerboard with 760,000 tons of competitive capacity. The first production will start in Bruck in Q4 2022. We have an investment of EUR 350 million, where around 60%-70% is contracted already. We have a solid financing package, EUR 265 million, underlying the competitiveness of these projects. I think that's the end of the packaging session, and we are open for Q&As.
Yes, we received a couple of questions from the chat. One of the question is, in containerboard, there have been a number of new capacity announcements converting graphic paper into packaging that will all be ramping up from 2024 onwards. How do you think about the supply and demand of this market, given, as an independent producer, you will be more exposed to pricing dynamics versus integrated players? Are you targeting... Also a second question from Cole Hathorn. Are you targeting specific offtake agreements for volumes on these machines?
To take the first question, I think, yes, we see a new capacity coming on board, and we saw that on Marleen's slides. It is a significant amount, but it's definitely needed when you see the demand growth that we now see. The leapfrog in e-commerce and the trend we see is stronger than before, and it will be well-placed. It also takes some time for these type of machines, as said, to be implemented in the market. Even though we come with 760, it takes two years before we are in a way fully ramped up. This will be very well placed in the market, and there's always room for competitive capacity in this large market.
Also, another question from Cole Hathorn. Conversions, what are some of the challenges converting graphic paper machines to containerboard that prevents smaller graphic paper competitors following you and converting to packaging?
I think it's coming back in a way to the main cost components and advantages we believe we have in this market. To take an example, the Golbey site, we have an increased steam demand of 60% following the conversion. You need access to sustainable and cost-competitive energy. That we are having with these two boilers. What others in a way find for their solutions, I can't comment, but it's a key component in this. Then obviously, there are some technical specifications, like for Bruck, which is a 5.3-meter machine. It's extremely well trimmed for meeting corrugators that are 2.5 meters and 2.8 meters, matching the 5.3 width.
This is also important in terms of whether machines are suited for conversion.
Thank you, Tore. We also received a couple of questions on the chat that are not relevant to this section. If you have any questions from the audience, you are welcome to raise it. Yes.
Thank you. Preben Rasch-Olsen from Carucel. I was just wondering about the packaging market, and it seems like you are already traveling around in Europe and you're talking about a very strong market. So have you started signing contracts already? And if not, when should we expect you to start signing contracts?
Signing contracts, not yet. Letters of intent, yes.
Start over.
Firm contracts? No. We are discussing concrete volume. Concretely, when do we start? How do we start? What will we do after a successful start with various types of customers? We have signed some letters of intent already, and we're taking those further the next months. We're really deep in the process already. Yeah.
Any other questions? Yes.
Hi, it's Sindre from Arctic again. It was very interesting, Marleen, to hear your views on the market. Could you also just touch on the, let's say, linkage between the testliner and kraftliner markets? 'Cause, I mean, prices in the latter are always quite higher, but now we don't see the same raw material price pressure. Is it only so that testliner is affecting prices in the kraftliner, or might you also see it the other way around?
There is, of course, a link between the two. Kraftliner does have a different application from testliner. Kraftliner is much more, for example, fresh produce, products that have a problem with humidity going from a cold store to another temperature. It's a different application. In that sense, there is a link between the products price-wise, but it's a smaller, much smaller segment of this market, and demand has been also for that product pretty high, this year, and supply has been challenging.
Any other questions? Okay, the questions on the chat will be answered by the CEO after the financial review section. Okay, now we have a break for 20 minutes, and we'll be back about 10:50. Thank you.
Hello everyone. Welcome back. My name is Lars Sperre. I'm Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy, in the Norske Skog group. In this section, we'll talk a bit about the very exciting work we're doing within energy and bioproducts developments. For several of the initiatives in this box, we are now moving from talking of projects to actually having businesses with actual products, actual customers, deliveries, and invoices. We'll also talk a bit about in this section about what's happening in the pellets business in New Zealand, and also some of the ongoing real estate development work we're doing in the group. First, I would like to welcome my colleague, Hugo Harstad, who is in business development in Saugbrugs and heading up the two very exciting new brands in the Norske Skog family, CEBICO for biocomposites, and nanocellulose in CEBINA. Thank you, Hugo, and welcome.
Thank you, Lars. I will start with the nanocellulose, the CEBINA product. CEBINA has been developed, worked on for quite a few years at the Saugbrugs mill. It's a fibrillated cellulose, so it's really the smallest particles you can make from wood fiber. When you process the cellulose to nanocellulose, you end up with a product that has an enormous surface area and also length. That 1 gram of this CEBINA product could cover a tennis court. It also has an enormous ability to bind water. This sample here is about 3.6 content of CEBINA, but you can see it's almost like a gel or coming close to a solid gel material.
