Good morning, and welcome to TGS Q4 2021 earnings release. My name is Kristian Johansen. I'm the CEO of TGS. With me today, I have our CFO, Sven Børre Larsen. Let me first draw your attention to the forward-looking statements that you can read when we finish up the presentation. The highlights for Q4 2021, we have net revenues of $120 million. That's the segment numbers. That consists of data sales of about $83 million. That's actually slightly down from last year or Q4 last year, but it's significantly up from $33 million in Q3 2021. We have prefunding revenues of $25 million. That accounts for 46% prefunding. We had proprietary sales that came in higher than usual at $12 million.
The reason for that hit is closely related to a survey, a proprietary survey, that we did in the North Sea in Q4. We had a strong Q4 backlog order inflow, so more than $160 million of new contracts signed. That means that the backlog at the end of the quarter was $90 million, and that compares to $47 million at the end of Q3 of 2021. Definitely one of the highlights of this report and definitely a highlight of Q4 is the fact that we signed new contracts worth $160 million, which is the best order inflow we've had in a very long time.
That causes some of the reasons for our optimism in today's report, and especially when we talk about the market going forward, which we will come back to that in the financial section of the earnings release. We have a robust financial position. We have net cash of $215 million, and that puts us in a unique position to continue to pay a dividend, a quarterly dividend of 0.4, so 14 cents per share, which again accounts for about $16 million on a quarterly dividend.
In addition to that, we had buybacks of about $3 million during Q4, and that's part of the buyback program of $20 million that we announced at the general meeting in 2021, and which we'll cease at the general meeting in May 2022. Again, as we have highlighted this morning, we see several signs of improving market conditions, and I will come back to that later in the presentation. Some of you may ask, why do we do impairments in the same quarter as you highlight that the market is getting better? The reason for that is, number one, we wanna be very cautious about our balance sheet. Number two, obviously, we have the largest data library of the industry.
There will always be certain areas, certain regions, and certain projects that don't live up to the expectations. Again, taking a cautious view on our balance sheet, that's something we have decided to do despite the fact that we see a significant improvement in the market conditions overall. I'll go through the operational highlights of Q4, and then I will pass it over to our CFO. If we start with Europe, as I said, we had a big OBN survey carried out in Q3 and Q4 of 2021 called NOAKA OBN. It's part of our strategy to provide the next generation seismic data in the infrastructure-led exploration area of the Norwegian Continental Shelf.
The first season of our NOAKA OBN project was completed in October 2021, and we have acquired approximately 300 sq km, which is about two-thirds of the full program. Data is now in processing, and it will deliver to our clients in October 2022. Talking about that, we've made great improvements in our OBN processing over the years. You know, we got off to a really good start being the leader in terms of doing multi-client OBN surveys, both in Norway and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.
It's really great to hear the good feedback that we have from clients on the quality of our OBN processing, and I welcome other clients to have a look at those images and see what a significant uplift we can show through better technology in terms of acquisition, but significantly better and more advanced technologies in imaging and processing. We have committed to complete the acquisition over the remaining NOAKA area in 2022, so we will be back there with a crew in the summer of 2022, and the goal is obviously to expand the area and shoot a larger area, just in line with what we did in 2021. Although the survey is considered to be proprietary, there's a lot of open acreage around it and surrounding it.
We still think this is gonna be a really good multi-client project for TGS. Moving on to Asia Pacific, this is actually one of the more interesting areas for current, and I will come back to the drivers that we see in this market. The key here is that some of these countries are just extremely population rich. If you're population rich like India, for example, with 1.4 billion people, and you import 85% of your energy needs, and the prices of energy have gone up by 300%-400% over the past 6-12 months, then you can imagine yourself what a hunger you have to start exploring for oil and gas and be independent in terms of your energy needs.
We've actually seen a significant uptick in interest in the Asia Pacific region in general. If you look further down on the page, you see that we have announced 120,000 km of a regional 2D to be. This is in Indonesia. Indonesia is another great example of a very population rich area. It's about the same size as the U.S. in terms of population and the country is importing most of their oil and gas needs today. Obviously great potential there as well. We have a 6,500 km broadband 2D reprocessing project that is also in Indonesia, that's in the Natuna Basin. Last but not least, we announced this morning 260,000 km of regional 2DQ reprocessing in India.
Again, these three countries, if you add Bangladesh, where we did the Sarawak survey in Q4, are just great examples of where we see an uptick in interest and activity, partly based on the fact that energy prices are going through the roof, in areas that are very dependent on import of oil and gas. Great example of how we see the market is now changing and how we see areas picked up significantly. These are areas where there's hardly been activity for the past five or 10 years, but where TGS still has data which is good. Sarawak phase one commenced late October 2021. It's gonna cover an area of about 8,600 sq km, and we're doing this together with Schlumberger and PGS.
