Good afternoon, everyone. I hope all of you have had a nice summer and Thursday so far. Welcome to our second quarter presentation. Both of those who are here today, but also those of you who are following online, either live or in the reruns. After this session, we'll have a Q&A part. For those of you who already have some questions, you can start posting those already. For those of you who are either new shareholders or considering becoming one, we are a green investment company. We're listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. We seek out and invest in solutions that contribute to a greener future. We do that using leading industry and finance experience and being co-located also with our biggest shareholder gives us a generous deal flow in addition to the one we get through our networks.
We also have a large number of enthusiastic shareholders, which both give us good input, feedback, and also tips on new investment opportunities. The combination of financial and industry expertise is reflected both in the management as well as in the board. As you can see on the board overview here, there's a slight change from last quarter. As Christine Spiten, due to getting a new exciting position in Fearnley, had to leave the board. We are very grateful for her valuable contributions to Saga during her time at the board. Wish her good luck on her new ventures and look forward to discussing sustainable cases in a slightly different context than before. At the same time, we are very grateful that Gøril Andreassen has taken up the seat after Christine. I've known Gøril for a very long time.
She has two decades experience within the sustainability field. She's currently writing a Ph.D. named The Transition to Green Energy, and I'm confident that her knowledge, and network will contribute very valuably to what we do in Saga. As for the rest of the team, we work really great together, have lots of fun doing what we love. Of course, this presentation as many other things in Saga, is a result of valuable contributions from everyone in the team. While having the opportunity to invest broadly, our main focus is on early stage. Once invested, we follow up actively in the companies, often taking a board position, sometimes also taking administrative positions, and we do whichever thing we can to help these companies to success. The industrial expertise we have in-house gives us extra confidence in going in early stage.
The early stage focus is also one of the reasons why we have a number of private investors who, through Saga, will get access to investments they otherwise wouldn't have access to. We also believe that the expertise that we have inside makes us very relevant for institutional investors also, which either might not have that expertise themselves or access to updated analysis on the field or the companies, to make a comfortable investment decision. We have a flexible ticket size and the network we have both nationally and globally gives us added benefits in terms of both, evaluating companies by growing the companies we have invested in and also through co-investing with that network. Primarily, we invest in technologies, not asset plays. We look for the early stage unicorns that have a significant and global potential.
We also look for gaps in the value chain and companies that address those gaps. The technologies we invest in should have a perspective on the technology which goes beyond 100 years, and preferably also a strategic match with the companies we have already invested in. Q2 in terms of net profits from operations, we ended up at around NOK 138 million. In May, we left the board of Bergen Carbon Solutions, which resulted in that the company went from being an associated company to a regular investment. The total effect from BCS in June, including the negative share price development the company had in the month, is about NOK 205 million. The other contributors to the results is the share price development in Horisont Energi and Hyon, which both went down.
It's been a tough spring, I would say, and also second quarter for many green investments. All in all, with cost of operations, we ended up at NOK 138 million on the positive side. The return on equity so far this year is close to 18%, which we are also quite content with. Our cash balance at the end of Q2 was also a strong NOK 674 million. While the second quarter was a relatively quiet one for us, there are still a couple things worth mentioning, both during the quarter and also some after the quarter. Hyon, which we listed in early February, they have made good progress on several aspects in what they do.
One of the milestones they reached this spring was the collaboration agreement with the Japanese Corporation Mitsui. In that agreement, they will explore joint business opportunities within maritime hydrogen infrastructure on a global scale. We are very excited about that agreement and also look forward to the outcome of the discussions which are taking place now and will continue throughout the fall. Besides Løkke joining Bergen Carbon Solutions as the Chairman, one of the big highlights from the company was the launch of a new product. They have today a product called carbon nanofibers, and they have launched a product which is carbon nanotubes, which has a higher value and a bigger market than the nanofibers alone. Very exciting for the company.
Due to our large exposure in the company, we also decided after the quarter to sell NOK 2 million shares for NOK 74 million. After the second quarter, we also decided to increase our stake in Heimdal Power, and we now own about 22% of the company, and we're the biggest shareholder. As announced earlier this morning, the Board has based on the development in Saga and realization of profits during the first half year to distribute dividends of 0.1 NOK per share, which takes the total over the last 12 months up to 0.2 NOK per share. It's been a while since we had an update on the sectors that we are following.
We have decided that we should give a little bit of insight into the latest developments that we find most interesting within the various sectors. Renewable energy is obviously a massive one and we've seen massive investments also happening in this sector. Our current favorite part of this sector is the grid part and investments have been very high in that field also. In order to reach the goals that the world has agreed upon in terms of reductions of emissions, that sector needs to triple its investments by 2030 to reach net zero by 2050. Not only that, for the digital grid solutions where we are exposed that market needs to go 8x by 2030 to reach this goal.
