Well, good morning. Thank you for attending. It's good to see so many happy faces in the audience. It's my great pleasure to welcome PGS to the conference. They've been coming here for a number of years, clearly in the seismic market, which has seen some improvement over recent times. It's my great pleasure to welcome Gottfred Langseth, who is CFO of the company. I'm looking forward to hearing what you've got to say. Thank you.
Thank you, Mick. Happy to be here. Even happier if I can get the slides up, Mick. Should I push something?
No ?
I may need some support here. I will start. There it is. Can we get it in the full screen? Is that possible? Thank you. Happy to be here. PGS is an integrated marine geophysical company. We own and operate vessels. We participate in the contract and the multi-client market. Around 1,200 employees, including the maritime crew. We have global operations, headquartered in Oslo. Regional centers in U.K. and U.S., in Houston. We operate 6 3D towed streamer seismic vessels.
We have an additional five, which are either cold stacked or used for other purposes, as a result of supply-side reductions over time. We have the largest libraries, multi-client, on the multi-client data in the industry. Approximately 1 million sq km of 3D data. Most of that GeoStreamer. We had around $700 million of revenues last year, a bit over $430 million of EBITDA, and a market cap currently, at least when these slides were prepared, of approximately $600 million. The seismic market, the marine seismic market, is demonstrably improving. In a way, the macro environment is supportive. I guess everyone is aware of that. High oil and gas prices and the increased focus on energy security is putting investment pressures on energy companies, our customers.
E&P spending is increasing, and there is a renewed interest in exploration as well. When it comes to the offshore seismic market, there is an increasing multi-client space across the industry. There's more interest from clients in participating in new multi-client surveys. More surveys are coming off the ground, and surveys generally attract better pre-fundings. They're both obviously very good for us. With respect to the contract market, the contract activity is increasing. That is what has been driving the improvement so far. That continues on a positive pricing trend. We are seeing that in a way, the industry backlog or vessel schedule, as we call it, for the winter season is firming up. I'll revert a bit to that.
This slide shows at the top of the graph all our sales leads for contract work, and the bottom part of the graph, the darker blue is active ongoing tenders. There is an increasing trend during this year, currently primarily driven by the southern part of the Atlantic margin and Mediterranean. I said this was contract work. In addition to what's captured here, there is this year a relatively large number of more informal budgetary requests from clients, which often results in either a contract or a multi-client project, which will not be covered by these graphs.
The dip at the beginning of the year was driven by a sort of a large bid in Brazil, which was canceled during Q1 and then has come out piecemeal for re-tender now later in the year. The order book is on a positive trend. It may require a bit of explanation when you look at the graph. Some will not be very short. The top part of the graph, which is shaded, is in a way the part of the order book, which is already produced.
Data is already acquired, but revenue recognition is pending the delivery or recognition criteria of IFRS. The part of the order book that represents future work is the top of the light blue further down, and that is what in a way represents the volume of work that we have secured going forward, and that is on a positive trend. Order book in Q2 was around $360 million, and that is approximately unchanged now at the end of August, which is good news in a way. Third quarter is a period of high production. Due to vacation and a few other things, it is in a way July, August not the most active months with respect to award activity.
We are more or less fully booked for the rest of the year, so fully booked for this quarter, and we have one more vessel month to sell in the fourth quarter this year. This slide tells a story about many things that the primarily supply-side capacity reduction, material, and significant industry consolidation. If you take it from the peak, sort of 2013, approximately, and up to now, the number of operated 3D vessels has reduced from 60- 14 today, material reduction of the supply side. If you look at the participating companies operating vessels and competing in the contract market, that was, you know, like six in 2012 and five in 2013, so five, six of significant size.
Today, we are two players in practice operating in this market. As I said, 14 vessels currently operating, PGS or we operate six of those 14. If I had time, I would want to just zoom a little bit into, and there's not a pointer here, I suspect. Anyway, if you zoom on, you know, this just appears to be a falling period, so sort of relatively linearly. The market, if you zoom in on 2019, the market actually started to recover late 2018, early 2019, and you'll see that the graph is pretty stable on operating capacity. What happened between 2018 and 2019 was that demand started to pick up, utilization and pricing improved quite a bit. In 2019, there was a period of optimism in the seismic industry.
