Good morning, welcome to our Capital Markets Day and the Q4 2022 presentation. My name is Bård Stenberg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications in PGS. We arranged this event together with Finance Norway, we have two moderators with us. That's John Olaisen from ABG Sundal Collier, and Christopher Møllerløkken from SpareBank 1 Markets. They will lead us through the two Q&A sessions. The agenda for the day is Rune Olav will start with a review of the seismic market outlook and the PGS strategy. Gottfred Langseth will do the Q4 2022 results and Capital Markets Day financials. We'll have a Q&A, followed up by a break. After the break, the EVPs will present their business areas.
We also have one Q&A at the end, we plan to have a lunch after the presentations and the Q&As are done. The lunch will be served downstairs in the social area. Before we start, I would like to give some practical information. As we don't have any planned fire drills, please evacuate if the alarm is sounded. I would also like to draw your attention to the cautionary statement showing on the screen, and also the risk factors disclosed in the Q4 earnings release and our 2021 annual report. As this event is webcasted live, I kindly ask the audience in Oslo to use the microphone provided when asking questions. With that, I give the word to you, Rune Olav.
Thank you, Bård, and welcome everyone, and good morning. This morning I will try to touch upon some of the 2022 highlights before moving to our market view. We will look at energy demand, seismic, supply and demand, and see how they interlink before moving into how we in PGS have positioned us in this market environment and our strategy. Lastly, I will come with our 2023 guidance before we sum up. 2022 highlights. 2022 became a year of recovery for the seismic industry and for PGS. There is significant improvements from 2021 into 2022, and there are significant improvements from the first half of 2022 into the second half of 2022. Both of these things play in when you look back at 2022. We saw significant contract price increase and margin expansion.
The prices were up more than 35% versus 2021. Not all of that is margin, obviously, but a large part of it is. We are now operating, and were operating in the latter part of last year with positive EBIT margins in the contract business. As many years before, we had a large portion of our contract business allocated to 4D acquisition, and we see that trend going on, continuing. We have logged the strongest order book since Q3, 2014. This is apples to apples. It's produced order book. We've not had a stronger order book than what we had year-end this year for many, many, many years. Most of our vessel capacity is actually booked for Q1 through Q3, and we see high ongoing bidding activity. During the year, we also took the market-leading position in carbon storage geoservices.
We completed four carbon storage acquisition programs of the five I know of in the world. We generated more than, or slightly more than $30 million of revenue in our new energy business, most of it, if not all, from the carbon storage market. As most of you know that follow us, we have now recently announced that we are entering the offshore wind market. Last year also gave us the second highest MultiClient late sales on record for PGS. We that came from increased exploration interest versus, you know, 2020, 2021 into 2022, but also from significant transfer fees. We improved our financial positions dramatically through the year.
That was done by generating approximately $210 million of cash flow before financing activities in 2022. Also with support from our shareholders of approximately $250 million of new equity. We are now well-positioned to refinance, our debt, which falls due next year. We saw strong progress on digital transformation in 2022. We moved 80% of all our imaging capacity from on-prem computers and onto the cloud. That is an enormous technical challenge because there is a completely different architecture, and you need new algorithms to be able to operate in the cloud environment versus on-prem.
This, we are now running it with much more flexibility of scaling up and down and at lower cost. We saw the start of new digital solutions in the multi-client space and also continued to improve our operational efficiency through digital solutions. 2022 actually had quite a few highlights. The year of improvement is obviously also shown in some of these key financial metrics. Produced revenues increased 39% from 2021- 2022. Cash flow before financing activities improved 35%. The order book is up 74% from year-end last year to year-end this year. Net interest-bearing debt is down 34%. All very key parameters for PGS. Now, if we move to the market, two words in the beginning on what we see going forward in terms of demand for our services.
What we are showing here is the fossil fuel demand from IEA's STEPS scenario. For those of you not familiar with the STEPS scenario, that is the Stated Policy scenario. This is the scenario where IEA have taken all the policies adopted by governments around the world and also included policies that they expect to be adopted and then projected it forward. What it shows, there are two main messages from this slide. The first main message is that you will see that oil and gas demand stays very high through 2050. In fact, demand of oil and gas is higher in 2050 than what it is today under this scenario. That will require significant investments in new supply, investments in existing fields and significant exploration to meet a demand like this. There is no doubt about that.
The second important message is that fossil fuels will move from being 80% of the total energy mix to 60% of the total energy mix in 2050. Meaning renewables primarily will have an enormous growth in the period, even in the STEPS scenario. That also provides business opportunities that we want to take part of. Now, if we zoom in a little bit and look a little bit closer in time into the next year, next years, and also closer to seismic, we get to this page. What this is, the two panels. For now, I just want you to ignore the yellow line. I will get back to that. The two panels are taken from Barclays E&P Spending Survey, published late December last year.
The top panel shows E&P spending growth, and the bottom panel shows offshore spending growth. What you will see here is that E&P spending is increasing, was increasing from 21- 22, and Barclays expect it to increase into 23, 24 and 25. What we see here. That is supported by most other analysts that also look at these things. The numbers may be different, but the picture is the same. They predict offshore spending growth as much as 24% into 2023. Why is this relevant to seismic? It's fairly obvious, obviously, as we are part of this. The yellow line shows seismic spending or revenues. This is the revenues of PGS, TGS, Spectrum, Polarcus, Shearwater and CGG, everyone we could kind of gather revenues from in the same period.
You could see how well it correlates with E&P spending. We expect that correlation to continue, and we expect increased spending on seismic going into 2023 from 2022. We also expect it to continue into 2024 and 2025. What we have learned over the last years is that we can talk about demand. We can show long-term demand, it shows that we need more investments. If our clients are not making significant cash flows after dividend, they're not gonna spend. That is not a problem these days. Our clients, the energy companies, generate record cash flows. The break-even level is around $50 million. We have a large raft of companies, Equinor, BP, Total, Repsol, Chevron, Exxon, Equinor, ConocoPhillips, combined here by SpareBank 1 Markets. It's above 50.
Current oil price obviously is much higher than that. It paves the way for the increased spending. We are sometimes also asked, "What if pricing goes from $80- $90? Is that gonna increase spending a lot on seismic in 2023? Or if it drops from $85- $75 or to $70, is that gonna have an effect?" The answer is marginally, if anything at all. It doesn't really matter whether the oil price is $80, $90, $100 or $70.
The point is they follow their plans, and as long as there is plenty of cash flow, they will follow the plans whether the oil price moves up and down within the current year. We don't get nervous until it approaches the 50 level or maybe below 60 if people below believe it is gonna stay there, then there might be revisions and effects on us. Right now, we have a very supportive price level on both oil and gas. What is our clients telling us? You know, does that support the macro picture we are seeing, the expectations we are seeing? The answer is yes. Here we have just gathered some of the comments we received from some of our larger clients towards the end of last year. I won't read them all, but I can...
You know, client one, continued high activity level, will reactivate real exploration with a global remit scanning for opportunities. This is a little bit of a trend. We are now seeing the major oil companies of the world moving into real exploration. We are not afraid of frontier exploration, head of one of the super majors told me the other day. This is a shift which will impact seismic. Client three here, the exploration budget will be kept high over the next year, We see increased activity level in 2023. What we're hearing from our clients supports what we're seeing in the macro picture. Even when we get closer to E&P spending, we expect increased spending going into 2023 on seismic. That's the demand side. What about the supply side? What kind of supply are this demand meeting?
Well, it's meeting the lowest supply in modern history and the most consolidated supply in modern history. In 2013, we operated worldwide, the seismic industry, 60 3D vessels, 60. In 2022, approximately 15. This is a little bit of a floating number. Shearwater takes vessels in and out and we do the same, but approximately 15. It could be 16, 17, doesn't really matter. It is historically low. Basically we are two players, Shearwater and PGS, that controls the world market of 3D seismic vessels. We currently operate 6 3D vessels, as you know. We will add Ramform Victory to the fleet in Q2 this year for a large 4D job for Petrobras in Brazil, which will go throughout the year and into next year.
Whether we keep Ramform Victory in the market thereafter depends on the demand at that stage. The story about the supply and demand for seismic is not about getting back to 2013. If we, for example, assume that demand goes back to 2019 levels within the next, you know, two, three years, that will mean significantly more activity for the seismic industry and tightening market and higher pricing. It will take us a few years to get back to 2019 level on the supply side, which obviously is supportive for us. Because in 2019, we operated 25 3D vessels, so quite a bit more than what we operate today. The market trends we see are: we see a strengthening contract market both on the exploration side and on the 4D side.
We see increased exploration activity, which drives both new multi-client surveys and more contract surveys. We see a recovering multi-client acquisition market. A year ago, we reported that it was difficult to get prefunding for new surveys, and it resulted in historically low investments for the seismic industry in 2022. That has completely turned around. We now see a fairly high demand for new multi-client surveys, and as we will get back to, and as you will see, we will guide on very high prefunding levels for 2023 on the higher activity level. We have improving visibility. As I told you, the order book is the highest since Q3 2014. How have we positioned the company, PGS, for this? As you know, we are a fully integrated service provider.
That means that we operate both vessels, we have a multi-client library, a multi-client business, imaging business, R&D business, and we use that to grow our business in new energy, and we use it to attack the contract market, the multi-client market, imaging market. We will see increasing revenues into 2023 because of the increase in seismic spending. We have improved our financial position, and we are ready to refinance in 2023. As I said, we have accelerated our digital transformation, and we will continue to do so to explore new models, see whether we can get more value out of our multi-client library. This is, in short, the PGS strategy. The financial strategy remains. We will focus on cash flow before growth, but we will also grow the new energy market in particular.
We will focus on return on capital employed. We will establish a sustainable capital structure. We are very close to doing that, and we believe that today's debt level is acceptable for a company like PGS. We will continue to repay debt over the next years from cash flow. The business strategy, as I said, we will leverage the integration across the PGS value chain, as you will hear, my colleague speak about later. We will aim to be the leading provider of high-resolution seismic for near-field exploration production, 4D and CCS, based on our streamer platform. We will develop New Energy into a significant business unit. We will increase the speed and penetration of digitalization.
We will continue to focus very strongly on reducing operating costs and increasing efficiency. We will reduce our environmental footprint and set the path for net zero in 2050. This is, in short, the PGS strategy. You will hear more about most of these elements later today. A few more words on what we mean by being an integrated seismic company. As I said, we are the only company who has vessels with streamers to attack the contract market. In combination with that, we have a large multi-client business with a large multi-client library. We have a strong imaging business which fuels both the multi-client business by processing, imaging the multi-client library and service the external market. Finally, we have an R&D department that continues to provide new solutions for the fleet, new solutions for imaging.
All of this together is what we call being an integrated seismic company. This is a sliding scale. It's not two different markets. In the middle, we are almost the only one operating. We don't care if you call it a multi-client or a contract, as long as the project makes financial sense to PGS. We can do a contract job, but let's say we do all the permitting because we already have a multi-client permit in country, and therefore we are the only contract contractor available to do a job quickly. We could do a multi-client job under the same multi-client, but we give special rights to the pre-funder.
