Welcome to Yara's Q2 results presentation. The presentation today will be by Yara's CEO, Svein Tore Holsether, and CFO Thor Giæver. Shortly after the presentation today at 1:00 P.M. Oslo time, there will be an audio conference call with an opportunity to dial in and ask questions. With that, it's my pleasure to hand over to Yara's CEO, Svein Tore Holsether.
Thank you so much, Silje, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you. As always, we will start with safety, and I'm really proud of our organization, which is working hard for Yara to continue to produce and deliver products to customers despite a very challenging environment. Our safety performance continues to be at a low and industry-leading level. However, another quarter with an increase in number of incidents that requires our attention. The volatile market environment, combined with reliability issues means increased demands on our teams. This means also more frequent adjustments to production schedules, more frequent changes to sourcing, and increased mental stress on the entire organization.
We've had several incidents in this quarter which have resulted in employees and contractors being injured and having had to take time off from work. These injuries I want to emphasize are all avoidable and serve as a reminder that we have more work to do before we reach our ambition of zero injuries. Moving to the financial results. Our business model continues to perform well as we deliver improved returns in continued volatile market conditions. Our overseas assets delivered a particularly strong financial performance with our Americas, Africa, and Asia segments accounting for approximately 55% of our EBITDA this quarter.
As we'll get back to later, we have higher prices and margins, including increased risk premiums amid the high and volatile gas prices in Europe. Strong returns also mean Yara has increased capacity to distribute cash to shareholders going forward in line with our stated capital allocation policy. The board will consider further cash returns in connection with the Q3 results. The war in Ukraine is having a dramatic impact on food security. The Economist calls it a food catastrophe, which is really fitting. Globally today, 828 million people are affected by hunger, and 50 million people live on the edge of famine. We repeat our call for coordinated action to create a more resilient food system.
Government action is definitely needed to meet urgent food needs, and to support planting and also keeping borders open, and in addition to that, also releasing grain stocks. We also need to see long-term actions to promote efficient and sustainable agriculture. This needs to be done in an equitable manner with particular focus on smallholders and underdeveloped regions. There is a clear risk of nitrogen shortages and further price spikes if the gas situation in Europe deteriorates further. However, despite a recent correction in grain prices, farmer profitability remains high. For Yara, the recent spike in gas prices also means we need to make operational adjustments.
We've therefore curtailed the annual equivalent of 1.3 million tons of ammonia and 1.7 million tons of finished goods. Of the finished product, curtailment, roughly half is urea for fertilizer, and the rest is nitrates and NPKs. We will continue to adapt to market conditions and use our global sourcing and production system to supply customers where possible. With that, I'll hand over to our CFO, Thor Giæver. Thank you.
Thank you, Svein Tore. The financial key figures show that Yara's business continues to perform well in a demanding market environment, with substantial underlying increases in EBITDA, earnings per share, and return on invested capital. Our reported EPS was $2.61, with the difference compared with the underlying $3.32, more than explained by a currency loss, driven mainly by the impact of a stronger U.S dollar on our debt portfolio, which is primarily held in U.S dollars. Now, those of you who know or follow Yara closely will be quite happy about this kind of loss, since a stronger U.S dollar is positive for Yara going forward, with our earnings being fundamentally U.S dollar-driven.
Our 12-month rolling return on invested capital at 17.7% includes the Salitre and the Dallol impairment from respectively Q3 and Q4 , 2021. Excluding these, the ROIC was 21.6%. The outflow of operating capital this quarter was due to higher raw material and commodity prices, and also cash outflow related to financial derivatives, mainly hedging contracts on foreign exchange exposures in key markets. The recent fall in commodity fertilizer prices is not yet reflected in our operating capital due to normal time lags. The higher investments, compared with Q2 2021, mainly reflect higher maintenance investments as we have several large turnarounds ongoing, including our Belle Plaine plant in Canada. Our operating cash flow was approximately $100 million lower than a year earlier, as a higher operating income, outflow was more than offset.
Sorry, higher operating income was more than offset by the outflow from operating capital. Overall, our fertilizer deliveries were 21% lower than in Q2 last year, with premium products more resilient, with a decline of 14%. We're taking several actions to reduce risk, and this includes carefully managing new order taking beyond what we can do from product that we have in inventory. It also includes the surcharges that we've introduced for many of our industrial products. The drop in deliveries was largest in Europe and Americas, down respectively 22% and 23%. In Europe, the decline is mainly a result of lower demand due to high market prices, as there was limited buying interest at the start of the quarter, until the new season prices were announced, a bit halfway through the quarter.
In Americas, the main reduction was in commodity blends as sanctions imposed on suppliers from Russia and Belarus impacted our sourcing. However, premium product deliveries were relatively strong, with a decline of only 2%. Our deliveries to industrial customers were at a similar level to last year as Yara continued supplying essential products for a number of industrial uses, including transportation. The Yara Clean Ammonia volumes were down mainly due to reduced ammonia production levels. Looking at the variance analysis, the margin improvement is the main result variance compared with a year ago, with a net $900 million improvement, despite gas cost increases amounting to more than $1 billion. The margin picture contains significant variations between regions and segments. We had a strong contribution from our North American production assets and also from our industrial business.