COVID dislocated the energy markets, and there was a further sort of reduction of demand for seismic services. In a way, just assuming that in a way, the pre-COVID level of 2019, if that were to revert now over the next couple of years, which I don't think is too unlikely, that would be a significant increase from where we are today, would create significant supply-side constraints and also significant margin expansion. Some key numbers there. Revenues, difficult period last winter. Following that, in the second quarter, we delivered 50% increase in revenues, delivered the second highest quarterly revenues we've had since 2014.
Strong EBITDA, as you can see at the top right, and in a way, more anecdotally, the EBITDA in the second quarter was almost 50% higher than the revenues we had in the first quarter. It's a material shift. Cash flow for our business will lag in a way the revenue growth by close to a quarter or approximately a quarter. Second quarter cash flow to the bottom right is driven by the revenues primarily in the first quarter. In the third quarter, now we will have strong cash flow, and that will be driven by the strong revenues we had in the third. I'm mixing here. Delivered in the second quarter. We are improving our financial position. We see improved earnings. Our debt is reducing.
In the second quarter in May, we completed a private placement and a subsequent offering thereafter, approximately $100 million to strengthen our balance sheet. That was extremely well-received in the market, placed at minimum or no discount to the market price. The share price and equity pricing has developed quite favorably thereafter. We've also secured $50 million of additional senior loans. With these transactions, we have improved liquidity by $150 million. We improved our equity and reduced our debt by $100. We have secured ample liquidity until the next larger maturities, which happens in the fall of 2023, a year from now.
With the improving earnings and cash flow, and the reduced debt levels to strengthen balance sheet, we are well-positioned to address the refinancing need that we have ahead of third quarter next year. Here we say that the new, our New Energy business is gaining momentum. I heard from Mick that carbon capture and storage had attracted an extreme interest yesterday on the panel debate. Many will therefore be well introduced to this week. Last year at this conference, even illustrated the potential of the carbon storage projections or scenarios for our business, which is in a way, primarily monitoring, the storage activities offshore.
That potential, we said was depending on which scenario of the projections play out could be in a way, these activities for carbon storage could require similarly many vessels or even more in 25 years' time than what is currently used for oil and gas related seismic. Time will show. The point on this slide is that this market is already developing for us. We have been awarded and executed and completed this summer four carbon storage 4D projects. One in the U.K., the Endurance, and three offshore Norway, the Northern Lights, Snøhvit, and Smeaheia. This is a market that is actually starting to generate visible business for us with almost a full North Sea season of work for one vessel equivalent.
We expect to generate approximately $30 million dollars of revenues relating to carbon storage this year. I will actually talk a little bit about digitalization, which will be the last topic before I go to my summary, and I think we're good on time as well. Three slides on the topic. The first one on data processing or imaging in the cloud. We have over a relatively short period successfully moved our imaging activities, data processing activities to the cloud. That has for us also put us in a position where we could process data at a lower cost than what we do using our own equipment.
It is just around two years since we started our cloud processing journey, so to say, and we are currently doing 80% of all our imaging work in the cloud. All of the most compute intensive workflows have been moved to the cloud. We're able to do that at a cost level, which is quite significantly lower than what we were able to do operating our own high-performance compute machines. Last month in August, our production in the cloud was 4 x the highest production month last year. That tells something about the growth. The benefits of processing in the cloud is in a way, actually giving me a lower cost. That's fantastic. Of course, very important for us.
In a way, the flexibility, unlimited compute capacity when we need it and virtually no cost when we actually don't need to process, that is a core benefit. Lower cost, more flexibility, and part of this in a way, no CapEx to maintain an in-house processing capacity. We have established a group internally, the Digital Factory. This Digital Factory is established to push our digital transformation and enable us to achieve that more effectively and therefore also support the achievement of our strategic goals. For the first two years, this has been predominantly focused on operating the vessels. We have achieved substantial progress in several areas there.
To mention a few, optimizing vessel speed in a way, monitoring all the bottlenecks to increase acquisition speed, be it noise, you know, tension on streamer lead-ins or super wides or these things. I won't go into further details, but that has enabled us to increase the acquisition speed, which is obviously extremely valuable to us. Innovation, preventive maintenance and preventing incidents or predicting increased risk of incidents. Lately, we have expanded into other areas, which includes, in a way, more effective tracking of our entitlements in all our multi-client agreements around the world. And more accurate and quickly responding to requests for bids. I have to say that activities that we have had in this area has had an extremely short payback and made fantastic progress.