This ability to bind water is what gives CEBINA also the qualities in products like paints and glues and coatings, and also in solid materials like fiber boards and in dried paint. You would see an armoring effect of this dried CEBINA. We've tested CEBINA in quite a few products the last two years, as I mentioned in paints where we now are entering into commercial sales, regular sales for paint production. We've also tested in epoxy floor coatings, and we've also done commercial sales, but we're still working there on the development of the final products. There is also the last application, drilling and completion fluids. There we have also ongoing activity and we will present an article together with an industry supplier in April of next year.
In addition to this list, there is also a quite large range of requests and testing that we do with various branches. It could be in clothing or in coloring of clothing, in paper production, where people see the need for the effects that you get in CEBINA. It's ongoing product development with customers. In paint, in particular, you can really visualize this special effect of CEBINA. We've tested on floor coatings in epoxy and, as you see on the picture, this is quite sort of crude picture of just pouring epoxy onto a floor, and then you would smear it out on the floor.
What is the real benefit of CEBINA? It is that it gives good coverage on edges and also if you have a tilted surface, it will actually stick on the surface. It's not going to just be floating off, but it will stick on the surface. On a application of painting of a wall, you will be able to apply the paint in a thicker layer without having any dripping or sagging, which of course saves costs for a contractor using this particular product. In August this year, we did the first testing of spraying of epoxy with good results. We had two demonstrations with customers and this is what you see here where you actually use a spray gun on a surface and you can spray the epoxy on.
You don't have to put it on manually in four layers, but you can do it in one go. In a larger application like this, you could go from one contractor saying that he was going from nine days to two days in this particular job that he was bidding for in just the time saving of using CEBINA. It's not that you're adding a lot of CEBINA into a product. CEBINA is still about, or sort of one, maybe 0.5% or 1%, but it gives this thixotropic rheology effect to the final product. We're both offering a more environmentally friendly product. We are replacing dusty, harmful products that the workers will experience.
We are in some cases very competitive on cost of the materials that we are replacing and, particularly on the large example of epoxy spraying, we are offering the possibility to save significant time on jobs performed with CEBINA as additive. The other product that we have also worked on for quite some year is our solution to the global plastic challenge. There is 368 million tons of plastic produced every year. Most of that ends up in landfills. It ends up in the ocean, and the challenge is there is of course the value of used plastic that the cost of using virgin plastic is so low and the usability of recycled plastic can be quite challenging.
What we have then looked at is how we can use our TMP wood fiber together with plastic in order to improve the value of recycled plastic and also add strength to the new composite material. Just by this direct replacement of wood into plastic, you can, for instance, save six kilos of CO2 just by not using one kilo of new virgin plastic. Our solution is to then use our TMP wood fiber that you see on the right side. Let's see. This material here, this is what we use at Saugbrugs in Halden, also in our SC paper, magazine paper.
We mix that together with, for instance, a recycled plastic and then we produce our industry-sized CEBICO pellet that can be used as a drop-in product in any molding process of plastic. The magic here is really in the processing, the pre-processing of the wood fiber and in the actual mixing of the two products. Wood fiber and plastic, it's like mixing olive oil and vinegar. It doesn't naturally mix, so you have to find a sort of shear temperature pressure system that actually allows you to mix these two products efficiently. When you mix them efficiently, you're able to get the strength benefits of the wood fiber in the new composite material.
Some of the products that we have tested this on and have been quite, I should say, successful on is on construction elements or pipe elements like this, where we can use both the recycled plastic and virgin plastic and do demonstrations with customers on how this can be applied in their process. It both improves the strength of a virgin plastic, recycled plastic, and by working on recycled plastic, we are able to also then increase the lifetime of plastic and the value of recycled plastic. If you are able to or produce a stronger material, you could also see customers being able to use the same sort of type of plastic, but in thinner layers, in lighter layers.
For instance, in a car industry, you can produce a lighter component and save weight on, for instance, a car. The figure on the left side shows some of these testing that we have done. We have tested on a range of these different plastic materials along the orange line here, going from a PP plastic, normal plastic, to a LDPE, quite soft plastic. You see by adding the wood fiber, we are able to increase both the bending strength and the resisting to stretching of the plastic. Interesting for, from a business concept is that you then can lift a normal plastic into a strength that you normally see in a glass fiber or plastic. That, of course, increases the value of this composite material.
If you recycle a PP plastic, you normally also will be traversing down on this value slope here, and by adding a wood fiber, you're able to also there lift the relation back up and get a higher strength value in a recycled plastic. As I mentioned, we worked on quite a number of different plastics, HDPE, LDPE, PP. These are plastics that are used for different type of applications. We also been into this other segment with biodegradable plastics and bio-based plastics, and we see quite a range of opportunities with our CEBICO applied in different plastics. Of course, in some segments, we see that there is a high value added by using our wood fibers. In others, we need to do more work in order to find the final recipe of our composite in that segment.
