Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our 2022 Investor Day. I'm Dave Hughes. I'm with the investor relations team here at Imperial, and I'd like to thank you for joining our webcast this morning. I'm joined today by our management team, and you're gonna have an opportunity to hear from each of them throughout the morning. We're coming to you from our office at Quarry Park in Calgary. One item of housekeeping before we get started.
I wanna draw your attention to the cautionary statement which is at the end of the presentation materials which were posted to our website earlier this morning. They contain some important information regarding forward-looking statements, reserves, resources, risks, and uncertainties. Today's comments also include reference to non-GAAP financial measures.
The definitions and reconciliations of those measures can also be found in the supplemental information section following the cautionary statement, and would highly recommend you have a look at that at your convenience. Now let me turn to the agenda. In a minute, Brad Corson, Chairman, President, and CEO, is gonna come up and offer some opening remarks. After Brad, Sherri Evers, our Vice President of commercial and corporate development, is gonna talk to you about Imperial and our efforts in the area of sustainability and environmental, social, and governance or ESG.
After Sherri, Simon Younger, Senior Vice President of the upstream, is gonna give you an update on our upstream business. We're then gonna take a short 10-minute break, after which Jon Wetmore, Vice President of our downstream business, is gonna give you a review of our downstream and chemicals businesses.
Following Jon, Dan Lyons, the chief financial officer, is gonna provide a financial update. Brad is gonna rejoin us for some closing remarks. We have a Q&A session after Brad's final remarks. I would ask at that time that you limit yourselves to one question plus a follow-up, so that we can get in as many questions as possible in the allotted time. Of course, if by any chance we can't get to all the questions, we will certainly follow up with any we don't manage to get to. With that, I will pass it over to Brad Corson.
Well, good morning, everyone, and it's great to be with you today. It's my pleasure to add my warm welcome to you for our 2022 Investor Day, and also to express my sincere appreciation for your ongoing interest in Imperial. While we were certainly hoping to be meeting in person today, unfortunately, with the ongoing uncertainties around the pandemic and associated recent lockdowns, we felt it more prudent to move ahead with a virtual event today instead.
However, things do seem to be improving, and I'm very much looking forward to getting out and meeting with you in person. Hopefully our next Investor Day will be in person as well. I just can't wait for that. I think you'll find we have a very exciting and informative program for you this morning. Once again, we have the full senior management team of Imperial gathered here with me.
They will each take you through their segments of the business, and we will all be available for questions at the end of our prepared remarks. I'd like to kick off the day by reflecting on the past year. 2021 was a great year for Imperial, both operationally and financially. I'm gonna take a couple of minutes to go over a few of the many highlights. First, it would be hard to reflect on the past year and not talk about the pandemic.
2021 was still a challenging year from a pandemic perspective, but fortunately, for our business, we saw significant recovery in commodity prices and product demands as restrictions began to ease, both in conjunction with higher rates of vaccination and ongoing mobility.
Through our actions in 2020, things such as reducing our cost structure, improving our reliability, and progressing high-return brownfield projects, we were well positioned to take advantage of the recovery that emerged in 2021. Our operational performance was nothing short of outstanding. We set a number of records at our assets. Our Upstream delivered its highest annual production in over 30 years, with numerous production records being set at Kearl.
You've heard me talk about those on many of the earnings calls. Our Downstream finished the year at 97% utilization in the fourth quarter. Wow, what a change. Our Chemicals business delivered its highest full-year earnings in over 30 years. All of these records underpinned by our relentless focus on reliable operations.
The combination of recovering demand, the business improvements we made in 2020, our high-return capital investments, and strong operations drove outstanding financial performance in 2021. We generated cash flow from operations of around CAD 5.5 billion, with free cash flow of around CAD 4.5 billion. We continued our relentless focus on costs, realizing over CAD 1 billion in efficiencies since the beginning of the pandemic.
It was these strong financial results that allowed us to return an all-time high of nearly CAD 3 billion to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks, while still growing our cash balance significantly. In April of 2021, we announced a dividend increase of 24%, which at that time was the largest dividend increase in our history.
I say at that time, because on February first of this year, we announced a further 26% dividend increase, making that the largest in our history. On the sustainability front, you've heard me say before that Imperial is highly committed to providing energy solutions in a way that helps protect people, the environment, and the communities where we operate. This includes doing our part to address the risks of climate change. In 2021, we made substantial progress towards advancing low-carbon solutions. The year saw the launch of the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero Alliance.