Obviously, the pre-funding then needs to be higher, and just kind of play around with the models like that. We do that quite a bit, and you'll hear more about that. We're also very attractive joint venture partner because we have a serious multi-client business, and we are a very good acquisition company, and therefore you see us do joint ventures with other multi-client companies. It helps us optimize utilization of our fleet because on the multi-client side we have some more flexibility on what to do when, and therefore we can stack our fleet schedule somewhat better. This also helps us grow New Energy because our strategy is to grow New Energy based on what we're good at already. We want to expand our offering based on the competencies already in PGS.
That is our strategy into New Energy, which you will hear more about from Berit. We try to get the most out of our data library, and here also digital solutions are quite relevant. Now, 2022 was a year of recovery, and you've seen a strong improvement from 2021. That would not have been the case had we not had a high-performing organization. PGS has a high-performing organization. This is a organization that we over the last year has put through at least two very large scale downs. We have reor-organized, restructured the organization, and we've centralized it to save cost and to prepare for an upturn. We are in a cyclical business. We know that. We knew the upturn would come, and it is now here. Now we will take the most out of this organization.
That means that we will increase it slightly, as you said, we, as you can see here, we increased it by 3% for the first time in many, many years in 2022. We will incrementally increase our organization through 2023, both to strengthen our New Energy business, our digital initiatives, and obviously our core business. The cost increase or the increase in manpower will be much less than the revenue increase. That is what we have designed this organization for. This organization, with a little bit of an addition, is ready to take on more activity and generate much more revenues. I'm looking forward to see how much we can get out of our highly competent organization in the years to come. We have, as other companies in the world, set us ESG targets.
Let's be clear. In PGS, we believe that we contribute in three ways to the world, three very important ways. One, to support the energy business, providing enough energy for this world. That means supporting energy companies, finding more oil and gas because we are going to need more oil and gas. We are proud of that position. Secondly, there is an energy transition going on, we need to contribute to that energy transition. We believe that with our competences, we will be instrumental in carbon storage to make that successful for the world. We will do our bit on offshore wind, hopefully if marine minerals becomes important, we will help there as well, because you need seismic for all of these things. We see business opportunities in the energy transition, we welcome it.
Finally, we need to do our part, and that's what this slide is all about. We have set a target of net zero in 2050. We will reduce our absolute emissions from our marine operations by 75% by 2050, and it should be 100% clean from our offices. We think we know how to get there. It will require some new technology, but it's not that difficult to foresee it, as Rob will come back to in his presentation. 2023 guidance. Group cash cost moves up to approximately $550 on the back of more activity. MultiClient cash investments increase to approximately $160 million. We will use approximately 60% of our 3D capacity in the contract market and 40% in the MultiClient market, so an increase of the share for MultiClient.
We will spend approximately $100 million of CapEx, which includes approximately 1 new streamer set or approximately $50 million of streamer CapEx in that number. We're starting to renew our streamer fleet or fleet of streamers. In summary, seismic market improved in 2022. We expect continued improvement into 2023. We have a healthy order book with good visibility. We're progressing well with our new energy business developments. We're increasingly leveraging the integrated approach, and we have significantly reduced our net debt, and we are well positioned to refinance in 2023. With that, I give the word to Gottfred to take us through Q4 and preliminary full year 2022 presentation.
Thank you, Rune. Sound is all right, I hope. Good morning. I will cover mainly going through the Q4 numbers, and then some selected financial areas and obviously in that the financial position and the refinancing. Before that, I start with that, I will spend one minute maybe on this slide. We are making some changes to our reporting. We are reintroducing percentage of completion based APMs, alternative performance measures. We do that to better capture the value creation relating to multi-client new investments, new programs, and multi-client prefunding. We are using these measures for our internal performance management and decision-making, and it will in our financial reports be reported as our segment reporting numbers.
The most important ones are listed there, produced revenues, produced EBITDA, and prefunding as a percentage of multi-client cash investments, or in short prefunding level, all based on percentage of completion, of course. Just to be on the safe side, this only relates to multi-client prefunding. There's no difference between these defined terms and IFRS on any other revenue lines, not contract, not late sales and/or imaging. Order book as reported now will be only the future production relating to our order book, as opposed to IFRS where due to the late revenue recognition, it included also some production that was already performed. This key numbers slide on revenues and EBITDA then compares the produced numbers and IFRS side by side.
Produced to the left, IFRS to the right. As mentioned, the difference is in a way on the revenue boxes here on the prefunding, which is shown with gray, I hope. I can't see whether the color is actually coming through on the screen. If not, if that's all right. Or shaded. You'll see from the IFRS numbers that the revenue from prefunding is quite lumpy and almost dis-what is it? Disguises the trend. For trend, we look at the produced revenues where there is a strong improvement during and throughout 2022. Fairly evident from the revenue and the EBITDA illustration.
That reflects a positive development for all our product services lines and revenue lines contract, late sales and pre-funding and imaging as well. Fourth quarter was our third consecutive quarter with a strong EBIT number. We had $46 million in Q4. Cash flow. The cash flow generation is progressing. As usual, the fourth quarter is impacted by a working capital build. Fourth quarter is, this is obviously revenue level-driven, but fourth quarter is in addition a bit special since there's a lot of relocation of our fleet in the first part of the quarter, so that also the vessel production revenues are back and loaded.
And that's the reason that in a way we often get a larger degree of Q4 revenues being sort of collected in Q1 rather than in quarter. We expect therefore a working capital release obviously in the first quarter now in 2023. Then to the order book, we had $416 million. That now only relates to revenue from future production. That's a significant step up from Q3 as you will see from the illustration and a 74% increase for the whole year. And as Rune Olav Pedersen already has said, it
The order book as we reported in a way on a consistent basis with what we reported last quarter, which in a way including the deferred revenues relating to past production was $517 million. That's illustrated here. That would be the number to compare to what we quoted in the Q3 report. We will, which that is strongly up as well. We will discontinue reporting this number. It's obviously possible to find it in our financial reports, but we will not focus on it. Okay. Order book increase obviously builds into a strong booking position. We've sold 17 vessel months for this Q1, 16 vessel months for Q2, and this is out of 18 vessel months available.
We have sold 12 vessel months for Q3. Q3 onwards, we will operate Ramform Victory. We will have, if I'm not wrong, 21 vessel months available for these quarters. As I said, 12 as booked as of today. This is a slide with lots of numbers. I will be short on the comments. On our segment reporting, the produced revenues which are shown at the top here are up 44% in fourth quarter compared to fourth quarter 2021, and revenues for the full year up 39%. That is a tremendously significant growth. Correspondingly for EBITDA, produced EBITDA increased 51% in the fourth quarter and 40% for the full year.
When it comes to the as reported IFRS numbers, they are in a way pretty close to the segment or the produced numbers for 2022. In 2021, we had large volumes of data delivered on our multi-client projects and delivered relatively speaking, reported high IFRS or as reported numbers. Therefore the growth in the numbers is less, but that is due to the starting point. We have a strong EBIT improvement regardless of which angle you look at the numbers, and that is due to a significant improvement of the contract margin, significant increase of multi-client late sales, and lower multi-client amortization. Just checking that we should be good on time here.
Looking into Q4 specifically on revenues, we had contract revenues of $111 million in the quarter. It compares quite well to previous quarter as you would see from the graph. 84% of our active vessel time was used for contract, so more than we've used in most of the earlier quarters. We are seeing improved pricing and improved, I would say a recovering EBIT margin for contract services. For multi-client total revenues or produced revenues of $134.6 million. Strong late sales, $92 million in the quarter.
We also had, relatively speaking, strong, late pre-funding sales in the quarter, that ends up in as pre-funding revenues, $43 million for the quarter and on $35 million of MultiClient investments. That is 170% pre-funding rate. From our perspective, whether a sale is a late sale and ends up in the blue, or it is a late pre-funding sale and ends up in the darker blue, doesn't really matter. In a way, that impacted our numbers this quarter where there was some portion that came into the pre-funding bucket. Utilization of vessels, 75% active time.
We had quite a lot of steaming in the quarter as we had a relocation of, I would say, most vessels early quarter before starting the winter season. We expect the active vessel time to increase in the first quarter. In first quarter as well, we will have some standby in the transition from winter to summer season. Cash cost slightly down sequentially to $131 million, and that is due to less production of the vessels on the vessels, less production time, and now a slightly lower fuel price. Our primary drivers, we had both Sanco Swift and PGS Apollo operating for the full quarter.
In addition to the 6 3D vessels in operations, these vessels operated as 2D and source vessels respectively. We ended for the full year at $488 gross cash costs. That's a bit below our guidance for the year of $500. On balance sheet, I will be quite quick here. Unrestricted cash and cash equivalents, unrestricted, $364 million at end of year. Our net interest-bearing debt of $616 million, that's a reduction of $319.7 million. On the cash flow, Q4 is impacted by a revenue related working capital build. I tried to explain it earlier.
I'm not sure I would do better trying to explain it, again, and I may actually revert to it, but this is purely revenue driven. You know, it will zero out over time, obviously. We are hopeful and expect our revenues to grow, and that will from, in some of the quarters, cause a working capital build. We had net proceeds from the equity raise of NOK 144.7. I just wanted to comment on that, for the reason that, you know, Norwegian krona weakened a little bit between the placement date and the date of receipt. That impacts this number, but we had, it was hedged. The gain, offsetting gain is in our as financial items as foreign currency gain. That was the Q4 numbers, at least what I intended to cover.
We go to the other topics, and maybe most importantly, the next two or three slides. We have a strong improvement of our financial position in 2022. We have increasing cash flow, driven by recovering contract margins and increasing MultiClient sales. It will be some delay between making the sales and realizing the cash flow, typically in our business, a couple of months. That has an impact, and we already touched upon the working capital. Still, we had a cash flow before financing activities of $209.5. Say $210 million in 2022, and that is up from around $155 million in 2021. It's clearly moving in the right direction.
The bars in the upper left graph here is our net interest-bearing debt. That is down. It was $936 million a year back, and now it's $616 million. This is quite close to our, in a way, the targeted level that we'll be talking about for at least four, maybe more years, we want our net debt not to exceed $500 million-$600 million. We're not saying we want it to be inside $500 million-$600 million, but not to exceed that level approximately. We're getting or touching the top end of that interval. That's not saying that we would change our priority in the medium term of reducing debt.
At the bottom, or the lower left, graph here just, you know, shows the sharp reduction of leverage ratio we've had during the year, obviously driven by less debt and improving results. That's the trick to achieve a reduced ratio. We have substantial headroom to the covenants in our loan agreement. This may be overdoing it, but here we break down the 2022 cash flow. We've introduced a subtotal in almost in the middle dark blue here of which is called cash flow before working capital change and financing.