This is the last one on digital change. The transformation is enabling new businesses and new business models. Primary example probably for us is how we deal with the multi-client library, in a way. The multi-client library is moving to the cloud, in a way. Instead of being stored in-house with PGS or our suppliers, it will now be stored in the cloud and accessible to our customers and even to us in a completely different way. We together with TGS and CGG launched the Versal last year. This is a joint multi-client marketplace where clients that buy into this service can access the data from all of the three companies to see what data there is, what the parameters are, and all of these, all sorts of things.
It's a shopping window. If the client wants to dive into and ultimately license the data, it will be routed to each of the individual companies. We have not merged our multi-client libraries, but this is in a way facilitating a much more effective way of presenting the opportunities to clients. Two weeks back we announced that Schlumberger is joining Versal as a participant. With that, more than 90% of all multi-client library offshore in the world will be available or visible in Versal. We've also developed an offering which we call Data Management as a Service, where we can manage the data that companies have licensed from us.
Instead of it being, you know, stored in an unstructured way with the client, we will store it with us in a structured way and manage the access and availability on behalf of the client. We signed the first agreement with a major oil company late last year on this. We last week announced an agreement with Shell for data subscription as a service. In a way, with an ongoing monthly or quarterly payment, subscribing to access to a significant part of our multi-client library. These are examples of how, in a way, the cloud enables different ways of working with clients and generating revenues, most importantly. This is the summary. The seismic market is demonstrably improving.
We have improved our financial position and are well-positioned to refinance ahead of our maturities Q3 next year. Our New Energy business is gaining momentum, particularly in the carbon storage market. Lastly, the ongoing digital transformation is reducing costs and is creating new business opportunities for us. Thank you. I then open for questions.
Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. It's just nice to see how the business is developing. I have sat through a lot of presentations over the last couple of days, though, where all the companies are saying, "No, we're being disciplined on CapEx. We're not spending more." Where is the spending for you coming from? Are we likely to see that come through in the fourth quarter numbers? I'm just trying to get a sense of what, where that message kind of breaks down, the discipline versus where you are actually seeing real spending.
No, in a way we agree with you, that in a way the communication from oil companies remains, there remains an element of continued discipline there. In a way, we take our expectation of an increasing spending from, firstly, the seismic survey programs that are discussed and out for bids, which is demonstrably increasing in a way. There are more surveys and more sq km and more vessel days and months that will be done over the next six-seven months than it was just corresponding sort of Q4, Q1 last year. That is obvious. We as well meet with our clients. They generally will say that budgets are up.
In many ways, in a way, there's a price inflation era, in a way, the margin expansion in some elements of the value chain. Even with unchanged activity, in a way, budgets would have to go up. That is either way what I can say. I saw that there's been a couple of new spending reports out, yesterday and today. I haven't had time to study it, but it is a little bit of a paradox.
Thank you. You mentioned in your presentation about what supply constraints will come into the market. You've gone from 60 vessels to 14, was it? Can those vessels start coming back, and how quickly? Also, would they be coming back primarily to service the sort of carbon capture opportunity?
Yeah. I'll answer the first, and then if they had second part of the question. In a way, more than half of the 60 vessels are scrapped or sold off to other purposes and so on. There may well be 25, 30 sensibly capable 3D vessels. The rationale of that would be readily available with seismic equipment available. You would get to. In a way, I would indicate that the first handful of vessels over the number 14 has a relatively short lead time to get into the market. There's a bit of cost and CapEx to do that.
Beyond that, it would require quite a bit of time, quite a bit of CapEx to rig the next vessels which would have been stacked somewhere for more than five years, in a way, and not with the equipment easily available.
Yeah. The second part was more the carbon capture opportunity.
Yeah.
Is it that what's driving the potential for you to end up with, you know, a shortage of vessels?
Yeah, in a way. That is part of it. In a way, the near-term growth of activity is driven by increased spending on seismic for oil and gas related activities. Obviously we have five-six vessel months of carbon storage work this year. We have not said anything about expectations next year. It will hopefully gradually start to be part of in a way a more important part of our activity base.
Thank you.
Thank you all.