Imperial is proud to be a founding member of this unprecedented alliance that is committed to working with our federal and provincial government counterparts with a goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands operations by 2050.
We also made two other significant sustainability-related announcements in the past year. First, we announced our intention to invest in a world-class renewable diesel manufacturing facility at our Strathcona refinery, providing Canada with a large, new domestic source of renewable fuel to help reduce Scope 3 emissions. Second, we announced a new greenhouse gas intensity reduction target of 30% by 2030 versus 2016. Along the way, our focus on safety has not wavered. Through 2021, the pandemic continued to present challenges in managing the health and safety of our workforce.
However, the robust processes we put in place allowed us to successfully respond to the changing conditions and ensured the continued well-being of our workforce while maintaining reliable operations and minimizing disruptions. This focus was, and is, a key part of our continued strong personnel and process safety performance.
I am incredibly proud of what the organization was able to accomplish in 2021, and I believe those accomplishments provide a very, very strong foundation for continued success going forward. Now let's talk about some of the themes you'll hear about today. First of all, resilience. Our integrated business model is a powerful source of differentiation for us, and it helps to insulate our financial performance from the volatility associated with commodity markets.
Our downstream business is a significant source of free cash flow and a significant contributor to our low corporate breakevens. Finally, our balance sheet remains rock solid and provides us with flexibility to take advantage of opportunities should they arise. Secondly, we have a lot more value to create through optimization of our existing assets, and this remains core to our strategy.
For example, in the Upstream alone, we're growing volumes at Kearl in a very capital-efficient manner, and we have more to do there. We're also transforming our Cold Lake operation as we accelerate the use of greenhouse gas-advantaged in situ technologies. We expect to capture synergies at Syncrude from the change to an owner-operated model. A lot of value-accretive opportunities within our existing core Upstream assets, and you'll hear more about that this morning.
Our focus on cost and reliability across the entire portfolio, including the Downstream, is also creating value for our shareholders via stronger cash-generating capabilities. Third, in the area of technology and innovation, we're rapidly expanding our industry-leading portfolio of digital opportunities, which help to reduce costs and improve recovery in our operations.
Our research and development efforts, both in Calgary and in Sarnia, support development and deployment of technology and solutions that support our operations, our emission reduction goals, and help us to meet the needs of our customers. Finally, you will hear a lot more today about our focus on a lower carbon future, including our journey towards emissions reductions and net zero in our oil sands operations by 2050. I have said before that we believe Canada should be seen as the supplier of choice when it comes to the world's energy needs.
We should be proud of what our industry has done and is doing with respect to responsible development. It's quite frankly unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Imperial is very much a part of this, and we'll talk more about how we are engaged in these efforts.
What does all this add up to? Simply said, value creation and shareholder returns. Imperial has a long track record of providing a reliable and growing dividend, and we've demonstrated our commitment to return excess cash to shareholders via share buybacks over time as well. With our strong balance sheet, our business plans, and with commodity fundamentals improving further, we expect to be in a position to continue returning substantial amounts of cash to our shareholders.
Switching gears, I'd now like to take a couple of minutes and talk a bit about the overall global energy landscape. 2021 was an interesting year with respect to a number of global supply and demand challenges, and we don't expect that to change in 2022. For some time now, we have seen a declining rate of industry capital investment, which has been further exacerbated during the pandemic.
This under invest-underinvestment is also being impacted by other factors, such as infrastructure availability and the uncertain and changing landscape around energy transition. With the market tightening up, geopolitical events are having a material influence on prices again. The current tragic situation in the Ukraine and resulting sanctions on Russian energy has further stressed global supplies. Given all of this, we expect another strong year of crude and product pricing in 2022, and potentially beyond if supply remains challenged.
This is all in an environment of increasing demands. While we certainly experienced significant demand destruction at the onset of the pandemic, global energy demand is quite robust now and has and has very nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels. This is despite the challenges that new variants pose as society has become more and more resilient.