One example, we can mix 50/50 of wood fiber and plastics. As I mentioned also, we process the wood fiber before we mix it together with the plastic in order to produce this drop-in product. Commercially, you see in the middle that we have a quite interesting picture when it comes to CEBICO. We are adding a plastic material that normally has been in this range from NOK 10-NOK 15 per kilo. We're mixing that with our TMP fiber at about NOK 1.5 per kilo. You're mixing these two materials, and you're offering a new material with higher strength value and possibly higher sales price.
Of course, the last two years, there has been a surge in raw material and an increase in price, which just improves this effect of margins that we are able to see on this new product. It's just about one year ago that we sanctioned the pilot facility that we build now on at Halden at the Saugbrugs facility. On the figure in the middle here, you see the dosing part of fibers and plastic material. Just below that platform, we have the mixing screw, and then we have the pelletizing unit sitting over here. Before this process, we also do the fiber preparation phase, which is also a big part of this project.
Just this week, we are completing the installation, and we'll be doing commissioning and opening of this facility now in December, which should be really a first for this type of technology in or applied at an industrial scale. It's a demonstration plant. We will be able to produce quite significant volumes, approximately 300 tons per year that we can provide or we can sell to customers for testing to adjust and find the right recipe for their particular molding process. With that, I think I will leave the word back to Lars.
Yes. Thank you, Hugo, for that. Going forward, and looking forward, in Norske Skog, we are certainly confident that we will succeed on the continued development of both CEBICO and CEBINA. We have a massive industrial competency inside Norske Skog. On the marketing side, we see the continuing strengthening sustainability agenda, giving strong tailwinds to the work that Hugo and the team is doing. In particular, when we look at CEBICO, again, the work has been ongoing for several years. We are now literally starting the demonstration plant for 300 tons down in Halden. We do hope and plan for in 2022 to make an investment decision based upon the learnings from the demonstration plant and ongoing engineering work to decide to invest into a 20,000-ton production unit to be based in Halden.
Preliminary CapEx estimates is that this is a NOK 300-NOK 400 million Norwegian crown investment. We will also, alongside the ongoing project work, establish CEBICO as a standalone business inside the Norske Skog family. This is to ensure that we will have an as broad toolbox available as possible when we come to the capitalization of this project. We believe that CEBICO could be suitable for external capitalizing, and we also believe that the CEBICO avenue will be interesting for industrial partnerships. We will look into that when we get further down into 2022, hoping and planning then for in 2024 to be up and running. Let's see how bold we can be on. At least aiming for the 20,000-30,000 tons with the ability to do bolt-on investments in CEBINA.
Hoping then to generate half a billion NOK of revenue and certainly aiming to have attractive margins on this product. If it works out of Norway in the Nordic market, it certainly also will work in Central Europe and other places in the world that plastics are used, where the biocomposite material will be helpful to drive sustainability agendas. That's CEBICO. CEBINA, certainly also very interesting, as Hugo has explained. This is more about driving the commercialization work. We will look to establish distributor networks out in Europe, and we will continue to professionalize and industrialize the production. We have a pilot facility that gives us 100-500 tons a year, and we will take that onwards, and we can do more sort of modular, less capital-intensive expansions around CEBINA.
Here there is sort of maybe less need to do preparations for capitalization efforts. CEBINA will also be established as a separate business planning for future growth. I then move on because of the timelines we have available. I'll touch upon Norske Skog's industrial partnership with the Circa Group. As you know, Circa is now a Euronext Growth-listed company capitalized to build industrial-scale small-scale plant in France. Circa aims and will provide a sustainable solution to the international solvents markets. As Circa has explained, there are a number of solvents today used in international manufacturing businesses based on fossil sort of materials, and they are harmful for humans. That's why they're labeled as toxic.
There are processes ongoing where these projects, these products will at some point face regulatory bans. In order for bans to be implemented, you would need viable replacement alternatives. Circa's Cyrene product, having got REACH accreditations for sale in Europe, having now been tested around the world for sort of since we've started to produce Cyrene down in the Boyer mill, and work has been ongoing, and there is a number of people who have sort of confirmed that Cyrene works, and it's an interesting product. Norske Skog holds 26% of Circa, and we will continue to support them. The key activity in Circa right now is to deliver on the 1,000-ton small industrial scale plant to be built in France. This is the ReSolute plant.
The project has recently faced some headwinds, increased CapEx costs coming out of the basic engineering work and quotation for equipment. There is then significant work ongoing. Circa made its Q3 announcement today, and they have reported on then significant and positive dialogues with its equipment suppliers and finding ways to both address the CapEx increase, but also finding ways to make the ReSolute plant a better stepping stone for the large scale investments that will have to be done to be able to process and produce Cyrene in industrial scale. This is the FC5 plants, which are planned to be built probably in Europe, probably then in France, which is the natural place to do it. This is sort of the 5-25,000 ton plants.