The purpose of this is the way we focus quite a lot on in a way, what do we day by day, month by month, quarter by quarter, what does our business generate? Obviously, there will be a fluctuation in whether, things are collected fast or slow. That is quite important for us, the cash flow generation. That is the way we look at it. It is our $817 million of produced revenues last year. We deduct our gross cash cost of $488, we deduct our CapEx of $48, we deduct our tax payments, there are some other pluses and minuses, it makes it a bit, add up to $15.9 million last year.
That is, in a way, what we have produced of cash flow in the quarter. That is $264.9 million. In the real cash flow statement, in a way, the working capital change will make this number better or worse in the realized cash flow. In the fourth quarter, $55 million of working capital increase leads us to a cash flow before financing activities in the cash flow statement. The same as I showed on the previous slide of $209.5 million. That is the real cash flow before financing activities. Then we have to pay our interest.
Unfortunately, as much as $96.9 million for the year, including the lease interests imputed, and we get to a net cash flow, which is the net before debt repayment and changes in equity of $112.6 million. The last thing I want to say about this is, it is back to working capital in a way, the $55 million working capital increase is revenue driven. This is a year we're looking at, Q for 2022 revenues was $76 million higher than Q for 2021. In a way, this Q for 2021 revenues builds into 2022 cash flow, whereas the Q for 2022 revenues is more important for 2023 cash flow. In light of the revenue increase between the quarters is, as you would expect or maybe better.
I may have to speed up a little bit. Moving to refinancing status. We have a runway to Q1 to end Q1 2024. We have a liquidity reserve and a cash flow generation to manage our 2023 debt amortization. The upper graph here seeks to illustrate that. It shows our amortization profile, and the gray bar is our unrestricted cash. We plan to refinance the Term Loan B in the first half of the year if debt markets are adequate, and that this may happen soon, or it can take a little bit longer. We are prepared to do it soon.
A transaction is likely to be, if we do it early in the year, and this is important, $650 million-$700 million total, including a new revolving credit facility. Not a new market loan of that size, but the sum of the market loan and the revolving facility approximately at this size. We have tried to illustrate it at the bottom. Something wrong with the colors here, but it's probably possible to see anyway. This is not rocket science. In a way, this shows sources and uses. When we refinance, we will have to repay the Term Loan B and this related super senior, that's $788 million. We also have to revert to that.
We'll have to make a liquidity sweep payment in Q1 to the ECF financing, that's $83 million. Then we want to maintain with a good liquidity reserve after refinancing, and here, approximately $150 million. That is what we have to solve for in a refinancing. Then, to the right sources, what do we already have? We have our unrestricted cash of $364, then we the refinancing amount that I pointed to, $650-$700 is what balances this equation. If you do it very mechanically, we see that it is closer to $650 than $700. Lastly, on this graph, we put in an illustration on the top saying something. Since these numbers are 31st December, we will generate cash flow in Q1.
We've just illustrated that. That can impact the timing, of a refinancing can impact in a way how these sources and uses ultimately look. Don't meter the small box at the top there. The purpose is not to show you the number, it's just to remind you that this also plays into, obviously the thinking. We are well progressed with preparations. We'll be able to execute on short notice if the market is where we need it to be, and we are well-positioned to refinance now during first half of 2023. That is the main message.
I included on this slide, fairly technical comments on the amortization and the liquidity sweep. Those who are not interested, spare over with me for 30, 40 seconds. Not everyone gets this right, what I can say. Therefore on the 23 debt amortization, the total amortization of our debt for 23 is $367 million. It's for the term loan, $9 million per quarter and $200 million in September. For the ECF, it is $130 million spread across the quarters. That is the total. We have a liquidity sweep. Up to now that has been for amounts over $200 million relating to anything that has been deferred, when we did the debt rescheduling two years back.
There will be a liquidity sweep now at the end based on Q4 balance sheet. That liquidity sweep will be $83 million, and that will be paid to the ECF financing now early February, actually. That is everything that happens on liquidity sweep. That since we're done with the old debt rescheduling, there will be a going forward liquidity sweep of both $175 million, and that will go to the TLB. It will always be applied against the nearest amortization. You start gobble up the $9 million per quarter, and then we'll start eating into the $200 million if we get past Q1. None of this will change the fact that we will amortize $367 million next year. It's just timing. Apologies for that.
Cash cost for next year, $488 million, 2022, $550 million for next year. The three primary drivers are shown here. More capacity and operation, operational victory most important there. Higher fleet utilization in general as compared especially to weak utilization in Q1 and into Q2 for 2022. And we put in what we expect to see of price increases and effect of salary adjustments for the year. Cost is very important for us. I will leave it there as Rune has already pointed to this. Full year CapEx for this year, 2022 was $48 million. It's well above where we guided. We started to build the new streamers with some quantity in 2022. We will do more in 2023.
For 2023, we'll build approximately a streamer set, full streamers worth of streamers. That will increase obviously our streamer investments for the year to approximately $50 million for 2023. We also have our yard schedule to follow and a bit of work we done from Ramform Victory to DNV and otherwise upgrade a little bit. As in total, we expect $100 million of CapEx for 2023. On MultiClient, we target a prefunding level of 80%-120% of our cash investments. We have a pretty consistent track record of being in the upper part or above that range. For 2022, we had $106 million of investment and 123% prefunding.
Prefunding will be strong in 2023 as well. We expect or plan to invest approximately $160 million and expect to be on prefunding around the top end of the target interval. Yeah. Finally at the summary. Our market is improving for all our product lines. We have a strong order book growth, obviously very helpful for our visibility and operating our business effectively. Cash flow generation shows a strong improvement. We have reduced our net interest-bearing debt substantially in 2022. We are well-positioned to refinance now in 2023, and we are prepared to do it as soon as we find the right market and timing. I will stop there. I believe Q&A is next. Hope I didn't run over on the time.
How do we do this board or, John?
Yeah. We're gonna open up for questions. We have about 20 minutes. We actually are ahead of plans. That's good from your side, PGS. While you prepare, we have a couple of questions from us. Maybe first, you're giving some guidance for the year, but of course the two key biggest uncertainties are MultiClient late sales and contract revenues. I realize it's difficult to give guidance on that.
Fueled by some very large transaction. There was obviously also a more of an organic growth in those numbers, but the very high numbers were
Were to a large extent impacted by transfer fees, basically large transfers in the industry that results in transfer fees. It is difficult to predict whether we will get to the same level next year or this year as last year. We do expect that our, let's call it organic, late sales will grow year-over-year. That is typically what we see when the market is growing. There is more interest and the stuff we invested in in 2018 and 2019, which didn't sell great in 2020, 2021, we expect to sell from also this year. Where it ends up in the end is difficult to say.
We expect, as I said, kind of an underlying growth, you're gonna have to adjust for the large transfer fees, we'll see. That's the best thing I can say, I think.
How big was transfer fees in 2022? Is it possible to give some indication of that in total for the year?
Not really. We always include, you know, an estimate of transfer fees. It always happens. You know, there's transfers in the North Sea, in the U.K., and other places of the world, so we kinda collect. Should we could indicate, you know, between $25 million and $50 million in any given year, you know, over this part of the business model. Last year it was significantly higher than the top level.
On contract revenues, is it possible to elaborate a little bit about the potential for growth for contracts?
Yep.
You have one more vessel, you have more available vessels. You probably see increased utilization, I would assume. How about day rates and then.
Yeah.
total EBITDA growth from the contract business, if it's possible to elaborate.
We will see, as you say, we expect at least to see increased utilization. We see that clearly in the first first half. Remember first quarter last year was very poor in terms of contract revenues utilization. We had, what, half of our fleet operating, something like that. That's obviously not the case this year. We also go into the year with much higher rate levels, both on margin and absolute rate levels in 2023. We expect margins to continue to increase through the year. I don't think we can expect the same amount of jump as we've seen in contract revenues from 2021 to 2022 into 2023.
We do expect it to continue to strengthen through the year. Yes. We have another vessel. You know, there are at least three impacts here which should improve the contract revenues.
If there are any questions from the audience, feel free to raise your hand. Unless I'll just continue what John was referring to. On the backlog you have, which is, you know, at a multiyear high, could you indicate what the contract revenues on average are versus 2022?
Fred, you wanna comment?
Yeah. Do you ask about the contract prices or revenue per day versus 2022? It's, I think we disclosed already what, how much is contract but, versus MultiClient. No, I don't think we can say more than what Rune has said. In a way, we are seeing a strong increase of day rates or pricing during 2022, 35% up. We say now that we expect higher prices for next, for 2023. We also say that the order book has higher prices, but I don't want to quantify how much higher.
No. There is also, of course, and we contribute to that. Important to remember that, you know, the increase of 35%, for example, from 2021- 2020 isn't all margin. You know, when we operate in some areas, the prices on the same margin are much higher because the costs are higher. If we operate in other areas, on the same margins, the call it day rate will be lower, but the margin the same. The mix also plays into the picture. It is important to remember that the way we run our business is obviously on a margin base, not on a top line contract. We take the costs into account, obviously.
That's why we say we expect the margins to continue to increase, but probably not as much as last year.
You had a strong year in MultiClient last year. Me and John, we only see the $ numbers, but could you share your thoughts on is this mainly volume or did you also improve the prices on MultiClient seismic last year?
That is a difficult question. It's when it comes to prefunding, it's not so difficult. I mean, you can look at the prefunding rate, obviously, because that impacts, you know, that takes care of the cost, clearly. It obviously improves on the prefunding when we report 123% rate, and we expect similar levels this year. When it comes to late sales, it is.
Can I drop in and say that it is, it tends to correlate in a way. When demand is higher, you have better bargaining position, you get in a way. This is negotiations for every head.
Yes, exactly.
It's not, you know, this is our price list and they order on the web. A better market, more interest for the data, our bargaining-
Mm
negotiating position is better and, we end up with, well, making both more sales and on average getting a better price for the data. Then the opposite when you're struggling in a way getting deals done, and it's opposite dynamics-
Yeah
I would suggest.
Yeah.
Maybe we could go over to the refinancing in the first half.
Mm.
You said that you plan to do it where the market is where you would like it to be. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on two key factors. What kind of interest rates would you accept? Also, what kind of length for the debt to maturity are you planning for?
Yeah. If I said that if the market is where as we like it to be, then, if that wasn't really right or I meant something else, at least, as it, when the market is at that place where we think we can do a refinancing transaction and get the, you know, best terms available, the market for the next half year and the year, We'll not get to a level where I like we in PGS like it to be. That's not the state of the debt markets.
We need to be able to refinance at market terms in a period where the market is open and in a way put our best foot forward and that is what we mean by the market being open or adequate or adequately good. I don't want to quote anything on interest rates, duration. The norm is to seek five-year new money. Whether it is five years or four and a half, that doesn't matter much. If I were to bet, there would be a new five-year loan to refinance the existing term loan.
Mm.
The current debt financing limits the possibility to pay out dividend. Do you think a refinanced debt will also have limitations on dividend payments?