This has added up to a fairly steady decline in global inventories, which are currently tracking below the five-year average with no signs of improving. For Imperial, our low corporate cash breakeven in the mid-20s on a US dollar basis allows us to be profitable even at low prices. Certainly at today's prices, we can generate a lot of cash and grow our returns to shareholders. The priority we have been putting on our existing assets has put us in an enviable position to take advantage of both the demand recovery and the strong commodity price environment.
We saw this in 2021, and we expect it to continue as we go forward this year. As we look to the future, demand for energy in all forms will continue to grow.
The world's population is expected to continue to grow through 2050, and with this growth comes the need for more energy. In addition, while in the developed world we are seeing technology help improve energy efficiency, in other parts of the world, the pursuit of improved standards of living is driving increased per capita energy usage. As the global energy supply evolves to meet this increasing demand, we expect to see growth in natural gas as well as other lower emission energy sources. These trends are expected to vary by sector.
Liquids fuel demand is driven primarily by transportation and chemicals, both of which are expected to grow. Commercial transportation is driven by economic activity, and we see personal vehicle ownership growing as standards of living continue to improve. As standards of living improve, the demand for air travel is also expected to rise.
With respect to chemicals, demand is driven by consumer preferences. Chemicals form the basis for so many products we all use today. You might immediately think of plastics, but don't forget about textiles, cosmetics, fertilizers, and many more products that we all rely on every day. As demand for energy grows, we also expect to see a shift to lower carbon fuels as the world works towards achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. Natural gas is expected to grow significantly, as are renewables and nuclear.
Though we expect to see growth in overall demand, that growth should be tempered somewhat by advances in technologies that drive energy efficiency. Clearly, there are many possible scenarios around the future energy mix, but one thing sure seems certain: they all continue to require oil and gas to a large extent.
To ensure there are sufficient supplies of oil and gas, significant future investment is required. While there's a lot of uncertainty around the transition timing and how it may take place, we need to remain flexible to respond regardless of how it plays out. Before I pass this over to Sherri to talk in more detail about our environmental, social, and governance performance and priorities, I wanted to take just a minute to talk about sustainability.
As I just mentioned, of the many potential energy scenarios out there, the one thing that is quite consistent is that oil and gas is seen as being a key part of the mix for decades to come. We see Canada as needing to play a large role in providing that future energy demand.
Canada is a world leader in sustainable development, with some of the most stringent environmental and regulatory requirements in the world. Our industry in Canada has shown incredible initiative and unprecedented collaboration via the well-established COSIA consortium, and more recently, via the Pathways Alliance. At Imperial, we are excited to reinforce our commitments to sustainability. We have demonstrated our ability to respond effectively to what the market brings, and are confident we will deliver on the challenges facing us with respect to current environmental challenges, and we'll do so while preserving shareholder value.
We have aggressive greenhouse gas intensity reduction goals, and most importantly, these goals are underpinned by specific plans to achieve them. Technology and innovation are key to achieving many of our commitments and goals, including economic emissions reductions.
Our long history of research and development will continue to serve us well on this journey. With that, I'd like to now hand it over to Sherri Evers. Thank you.
Good morning, and thank you, Brad, for that introduction. I'm really looking forward today to sharing with all of you the significant progress that we've made in the areas of sustainability over this past year. It's not also what we've accomplished in the past year, it's also the progress we've made on our plans as we look forward in the coming decades, as Brad has just alluded to.
Before I get into talking about the momentum that we've gained in our ESG and sustainability work at Imperial, I first wanted to touch on the overall foundational value of being an integrated oil and gas company in Canada. As Brad talked about, Canada is a leader in ESG, and one of the reasons that we are a leader in ESG is the geopolitical framework that we have and enjoy in this country.
We have a strong human rights record, we have a relatively stable political environment, and we have some of the most stringent but also a cooperative government working with us on the regulatory framework that we work within. Not only that, we have unparalleled expertise when it comes to carbon management, and we are one of the third-largest operators of carbon capture utilization and storage capacity in the world today.
Our emissions measurement and reporting is also a global leader. When Canada originally signed on to the Paris Agreement, Imperial, along with many of our other oil and gas counterparts, started to look at what we were going to be able to do to start abating the emissions that we generate through our operations.
It very quickly came to realize that if we're going to be able to do this to create a greener economy in Canada and do this at the lowest cost to society while ensuring stability and energy supply, that it really was going to take all of us coming together to collaborate with ourselves as industry, through the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero Alliance, and working with the government, working with our indigenous communities, and working with clean tech firms and academic institutions in order to achieve this very lofty goal.