The broadband 3D reprocessing project that comes along that is crossing the border of Timor-Leste and Australia, and that continued in Q4 of 2021. A lot of exciting projects going on in the Asia-Pacific region. Again, a region that we haven't really talked too much about over the past few years in earnings releases, but you will definitely hear more about Asia-Pacific and these specific countries in the next few earnings releases. Africa, also an area where you see an uptick in interest, and it's pretty much the same drivers. This is Egypt, where we are acquiring data as we speak. It's the Red Sea. We commenced that in December 2021, and we'll cover an area of approximately 6,000 sq km, and we're doing this in partnership with Schlumberger.
Again, very, very similar drivers to what we see in Asia-Pacific. Gas demand for local energy needs and export markets driving activity in Egypt. In that regard, we think there will be more potential in the Red Sea. You may even see an extension of the current survey in the Red Sea, and you're definitely gonna see more activity, both in the Red Sea and also on the Mediterranean side of Egypt. Again, areas that you haven't heard a lot about previously from TGS, but you will definitely hear more in the future. Latin America, we're doing a multi-client 3D survey in Suriname, and we're doing that in a consortium with CGG and BGP.
I think all you need to do is to have a look at the map, and you'll see that Suriname is adjacent to Guyana. In Guyana, we almost hear about new discoveries on a monthly basis. Obviously an extremely prospective region which drives the interest in, for data also in Suriname. The phase 1 of this project includes about 11,100 sq km of new 3D. In addition to that, we're also doing 3,000 sq km of reprocessing of existing data in Suriname. There is potential for additional phases.
Whenever we call a project phase 1, you can probably assume that we have plans for a phase 2 or a phase 3, and I think the best example of that would be in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, where we have a phase 52. I'm not saying that we're gonna be around for 52 phases in Suriname, but there is definitely potential outside the data that we're acquiring as we speak. Just lost the picture here for a second. We're back again live. That was not a commercial break, but it was a technical issue with the system here.
Again, Suriname offshore acreage includes three blocks recently awarded and current open acreage offered in the 2023 bid rounds, and I will have a separate slide on these bid rounds coming up for 2022 and 2023. The data in Suriname will be available in the first half of 2022, so it's running through the processing centers as we speak. Moving on to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Engagement Two, as you see from the map here, is the next phase of our Gulf of Mexico ocean bottom node survey. It continues after, you know, we did Amendment about two years ago. We did Engagement One last year, and then we're doing Engagement Two this year, and we obviously have plans for further phases of both Amendment and Engagement.
This is an example where TGS has taken a leading role in terms of OBN acquisition and processing for our clients in both the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and Norway. By doing that, also develop new processing algorithms that have turned out to be very successful. Clients are very excited about the quality of data coming out of the processing centers these days on both Amendment and Engagement surveys, as well as the surveys that we are doing in Norway, where NOAKA is the latest example. Data acquisition of this survey began in 2021, and it will complete in March 2022.
Again, the combination of ultra-long offset OBN data and what we call full waveform inversion or FWI imaging is proving to be very popular and among our Gulf of Mexico operators. That helps obviously execute their development and infrastructure-led exploration activities in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Talking about that, a lot of the recent surveys that we have carried out in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico is over held acreage. It's less dependent on future licensing rounds, which I will come back to, because obviously there will be questions about what is the future of the lease sales in the U.S. If you look behind the shaded area here and you see Engagement 1 and Engagement 2, you see that a lot of the blocks have already been taken, and they're already controlled by oil companies.
You see for Engagement 2, you see there is an open area in between. In the middle of the survey, there is some open acreage, and typically that's the open acreage where we would benefit from future licensing rounds. On the left side and the right side of the survey, it's pretty much fully held by oil companies who have picked up these leases in previous lease sales. That's why we're saying today, even in the earnings release memo that although we're obviously not pleased about the uncertainty in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, a lot of the recent surveys we've done in the GOM are probably more reliant on exploration success and infrastructure-led exploration rather than future lease sales.
The Gulf of Mexico development and ILX remains strong focus for our clients and also for small independents, and that's something we will definitely benefit from in the future. Talking about that, the status of the GOM lease sales, you probably saw the announcement from BOEM in a couple of weeks ago. Basically, the announcement says that Lease Sale 257, which was held in November 17, 2021, has been formally vacated by the judge. This obviously came as a big surprise to the industry, although we knew that there were environmental institutions who were fighting against it. Still, you know, having a lease sale vacated is obviously unfortunate and very surprising for the industry.
The process now is that Interior will now have to carry out a new National Environmental Policy Act, we call it a NEPA, and then go through the lease sale process all over again. You basically start from scratch, and then you follow the same procedures as you did in previous rounds, where the key issue is actually to prove the consequences of shifting production from the Gulf of Mexico to elsewhere. That's a key issue they're talking about to politicians now, is that what are the consequences if we stop producing or if we halt lease sales in the U.S.? What we all know is that that's gonna lead to increased production somewhere else, and the question is how much is that gonna increase emissions on an overall global level?