Yes, it will, but there will be baskets for everything. There will in a way then. This is part of our preparations, considering which baskets do we need and what's the cost and marketing consequence of having, in a way, asking for too much flexibility. That is the trade-off. That is the work that we're doing now to figure out how we can best do it.
Mm.
Currently, it's not basically not possible to pay out dividend. Do you think you will be able to be in a dividend position if your cash flow is strong enough? Will the new debt allow you to pay dividend if the cash flow is strong enough?
I'm tempted to say yes, but it's yes with a bit of complication. Yes, there will be baskets for paying dividend.
Mm.
It will allow paying dividends. When we get to a position where we want to pay significant dividends, which I hope happens soon, we are likely to also refinance at, again, at the same time. In a way, this is not the best market we're looking at today, we will, you know, if we early, whatever date, a year or two from now, is sitting with a much stronger balance sheet, X amount of cash to distribute as dividend, we, I will at least envisage that we will sit down and say, "Okay, we did the refinancing in 2023. We have further strengthened our balance sheet. We'll do it again.
Mm.
At relatively low cost, lower our interest rate. I think your question is a little bit academic.
Mm.
In the short version, it is yes.
I guess to comment a little bit as you will understand from this is we aim to continue to repay debt. That will, if things go the way we believe it will, it will strengthen the company financially. It will increase our credit ratings and therefore lower our cost of debt. Flexibility in a new instrument is quite important, and it plays to your dividend question in a way. Not to tie yourself to the mast for five years, to put it that way, is quite important.
Mm.
There's a related question from the web, from Mr. Ingrid Trondstad. Will the refinancing include more equity issue or not?
No.
No. Planning to do this without.
That is not the plan.
No, no, we're not planning for that at all.
There are a couple more questions from the web.
Yeah. I'll just ask the ones you haven't already answered. Regarding the recent wind farm contract, will this work be carried out by Sanco Swift?
Yes.
Do you think that the multi-client model of your peers have reached their endgame?
No. I guess it's the answer to that.
Easy question. Yeah.
I'll let them comment on that, but I mean, we believe in our model, but that doesn't mean that everyone else is out of business, to put it that way.
We have a question here on the costs. You're adding one vessel this year, the cash cost guidance does not increase so much with regards to 2022. Can you please give us a bit more explanation on the mechanics?
It is, you know, yes, we're adding a vessel, it's only half a year. Half. Not sure I understand it. Anyway, if you think that a full year cash cost for a 3D vessel with everything is $50 million. I'm just taking a number out of the air. Just $12.5 or $25 for half the year. That is, it doesn't increase by a full year operation of another vessel.
I mean, let me also kind of comment. What we have been very focused on in PGS over many, many years now is to lower, call it, the overall cost of the company per 3D vessel. That will continue as we grow. That was what I tried to talk a little bit about on the organization is, yes, obviously, we bring in a vessel, it will increase fuel and crew and all that, but it will not proportionally increase the rest of the cost in PGS. Therefore, we expect that our cost per 3D vessel will continue to lower. You won't see the same growth in the overhead as we grow our business.
Just to add, it's fair to assume, right, that the fuel cost per day this year will probably be lower than last year per vessel given where oil price is and versus where it was last year?
If you look at it today, the average price for fuel consumed by our fleet in 2023, we expect it to be lower than 2022. It's not that large impact anyway. It may fluctuate, but prices have come down quite a bit from the peak levels. They started quite low in 2022.
On the refinancing, have you set up a limit on the interest rate that you could, you know, stop the process and delay it?
We-
Stop the trains.
Well, you could say, yes, we have. We're not gonna tell you what it is as we would be telling the market that our, you know, our opponents as well. I don't think we'll give that up.
Question from the web here. Have you considered taking Valiant out of stacking?
Not right now, no.
Could you please elaborate on your capital allocation strategy in the event late sales and/or contract disappoint in 2023? There is some more here. Will you ask shareholders to fund MultiClient, or will you cut MultiClient activity? What is the pecking order?
I know, yeah, if I start, Rune. It's a little bit in a way. The way we plan with respect to new multi-client surveys is so that if we reduce our multi-client investments by $60 million, we'll improve our cash flow by $60 million. We do projects that on average pace the CapEx. They have to qualify for getting prioritized in our capacity allocation decisions by, in a way, funding the investment and delivering a all-in business case, including the late sales that compete with the alternatively doing contract work. That is, you know, my best stab at it, Rune.
Yeah. It's always difficult to comment on, let's say, alternative scenarios. Obviously, if revenues for some reason were to disappoint, we will sit down and take a look at our cost, as we have done over the last five years and see where we can reduce our cost without at the same time reducing our revenues.
Final question from the web, I'll just give a brief background. You have six vessels in operation now. You'll add a seventh in Brazil. The question is, with this wind farm contract on Sanco Swift, will that mean that you're increasing to eight vessels?
ds on how you count in a way. But it is, will be Sanco Swift doing the wind farm job. And as I, yes, we have six vessels in operation now, but we also have PGS Apollo operating as a source vessel, which is always a full-fledged 3D vessel if you equip her. And we have Sanco Swift already operating as a 2D vessel, you know, meaning with one streamer. And Sanco Swift will move from that 2D operations and operate the wind job. So we like to communicate the number of, call it, 3D vessels we offer to the market. But it is a good observation
We do operate more vessels for other purposes, and these are some of them, full-fledged 3D vessels or could be.
Yeah. Question from the audience here.
Can you speak a little-
Yeah.
Yeah. Mm.
I have a question pertaining to the rate development. You have said that you increased rates to 35% last year, which is a nice number, but I have to be a bit provocative and say it's nothing impressive compared to, for instance, the rig companies, offshore rigs, less consolidated in industry, increasing much more. I'm a bit surprised you're now saying that in this year you see a rate increase but not perhaps the same magnitude. You're coming from a very low level. You're a virtual duopoly. Could you elaborate on why you have so muted ambitions, to be a bit provocative again?
Yeah, yeah.
on the rate picture? Thank you.
Well, I could just say there's nothing wrong with the ambitions. We obviously have ambition to raise the rates as much as we possibly can. That's clear. I guess it's, there is a bit of conservatism in this. You know, we need to kinda see it, see it play through in the market. The macro picture, what we're hearing all supports an increasing market, which, you know, could lead to a price increase as high or higher, that's clear. At the same time, we have a large backlog, which we also are gonna get into, which is at a higher level. Not that, you know, it's not another 40%, on top of that. It's I don't know. What can I say?
I'm trying to read the tea leaves here a little bit, and the market will decide, you know, where we end up. I just think, maybe this is a tendency we have, you know, that this will continue to kinda grow more gradually. I didn't expect the 2022 rates to be 35% higher than 2021 at this time last year either. This will be play out by the market, and we obviously follow it quite closely. As you say, we have one main competitor and we consider every bid in light of, you know, backlog, activity level, where the vessels are, where the competitors have vessels, these things.
I'm not gonna rule it out, but there is, what can I say? There is a prediction that it will increase, but maybe not as much as this year.
We'll pause for a 15-minute break, and we'll be back here at 10:30 A.M. Welcome back from the break. We will now go into the business areas. Nathan Oliver will present the Sales & Services. Berit Osnes will present New Energy, and Rob will present operations. I give the word to you, Nathan.
Thank you very much, Bård. I assume everybody can hear me OK. I'm seeing a few nods. Good morning, everybody. In this section of our Capital Markets Day, I will talk to the PGS Sales and Services unit, which includes the contract acquisition, multi-client, and imaging business segments. Following this, I will hand over to my colleague, Berit, who will give you an exciting update on our new energy business. In my presentation today, I'm gonna talk about global E&P activity drivers and give you a little bit of a whirlwind tour of what these look like and the return of exploration that they're driving. I'll talk about the growth of the infrastructure-led exploration segment and the emergence of what we call the integrated business. I'll talk to our 2022 multi-client business performance.
Finally, I'm gonna touch on two digitalization initiatives, one in the MultiClient space and one in the imaging business that really demonstrate the value creation that we can leverage from the cloud. For those of you wondering what the fantastic image on the left-hand side of the screen is here, I am running a little competition. At the end of my presentation, if anybody knows what this is, there will be a prize. Global E&P activity drivers. Well, the global pandemic led to a near-term focus on existing assets and a real diminished appetite for frontier exploration, as we called it back then.
The geopolitical conflict and high and volatile oil and gas prices have seen a shift in the energy politics from the short-term focus on the environment and energy transition to a greater and sharper focus on affordability and security of supply. The official view is that global explorers are taking a measured view and holding budgets and activity steady whilst focusing on improving their overall efficiency in light of the current commodity prices. There's substantial evidence that more is happening in the exploration space that originally meets the glance. Sensing a rekindling of enthusiasm to explore, governments are taking notice and are increasingly providing access or availability of acreage for access, hoping to entice new inbound investments. The traditional method for this, of course, is licensing rounds.
As you'll see on the map here, the call-out boxes really show those licensing rounds associated with our own multi-client footprint, and in smaller font, the other licensing rounds that presently are anticipated to take place during the course of 2023. There are increasingly other conduits to acreage access, including shorter timeframe mini-licensing rounds, as we've seen ongoing in Nigeria at present. Acreage promotions directly by governments that we see in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Permanent offerings, as Brazil has moved to now, open-door rounds that we've seen in Uruguay, just to cite a few examples. That's not to say that traditional licensing rounds are dead. They do still exist. I mean, we've seen that here with APA in Norway, of course. The 33rd round licensing in the U.K.
Egypt licensing round, MBR 2023 in Malaysia, of course, the U.S. GOM with lease sales 259 and 261 that will take place during the course of the year. I would say that added to this, we're also seeing carbon storage bid rounds, which I've noted on the map here, taking place. In the U.K., the 2022 carbon storage licensing round attracted a total of 26 bids. These awards are due in early 2023, while in Norway, acreage in the Norwegian North Sea is available for bidding, and the deadline is February of this year. Licensing rounds and acreage access, be that for hydrocarbon or now CCS, can be seen to act as major triggers for seismic demand. One of the other major activity drivers influencing demand is drilling.
As offshore picks up momentum in 2023, this will be an extremely active year. I refer to high-impact wells, and just to provide some definition there, what I'm referring to are frontier newfield wildcats or play opening wells. I think it's worth taking a look back on 2022's activity when it comes to high-impact wells and global resource add. There are a total of 178 conventional discoveries made globally, equating to just under 19 billion barrels of oil equivalent recoverable. Now, of that, 65% of those barrels came from high-impact wells, and that was just 17 high-impact wells. A total of 77% of all discovered resources came from the deep water.
We get some sense of the enormous value creation that organic exploration can drive specifically in the deep water environment. If we look forwards to 2023, what can we expect by way of high-impact wells? These I've marked around the world here. I'll just pick on a few to as part of my world tour. In North America, activity is forecast to rebound following what was really a rather quiet 2022. Starting in Canada, we had the Ephesus newfield wildcat in the Orphan Basin offshore. While there are a number of campaigns planned in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, plus further drilling commitment wells offshore Mexico with Yatzil, Itzcali, and Yokol.