You see, the challenge that we have facing our industry today is really bigger than any one of us can accomplish on our own.
By pooling together our talents and our resources and working to develop that new and innovative technology, we can continue to see Canada remain firmly at the top of the ESG spectrum, but also become a leader in terms of climate change. Canada has lofty goals to achieve net zero by 2050, and through this collaboration that we have and in working with government, we believe that we can set the appropriate fiscal and regulatory policies that will enable that rapid deployment of technology advancements that are going to be required to meet those goals of achieving reliable and sustainable low-cost energy to Canadians and to the world.
Now I'd like to focus a little bit more on Imperial sustainability priorities.
Our sustainability report outlines significant detail about what we're doing overall in this space, but I wanted to highlight four strategic areas in our sustainability priorities. The first is around climate. I don't think you can go anywhere these days without thinking about climate change and the impacts, obviously, that will have on oil and gas and how we work to not only to manage the energy transition, or as I like to say, energy transformation, and developing those pathways that'll allow us to achieve that net zero future. Any business in Canada will also tell you the importance of Indigenous reconciliation.
It's extremely important for us to continue to work and collaborate with our Indigenous communities and work to understand what are the priorities that we can work on together, how can we ensure that we have strong economic performance and measurement, and create a social framework that allows them to have societal economic benefits and create generational wealth that we know is extremely important to them.
Imperial has been around for more than 140 years, and we didn't get to this stage without our people. The commitment, the resilience, and the innovation that they bring every day is only further enabled by ensuring that we can create an inclusive workplace where everybody feels that their diverse opinions and ideas are going to be valued and respected.
If you can create an environment where people can bring their best selves to work every single day, we know that we are going to be able to empower our workforce to create solutions for the challenges of today and the opportunities for tomorrow. Imperial will continue to have a strong commitment towards environmental performance, particularly around protecting our water resources.
Canada is extremely fortunate to have some of the most water resources in anyone in the world, and it's important that we continue to do our efforts to protect that base. Included with that is also continuing to ensure we can preserve the biodiversity in all the areas where we operate.
Strategic investment into areas that will have meaningful investment impact to the environmental, social and governance continues to be a key priority, while continuing to ensure that we can deliver strong financial performance for our shareholders. If I can get into a little bit more detail around our progress, I'm exceptionally proud. I don't think that I can say at any point in my career with Imperial that I have seen as much progress and momentum around ESG as I have in the last 12 months.
The entire organization has been extremely focused on creating and moving the needle. While I won't talk about all of these throughout the course of today, many of us will touch on a number of these opportunities.
Really the key thing I want you to take away is the momentum that we are building and gaining in the space towards ESG and certainly in our climate efforts. We expect this to really just be the start. You'll see as we talk throughout the day not only what we've accomplished, but the plans that we've set as we look forward. Just to hit on a few examples. When we talk about climate, certainly one of the biggest focus areas is reducing the emissions intensity in our operations, and we are well on our way to delivering our 10% reduction in 2023 versus 2016 levels.
A couple of the key areas that we've been working on are technologies in our Cold Lake region. The first is liquid addition to steam for enhanced recovery, and the second is non-condensable gas.
Both of these technologies are adding light hydrocarbons to steam to enable to get enhanced bitumen recovery. If I move over to our Downstream, as Brad mentioned earlier, we're extremely proud to have announced the largest renewable diesel production facility at our Strathcona Refinery. This opportunity has the opportunity to reduce emissions in commercial transportation by 3 million tons per year. As Brad also mentioned, we've recently established our new targets for emissions reductions intensity out to 2030 with a 30% reduction planned by 2030 versus 2016 levels.
It's not just in the areas of climate and emissions reductions where we've been placing our focus. We continue to have a strong commitment to our Indigenous business development.
In 2021, we achieved our highest level of Indigenous spend, reaching over CAD 3.3 billion since 2008 into helping develop and prosper Indigenous communities. We're also a member of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, and through that council, we have the opportunity to achieve certification through the Progressive Aboriginal Relations.
Through a very rigorous process and through all the excellent work that our teams are doing around increasing our understanding around Indigenous reconciliation and creating economic benefit and development in our Indigenous communities, we're very proud to have received the silver level of PAR certification, and we continue to look forward to growing our status within that certification in the years to come.