On the right-hand side, you can see the answer to that, or at least you can see McKinsey's interpretation of that, where you see the GOM stacked up really well, compared to other key basins in the world. North Sea actually has the lowest emissions. No question that Norway wants to continue to produce oil and gas. The second lowest emissions are actually in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and then followed by Brazil, and then you see some of the onshore basins further down the list. Then you see obviously U.S. heavy oil, Canada oil sands and that kind of stuff being pretty much out of the bar chart here because they have so high emissions.
Again, if you were to think about global emissions, then obviously there is a very strong case for continuing to produce oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico. We think, you know, in the long term, we think politicians will obviously look at this because the consequence of shutting down the Gulf of Mexico will obviously be that you shift spending over to U.S. onshore, which again, we will benefit from. The world would not benefit from that because it's significantly higher emissions, as you see from this bar chart. Lease Sale 257, it falls within the 2017 to 2022 leasing program that expires on 30th of June 2022. The chances of another lease sale before the expiration of that period is rather low as it looks right now.
The second question is, when is the next five-year plan gonna be announced? Because the deadline for that is 30th of June 2022. That may also be delayed. Again, I think what you need to take from this presentation is that the industry is still very optimistic that there will be a solution to this. There is definitely fact on the table here that can be presented to Interior, and then hopefully the pressure in the U.S. on politicians right now with, you know, record high gasoline prices and electricity prices around the world who are going through the roof. We think that over time, that may have a positive impact on this situation. More to be followed up in that regard.
Finally, I just wanna talk a little bit about the progress we have made on the new energy solution strategy. This is something we're really proud of. We kicked it off in the spring of 2021, and when we look at where we are today, and we're actually really proud. We made an acquisition of a company called 4C in the summer of 2021. If you look on the upper left-hand side and look at the bar chart there, you see that, 4C had a growth in order inflow of 53% in Q4 of 2021. Overall, for the full year, they had an order inflow growth of 47%. This is a really great performance by Chris Anderson and his team.
We're just extremely pleased to have 4C as part of the TGS family. The plan is obviously that 4C is gonna be one of the building blocks to expand the services of TGS and make sure that we have a portfolio that doesn't only cover oil and gas data, but data throughout the value chain and covering all the different renewable energies as well as oil and gas. In addition to that, we have completed the Southern USA CO₂ Atlas. This is a storage atlas which basically tells operators where the best storage opportunities are for carbon capture and storage. We're doing that together with a company called Canadian Discovery.
This allows clients to look at a map and basically rank the different alternatives and the different basins and the subsurface in terms of opportunities for future carbon capture and storage projects. Again, this is an industry that is gonna grow tremendously over the next decades, and TGS is in a great position to provide this data, and it's another example of how subsurface data can be used very effectively outside the core exploration business that we're doing today. Another example of that is that we're launching what we call an integrated wind atlas application. This is an app that wind developers can use to do the same thing, so basically rank the different area and screen the different area for offshore lease.
You see an example of that on the upper right-hand corner of the slide, where you see a picture of the ScotWind application, so the awards for ScotWind. You see that the data and the data showing where there is best to be positioned in terms of not only wind speed, but other factors that comes into play in terms of making a decision where you wanna be and where you wanna bid and where you wanna put up your infrastructure for the future. A very exciting project that we just launched about a week ago. You can go to tgs.com and see more of that.
Last but not least, we're also pleased that we commercialized our digital acoustic sensing VSP processing solutions for 4D reservoir and carbon storage monitoring, and won the first 4D project awarded by a super major in this regard. Some of you may remember that we announced a collaboration with Halliburton in this regard, where TGS is doing the DAS VSP processing, and Halliburton provides some technology into that. This is a great example of the first commercial project won by TGS in that regard. Very pleased about the collaboration with Halliburton and very pleased to see super majors are buying into this now. Lots of interesting stuff going on in the new energy solutions business.
With that, I wanna hand it over to Sven Børre, who's gonna go through the financials, and then I'll come back and talk about the outlook for our business. Thank you very much. We had one slide that we cannot forget. It's on our ESG performance. We are once again proud of making good progress in our ESG strategy and performance. You see, I'm not gonna go through all the awards that we have won through 2021, but just conclude that we are considered to be best in class. We're considered to be among the best Norwegian companies in terms of ESG performance, considered to be among the best in our industry as well on a global basis. Last week, we announced that once again, we qualified for the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.
We're 1 out of 2 Norwegian companies and 1 out of 18 global oil and gas or energy companies or energy service companies. Again, that's something we're very proud of. We qualified last year, but this year we qualified with an even better score. Now it's time to hand it over to Sven Børre Larsen and the financial situation for Q4. Thank you.
Thank you very much for that, Kristian, and good morning, everyone. I'll start off with some practicalities with respect to our financial reporting. As you know, IFRS 15, the accounting standard regarding revenues from contracts with customers, came into force from 1 January 2018. This has had significant impact on revenue recognition for the multi-client industry. Since then, TGS has reported two sets of accounts. We have reported the IFRS accounts, which obviously follows the IFRS rules, and the segment reporting accounts which follows the old accounting standards prior to IFRS 15.