South America is clearly once again going to be a key region for high-impact exploration, and nowhere more so than the Suriname-Guyana Basin, where drilling will continue apace with the Amotik, Way, and Walker probes. While in Brazil, the Morpho well in the equatorial margins will be very, very keenly watched given how long it's take to procure the necessary environmental permitting to start this work. Further south, Argentina will see its first-ever deepwater well drilled in 2023 also, the Aldrich well. Quite a lot of activity that we're seeing in the southern part of America. In Europe, drilling activity is expected to fall slightly year-on-year. However, the Eastern Mediterranean has seen a recent uptick in high-impact exploration drilling and success associated with that, with the Cronus, Zeus, and Nargis discoveries recently announced.
Activity will continue in 2023 with an estimated five new wells to be drilled, including the Qana prospect in Lebanon. Africa will be an area of strong focus, with wells expected in the emerging Orange Basin. Many of you will have already heard or seen of the Jonker well that's currently in the progress of drilling to deeper depth in Shell's acreage. That's gonna be another exciting well to watch as they enter the deeper zone. There are also frontier tests in Morocco, Gabon, and Mozambique as well. Not to be left to one side, in Asia-Pacific, we're gonna see deepwater wells in Sabah, in Malaysia, Leleng and Lelayang, and Pikaka. Also, we're gonna see activity on the North West Shelf of Australia with the Honey Badger and Beehive probes as well.
Quite a vibrant picture when it comes to high-impact wells and drilling activity as we move into 2023. I mentioned earlier that there's more happening in the exploration space than meets the eye at first glance. I think it's true to say that the word frontier has been somewhat renamed to emerging basins. It's interesting to take a step back and look at where emerging basin acreage has been acquired in the last 12 months by the major IOCs and NOCs. For clarity here, when I talk about emerging basins, I'm excluding the sort of the traditional hydrocarbon basins such as the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, for example. I've marked on this map those areas of license awards in the last 12 months in the, in the light green color, I think you can hopefully see.
In Canada, Brazil, outside of the core basins, and Uruguay alone, there's a total of 90,000 square kilometers of emerging basin acreage has been added to exploration portfolios. If we hop across to the other side of the margin, and we look at Egypt and Greece in the Mediterranean, Angola, Namibia and Mozambique in Africa, that's added a further 110,000 approximately square kilometers of emerging basin acquisition. As I said, all predominantly picked up by IOCs and NOVs. IOCs and NOCs, I should say. Now, I need to apply a cautionary notice here for those of you that are following the demand quite closely. This does not mean that there's gonna be 200,000 square kilometers of new seismic that's gonna be acquired next year.
I'll come back to that because there is a volume of work program commitment associated with this new acreage. However, as I've said, this will drive new demand, though not necessarily to the same extent of the 200,000 square kilometers. That demand is also gonna be seen and evidenced by activity or an increase in activity in the multi-client environment as well. You can see that with our own firm multi-client programs that I've marked on this map. In Brazil, in the southern part of the Santos Basin, looking at potential analogs across the margin to Namibia. In Sarawak and Sabah in Malaysia, following the recent Malaysia Bid Rounds there, and the Norwegian Sea program that we have in Europe that we will conduct this year.
These are what I've marked as the firm programs, and I can assure you there's quite a few more that are conceptually in the planning and development phase, but I don't really want to give the game away completely and show all of those to you just yet. I sort of come back to the acreage ad that we've seen from the IOCs and the NOCs, and I think to me the message is that you really need to watch what they do and not necessarily listen to what they say, because there's two different things going on here. If I skip forwards and we look at the demand forecast for 2023, I've already talked about the 200,000 square kilometers and I've applied the cautionary notice here.
I mean, just to put that into context, we are talking about a volume of emerging basin acreage that is approximately the equivalent of the totality of seismic that we acquired as an industry in 2022, just to give you some sense of scale. Remembering that not all of this new acreage is gonna come with work program commitment, we do nevertheless forecast demand to grow by as much as 40% year-on-year, albeit from a low base in 2022, I hasten to add. I would say that note on the demand forecast on the top here, we're talking in terms of square kilometers. Now, this growth is very broad-based, but much underpinned by the returning appetite for exploration following the recent accumulation of acreage.
We see this translated to both the contract and the multi-client segments with the increase in new programs, as I've already referred to our own programs that we will conduct in 2023. The overall contract multi-client ratio year-over-year is anticipated to be relatively stable across the industry. Here we're talking about mid 40%-mid 50% contract and multi-client respectively in sq km terms. You'll see I've also forecast in the yellow line the active vessel years to meet the demand that we see in 2023. That forecast includes steaming and yard, but it does not include stack or idle time. You'll note that this sums to approximately 15 vessels, which is the size of the present active fleet. Now, I say approximately as stacking is quite dynamic as we've heard earlier.
What we see is a market that is very balanced here. The demand growth, given the present supply, supports the opportunity for further margin expansion and of course increased utilization. I will touch on 4D. You've heard me talk in previous capital markets days about the premium 4D segment. I'll be honest and say that the growth levels that we saw in 2022 did not meet the original expectation when we were tracking bids and leads from late 2021 and into early 2022. As you can see from the graph on the bottom left.
While we did see a modest increase year-on-year from 2021 into 2022, a considerable number of programs that were forecast to take place were deferred. They were deferred for a number of reasons, be that field operations, additional appraisal well drilling, and in the same case of some of these, just simply the inability to secure permits. This happened in Nigeria, Malaysia and Australia to name just but a few examples. These programs have not disappeared, but they have been pushed out in time. At some stage in the not so distant future, they will reappear back into the opportunity basket for 4D.
Having talked in detail about the 4D segment previously, I think it's worth looking at the industry activity mix in greater granularity as there are two other segments outside of 4D and exploration that have developed in recent time. The first of these is infrastructure-led exploration. There was much commentary during the pandemic about the industry gravitating towards near-field exploration for optimum exploitation of existing infrastructure. This segment has no doubt grown significantly, certainly in the more mature hydrocarbon basins. Here, similar to 4D, the value of multi-sensor technology comes to the fore again. For the purposes of this analysis, I've actually included those multi-client programs where the objective is ILX.
Our own Norwegian Sea GeoStreamerX program being one such example, where we will shoot a second phase this year over an existing underlying data set that we have, with that produce a higher resolution dual-azimuth GeoStreamerX image for search or in the search for subtle hydrocarbon traps. The other segment that I'd like to draw your attention to is what we call the integrated segment. This collective of programs typically don't go to market. They're uniquely created by optimally leveraging our full suite of capabilities, this is both technology, service, and commercial models that we can deploy. This has led to recent multiple projects in time with in Egypt, Canada, Namibia, Côte d'Ivoire, and even Papua New Guinea over the last few years.
This is an important segment and is extremely unique to the way in which we can combine the building blocks of our services and technology. What of the customer base and customer landscape? Despite the consolidation that the industry has been undergoing, surprisingly, this is not really reflected too much in the absolute number of contract customers that we've seen over the period, which you'll see remains quite stable. The IOCs and NOCs, they form the bedrock of our activity as they always have done. The IOCs historically cycling between seismic years and drilling years. We're also starting to see the NOCs flexing their muscles outside of their domestic markets, which in their own right are quite substantial in volume and value terms themselves. It's good to see the independents haven't altogether disappeared.
Despite appearing to be an endangered species during the pandemic, we can see that they still are there, and they're still active. What's more, we also see the potential for the customer base growing with the appearance of specialist CCUS companies that we're now starting to interact with. What are we seeing in the contract market? Well, this is a familiar chart to many of you, where dollars down the left-hand side, time along the bottom, and then we've got the active bids that are in-house and the bids and the leads that we see through our business development activities. This shows that directionally demand continues to trend upwards. There has been a recent drop observed, and that's really represented by the awarded work that we had at year-end, and also the what I'd call the post-holiday season, sort of Q1 quiet period.
I think historically you can see this imprinted over time if you go back and look at Q1 in previous years. The order book has increased by close to 75% year-on-year. We have improved utilization and efficiency, and with that, a significant improvement with pricing and the rates that you've seen quoted previously, 35% higher than the 2021 average as the market went into recovery. As I've said before, contract pricing is expected to continue to trend upwards in 2023, helped by industry discipline, given the consolidated field that we operate in, the demand growth, as I've pointed to, which will lead to improvements in further utilization. Now I'm gonna switch gears here a little bit and talk about our MultiClient library diversity.
Here we see, the revenue that each of the major geomarket units has recorded during the over the quarters for the last few years, from a historical perspective per region. I think what this speaks to is the value of having a global portfolio. Europe is clearly the stable foundation that we have here, and the other regions vary with their contributions quite significantly from quarter to quarter. Historically related somewhat to the investment history of prior years and itself related to the key trigger events such as licensing rounds, which we've seen as a driver to investment activity in MultiClient.
You'll see in Q4 we had a pretty solid contribution from across the globe from library sales on investments that go back years in time, library sales from more recent investments, and even pre-funding from the programs that we acquired during the course of the 2022 period of time. From the historical profiles now to the details for 2022. Let's continue with the regional distribution which you'll see on the right. I mentioned previously it's reflective of recent investment history. The Africa, Mediterranean, and Asia region have grown and together with North America have reduced the dominance of Europe year-over-year. I think what I'd say about South Africa's diminutive contribution in 2022 is that it's reflective of our own recent muted investment history.
This has really been due to the reduced level of activity that we saw during the pandemic, the switch from hardwired bid rounds to a permanent offer round, and some uncertain drilling results which has really led to a little bit of a pause. However, we do anticipate this is gonna change, and I've talked previously about a new large and well-funded multi-client program that we will be shooting in an emerging basin in Brazil imminently. We anticipate that, when I come to speak next year, we're gonna start to see that growing revenue segment for South America improving. Looking to the left, there's a stable group of companies who do the heavy lifting.
By heavy lifting, I'm referring to the companies in the dark blue color here, which you can see contributed to close to two-thirds of our revenues. These are fairly evenly distributed, which means we're not reliant upon one particular company to deliver all of our business in the MultiClient segment. I think all in all, I'd say that there is a solid customer base here, and a good mix between small, medium, and large clients that we deal with. Finally, some performance numbers. I think the graphs will be familiar to many of you. The upper part shows that our revenues for 2022 were 35% of our peer group, while our cash investment share was only 19% for the period. A pretty healthy ratio.
The prefunding level in 2022 was at the top end of our guiding, just over 120%, which is excellent and follows the trend of strong prefunding that we've had over the cycle. I think to me, this speaks to the quality of the portfolio of projects that we develop and the investment discipline that we apply. Late sales ended the year at $327 million, the second best on record, as you've heard already. Yes, there were M&A driven change of control transfer fees, as there were for everyone. These are a forecast component of the multi-client business model and not just a pleasant surprise every year.