As you can see by the graph we've included, it will make up 40% of the total grid investments. As a recent report focusing on the U.S. has found the digital grid technologies can save the U.S. grid $5 billion alone. Obviously some interesting opportunities here for Heimdal Power going forward. In the circular space, plastics and recycling is still high on the agenda. While everyone agrees that the world should use less plastics, all projections go in the other direction. In fact, it's projected that we will double the use of plastics towards 2050.
If all that plastics is supposed to be produced by the conventional dirty way of producing it, the demand for oil will be about 22 million barrels, which is more than 20% of the total oil production today. Obviously, we don't want to be at that situation and if we do everything that we can, or at least most things right, we can potentially end up with around 10% going to landfills or incineration in the end. That will also reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by 73%. Many initiatives have been taken, but a lot also remain. These are initiatives that has to do with behavioral elements. People need to be educated about what to do with the plastics, with the various different kinds of plastics.
We need technological improvements on the ways to sort the plastics to avoid creating microplastics in that process, which is also an issue. We also need to make the processing plants downstream to get the final end value of the plastics into a new valuable products up to levels which are satisfactory. It will certainly be interesting to follow this space to see which of these technologies can handle the plastic waste the best way possible. While everyone got excited about dolphins, cute dolphins, and small fish swimming happily around in clear water as a lot of industries shut down during the early stage of the pandemic, that is more like a distant memory right now. Cause if you look at the CO₂ emissions, they're just back to the level where they were before the pandemic.
In fact, they're actually higher than that for the energy and industry sector. Obviously, the shock of a pandemic and the high carbon prices we have today is not sufficient to make the meaningful change that we want to do. However, the focus on where we should apply these technologies is getting more clear, and it's narrowed down to the sectors where we simply don't have any other opportunities. A decade ago and more, we were talking about capturing CO2 from natural gas power plants. Well, we can replace those power plants with renewable energy and other zero emission technologies. From cement production, waste incineration, and hydrogen and ammonia production, at least it's, if it's from natural gas, we need the carbon capture storage technologies.
Even though we need that, our take is that avoided CO2 is the best. If we can use the carbon for something useful and store it in a solid form, even that's also a good way to use it. CCS, well, we simply just need it today. All of these three means of tackling the CO2 challenge is necessary, but hopefully we will get down to a level where we can rather just use the carbon instead of finding place to put it. We have hydrogen, the Swiss Army knife element. If you look at hydrogen, it's kind of difficult to follow the progress. There's lots of news out there.
One of the indicators that is one that is certainly useful to follow is the annual shipments of technology, namely fuel cells and electrolyzers. It's really encouraging now to see that the fuel cell deliveries, for the first time ever, have crossed the 2 GW mark. It's becoming a meaningful industry which is gradually making a meaningful impact in on the world's energy systems. If you look at the graph on the right, we have the fuel cell shipments is plotted up against the historical shipments of wind and solar. You can see the trend is more or less the same. Electrolyzers. In EU, which has been very progressive on implementing hydrogen policies and strategies, we have seen some really ambitious targets being put out there recently.
EU wants to produce 10 million tons of hydrogen domestically and import 10 million tons of clean hydrogen from the outside. How much is that in terms of electrolyzers? It all depends, of course, on the utilization factor of the electrolyzers and so on. If you have a very high utilization, that will give you more than 100 GW of electrolyzers. Compared to solar and wind, maybe not, it's not a massive number. If you look at the historical electrolyzer deliveries, it is truly massive. That's 1,000 times the global annual market in 2018. Luckily, we've seen a really good development on the electrolyzer market also. Bloomberg estimates that last year, almost 0.5 GW
Still, it's a way to go to reach excess of 100, and certainly also to reach the target that IEA has set for the world to reach the global emission targets out there, 850 GW. Of course, this is truly bullish for the electrolyzer industry, and then that means also the renewable industry. We see while Europe has taken the lead and during the last couple of years, U.S. is coming now and coming strong. With the latest Inflation Reduction Act, they have put in place a subsidy on green, primarily, but also blue hydrogen, which in many regions in the U.S. will make green hydrogen the cheapest option in the near future. We expect that to have truly a great impact on what's happening there.