In Europe, our realized nitrate price increase is lower than what can be modeled based on published prices. This is mainly a phasing effect linked to what I mentioned about the low delivery rate at the start of the quarter before the normal seasonal price reset. Our order book for nitrates is currently at a normal level for this time of the season. Energy prices are slightly lower than our guidance as our realized energy cost has regional hub differences including lower cost from some of our plants that are not exposed to hub gas prices. Our realized energy cost is as normal, calculated based on production volumes in the same quarter last year. The margin contribution from NPKs was positive despite a lower market premium compared to a year earlier.
As you've already seen, our volumes were lower, especially in Europe and Americas. The other variance mainly reflects higher fixed costs, of which more than half is driven by inflation, and the rest is driven by ramp up of new business areas and increased spend on reliability and maintenance. Now let's take a look at our operational improvement, where my main comment is that we have more work to do on reliability. Ammonia production was negatively impacted by reliability issues in Pilbara, Ferrara, Brunsbüttel, and Cubatão, and also turnaround delays in Hull and Cubatão. We also had reliability issues within finished products with the major impacts in Tertre, Porsgrunn, Babrala, and Cubatão.
My main positive comment on reliability is that our North American assets are performing well, which is a credit to our teams in the region and also a result of us deliberately prioritizing maintenance resources to our most profitable assets. I also want to mention there's no material impact on Yara's finished product volume so far due to lack of raw materials, as we have increased our phosphate and potash sourcing from existing suppliers and entered contracts with new suppliers to offset the lost volumes from suppliers linked to sanctions. Our energy consumption efficiency was negatively impacted by ammonia plant utilization being moved up and down more than normal due to the market environment. As already mentioned, our fixed costs have increased, driven partly by a challenging operating environment and partly by inflation, in particular in Latin America.
However, our total resource use guidance is unchanged as we continue to allocate dynamically between CapEx and OpEx within a total frame. Lastly, on operating capital days, we are stable and compared to last quarter and on track to achieve our long-term target. Looking at our net debt development, I've already covered the key elements within earnings, operating capital, and investments. One further note on operating capital, our accounts payables to companies linked to Russian-sanctioned individuals amount to $220 million as of June 30th , 2022 . These payables are related to goods received before sanctions were implemented and are presented in the line trade and other current payables in our balance sheet.
All of these were overdue as of June 30th , but future settlement will be dependent on the development and sanction regulations, so the timing of cash outflow for now is uncertain. Back to the overall debt development, we also paid a record annual dividend of NOK 30 per share in May, and still ended the quarter at basically the same debt level as we started. As Svein Tore has already noted, our dividend capacity is strong. In line with our capital allocation policy, we will consider further cash distributions in connection with our Q3 results. As we have seen over a longer period of time, Yara's business model is resilient and has delivered strong returns through several challenging periods, most recently the pandemic and the current energy and food crisis.
Looking further back, we performed well also through the financial crisis in the 2008-2009 season. Our diversified geographical footprint is a key reason for this, allowing us to better respond to and offset challenges in one region within other business areas. The most recent example being our production plants outside Europe being able to support both in terms of providing more ammonia to Europe and contributing with higher earnings, which more than offsets margin challenges in Europe. Our ability to optimize ammonia flows globally is also an example of how our flexible assets create resilience. Another example of asset flexibility is our NPK plant's ability to adapt both raw material sourcing and NPK grades produced in response to significant market disruptions, both in terms of raw material supply and customer demand. Our strong operational and commercial organization is also a key element in our resilience.
These teams have made major efforts in the face of the recent challenges, managing risks by adapting and optimizing our production, our order books, regional flows, and commercial terms. This strong asset base and organization has allowed us to continue operating and delivering essential products both for agriculture, transport, and industrial purposes, and at the same time delivering strong returns. Wrapping up today's presentation, we are excited to issue our first green financing framework, underlining our clear commitment to sustainability, which is a foundational element in both our heritage and our long-term strategy, and our approach to capital markets. Potential financing proceeds will be used for eligible green projects such as green ammonia, premium fertilizer production assets, and carbon capture and storage projects.
The framework is aligned with best practices outlined in the International Capital Market Association Green Bond Principles and the Loan Market Association Green Loan Principles. CICERO has provided a second-party opinion for the framework, which was rated as medium green. That's all for me today, and I now hand you back to Silje.
Thank you, Thor Giæver. Just a few closing remarks from me then, by reminding you that we have a conference call starting in approximately 40 minutes at 1:00 P.M. Oslo time. If you don't have the details for this, you can go to our webpage, yara.com, under Investor Relations, Financial Calendar. With that, we thank you for watching today's presentation.