Circa today works also see how we can make the ReSolute plant an even more sort of, effective, production plant. Among other now investigating the biochar, which is a side product in Circa, and use that for on-site energy generation. This would mean that you would take the biomaterial coming out. They have LGO, which is the key product, which is transformed to Cyrene, and then you have biochar. The biochar can be used to generate bioenergy and used in the production, in the ReSolute plant. ReSolute plant is a small plant, but when you look for the big industrial scale, plants to be able to generate your own energy at the site is a good thing, and it's green energy, so it's a very good thing.
It also, in today's energy crisis, with the very volatile energy prices we see in Europe, this is very good. Let's see how the energy markets are hopefully normalizing. Still, if Circa can be able to generate their own green energy, this will help the business case. We also see that Circa continues to expand, and we are certainly glad to see more dedicated resources coming in to address the upscaling. There are significant project works that has to be done to deliver on this one. Norske Skog will continue to be there. We will both support Circa, and we will challenge them in the work they are doing to realize the growth story.
All in all, Circa still receives really good market interest for its products, and there are bits and pieces of signs where you see highly professional international business groups utilizing Cyrene and other Circa products in their business development plans. Shell recently filed a patent where they use Cyrene as a building block. Moving to a little bit the other end of mature businesses, this is New Zealand. As Sven said, Norske Skog, we own a pellets plant in New Zealand. This is now a 90,000-ton unit. So the picture shows this is where the actual production is ongoing, a little bit smaller facility compared to our paper mills, but still a fantastic business. We've expanded this one.
We bought it back in 2015, a fantastic production equipment which didn't work out, and we bought it in a fire sale. We've used the time since then to put it in place where it is today, which is a solid business which has sort of 75% of the volumes it sells is done on medium to long-term contracts. It has a very sustainable and long-term supply arrangement, both for the fiber and for the energy, and it's using geothermal energy to produce pellets. We are in the process now, and we worked with Nature's Flame to scale it up. We scale it up to 90,000 tons.
Now, because of the sustainability drive, which is also ongoing in New Zealand, the New Zealand government has put in place a NZD 70 million dollar fund to fuel decarbonization in New Zealand. This is grants available for New Zealand industry that we'd like to convert, and there are quite some bio some coal-based energy units in New Zealand, and pellets is the alternative. This has driven to a lot of projects in New Zealand that would like to have renewable pellets supplied from Nature's Flame in order to enable them to deliver on conversion projects. The Nature's Flame business sits with additional access to both raw materials and energy.
We've scaled it up once, so we know how to do that, and we are now looking into scaling it up from a current sort of 90,000-ton capacity to a 150,000-ton capacity. This, we believe, can be done for another 15 million NZD of extension CapEx, but we also believe that that investment will double the EBITDA generation from this business. Linked with supply contracts, as was on the previous slide, and a lot of the volumes to be produced in the additional 60,000 tons being locked in with local domestic New Zealand customers, we believe that this is a great expansion possibility.
However, as Sven said, New Zealand is far away, and we are in the process to see if there are people who are better fit to take on this expansion project. Norske Skog is very proud of the travel we've done since 2015 to develop this business, and we are certainly minded and prepared to execute on this expansion project ourselves if the market does not give us the valuation proposals that we think this business deserves. From the engagement in the process so far, we are pretty sure that this business will be sold in first half of 2022. Moving to illustrate that we do work across the board, and we do work with all the assets we have in Norske Skog.
This is inside, again, the box of development work in Norske Skog. We have the business model of Norske Skog is that we challenge the business units to work with all assets, including land available, partly to drive other businesses to come to work with Norske Skog in order to build stronger total industry footprint. We also look for ways to do real estate development. This is a picture down at the administration part of the Saugbrugs mill in Halden, where we have an ongoing real estate development project. A lot of this is done in a JV. We have Porsnes Utvikling, which is together with the local Halden-based real estate development group, Ringstad Gruppen.
The first part of the development we're doing is this building here, which is repurposed to a high school. This is the project. We're taking the old storage buildings, renovating them, and bringing them into a roughly 10,000 sq m high school, state-of-the-art. Secondly, we are preparing the area between for further real estate development. This is the school. This is a building that could be made available for either school expansion or other activities. This has been demolished to allow for new activities. This is the existing administration building where quite some of the administration is sitting at the Saugbrugs mill. I'm sure they almost sort of feel harassed by naming them as non-core, but that is Even that has to take that one. Here there is a lot of activity.
This step is now almost completed. The school building will be handed over to the municipality in Q2 of 2022 in order to open the school in the autumn semester. At the SPV who is doing this project will lease out the school in a 35-year lease arrangement to the municipality with an estimated annual lease payment of NOK 25 million-NOK 30 million. There is a project financing in the SPV of some NOK 370 million. This is the first step, and we are confident that we will be able to do more here. Also, this area is the parking area, which we also believe will be attractive for further development as the Saugbrugs City will move and develop in this area.