We have now decided that from the financial year of 2022, we will discontinue the segment reporting that we have done since 2018. Instead, we will introduce alternative performance measures that will help the readers of our accounts to get at least the same level of understanding of the accounts as they have done before, and an understanding of the fundamental developments and the drivers for our business. Our plan is to issue a detailed description of the APMs, including historical development well in advance of the Q1 report that will be published in May this year.
I can already now say that focus will be on order inflow and order backlog in addition to cash flow. Also, we will probably continue to report segment revenues in order to ensure continuity in our reporting and make sure that we can still compare to our own history and also to our peers that probably will continue with the segment reporting. We will come back to this in more details in a few weeks' time. I'm going into the normal content of the financial presentation, starting off with talking about net revenues. We had prefunding revenues of $25 million in the quarter, which is significantly higher than the $13 million that we had in the same quarter of last year. This is driven by 55...
$54 million of investment in the quarter and a prefunding rate of 46%. We had late sales of $83 million in the quarter, which represents a significantly larger than normal seasonal upstream. In a normal year or the long-term average of a Q4 late sales, this is to be 35%-36% of the full year late sales, and this year it was 42%. We have a really strong momentum in Q4 relative to what we have seen earlier in the year. Under proprietary revenues, $12 million, which is significantly higher than the run rate that we've seen in the past. As Kristian already alluded to, this has to do with the NOAKA OBN project in Norway, which is partially proprietary, but also...
Mostly proprietary, but also with some multi-client content. It's kind of a hybrid survey. But as I said, part of it is characterized as proprietary and is as such recognized as part of our proprietary revenues. You will also see that the cost of this is recognized as cost of goods sold and not capitalized through our library as we normally would do with our multi-client project. This means that we had $120 million of net revenues in the quarter, which is more or less exactly the same as we had in the same quarter of last year. Focusing a little bit on operating expenses on the top left-hand chart. We had $26 million of operating expenses. If you include this, it includes personnel costs and other operating expenses.
It's a little bit higher than what we normally would expect. This is partially due to some unusual items that are included. Partially as we came back into a bonus position for our employees in Q4, so that has also been charged to that number. The run rate going forward will probably be in the range of $20 million-$22 million per quarter, excluding any bonuses that we hopefully will generate. Talking about amortization and impairments. We had a total amortization of $167 million in the quarter. This includes $97 million of impairments of the multi-client library.
We have chosen to take a cautious approach and despite the fact that we see an improving market outlook on a macro basis. The reason for this is that certain of the regions we are exposed to are likely to remain a little bit out of favor, even if we see an improvement of the market. We expect to see less improvement in these markets relative to the more general market trends. The clearest example of this is from the northern parts of Norway. As you know, we have done a significant amount of service in the Barents Sea in the past.
We do not have massive amounts of book value left there, but with these impairments we are taking out the last bits of the book values that we have in the Barents Sea. We also impaired parts of the surveys that we have in the frontier parts or outer parts of the Norwegian Sea in Norway. In addition to this, there are also a few individual surveys around the world where special circumstances have triggered impairment. For instance, in Latin America, and we are also taking down one survey onshore, the U.S.
For 2022, we expect amortization to be in the range of $210 million-$240 million, given the plan that we have for investments right now. This may obviously change if our plans and our forecasts for investment and investment activity changes. Looking at our operating result at the bottom left-hand slide. Obviously, with the large impairments, we had a negative operating profit. You will note that it would have been positive if we didn't charge the $97 million impairment. This obviously puts us in a good position for 2022. Multi-client revenues, as I already mentioned, were $55 million in the quarter.
The largest investments were related to the Engagement 2 survey in the Gulf of Mexico and the Sarawak survey in Malaysia. We had a 46% prefunding rate in the quarter. We are once again showing very strong performance with respect to cash flow. We have free cash flow of $163 million in 2021 corresponding to a very high free cash flow conversion rate when we divide the free cash flow by revenues of 53%. Obviously, the very strong free cash flow in 2021 has to be seen in context with a rather weak cash flow we have had in 2020. If you combine those two years, you will see a pretty normal picture.
Of course, with the strong cash flow, it means that we, as always, end the year with a very strong balance sheet. We have $215 million of net cash at year-end, which obviously provides us with a lot of flexibility for increasing investments beyond the current guidance if market conditions permit for that. Since we acquired Spectrum in 2019, we have had, as you know, substantial presence in Latin America. As you also know, this is a region with very complex tax and regulatory frameworks.
As such, we have lately conducted a thorough review of parts of the historical accounting practices related to this region and has concluded that certain changes are required. Therefore, we have done some restatements of prior years' accounts, which has had limited impact on the statement accounts in 2021. The impact on the equity opening balance is approximately $20 million. You'll find more information about this in the notes of the quarterly report. To the segment income statement. We had $119.5 million of revenue in the quarter. Cost of goods sold, as I mentioned earlier, were a bit higher than normal due to the annual survey, $8.5 million.