Overall return on investment has increased in the recent period. Again, I have to be honest here and say that this is contributed to by the reduced investment that we've had in 20 and 2021 and 2022. As you'll have seen from the group of firm programs that we have for 2023 alone, our investment level will increase, which somewhat mirrors, obviously, the growing appetite of our customers to explore again. Now I'd like to talk to our cloud-based multi-client business models. The way in which our customers access and consume data is changing. It was clear some years back that the best way to support this evolution was through the strategic focus to liberate our seismic data.
The vast majority of that strategic initiative concluded in 2022. Our investment is already utilized by industry trailblazers that are ready to run with the innovative and creative solutions that we've developed. I think PGS's competitive advantage lies in our ability to effortlessly serve multi-client data to our customers where and when they want it and exactly how they want it, which gives them the opportunity to unlock real efficiencies in their enterprise workflows. We call this MultiClient on-demand. In addition, we continue to bolster our capabilities of cloud-based access platforms, such as our own client portal and Versal, that also help teams across the industry spend more time focusing upon using the data that they have. The desire for on-demand access will only accelerate in the future. PGS is uniquely positioned to meet industry needs, thereby creating significant value for our customers.
Finally, our imaging journey to the cloud. This started back in 2019 in partnership with Google. You will have heard me talk previously about digitalization enablers, as I call them, stating that one of our key projects was the transition to high performance computing in the cloud. The change in business landscape forced us to accelerate our ambitions and raise the target somewhat. Also encouraged by our CEO stating on numerous occasions that we would never buy another computer. Here we are. Turnaround and product-productivity increases as a result of the scalability of the Google Cloud Platform can now be realized. In August this year, we operated the world's seventh largest supercomputer, and actually the world's largest cloud-based supercomputer. It's also resulted in reduced CapEx and compute in use.
reduced CapEx investment in compute, while at the same time giving us accessibility to the latest technologies and infrastructure for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in the seismic space. There are many further gains to be made in this area, I think this is really a case of hold on and see how far we can go. In summary, the recent return to emerging basin exploration has helped drive positive momentum in the offshore E&P segment. This has been seen with strong utilization and pricing improvements in the contract segment itself, with bookings up significantly year-on-year and pricing expected to continue to rise into 2023. PGS continues to be uniquely positioned as the only fully integrated player with market leading acquisition, imaging, and digitalization technology, which we believe provides us with significant competitive advantage. With that, I will hand over to Berit.
Thank you. I'll go left. Good morning, everyone. Nathan has of course now just given us a very good overview of the rising activity levels in the hydrocarbon markets, which is incredibly important to deliver affordable energy to the world. There is no hiding from the fact that we, and that is the big collective we, have to transition to low carbon solutions. In PGS we recognize this, and we intend to do our bit to aid that transition. We're a good group of people who are really passionate about this. Of course, PGS is not a charity and it's not a government office, so we have to make money to do this. Without profits, no possibility to act. Does it make sense from a business perspective to have this strategic goal? I absolutely think it does.
We aim to be, and we have been profitable from day one in our new energy efforts. We are well-placed in the sense that PGS's core products and competencies are highly relevant also in the new energy markets, which I hope to show you throughout this presentation. The two most important markets, as Rune has already alluded to for PGS New Energy are offshore carbon storage and offshore wind site characterization. Towards the end, I will also touch a little bit on marine minerals that may represent the future value. I won't spend time explaining the value of CCS for reaching our climate goals. I will just point to the fact that all pathways to net zero, they do include this as an essential tool.
Carbon storage is simply not possible without proper understanding of geology, and the way to map geology is seismic data. There is probably no shortage of rock volumes to store the required amounts of CO2 in the world, but there are actually very few locations that are described to the level of detail that is necessary for those locations to be approved as storage sites. The industry is simply not moving fast enough. Well, we have the data and the knowledge to help. Offshore wind, on the other hand, is moving at a really impressive pace. The annual growth rates are quite impressive and our European home market is leading the way.
We have watched this growth with interest over some time and decided to have a go at it, I will explain how because wind and seismic is a slightly different combination to seismic and hydrocarbons. I'll start with carbon storage. This slide covers a lot of points, and I'll try to walk you through it and hopefully make some sense of it. The map shows that there is a good match between our data library in blue, and here actually the colors work. That was good. The awarded CCS licenses in orange and blocks on offer in yellow. Keep in mind that areas that don't sit in our library also represent business opportunities for us in the form of new acquisition. We break the CCS cycle down to four phases.
We have seen that clients tend to use publicly available information in the very early screening phase. As they start to compete over the best sites, they are likely to want better data, and we have developed commercial models like data subscription for that particular use. Screening will deliver many opportunities, and to pick the right ones, you will have to do more detailed mapping. This is the identification phase, and there is where our library really becomes valuable. For us, it represents revenues in form of data licensing, but it also represents funding opportunities for us to reprocess our library and keep it up to date.
This identify phase ends with the license application and hopefully an award. The project moves into a rigorous site characterization phase, which certainly requires high quality seismic data. This is a case for us, again, for reprocessing or new acquisition. If studies are positive, the project will move into development phase and a new baseline for future 4D monitoring is likely to be needed. There on, we're into monitoring, which is mandatory for decades, even after the injection has ceased. The early years of injection are quite likely to see traditional 4D seismic as a very important part of their monitoring program. Good business there. As we move to the post-injection stage, other methods are likely to prevail. PGS will take part of that technology development to stay relevant. Throughout all of these phases, we offer geoscience advice.
Carbon storage isn't simply exploration in reverse. It requires an earlier understanding of dynamic behaviors of the rocks over large areas. At the bottom you see a simulation that we have run on a potential site in the U.K., showing CO2 saturation over a time span of more than 100 years. We are working with industry and academia to increase the understanding and create better models, and here our regional data coverage and ability to work with large data volumes is of crucial value. Back to my target and Rune's target to make new energy a profitable business from the very start. This is an overview of some of the activities we had in 2022. We were contracted to do three bespoke surveys for carbon storage and one Snøhvit, which was a combined 4D monitor for production and carbon storage.
In total, it was a quite close to a full North Sea season. As expected, we do see variation in the specification of these surveys depending on their area challenges, but we also see a common factor. They all need high quality seismic, both at the reservoir level and at the shallower layers to properly map the sealing potential of the sites. Here PGS is uniquely positioned as the GeoStreamer technology delivers both the deep imaging and the high resolution at the same time. Our innovative towing solutions also come into play. For instance, in one of these surveys, we towed more than double count of streamers and sources compared to the original plan, and I can assure you we had a very happy client.
We also had MultiClient data sales related to CCS license applications, and we started a large MultiClient reprocessing project in the Southern Gas Basin of U.K. and the Netherlands. This has become quite the hotspot for CCS purposes, but it also has remaining gas potential at the deeper levels, so this is a truly integrated project. One other thing to notice here is our dialogue with other players in the CCS value chain. We signed a letter of intent with deepC Store in Australia to jointly develop storage options there, and we have similar discussions ongoing with other players in other geographical markets. Together, we can offer ways for CCS operators to really get a head start of their projects. Now moving into offshore wind, and I gather from the questions earlier on that you have noticed the press release about our first contract award.
We are really excited about this as wind can become an important new arena for PGS, although we are cognizant of the differences to our traditional markets. I have tried to illustrate those differences on the slide here. Unlike hydrocarbon exploration or carbon storage for that matter, the most important success factor for a wind farm is not the subsurface. It's the wind. That's the revenue generator. There are some important cost optimization factors and potential project blockers like environmental permits. The part that we aim for, the geology. In wind, the geology is not the project enabler. It can represent a significant risk to the project and the development of that project which must be taken seriously. The traditional PGS business has been to map targets at several kilometers of depth.
In wind, it's all about the seabed itself and a few tens to hundreds meters into the seabed. Although the principles are the same, the methods are slightly different. Here, I have listed the methodologies, and I have grouped them into geophysical and geotechnical, where geophysical are indirect measurements and geotechnical are direct soil samples or intruding measurements. PGS expertise is geophysics, and we will do all of those geophysical measurements. Some are hull-mounted equipment, some are towed equipment, and some may be deployed from unmanned vessels even. 3D seismic operation is the core strength of PGS, and that's where we see that we can bring a whole new level of efficiency and data quality to this industry. We may also decide to do some geotechnical work, and we will definitely deliver our data as part of a holistic ground model for these sites.
Given these differences, do we have the right assets for this market? We can look at it through the same lens as we did for carbon storage. The map shows our data library overlain by the wind farm areas that are under evaluation or in development. You see an interesting degree of overlap, meaning we have something to offer in the early screen to identify phases. The images below the map are showing vertical sections of approximately the first 100 meters into the seabed. The upper panel is what our data or anyone's data looks like when it's processed for deep exploration purposes, and the lower panel shows what resolution we can achieve through targeted reprocessing. This is valuable information for government offices and developers in the early phases.
When a license is awarded and the development project starts, this is not enough. Now you move from mapping at a scale of a few meters down to decimeters in order to design and place cables and turbines and other installations optimally. The equipment that we use in deeper mapping doesn't really deliver this resolution, we have invested in the most efficient ultra-high-resolution 3D technology in the market, the P-Cable spread that you see in the cartoon on the lower left. At first glance, you may think that this looks just like any other PGS acquisition spread, in principle it is, look at the difference in size. The cartoon in the middle shows a quite modest layout of 12 streamers of six kilometers length, we often tow a lot more than that, okay.
The little blue square at the bottom is the size of the P-Cable spread in comparison. It's less than 100 times 100 meters. Cost to operate a kit like this is not the same as for our large-scale spreads. Dear gentlemen, you should know by now that it's not just size that matters. An ultra-high-resolution 3D from this tiny little spread can actually produce more data than a full exploration 3D survey. Data management and processing capacity becomes really important factors for success. Coupled with our operational excellence, these are areas where we stand much stronger than the traditional site survey players who generally deal with 2D data and do fairly simple processing. As wind farm developers are awarded larger blocks and more complex geologies, our offering becomes even more valuable, and we will continue to improve our efficiency through technology development.
This is just the start. We also explore, aim to explore our geoscience expertise to see if we can replace some of the geotechnical sampling with higher quality geophysical data like we have done in the exploration domain. That would be a substantial time and cost saving for developers and would be very welcome. Towards the end now, a few words about marine minerals. You're probably aware that there is an opening process going on in Norway, roughly in the area between Jan Mayen and Svalbard. It's a huge area, more than 400,000 sq km and water depths around 3,000 m. How do you map something like that? Well, again, there is nothing that is more efficient than towed seismic.
Seismic doesn't have the necessary resolution to map deposits accurately, and it doesn't say anything about the metal content of a deposit. The value of towed seismic has been debated in this domain. On the slide, you see a 2D GeoStreamer line acquired this summer as a part of the ATLAB survey. ATLAB is a broad coalition between industry players and academia formed to research the best mapping methods. The line now clearly shows, actually in the right colors again, good, a clear difference in character between the smooth seabed and the smooth layers that are colored in green and the part on the right side there that I have colored in red. There is this strange noise on top of the seabed in the red area. Can you see that?