We naturally see ourselves as participating in the development, but when it comes to the long-term ownership of a completed project, we certainly think that there are people who are better suited to sit and collect invoices for 35 years. That is part of the plan that we do revisit the ownership structures when we get to the end of these projects as we move on. Secondly, this is also in Halden. Again, just to visualize a little bit of the work ongoing in Norske Skog group. This is the Saugbrugs mill up here, and this is the Saurøya Island, close to 1 square kilometer of area, which Norske Skog owns the very vast majority of, exception of some small pieces up here.
This is where we have the outbound logistics operations on sea freight from the Saugbrugs mill. But the point is that the Halden city is having a large development project ongoing around the train station here, looking for how to sort of expand and evolve the commercial center of Halden. Naturally, we are engaged in that, partly because we look for how we can possibly rearrange the transportation in and out of the sea freight port. Also because we then own Saurøya, and we believe that we will be a natural partner to develop the Halden city. What we're actively looking at is then to do real estate development in this east-facing section.
Secondly, to see what we can do with this rather large area down at the south tip of the Saurøya. While naturally, we also then look for how in the future we'll develop the seaport and the logistics activities. In total, we believe that this is certainly a longer-term project, but having some really interesting opportunities sitting in it. We will probably look to engage with a local partner to drive through or at least a professionalized partner who are experienced in this kind of long-term and decisive development projects. A bit of a goal to make it a new Sørenga section of Halden, but certainly potentials. Summing up the rather fast-forward review of what's in the upper growth boxes of Norske Skog.
Again, as I said in introduction, I think the most fascinating thing is that we are now moving from we've had biogas, we've had pellets, now we're seeing that again, the projects are moving into businesses. K9, the energy Bruck waste to energy project, will start to invoice its receipt of RDF waste in January. CEBICO and CEBINA are selling commercial volumes into the market. We have Circa, and we have other activities lining up behind here. This is certainly an interesting avenue, and we believe that we will be able to come back and have more exciting news as we expand the business. In particular for CEBICO, we think 2022 will be very exciting.
On that note, I think we plan to open up for some Q&A to either me or Hugo before we would invite the CFO, Rune Sollie, to do the financial review section.
Any questions? Everything is fine. Okay. Rune Sollie, then it's your turn to give an update on the financials. After Rune has done that, the CEO, Sven Ombudstvedt will answer the questions from the chat, and he will also answer the questions from you here among the audience.
Okay. Thank you very much, Lars and Hugo, for an interesting presentation. As Lars said, my name is Rune Sollie. I'm the CFO of Norske Skog. I'll talk you through a few financial items that is impacted by this. First, what I'd probably like to start with, I've been talking a lot about nanocellulose.
Now I'm able to see it, hold it, and according to Hugo, even taste it. It's so green. Since I started here, we've been talking about it, so it's now good to see it's come to fruition with an actual product here that we look forward to being developed even further in the years to come. Also, now we have seen these other products here, so it's good to have something tangible that now we can touch upon. We'll see if we press the right way. Okay. I'll start shortly with a bit of recap. Here, as Sven has said earlier, publication paper is still an important part of our business and will remain so for some time.
It generates about NOK 10 billion of revenues, and, as Sven said, we will also be able to have an EBITDA over the cycle around maybe NOK 1 billion, and then also have a positive cash flow from this. The cash flow, we will of course work to optimize as much as we can in this period, going forward. As you see, now brought all colors together on the right hand here. The green will go down as we transition some of the machines out of publication paper and into containerboard, while we also add the green bar on top of this that Lars now has talked about. This is a development that we are looking forward to going through this exciting journey.
That said, as Tore has talked about here and others, this also has an investment profile in it. Here we see the investments that have been done so far. This is mainly the K9 boiler that you see in 2020, but also projects at Saugbrugs, where we have the energy efficiency projects here. The remaining CapEx for the waste-to-energy boiler is around EUR 17 million for now. Then we have the other containerboard projects that will start to show in the cash flow and investing activities where the majority, around EUR 230 million, you will see in 2022 and the remainder in 2023, when we have the completion of PM1 at Golbey.
Yeah, maybe I can get this away so you don't have to see it. There we go. Then I'll jump down to depreciation. Let's hope it doesn't update by itself now. For the existing business, we have annual guidance of about NOK 400 million of depreciation going forward. Of course, when we add these other investments to this, that will of course increase the depreciation of approximately, well, over 24-25 year period with about NOK 20-NOK 25 million annually for this. Of course, these are assets with a long useful life, so they will also have a long depreciation period. Maintenance CapEx, we have guided on around NOK 150 on an average year. This will of course also be impacted by the projects. They will also require maintenance over the time.