Personnel costs, $14.2 million, that include bonus payments that we didn't have in the past two quarters. We had other operating costs of $12.7 million, which gave us an EBITDA of $84 million, which corresponds to a margin of 70%. We had the impairments as part of the amortization line here, $97 million. Total amortization were $167 million. Adding on depreciation means that we ended up with a negative operating result of -$87.7 million. I will draw your attention now to the foreign exchange line in the accounts. We booked an exchange loss of $15 million. The majority of this relates to a customer contract entered into in late 2019.
Normally, we insist that all our contracts are in dollars. We accepted this one in local currency as we had significant offsets and taxes in local currency. That's also parts of the investment for this project was in local currency. As such, the net loss related to this is significantly smaller than what this line item in the accounts suggest. This meant that we had a negative result before taxes of $103.4 million. A negative cash tax cost since we had a loss of $16.7 million, which gave us a net income of $86.7 million negative. As I already alluded to, our balance sheet remains very robust.
$215 million of cash at the year-end and with a very strong equity ratio. Cash flow, as mentioned, strong in the quarter. $117 million of cash flow from operations. We invested $76 million cash during the quarter. We paid dividends of $16 million, and we bought back shares worth approximately $3 million, which gave us a net cash flow that was positive by $19.2 million. To the dividend, I'm happy to once again announce that the board has resolved to continue to pay dividends based on the strong balance sheet that we have and the improving market outlook. We will pay $0.14 per share for Q4.
The ex-date is set to 17th of February, and the payment date is 3rd of March. As I mentioned, in addition, we bought back shares worth $3 million in the quarter. We have $4.3 million left on this share buyback program, which expires around our AGM date in May. With that, I hand the word back to Kristian to go through the market outlook.
Thank you very much, Sven Børre Larsen. Starting on the first slide, as we have indicated this morning, we see several signs of improving market conditions. I'm gonna go through some of the reasons for that in the following slides. Number one is that we see obviously higher oil and gas prices. Number two is an improved order inflow, as you can see from our backlog after Q4. Number three is that we see a significant increase in E&P spending budgets being announced over the past few weeks by the super majors and other clients. Number four is that exploration economics are at attractive levels, and the cost of exploration versus the oil price is at a gap that we've hardly ever seen in history. Last but not least, improved license round activity expected for 2022, and even for the years after that.
For the high oil and gas prices, I don't think we need to spend a lot of time on that. I think, first of all, you've obviously read the reports. You follow the oil price development and the gas price development. Probably more important is that we all feel it on our own wallets right now. In the U.S., prices of gasoline and of course, you know that Americans are driving a lot, so the prices of gasoline are record high now. We've hardly ever seen prices at the level you see now, where you have, you know, between $4-$5 per gallon. So a significant increase in that. We see natural gas prices. We see the gas crisis in Europe. We've probably the worst is behind us, as you see from the graph.
Again, we currently have gas prices that are about 4-5 times as high as the average in 2019 and 2020. Obviously this points at a very unsustainable situation, where obviously this will need to be sorted out in terms of reducing the impact of and the inflationary impact of very high prices of oil and gas. The second one is strong order inflow. We have talked about this today. We had a contract inflow of more than $150 million during Q4. It's among the highest order inflows we've ever seen in the history of TGS. Obviously a significant upgrade from what you've seen in the previous two years, you know, driven by, obviously, COVID-19.
These projects have or these commitments have been received on several projects. We've talked about all these projects today, NOAKA, OBN, Sarawak 3D, Suriname, Engagement 2, and Red Sea. The good news is obviously that some of these projects may even continue in different phases. While we're in early stages for some of this, it may continue for a while. We also see increasing E&P spending budgets. Some of you may have been caught by surprise to see some of the announcements from super majors about their 2022 CapEx plans. ExxonMobil, about 27%-45% increase year-over-year. Chevron more than 20%. Shell 15%-35%. BP 9%-17%. Equinor about 23% increase for next year or this year. ConocoPhillips 36% and Hess 42%.
If you asked us back in September or October, what do you think about seismic spending for 2022, and we asked our clients obviously the same question, I would probably say, or most of them would say that it's flat or flattish. If we ask the same question today, they would probably refer to these numbers and say that seismic wouldn't deviate much from the overall E&P spending guidance. That's obviously great news. That's the reason for most of our optimism today in terms of going into a better market. What's the timing of that? Well, that's still hard to say, and sometimes it may take a little bit of time before you start to see the results of that. We definitely see more hectic activity in terms of client meetings.
We have data showing that we probably have twice the frequency as we had last year. Things are definitely moving in the right direction, and that makes us quite optimistic for 2022, and definitely for the years after that. Exploration economics are also at very attractive levels. If you look on the left-hand graph there, you see that the gap between exploration cost and the price of Brent is at the highest level it's ever been. You know, Brent continues to be extremely strong. It's been going from $19.33 back during when COVID hit us to a level today above $90 per barrel.