Within the maritime space, as mentioned last year, the maritime sector needs to be at least 5% zero emission by 2030 to enable decarbonization in line with the Paris goals. With the phasing in now of ETS for the maritime sector in the ETS, we expect this to truly accelerate. We already see this happening in the industry so far. In 2022, first half year, 60% of all new vessels ordered were low emission. Now, low emission also includes LNG, but LNG is a lot better than the other alternatives out there, and is the step towards zero emission hydrogen and ammonia. With the aging fleet that is operating also, according to Clarksons, 40% of container bulk and tank fleet will need modifications or be scrapped by 2026.
This industry is in or should be in a rush to make meaningful changes to reach these targets. In terms of being one of the leading nations within low and zero emission shipping, Norway has obviously strong ambitions on this also. The Norwegian Shipowners' Association has a target of reducing the emissions by 2030 with 50%. This will demand a lot of new low and zero emission ships. Luckily, we have a government which also supports this development. Recently, the government's entity for granting support for low and zero emission initiatives, Enova, granted more than NOK 1 billion to establish five different hubs for hydrogen production related to the maritime sector and seven ships that will go on hydrogen and also ammonia.
This all supports the market that we see Hyon will play a major part in. We have ammonia. A recent report from IRENA and the Ammonia Energy Association confirms that the need for ammonia will more than triple going forward until 2050. Which confirms the analysis we have done in Saga Pure. What's also interesting is that most of this increased ammonia demand will most likely be ammonia that will be transported. Mostly the ammonia today is produced on site at the fertilizer plant and at the use place. Only 20 million tons out of the 180 million tons today is transported on the oceans. Whereas we're going to add 500 million tons on top of that. That is also going to be an interesting opportunity for the maritime sector.
A lot of the new ammonia that is projected is also projected on the fuel side. We see that with the current CO2 prices in Europe and relatively normal gas prices, the blue ammonia is already competitive with the gray ammonia. In fact, with today's gas prices also, because the CO2 is valid for both the blue and the gray. Also green ammonia will benefit from this. At a level of $150 per ton CO2, with an electricity price of roughly $40 per MWh, then the green hydrogen will also make green ammonia competitive with the gray. Far, there's been announced 15 million tons capacity on the clean ammonia side. It's a significant number, and it's up from five only one year ago.
Of course, there's still about 500 million tons to go before we are where we should be. We expect a lot to happen in this sector also. Given the attractiveness of using clean ammonia to decarbonize in a big manner near term, we see the attention around ammonia rising significantly as well. Right. With that, we turn to a brief update on the various portfolio companies. Speaking of ammonia, we have a position in Horisont Energi, which develops these clean ammonia value chains, both blue and green. We have a strong position in the company, including the Chairman of the Board. They're making good progress on all the projects they're working on. During Q2, they signed a collaboration agreement with a company called Lhyfe, which is a green hydrogen developer.
They are going to look at green ammonia projects across Europe. Further, the company decided also during this summer to extend the concept study related to the Barents Blue project, which is the first and large ammonia project they have up in the north of Norway, to optimize the ammonia facility even further. They're also preparing for a second carbon storage facility in the southern part of the Norwegian continental shelf. All in all, making good progress. We're excited to see how this company will develop going forward. Bergen Carbon Solutions, they have a technology which converts CO2 to valuable carbon fiber products and oxygen. They do this with zero emissions and at a fraction of energy demand of the current way of producing carbon nanofibers.
We've worked very closely with this company for almost two years now. We're very happy where the company is today. Our main contribution is as such, given to the company. With that in mind, and also the strengthening of the board, both earlier this year and with Jon André Løkke, previously CEO of Nel, entering the board, gave us comfort to leave the Board of Directors in May, and hence the company moving from an associated company to a regular investment. In May, the company also announced that the CEO of BCS, Jan Børge Sagmo, stepped down due to health reasons. While this was not good news for the company, he had hired a lot of good people. They were in good progress on the projects.
While being instrumental for taking the company from an early stage to where they are today, we are confident that the company, with the strengthened board, with the contracts they are now making, will have a good chance of succeeding going forward. As mentioned, they had launched a new product on the carbon nanotube side. It's a bigger market than the carbon nanofibers. That is going to be exciting also to see how their product will be welcomed by the market. One thing that they have been working on very focused has been the battery sector. With using carbon nanofibers for batteries, especially on the battery anode, you can increase the capacity of the battery, and you can also increase the lifetime.
They've had some good test results from several companies around the world, and one of the companies, a Japanese big corporation, has had very positive results and then asked for more carbon nanofibers to get the tests even further. During the summer, they also announced that the location for the first production facility will be in Høyanger, Norway. This change saves the company almost NOK 90 million, and it also saves construction time and risk in terms of execution. We're very happy about that decision and also look forward to that plant, but also a plan in motion once they get the volumes up. While we sold NOK 2 million of our shares in the company recently, our expectations for this company remain high. Oops.