We've said that will be at a level of around NOK 220 million per year in addition to these amounts. Here you see the CapEx profile now and also how we expect the forward-looking CapEx to develop. That said, this also impacts another metrics in our business. This is of course the leverage. We expect that to peak at the end of 2023 as the containerboard project comes to an end and all loans and things are fully drawn. Here we've started in this illustration with our net debt at the end of Q3, added on the remaining debt for the CapEx here, and also the remaining for waste-to-energy.
As you have heard earlier today, there's also other projects that will work the opposite way here, as Lars has gone through the potential non-core assets and things that will bring cash in. As well also, of course, the CapEx that we will have from the publication paper business in this period that will drag the leverage down. On the right-hand side, we have illustrated that the net debt will be somewhere in between the full year here and where we are now. Of course, the exact amount will be very dependent on the actual outcomes from all these processes.
Just also here, as you see on the left-hand side, there is the CO2 compensation and CO2 allowances, which are received later than they are earned, so they are not included in the cash, which is now only the actual cash balances that we have at the end of third quarter. The other side of this is of course from a liquidity point of view. Here we've started with the cash on balance sheet at the end of third quarter. We've added the undrawn RCF to this. Also here on top, we've shown the impact of the CO2 allowances and CO2 compensation here.
Just deducting our shares of the investments here, EUR 65 million for the Bruck, as Tore shown, of the remaining part of the waste-to-energy, that would be our share. Ending up with a liquidity buffer in this calculation of EUR 78 million. Of course, on top of this will be then the cash flow from the operations in this period over the next year and any potential net asset sales. We believe we're in a comfortable position here for the business as well as also to do some of the investments here as have been described earlier. Of course, once this is completed, we will start repayment of the loans for the facilities that will have average maturity towards the end of 2030. Here's an important slide.
This of course has not come by itself. This has come through many years of investing activities in the mills to improve energy efficiency and other things to become in a position that we are well below the EU benchmark for CO2 emissions, being well below the benchmark. In turn, results that we are, as had been said before, we are a net receiver of CO2 quotas for our business. As you all know, this will now move into Phase 4. We will still be below, and as has been said earlier today, the boiler in Bruck waste-to-energy, which puts us even further down.
We're reducing our CO2 emissions even further, which we have shown here on the middle graph with the bar on the right-hand side, the impact of this on our CO2 emissions. As you know, this also has of course a very important economic side of it, particularly the way the energy or the CO2 prices have gone lately and are expected to stay at that level. Where they end up, we will all see in due course. On the right-hand side, we have also just shown our CO2 quotas for the coming period, the first stage of Phase 4, and then there's another stage after that to go, taking us up to 2030.
That is not exactly clear how that will work out, but at least we have visibility on the coming years for our mills in this respect. Here, another slide on the same subject. As you all know, we also receive CO2 compensation. As we've said before, on the left-hand side here, you see the CO2 prices, and they have developed for a long time. They've been hovering around EUR 5 before they moved up to an average of 25, and now they've moved up to an averaging of 57, of course, making it a much more significant contributor. As the expectations are that they might even go higher, the point of this is that the polluter should pay for polluting here.
As you've also seen probably on your bill at home and also on others in the media, the electricity has gone through the roof in many places with prices above EUR 200 per MWh, which has been a very steep decline in a very short time. Part of this we are compensated for, but as we will try to illustrate here, it's a relatively modest compensation compared to the energy prices. As you know, we are a big consumer of energy prices here. We've seen now here that the energy compensation intensity has decreased, but the higher CO2 prices also impact the compensation. There is a link there, but it is a slightly delayed link in terms of how this is calculated.
Still, CO2 compensation is an important factor for energy-intensive industries as we are and many others. It is also important that this continues, that it is proposed that it will continue in Norway. I'll just round off with a few items here. We remain focused on having financial flexibility to fund the long- and short-term capital needs that we have. As you've seen, we have many interesting things that we would like to do, but we also maintain a capital structure that suits the group's strategy here. We have access to a diversified range of capital sources. We have a bond we've done. We've done local loans for the Bruck and Golbey projects.
We have been in the equity market, so we will have access to this, and we'll consider all these options as we go along. As shown earlier, we will probably have a higher peak leverage than two, but our aim is over time to have a leverage of less than two in the longer term, once these projects are completed and start generating EBITDA. Also, as we've seen here, we'll keep the maturity profile spread out here to match the investments and have a sound financing for the time to come. Okay, should we do questions and Q&A in one go now, Carsten? Or how do you want to do it?
When we conclude, and then we have Q&A.
Fine.
Very good. Thank you very much. Just very briefly to conclude, we have also received quite a lot of questions online, which is pleasing to see, so we will try to answer those in full detail. From my side, publication paper markets, as you probably gathered from the opening speech, will remain tight into 2022. We expect price increases also from present levels in the early parts of next year. Our sort of main competitors have also indicated similar levels, so that should be no surprise to anyone. Packaging market is less than one year. Tore is now counting in days rather than months and years. We will hold him obviously accountable for that, and the Bruck team. As you can see from Lars and Hugo's presentations, we're quite excited about also the bio and energy projects.