That is because the seabed over there actually looks like the picture on top. That is exactly what we're looking for. We have shown that we can locate areas of interest with towed seismic, but to properly characterize them, you actually do need to go down there with an AUV. The most important thing to do is to make sure that we map and understand the ecosystems and find ways to explore and possibly exploit in a sustainable way. In summary, the strategic goal to develop new energy into a substantial business unit stands firm, and we will do this by using our core strengths and build brick by brick in tune with the development of the relevant markets. We have already shown that we can generate good business and carbon storage, and we aim to do so in offshore wind as well.
Time will tell if marine minerals have a future. If so, we are well-placed. Thank you. Now to the man who will deliver everything, Rob, operations.
Thanks, Berit. I think sounds like the microphone's working. I'm now all that lies between you and lunch, so if you'll just bear with me for 15 minutes, we can talk through my business area, which is operations within PGS. What that means fundamentally is the fleet and all that's associated with that. In lieu of an agenda, I'll start by just talking you through what operations means for PGS. What it's really all about is the safe and sustainable operation of our vessels in a cost-efficient manner. This is enabled by use of industry-leading technology and some of the best people that are out there as well. I'll work through each one of those in turn as I present to you this morning.
Starting off with safety, I think it would be really remiss of me to stand up here and talk about safety without referring to, you know, the obvious elephant in the room over the last couple of years, and that's COVID. Everybody here and everybody listening online has all been affected by this. This has been a global challenge, and it's been one that's put PGS through some of its most difficult periods in our history. It's been an enormous challenge to the market, and for us to be able to survive this, it's involved being able to operate a global fleet of vessels with people coming from all over the world to crew these vessels under extremely challenging circumstances. We managed to achieve that.
It was very difficult, and it's required some massive dedication and sacrifice from our crews and indeed loyalty from our crews to bear with us as we work the way through this. What's been particularly important is how our strategy has worked. You know, going into this with a strategy of having crew based all around the world, and ensuring that we maintained and kept hold of all our key talent through this challenging period has been you know, extremely important to the success story we have here. We're actually extremely proud that through this whole period, we managed to deliver an operation that didn't have a single case of COVID transmission in the offshore environment, which I'm given to understand is if not unique, quite close to it.
Some of the statistics you'll see at the bottom of the page here remind us just how much the offshore industry and the maritime industry at large has been affected by this. I'm sure we've all been, you know, subject to isolations and quarantines, but the quantity that some of our crew have taken cumulatively over this period is quite substantial. We owe them a great debt of thanks to helping us get through this period. During that period, yet we're also very happy to see that over the last couple of years, our safety statistics have, you know, maintained a very flat trend despite the additional challenges that we've had getting to and from the fleet.
We have seen an ever so slight uptick in 2022 in terms of our overall statistics, but this is both offset by the fundamental lower severity of the incidents we did see in 2022, and also the fact that this is this uptick is something that we've seen generally across the market. Our bigger clients who have much higher numbers in terms of their safety statistics were already warning us at an early stage of 2022 that as people's attention had started to move from the pandemic back to the day-to-day operation and the more normal operation, that safety statistics at large were starting to tick up a little bit. You know, perhaps there's a little bit of relaxation post-pandemic. That's something we've got our eye on as we go into the next year.
Moving now towards the fleet, there's been some questions already on this this afternoon. This graphic up here is showing you what the PGS fleet currently looks like. We have in the dark blue at the top there, we have the active fleet, which is six currently, 3D vessels. All of these are Ramform vessels. We also have three further vessels down there, 3D capable. PGS Apollo and Sanco Swift, as has been mentioned earlier, are currently operating in source and 2D mode respectively, with Sanco Swift moving to 3D mode with the P-Cable for this wind project that we've just been talking about during the course of the summer.
Tansur, formerly Ramform Sterling, is currently operating in our Japanese joint venture, and she continues to provide us with stable revenues of approximately $30 million a year through this period and through the duration of her contract. As we look to those vessels currently in stack, three more Ramform class vessels, of which Victory, Ramform Victory, will be coming back to market for the Brazil projects from the latter part of this year. As has been previously discussed, we will take a view on how long she stays in the market according to how the market develops over this period. A few highlights of the fleet. I think it is very important to point out that these vessels are all very similar.
The Ramform design has been scaled over the years, but fundamentally these boats all look and feel the same. They also all have fundamentally the same equipment on board, most notably the GeoStreamer. For those of you who aren't that technical, what is the GeoStreamer? In very short, it is a multi-sensor cable. For the harder, more challenging projects or more valuable projects, our clients will prefer multi-sensor data, and we control 70%-80% of the active vessel fleet of multi-sensor cables. There's only one more thing I'll focus on here, which is going back to safety. Barrett mentioned that size isn't important.
There are occasions when it is, and I think having a big wide-back deck, it's been proven over the years that this does mean it's much safer, much less congested on the back of the boat to deploy the equipment spreads that we do, and to be able to deploy a range of different equipment spreads depending upon what project we are, we are there to perform. Cost of course, is something that comes under great scrutiny, and this is an area where we've continued to challenge ourself over the last few years. You can see from the graph on screen, we've managed over the last five years to drive our overall cost of operating the Titan-class vessels down by 22%, which is quite a, you know, strong achievement, particularly given the market that we've been going through.
How have we done this? Well, fundamentally, it's because we've worked really hard to make sure that this is something that we're able to deliver. The restructure in 2020, you know, partly or largely driven by COVID, of course, has been a contributory factor. There's been heavy focus on how we manage our assets, how we get the best out of what we have. Also the digital transformation that's already been alluded to several times today has allowed us to move forward in different ways as well. As we move forwards, we're starting to think about what the market looks like. We can see from the numbers that have been presented earlier today that things are moving in the right direction. How is PGS going to respond to this?
The short answer is that we will, you know, we have a large fleet, as I've pointed to on the previous slides, and we will bring vessels and capacity back into that market as and when we can do so, as driven by margin growth. We will not be bringing back vessels purely for the sake of increasing our market share. The question becomes: What are the challenges that we might face in order to return some of these vessels to the market? As you can see here, there are two primary challenges here, people and equipment. We have the boats. When it comes to people, there's been a very large attrition in terms of personnel offshore over the last few years. I quote some numbers here from 2019, but this period of attrition goes back further than that.
A lot of the people that have left will not be coming back. Unemployment in many of the countries from which we source our seismic crew is low. Many of the people that have left the industry have either got other jobs or they've retired. That means that building crews for the next generation is probably one of the key challenges that we face. The big strength that we have here, as you can see in the graph on the top right there, is that over 85% of our crew have more than 10 years experience. You know, we have a very strong base from which we're working. Also, over 80% of our crew are full-time and permanently contracted to PGS, which puts us in a very strong place. We have crew who've worked with us for a long time.
We have a lot of loyalty. We have a lot of experience. The next challenge is how we increase the younger crew, the more junior crew, and grow that base to ensure we're ready to meet the market demand that we expect to come. Moving to equipment. Supply chains are probably the biggest challenge or the change that we've seen over the last couple of years. The geopolitical situation as has developed and what's gone on with COVID means that supply chains are challenged as they haven't been for many years. This means that fundamentally, getting hold of equipment takes longer than it used to. What we've done here, to give one example, is to continue investing through the cycle.
We continue to build and refurbish streamers. The numbers that I show on screen here for reference represent roughly 40% of the active streamers that we might use on a daily basis in the water. As we look towards the future, we will continue to build streamers. We've already discussed that our CapEx run rate will be around $100 million over coming years. That includes, you know, approximately half of that to be continuing to build streamers at the rate of approximately one vessel set per year for the future. I said digitalization has enabled some of our progress. I'm just gonna give a few quick examples here. Again, sticking to our key, you know, messages of safety and cost.
On the safety side, with our partner Cognite, we have built ourselves a tool here which allows us to address one of the challenges we started to see offshore, is that we have quite a well-evolved safety system where our crews are very keen and willing to give us feedback on any little thing they might see offshore. To the extent that we get about 7,500 bits of data input from the crew each year, which tell us something they might have seen offshore that isn't safe or even that is safe. As you can imagine, that's an enormous amount of data. Sift through that and find the signal from the noise is or can be challenging.
One example we had here is that we were receiving something like 10 safeguards out of these 7,500 over the year, telling us there might be something wrong with life jackets when they were being tested. I think under normal circumstances, that wouldn't have been noticed. They weren't all on one boat. It was across the fleet. This allowed us to extract that signal and go to the life jacket manufacturer and discover actually there was a manufacturing problem, and that was something we were able to help them to fix. This will allow us to proactively prevent incidents that we probably otherwise wouldn't have seen. Another one. One of the challenges that we face when operating our fleets at sea is how we manage our vessel speed. Vessel speed has two major impacts.
You know, of course, there's a cost to the fuel and there is a requirement to deliver data fit for the project. Understanding what the limitations might be to achieving the optimal speed on any given survey is more complicated than you might think. There are a lot of different factors going into that, and trying to address that through a human on a, you know, minute-to-minute, second-to-second basis is very hard. What we've done, again, in conjunction with Cognite, is build ourselves a tool which allows this to happen automatically, and we've taken this to the extent where we were able to run one of our vessels last summer for a period without any manual input whatsoever to the speed of the vessel. My third example here is energy efficiency.
We've talked about, you know, the cost of fuel and that that is an impact on our business. One of the ways we can drive that is to manage how we use our fuel. This use case is a way that we use all of the information that we have on board from, you know, the modern fleet that we have and the sensors they have on board to adjust the way that we run our boats, the load we put on each of our engines and so forth, in order to ensure that we extract the maximum efficiency from the fuel that we are burning. This leads, of course, directly to cost savings. Now moving on to the final section, social and environmental responsibility.
This is obviously an area of key focus for us Rune has already alluded to. We do have a strong track record of reducing our emissions per data unit, as this graph shows, over the last decade. Our goal here is to reduce our data emissions per sorry, our carbon emissions per data unit by 50% by 2030. As I said, there is a strong track record here, but there has been a blip in 2022 where we have crept back up again. What lies behind this? We've talked already a lot today about utilization of the fleet and the amount of steaming that took place in 2022. That is one of the key reasons for this move in the wrong direction. We've also done an unusual amount of work in dual vessel operations.
What does that mean? It means that fundamentally, we're using two vessels to acquire a single data unit. The amount of carbon or fuel consumed to acquire that data unit is significantly higher. That's driven us in this direction, and we do expect to, you know, return onto the path next year. We've always recognized that this is quite an involved metric and probably not one many of you see very often. The wider world is looking to different targets. This is the same slide that Rune showed earlier on, presenting our key targets for the next 30 years. I'm gonna hone in on one of those in particular, which is the 75% reduction in maritime emissions, and that is the direction that we will be taking for the future.