Heimdal Power, they've developed a technology which represents a revolution for the electric grids, enabling real-time insight and for the grid operators and increase the flow of power through the electric grid while maintaining safety. They're making good progress on the customer side, currently counting 20 contracts in 10 different countries across Europe. What's good to note is also that some of the customers now, they're coming back to the company. They've had a few neurons tested first, maybe on a single line, and now they want to expand the test to area-wide network. That is exactly the development we want to see, and it's a step right before we can expect bigger things happening on the customer side.
They're also working very actively with a number of leads, and I'm happy to see that they have gone from just above 200 qualified leads in Q1 to more than 300 in Q2 this year. We recently also hosted a debate on the state and future situation of the Norwegian grid and how their solution or digital solutions for the grid can play a role in optimizing what we already have to maximize the development of renewable energies, and which will also kind of make a good progression on that. You can start building the renewable assets before you start building additional grid. You can find the link on that debate in our social media post from the last week.
We are very, very excited about what this company has achieved so far. When the opportunity presented itself recently, we also decided to increase our stake in the company. We have IC Technology. They're developing innovative fuel and storage solution for liquid hydrogen. This technology is also suitable for other cryogenic fuels, which means that a ship owner which plans to build an LNG ship but wants it to be ready for eventually also having hydrogen on board. If the development with this technology goes well, he can buy a tank from IC Technology, and that will be, in practice, hydrogen-ready. These fuel tanks, they consist of a number of elements which will be welded together to create a containment system for the cryogenic fluid. There is a vacuum within these chambers, and it's obviously important that this vacuum is tight.
We're very happy both that the first element was successfully manufactured by Prodtex here in Norway, and you can see a picture of the laser welding happening. The first element out of a number of elements was successfully produced. It has been successfully vacuum tested. It's tight. The next step will be to put these together in the containment system to test the entire system, and that will happen during the course of this fall. We're very, very excited about where they are and of course about this test that will happen later this year. They recently also got a grant from The Research Council of Norway of NOK 11 million to further develop this system. We have Hyon, which presented earlier this morning. They have over the course of spring further refined the fueling concept.
They've hired a lot of good people, and they've made good progress on their first bunkering project, the Hellesøy Verft. It's really exciting to see the development that's happening in the company, the innovation, and the progress they're making. In Q2, we had Otto Søberg joining as chairman of the company. Very excited about that, about the industrial expertise he brings to the company, but also his expertise related to export of technologies from Norway. Speaking of the global market, which will obviously be very important for Hyon going forward, with Mitsui joining in a collaboration agreement between the two companies. It will be exciting to see what that can lead to in terms of the international opportunities for the company.
The company also signed a number of agreements with key suppliers and partners that will ensure the best product possible, hopefully to be delivered to some of the leads they're working on within the next 12 months. Summing up, over the course of spring, we've seen how international conflict can truly shake up the energy markets in a way no one could predict, or at least very, very few. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions going both ways, we've seen energy prices unseen in any time in history. Of course, this is supercharging Europe's efforts to gain energy independence and basically accelerating all projects within the renewable space. While Europe might continue to import Russian natural gas after this incident, who knows?
What is for sure is that the ongoing war and the conflict has led to a one-way street in terms of Europe truly wanting to gain the energy independence. Despite these accelerated efforts on renewables, we at the same time see a lot of dark clouds with regards to the markets. We see inflation rising, we see interest rates rising, we see a lot of things that make us want to stay with our current investment philosophy. We are very cautious about where we invest. We will continue to be that. We are of course evaluating a number of investment opportunities. We will continue to do that, but we will also continue to ensure that the companies we have invested in has the greatest chance of success.
That goes for both, the technology side, the network side, but also on the people side. While we are a relatively small team in Saga, we are contacting the best people we know and help them come to the companies that we think will make the biggest change going forward. With that, I think, we'll move on to a Q&A session. As last time, our CFO, Espen, will lead the session, and we'll answer the questions to our best ability.
Thank you, Bjørn. Today, actually, we have no questions from the online viewers. All right. We have some people participating in the audience. Are there any questions? No?
Do you have any questions?
I don't.
Okay, let's hope we'll have some more questions the next time, or everything was just perfectly clear.
Thanks everyone for coming here today, for following the live stream online. If you should have any questions, don't hesitate to send them on email, and we'll answer at our best ability. With that, I'd like to thank everyone for coming here today, and hope you have a nice afternoon.