The Bruck boiler is looking significantly better than when we announced it. That doesn't necessarily mean that over the life of the boiler it will be present levels, but I think we can, or everyone can do back-of-the-envelope showing that this is significantly better with today's trading environment. We will also over time, hopefully we've shown you a little bit of that. I think the value of our industrial assets and the innovation and the competence that we sit on will become very apparent over the next couple of years as projects come to commercialization maturity.
I think there is a significant underestimation in Europe and in Norway of how much it takes to do the Green Deal in terms of money, in terms of innovation, in terms of time. We are 8 years away from 2030, and listening to at least local politicians, they haven't really grasped that. I think there will be no green shift without a vibrant forest industry, and we are absolutely here to help society and government to do that, at the same time delivering interesting returns to our investors. That's the promise, Carsten, and then I'm sure this will be destroyed by your Q&A.
Yes, we have received about 15 questions from the chat, and I will read them now, and Sven will answer them. I will.
In quick fire succession.
Yes. Does paper tightness cost optimization with the Western Europe plant and CO2 credits imply we will see higher EBITDA margins over the next few years? And what is normalized over the cycle margin and where it should be in 2022 and 2023? The question is from Andrius Mukovozas.
The simple answer is yes, but I think we will repeat the guidance that both Rune and myself have given that over the cycle of the present portfolio of graphic paper production is generating about 10% EBITDA margin and NOK 1 billion on the present portfolio in turnover.
From Andrius Mukovozas again. When are you planning the next price increase? What could be a blue sky scenario for graphic paper cash flows next few years?
Yeah. The next pricing, as I said, is from the 1st of January. We will increase again pricing in Europe according to the market. For those of you who know me, I'm not a blue sky type of person, so I'm not going to comment too much on it.
Then, too, CO2 prices are up again. Very strong market reaction to German coalition agreement to put EUR 60 CO2 floor domestically. Power price is getting repriced through 2025 on the back of clear government support for clean generation. How much of CapEx would be funded with carbon at EUR 100 per ton?
Yeah. I think the simple answer to the CO2 question, as Rune Sollie showed as well, we have about 400,000 tons of CO2 sellable quotas, so anyone can do sensitivity on the quotas. Obviously, there's a link to the CO2 compensation scheme in Norway and France as well. I think I will leave that to anyone with a spreadsheet to do the sensitivities. Obviously a higher CO2 quota price is positive for us and it is, as Rune indicated, a significant part of our business these days.
We have received four questions from Jan Martinek. Carnegie estimates that your CO2 permits should increase from this year EUR 30 million to over EUR 60 million. This is very material. Can you confirm the numbers?
No, I cannot confirm it outside of what I just said. I think that's the answer to that question as well. Obviously it is a significant part.
The second question from Jan Martinek. Are you planning to list any of your subsidiaries in the next 12 months?
The good thing is that Lars already answered that question. We are considering for CEBICO external parties and possible external financing for it.
A third question from the same person. Circa share price is down significantly. Are you considering taking advantage of this situation to increase your position in Circa?
I would not let the chairman of Circa answer that, so I will answer that myself. We have supported Circa for many, many years. We will continue to do so. I don't think that the fluctuation of the share price influences that. We are very happy with the 26%, and we will develop from there onwards.
The last question is from Jan Martinek. You subscribe to 10% of recent share issue by Ocean GeoLoop that does carbon capture. Can you please comment on the investment in Ocean GeoLoop? Is that part of your strategy? Will you be increasing this position? Thank you.
What we showed with Ocean GeoLoop is that they are doing work to test out their technology at the Skogn mill for CO2 capture and usage. We own now 2.6% of Ocean GeoLoop, which means that we believe that they have a very interesting technology. We will develop it with them, but we are not intending to become a major shareholder of Ocean GeoLoop.
A question from Geir Drangsland. Many power intensive companies in Norway have experienced large increases in their power bills even though they have hedged because of the surprisingly large deviations between the system price and the area price on power. Could you elaborate on how this affects you in Norway and your other plants? Please touch upon your general strategy related to power and hedging.
Yes. In general, we have for the Norwegian power consumption, the Saugbrugs mill is more or less fully covered on long-term contracts. The Skogn mill is covered to sort of a 70%. We have a general view or have had at least a general view that about 70% of electricity and energy should be covered on long-term, and that has suited us quite well with the closure of PM5 last year. That means that the Saugbrugs mill now has a higher portion. I think in general, the Norwegian power situation is more or less where we want it to be. Clearly his comment about areas and regional differences is positive for Skogn, which is in the NO3 area, which has significantly lower prices than the rest of Norway.