We intend to reduce our maritime emissions per joule used offshore by 75% by 2050. How are we gonna get there? Well, we've done a study with DNV. We've spent a lot of time internally looking at this. Whilst it is not yet quite certain what the targets are going to be, the IMO, the EU, and various other bodies are still looking into the exact details. What is clear is the trend that we are likely to see, and that's shown in the bar chart on the bottom right-hand side here. It's essentially saying that there are relatively small changes required over the next five to 10 years. A 2% reduction by 2025, a 6% reduction by 2030.
These changes are things that we believe we can manage with our existing fleet with some small changes to the way that we operate. I've talked already about some of the energy efficiency things we can do with digitalization. There are also other things like biofuels that we can move into the mix, and we're confident we can get through these early stage gates. When it comes to the bigger ones further out in time, the 75% by 2050, which could be 50% or 100%, depending upon exactly where these some of these bodies land, that's gonna require a different solution. What that means is fleet renewal. Even the newest of our boats will be 28 years old, I think it is, in 2050, well past their, you know, expected life.
As we renew the vessels, we will be re-renewing with lower or zero emissions vessels, and that will be our path to achieving these targets. Finally, on from environmental sustainability to social responsibility, which I think is another very important part of our message. I'll just start with the headline here that many of you have probably seen from some of our social media releases over the last few months. I say greater than 100 lives saved at sea in 2022. It's very hard to categorize that or come to a precise number. Certainly we've rescued approximately 100 people just in the last couple of months at sea, including recently a rescue of 89 people offshore Italy, from the Ramform Hyperion.
These were rescued just before a storm which would almost inevitably have led to the capsize of this boat. This is worth mentioning, I think, for several reasons. First of all, that these things don't happen by accident. The way these rescues have been conducted was extremely, you know, gratifying in terms of the competence of everybody offshore and onshore to support the operation. This is because we train on these things. We expect these things to happen. As we do our risk assessments going into any given survey, we have a pretty good idea of the things that could occur, and we make sure that we are as prepared as we can be for them to occur. When they happen, generally speaking, they go very smoothly. I think it's also very important that we do do these things.
It's a very important part of what one should do at sea. I'm very proud of the fact that our crews will immediately respond to these incidents and execute on them without any consideration because of the training that they've gone through. Finally, healthier oceans. We have talked in the past about the amount of plastic and so forth that we recover. That continues to be an ongoing trend. We collect approximately, you know, 200 tons over the last 5 years. You know, that is quite literally a drop in the ocean, but it is something. Of course, as part of our operation, we do not contribute to that. Nothing goes over the side of our boats. We are collecting it. I think that's where I finish.
I think we then move on to questions after the final summary slide. We have the most productive fleet in the industry. We do continue to focus on cost, and within that cost focus, we continue to ensure that we are ready to scale up as and when the market and the margins drive us to do so. Whilst we've had much success through digitalization, we still continue to believe there is a lot more that we can do there, and we will be continuing to drive down that path. Of course, we'll do all this whilst making sure that we do it safely and we deliver what our clients want and need. Thank you.
Thank you. We're ready for Q&A. If you have any question, feel free to raise your hand, we'll start by some questions from the web. The first one I'll just answer myself, if I answer wrongly, feel free to correct me. There was one investor here asking, since you're not planning to raise equity, does that mean that you've changed your outlook? I would just add, you've never said that you would raise equity in terms of this proposed refinancing. We'll go to the next question.
That is correct.
What is the economics of CCS players, and is there willingness to pay for seismic data on a similar level as the oil and gas players?
I guess that's to me.
Yeah.
As I said, we have this very clear target that we have to operate profitably from day one in the new energy markets as well as the hydrocarbon markets. The fact that you saw us do 4 surveys last year kind of answers that question.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, clients do recognize the value of data and that they actually have to have high-quality data, and they are prepared to pay for it.
In the, this is also for Berit. Given the small size of the spread for a detailed seabed survey, I guess he's referring to the offshore wind survey. Are the Ramform vessels the optimal vessels for these kind of surveys? Are these the most cost-efficient alternative?
We're not using a Ramform for the first survey. We're using the Swift. We see that again, the most cost-effective solution for us is to use the base of vessels that we already have versus to go out there in the market and lease something on the open market. Now, this may change over time. We really do need to look at what are the most optimal platforms to operate in the wind setting. I think there's two elements to this. It is I explained the very small setup that we have today. Over time absolutely are on a path to expand the size of this to become more efficient.
We may want to have slightly larger vessels than you would think. This is something that will have to evolve over time, and we will be looking for the most optimum solution as we go.
Next question is probably to Nathan. What do you think about the new blocks in the Barents Sea? I assume the investor is referring to blocks being included in the latest APA round in Norway. Will this be very good for the industry? CSEM data has been very successful predicting wildcats in the Barents Sea. Does PGS still have the CSEM capabilities?
Yeah. I mean, I did notice the number of blocks that were put up in the next round in the Barents. I think it remains to be seen what industry's appetite is going to look like there. There's been variable success to date. You know, there's undoubtedly hydrocarbons to be found and commercially produced. I think that it will be a little bit of a bellwether for industry's appetite for exploration in that particular area when we see the potential bidding and take-up of acreage there. The CSEM?
No, we don't.
That-
... own it anymore. We can access it through our partnership with OFG.
Yes
... which are the owner of, that kit now. There are no, EM plans, in PGS currently.
One investor is asking for when do you need a new streamer package? I would say then immediately since you're building one this year. Last question: let's say that you had to buy a new vessel today, would you go for a new Ramform vessel or a smaller?
I think we like the Ramform platform very much. I think the question to us would rather be what size of Ramform would we go for if we were to buy a vessel today? It's not given that we would add another of the biggest. I think we have communicated earlier, and as you kinda see in our fleet mix, we will going forward optimally have a fleet mix where some are large, the Titan-class Gazes, and some are smaller, you know, which could do 4Ds and other things. So, it's difficult 'cause we haven't really assessed what to do if we were gonna build a vessel. I think it would be a Ramform, and the question is the size of it.
We have a couple follow-up on these matters. The new streamers that are building this year, are they for Victory?
The streamers that we're building currently are part of general fleet renewal.
Yeah.
There is no
'Cause the story has been you continuously said that you had a streamer set for the seventh vessel.
Yes.
Yeah.
That is correct.
What you're building now is for to replace?
It's just an ongoing program of continuing to refresh the streamer pool.
Yeah.
It's, Whilst we talk about building one set per year, it's not actually distributed in the way that we get a new set and we put it all on one vessel.
Mm-hmm.
We just manage the wider streamer pool that we have.
Mm-hmm. Right. May I ask if in the case that you're gonna bring in one of the others, the, like, an eight vessel, how much CapEx would that require?
Yeah. We, as we have communicated earlier, we have streamers for seven. We don't have streamers for eight anymore. Bringing in an eighth vessel would require that we build a streamers, you know, increase, let's say, the pool with the streamer set so that we can equip an eighth vessel. How much CapEx it would require depends a little bit of timing, I think. Let's say if we were to bring it today, we're gonna have to more or less build it. If it is next summer, we may not have to build an entire new set for that to where, you know, we could take it from the fleet.
If it's in two years, you know, we may take it with the fleet renewal system, we have. It depends a little bit on it. Obviously the eighth vessel will likely require some more CapEx. I don't think you could just add another $50, to put it that way. That depends a little bit on timing and what's in the pool, how many streamers we choose to equip it with, things like that.
Mm-hmm. Only the streamers that would be the extra cost, or would it have to be like a general upgrade of the vessel?
Not so much. Some upgrade of the vessel, classing, that kind of a thing, and then you need other in-sea equipment, as well. Rob, you wanna comment?
I was just gonna say that, yeah, we've got PGS Apollo and Sanco Swift operating currently.
That's true.
From a classing point of view and a general equipment, there's not much that's required there. Streamers would be the bulk of the expenditure required.
Yeah. That's true.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
If I understood correctly from one of the previous slides, we should expect $100 million in like continuous CapEx going forward. Is that to sustain a fleet of seven vessels?
That is to sustain a fleet of seven vessels. As I said, I think we could probably phase in an 8th vessel and not increase that very much. You know, if we're to assume that doesn't come earlier.
Mm-hmm.
That's kind of what I was trying to allude to.
Mm-hmm
These things, you know, will fluctuate around that number a little bit because it depends on the yard schedule and, you know, other maritime. There are, you know, other stuff in the CapEx than the streamers. I think, you know, we would aim to not increase the CapEx number much and still go to eight.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I felt the hairs in my neck rising up when I heard you started talking about building new vessels already. I mean.
There is no plans on that.
Are you starting to?
No
... for the idea of building new vessels?
No, we're not.
When potentially could we How many vessels can you bring in before you start or building new vessels?
No, I mean, we can at least go up to nine, at least.
Mm-hmm.
Then there's a question of the last two ones. I mean, if this were to happen, let's say quickly, that the market explodes or something like that, we probably can begin, even bringing in a tenth. Then it starts to get, we have 11 vessels on the chart there. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that they will return all 11- 3D operations when, you know, how old the last one will be when this is relevant. That's probably the max. We're talking many years into the future here. No, we're not planning to build any vessels.
I feel my hair is coming down.
Yeah, yeah. That's good to hear.
We have one final question from the web, but I'll answer it, and you can just correct me. Are there plans for electrifying ships or other forms of environmentally friendly fuel? Rob just said that yes, when the fleet renewal is coming, you know, they will be either electrified or more environmentally friendly than the current fleet.
Correct. There's a question here, I think. Yeah.
From the audience.
I was just trying to understand that the dynamic on the CapEx, we should interpret the $100 million number going forward as in sort of increase from six to eight vessels. Is that roughly?
Yeah, roughly over time.
Roughly. Over time.
As long as this kinda-
Yes
... projects out over time, yeah. We will have, you know, seven vessels operating.
Yeah
... with the 100.
Yeah.
You know, we will start renewing the fleet and if we get well into the renewal problem, we can bring in an eighth vessel without, let's say, increasing the factor.
Definitely.
This is not, you know, it's not like a pure math. You know, it depends on how well the equipment is at the time. What do we think is the optimal spread we put on it? Should we put a 14, 12, 10 by 6, 8, 12? You know. There is that, and then there is the number of spares we can flex with in an interim period, you know, until we kinda catch up. That's why this is not call it exact math.
Sure.
Rob, anything to add to that?
Yeah, I'd just say that also it's about the wider trend in terms of what the market wants in terms of spread, not just, you know, what the new vessel might need.
Yeah.
To pick an arbitrary example, if the world's moved to the degree where we required half as much streamers on a vessel in order to address the market as it was, of course, we'd have many more streamers available to put onto another vessel. As Rune said, it's a complicated problem.
Yeah. That's why our best, you know, guidance we can give is kind of an approximate $100 going forward, but that should take into account the market we see.
Great. With that, I think we're concluded. On behalf of... I think we've changed name, but I call us NFF still. On behalf of NFF, John and me, I would like thank you PGS for arranging this Capital Markets Day. There will be served lunch. It's just exit the room and one floor down. Thank you.
Thank you.