Obviously a very strong oil price, and that's also the reason why you see companies like Goldman Sachs and Pareto and a few others being very bullish on the oil price going forward as well. Again, very attractive market to explore for oil and gas right now because of the low prices of exploration and the strong cash flow for our clients. We see an improving license round activity. Obviously not gonna go through this. It's a rather busy slide, but this is good in this regard because it means that there is a lot of licensing rounds being planned for 2022. Obviously you see the usual suspects.
U.S. Gulf of Mexico, obviously uncertainty related to the timing of the Lease Sale 258 and the new five-year plan, but we think it's gonna be there. Canada will have a round this year. Latin America, you see permanent offer in Brazil, which is taking place as we speak. That permanent offer has more acreage than any licensing round in Brazil have had in a very, very long time. Lots of acreage being offered now at some of the permanent offer rounds. I wanna draw your attention to Africa and Asia Pacific, where we probably see the highest growth in terms of activity.
I've been through the reasons for that in my previous slides when I talked about, you know, population-rich countries that are importing a lot of the oil and gas and energy today, and obviously they need to become more independent in terms of energy needs. There's a great push in that regard for both countries in Africa, but probably more important, countries in Asia Pacific where we see the highest growth as we speak. Our guidance for 2022, based on that, we are comfortable to invest more. We announced this morning that we're gonna invest about $200 million in new multi-client projects for 2022.
Our pre-funding rate is gonna be higher than it was in 2021. We will continue to outperform in terms of cash flow and return on capital, and extremely proud about our cash flow for 2021, which accounts for more than $160 million in free cash flow, defined by sales minus multi-client investment. Very strong free cash flow in 2021. We still think that's gonna be strong in 2022 as well. Which again puts us in a unique position to continue to pay a dividend. There were some speculations back in the fall of 2021 from some analysts that TGS may not be in a position to continue to pay a dividend after a relatively weak free cash flow in Q3.
I think we proved in Q4 that the dividend is great, and there's no reason to believe that TGS will cut that in the near future. We also target industry-leading distribution to shareholders, and the distribution of our multi-client investments is for the 200 for the year. We expect about 20% of that to happen in Q1, another 20% in Q2, and then we expect 60% of our total investments to happen during the second half of the year. Summing up that, net revenues of $120 million, which is the same level as we had in Q4 last year. We had a strong order inflow, more than $160 million, as we have discussed today. Means that we have a backlog at $90 million, and that compares to $47 million at the end of Q3.
Robust financial position. We have a net cash of $215 million at the end of the quarter, puts us in a unique position to continue to pay a dividend. $16 million paid out to our shareholders based on Q4. In addition to that, the buyback where we carried out $3 million of additional shareholder distribution in Q4. Several signs of improving market conditions, and I guess we have been through them today, so I don't need to repeat that. I will open up for your Q&A, and ask Sven Børre Larsen to come up and join me for that, please.
Okay, you can all use the web client to pose questions. We will hopefully get them up here on the monitor. Yeah, I've got some questions already. This first one is generally a normal year for TGS, how much of late sales does information from the multi-client library that has already been fully written off stand for? The question is asked in order to get a clue about how a bad market may affect TGS' earnings capacity as it may recover. This quarter, it was roughly 20%. That's not unusual. It varies quite a bit from quarter to quarter, but the long-term average is probably somewhere between 15% and 20%.
Then we have a question, or actually two questions from Jørgen Lande in Danske Bank. Good morning, gentlemen. On the NOAKA survey, can you indicate the prefunding rate range from the survey? How essential or influential is this survey with regards to your guided 2022 prefunding rate level? Thank you. In NOAKA, as you said, most of that is proprietary and as such, not relevant for prefunding rate. We'll probably do some or continue doing more phases of NOAKA in 2022. Parts of that may be proprietary as well. That will obviously still not have an impact on the prefunding rate.
If anything, the multi-client part of NOAKA, which obviously have low or almost no prefunding, will have a kind of a negative impact on prefunding rates. But that, of course, have been accounted for in our indications. And then the other question from Jørgen relates to the investment profile. I guess he posted that question prior to you going through that slide. But just to repeat, we expect roughly 20% in Q1, roughly 20% in Q2, and the rest in the second half of the year. Then we have a question from Kim Vidal at SEB. Following up on your comments of a gradual recovery, what do you expect of sales potential from the different regions outside of Gulf of Mexico in 2022 versus 2021?
Thinking in particular about Latin America, which was quite disappointing in 2021. Also, what do you see of transfer fee potential in 2022?
Yeah, I can give that a shot. I think in general, you will see relatively healthy spending increases. If you listen to our clients right now, they're all indicating that there will be higher spending in 2022 than in 2021. Pretty much across the board. I think regions that will do specifically well in 2022 versus 2021 is, yeah, you're touching on Latin America. I think 2021 was rather disappointing for Brazil, where we have a lot of data. I expect 2022 to be better, and Brazil is one example of that. If you go onshore U.S., I mean, it's taken a long time for onshore to recover, and it's been very slow for 2021.