In general that's, it's positive for Skog, presently, at least. In terms of the other mills, I think we refer to the presentation for Bruck and Golbey with the boiler investments and the energy mix and the pricing indications we have given.
We received two questions from Martin Normann. First question is: What is the potential containerboard capacity from the remaining machines in Golbey and Bruck?
First of all, Martin, I think this is a bit of a long-term question, but I will answer it nonetheless. Given the sizes of the machines, PM2 at Golbey and PM4 at Bruck are larger than the ones we have now and will probably be even more competitive in the case we are deciding to do something with them. I would estimate between 1 million and 1.1 million tons of containerboard if we are doing it similarly to the design of the two we are converting now.
The second question from Martin Normann: Given Q3 statements of the price increase of EUR 100 per ton from all mills and further EUR 100 per ton from Bruck and Golbey, this translate into a Q4 price increase in Europe of more than 2,000 NOK per ton. Can you confirm this? Given sales of around 420,000 tons, this translates into an EBT effect from price changes Q3 to Q4 of more than NOK 800 million, maybe NOK 900 million. If this is not correct, please explain why.
Everyone who has a spreadsheet can do this type of calculation, so I cannot say anything more than what we said earlier today, that these prices have indeed come through and they were absolutely necessary given the energy situation in Europe and given the recovered paper prices in Europe. Yes, the fourth quarter is going to be better than the three first quarters of the year, but that is not necessarily an enormous achievement.
The last question is on the chat. Can you please say something about the risk of losing CO2 compensation for the Norwegian mills?
Yeah. There's always a risk, political risk with political regimes, but at the same time, I think all political parties in Norway are supporting the CO2 compensation scheme. I also think that given, let's say, energy prices where they have been lately and probably will be during this winter, I think it's unlikely that anyone will change that in the short and medium and long term. It's maybe difficult, but the system is there to stay, and it's heavily linked to the EU ETS system. As long as that is in place, I regard the risk of losing that as low.
Thank you. Any questions from the audience here? No?
Yes.
Yes. Sorry.
Normann, you ask the audience first and then, nobody. I have a lot of questions, so I don't know where I start, but I'll take an easy one.
Start at the bottom.
The easy one. The Ocean GeoLoop, you have 2%.
2.6%.
Yeah, 2.6%, sorry. Why do you enter into a partnership where you can create value and not just demand a higher ownership? Because if you say, "No, forget about it," what is the worth of the company? Is there any lack of commercial instincts in the company?
I don't think so. I am not sure if you met Anders Onarheim and Hans Gude Gudesen, but I would doubt that it's a lack of commercial instinct, neither on our part nor on their part.
I agree with you on their side.
For our side, we are not necessarily sort of. Also with Circa, we want to have ownership positions in order to have the right incentives. There's also other agreements between Ocean GeoLoop and ourselves, which probably would also be termed commercial. I think our main interest is to enable this to work, and we think that the value of the Skogn mill is significant if this works.
I just repeat my name according to him. My name is Nils Foldal.
I know that, Nils Foldal.
He wanted me to say, you know? This is a part of the branding. No, I'm just kidding. I wonder, the second thing, I think you've done a splendid job, by the way, and you've taken down through John Chiang, the debt of the company, and now you're increasing it. With Madeleine's previous presentation, the best today, I think that
That's a slight sexist comment, isn't it?
No, no, it's not. It's, I would say, despite she's a woman, she made the best presentation.
That's even worse, I think.
The thing what puzzles me is that you have a change in business model where you go to become a much-
There is a question at the end of this, is there?
Yeah, there is.
Oh.
The thing is that there is a new change of business model actually becoming even more raw material producer than what you have in publication paper. Given that, you can maybe negotiate on volumes, you can't do that on prices. My question is that given that you're actually increasing the cyclicality of your revenue stream, why don't you actually use the opportunity you have to be sure that you don't go into a new Norske Skogn again where you have too much debt? You're actually exposing your forecast based on today very favorable prices, right?
I would say that the business case looks so good I wouldn't dare try to actually leverage the whole transfer business as you're doing now to conversion. Could you comment on that?
I don't have a lot of comments to that. I think it's more a statement than a comment. I think we based the leverage on long-term margins for the last 11, 12 years, and I think all the trends indicate that this is going to be better rather than worse, but we're still basing it on the 10-year average. I think the fundamental assumption is wrong, but I leave it for you to have your own opinions.
Any other questions from the audience? No? Thank you, everybody. Sven, maybe you will give some concluding remarks.
No, I just thank you all for coming. I also thank everyone online for listening in and for the questions and for your interest. If there is anything else, obviously Even Lund is here, IR, Carsten Dybevig, communication, and obviously the management team if you should wish to speak to us. Thank you all for this morning's session, and have a good day further on. Thank you.