It seems like the operators are being very disciplined, and they've burned their fingers in the past. We expect to see a relatively good uptake of activity there too. Asia Pacific, we've touched on that. Asia Pacific is obviously driven by huge populations and the need to be independent in terms of energy. There will be more activity there and Africa as well. We think all those regions are gonna grow. U.S. Gulf of Mexico, obviously a bit uncertain. We had a pretty good Q4 in U.S. Gulf of Mexico. As we said today, it's some of that may be impacted for the future if you don't have a license round for another 12 months.
Keep in mind, we were at the same point one year ago where Biden introduced a pause on licensing rounds, and we came back and had a round in Q4, and that was pretty good. I think the experience we have is that when a region is, you know, either shut down or there is less activity, then budgets tend to shift somewhere else. In terms of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, if you assume that some of that spending will be shifted, we think it's gonna be shifted to the U.S. shale and U.S. onshore. That's quite likely to happen. Hope that answered your question.
Kim is also following up with asking about how well our library outside of Gulf of Mexico again is fitting to the trend of ILX infrastructure-led exploration and less focus on frontier areas.
Yeah. I mean, it's clear that PGS traditionally, and especially Spectrum was very frontier. PGS probably less so, but more frontier than some of our peers. I think it's Norway is probably where we are considered to be frontier compared to our peers, where we have most of our data in the Barents Sea and the outer north, or Norwegian Sea. I think in terms of Africa and Asia Pacific, we have a library that is well-positioned for ILX. Brazil also. Some of the surveys that we have done in Brazil are a combination of frontier and ILX. So and again, Gulf of Mexico, what we have there, majority is actually ILX interest.
If I may add, Kristian, also in Norway, we are building up ILX presence, so to speak, with the Utsira survey and then NOAKA survey, OBN surveys that we have done in the North Sea.
Yeah.
And-
Adding to that, I think it's interesting to see that there are clients now who start talking about frontier again. I met a client about two weeks ago who said that their frontier budget for next year is gonna be 100% of what it was in 2021. 2023 versus 2021. You know, getting those signals at an early stage is causing some ground for optimism, obviously. Frontier is definitely not dead. There are clients who are now looking at frontier again, and obviously we stand to benefit from that.
Yes. A few questions from John Olaisen at ABG. Why are you not increasing MC investments more than you do, given the optimistic market outlook? And could you talk a bit more about the 2022 prefunding rate? It seems that they are generally increasing. If so, then again, referring to his first question, why are we not increasing multi-client investments more?
Yeah. I think right now we have pretty good visibility on our investments, and we feel good about the number around $200 million. We obviously have a balance sheet to invest far more than that. We will see how the market develops. I think right now a significant portion of the $200 million is related to ILX and existing infrastructure. So also in that regard, I think the upside would be if we see further signals that frontier is picking up, then there will be additional dollars put into our investments. For now, we have good visibility on the $200 million, and we feel that's a prudent number to announce to the market.
Then we have some accounting-related questions. He says, you mentioned that you expect 2022 amortization charge of $210 million-$240 million. This will mean the sixth year in a row with an amortization significantly higher than the investments and falling book value of the library. Could you elaborate a little bit on this trend, and if possible, give some indication on what the amortization charge will be in 2023, assuming flat MC investments? Jon is obviously completely right. So our amortization consists of two parts. We have a straight line amortization of the vintage library, and we have a WIP amortization.
That's the amortization on the projects where we are recognizing revenues on a POC basis during their work in progress phase. Obviously, the straight-line part of the amortization has continued to fall and will probably be significantly lower in 2022 compared to say 2021, sorry. That's a very positive trend obviously. Then we expect the WIP amortization to be slightly higher, obviously, in 2022, partly due to the higher investments and partly due to...
which we expect will lead to more prefunding revenue, but also more late sales related to service that are in progress. Then in the longer term, obviously, they will converge. If our investments stay flat, at some stage you'll probably see that the amortization is coming down to the same level. John is obviously completely right that amortization has been higher than investments for quite a while. If you see that the gap we expect now for 2022 is lower than what we've seen in the past.
It also obviously reflects that the fairly, how should I say, conservative amortization policies that we follow. You take a write down on the MC library but left the goodwill unchanged. Could you talk a little bit about the consideration for leaving goodwill, why it was not written down? Yeah. Goodwill is you measure that in a somewhat different way. First of all, it's helpful doing impairments of the library because it all other things equal, leave more headroom for goodwill. Secondly, you have a much longer time horizon for goodwill than we have on our surveys. The surveys have typically most of the surveys we apply or assume an economic life of only four years.
Some of them will have only one year left of the forecasting horizon. Some will have three, some will have two, and so forth. For goodwill, you have a much longer time horizon, which means that if you expect a steeper recovery at some stage, you will get goodwill will be more positively affected by that than the multi-client library from a kind of accounting technical viewpoint. I hope that answered John's question. From Mick Pickup at Barclays, you talked about an encouraging new energy start. What are expectations for 2022 in terms of rate of growth? And given the growth, are there other areas we can look at to deploy capital?
Yeah, good question, Mick. We've gotten off to a good start, and we had an acquisition of a company called Foresee. In addition to Foresee, we're developing quite a few internal or organic initiatives as you saw from one of our slides today. We're quite optimistic that we're gonna continue to have organic growth. We're gonna launch new products and services to our clients. That in itself is gonna be a good business in 2022. We're also looking at M&As. We had a long list of targets that we have been reviewing, and we've even been bidding for something. But as you know, the prices for some of this stuff may be rather steep or rather sharp.
I still think you're gonna see a combination of organic growth and inorganic growth, and over time, that will become a quite significant part of our business. In 2022, if we could get to $10 million plus of revenues, that would be pretty good. We hopefully can have even more, but it depends on whether we succeed in our M&A initiatives. Some of these organic initiatives are definitely paying off well, we're quite optimistic about the future of that.
Mick Pickup wants to know more about Q4. A decent step up in lease sales, but how was it versus your expectations? Whereas the hope was it could have been better, and who didn't show up with a checkbook?
No, I think in general we can be quite transparent about. We did slightly better than we expected. We expected to be north of 100, but 120 was probably slightly more than we expected. We're quite pleased about the development of Q4. Probably even more important, I think the order inflow of $160 million just proves that clients are definitely coming back with their checkbooks. There are definitely clients who still haven't spent a lot of money on seismic. I think that some of the European super majors have obviously been very busy with their reorganizations and restructurings and their strategic plans about, you know, how do you split CapEx between oil and gas and renewables and that kind of stuff.
That's taking longer, of course. In general, I think Q4 was a healthy quarter in terms of both sales and also the order inflow and the outlook for the future.
Yes. Then we have a question from Kevin Rogers from Chevron. Morning. Thanks for the presentation. First question, you impaired some frontier surveys this quarter in your book value of $700 million, end of 2021. What remains related to number 1, surveys that you impaired this quarter and 2, to what we can call frontier zones? To answer that, I mean, we—as I indicated, in certain areas like the Barents Sea, we have taken basically the book value down to zero. I don't have the exact numbers, to be honest, of how much of the impaired surveys that we on average then have left in percentage terms. But it is a little bit, not much.
How much do we have left in what we can call frontier zones? In Norway, we have quite limited exposure now to frontier zones. In other areas where we do expect an uptick eventually in frontier exploration or what you can call frontier exploration, we still have book value left. That's particularly in places like for instance, Latin America and parts of Africa where we see a more promising outlook for an uptick than we do in for instance, Norway. He has a question about-
I would just add to that. I think it's important to define, you know, what is frontier. There is no clear distinction between the two. You know, even taking the Barents Sea, as we would definitely call that frontier, a frontier basin, but Equinor is building now infrastructure around the Wisting discovery. I mean, Gulf of Mexico, another example. Is Gulf of Mexico frontier or is it mature? I would definitely say it's more mature than many other basins in the world. Given the history of seismic and the history of infrastructure or the closeness of infrastructure, et cetera. In that regard, it's kind of unfair to draw that very clear line between frontier and ILX.
Because there are certainly regions where PGS is really strong that some people would call frontier, but I would definitely say that it has more infrastructure than pretty much any place in the world.
He has a question about the M&A strategy. Is there any business that you would interested in? It's referencing two examples, the PGS Library and also the imaging activities of Schlumberger.
Well, I mean, we cannot be too specific on our strategic plans in that regard. I mean, we have a strategic plan of being a consolidator in this industry. We've been quite open about that for many years, that we think that the industry, although we have gone through some consolidation, we still need further consolidation. Because as it is right now, and if you look at the numbers for 2020 and 2021 for the industry as a whole, I don't think there's any company who have positive return on capital. So if the industry as a whole has negative return on capital, then obviously there is a need for further consolidation. So in that regard, we definitely would look for opportunities to do that.
I don't want to comment on specific opportunities in that regard. In general terms, yes, we're definitely looking at that.
The last question, I think, from Ishrat Hassan. What does the pipeline on new energy renewable projects investments look like? How should we think about capital allocation into these segments over the next two years? I guess that was answered earlier.
Yeah. I think in terms of organic, you will see that our CapEx would be single-digit $ million for sure. It's not gonna be massive. I think over time, that will gradually step up, and then it will also be accompanied by more M&A. Again, we're looking at that. We cannot give you any guidance of how big those acquisitions should be as of now. All right.
That's it.
Thank you very much. Thanks for everyone who was listening in to our Q4 earnings release. We welcome you back to listen to our Q1 earnings release later this year. Thank you very much for your attention, and see you soon. Thank you.