Turning to our people again, as I mentioned earlier, we are working on how we can build out a more robust progress in inclusion and diversity. That includes involving our employee resource groups as we work to create a more sustainable and inclusive culture and work environment for the company. I'm exceptionally proud of what we've accomplished in this space, and again, look very much forward to what we can accomplish in the years to come.
Of course, foundational to all of the ESG progress that we've made is a robust governance structure and a very committed leadership team and an engaged board of directors. The ESG management is embedded in all levels of our organization, as you can see. A couple of new areas of focus in the last year have been around climate.
We've created a climate council that works across all parts of our organization, including our Upstream, our Downstream, and Chemicals organizations. We have multifunction teams that are working on developing the pathways and road maps that will allow us to achieve our long-term emissions goals, while at the same time protecting our strategic initiatives and delivering shareholder returns. Following that similar vein, we've created an inclusion and diversity council.
Again, that group is focused on sharing best practices and driving ownership through every level of the organization towards creating that more inclusive and diverse workforce that will really work to empower our people and allow them to bring their best to work every day. New this year, we also engaged Ernst & Young to complete an assessment, an extensive assessment of our ESG framework.
We worked with investors, we worked with our customers to understand what are the risks facing our business and what are the opportunities for Imperial Oil. This has really helped to frame out our ESG strategies as well as our effective risk management as we move forward. I talked about the importance of Indigenous reconciliation, and our journey continues as we look to progress our own understanding, and learning and growth that is required.
In the last year, we've made it a priority to create a safe place for our employees to learn, engage, and understand what Indigenous reconciliation means and where there are opportunities for us to further engage from a business perspective, with the Indigenous communities where we are operating.
We launched a new and expanded training program that included computer-based training as well as in-person learning with a focus on the residential school experience. I can say that in 2021, we had the highest level of participation through our employee groups into this expanding training program. We've been able to leverage that into external volunteering opportunities as well as community engagement and participation across the country. New for us this year as well is an executive-led Indigenous recruitment and retention working group.
The focus of this group, again across multiple disciplines, is to focus on how we can attract Indigenous talent to our organizations and work on developing and furthering their careers within the company. Finally, we have not relented on our focus on creating business development and working towards creating economic benefit for our communities.
As I mentioned previously, we've reached record level spend in 2021 working with indigenous businesses in terms of helping them grow, the financial prosperity in their own communities. We saw our largest, indigenous business operations contract awarded at Kearl this year, and we're exceptionally proud of that. Our efforts are not being recognized only externally, as I mentioned through our PAR certification, but we've also been invited to join a working team with the government of Canada as they look to increase their indigenous, procurement to 5% across the country.
We've been the only oil and gas, company that was invited to participate in those efforts, and so we're exceptionally proud to be part of that working group. Let me now switch gears to climate.
This is certainly, I think, the most pressing challenge or one of the most pressing challenges of our times. I recently attended an industry conference, and somebody had equated that the work that we have to do in the next 28 years to abate carbon to get to a net zero 2050 future is equivalent to what the Industrial Revolution achieved in its time. We certainly have much less time and significant efforts to achieve over the next 28 years.
The real critical thing here is to be able to create an environment where people have access, every person has access to reliable and secure energy at a low and affordable cost. At the same time, we need to be able to accelerate aggressively to achieve the goals that Canada has set out, as well as the Paris Agreement.
This is gonna take a strong amount of patience. It's going to take collaboration with our partners, collaboration with all levels of policymakers, with Indigenous communities, with clean tech firms, and academic institutions. Every reputable energy outlook, and Brad mentioned this in his opening remarks as well, suggests that oil and gas will continue to make up a material part of the energy needs for the future, particularly if we want to have a stable and reliable path to energy as we move forward. Our corporate strategy focuses on four areas.
The first is advancing climate solutions in our operations. The second is around providing lower lifecycle emission products for our customers.
As I mentioned, this can't be done without finding those solutions and collaborating with partners and policymakers to make this happen if we're going to work to achieve society's goals to achieve net zero by 2050. Of course, the way to do that is through transformational technology. We need to evaluate, deploy, and develop the transformational technologies. The good news is that our industry has over 100 years of experience, a strong track record of developing and deploying new technologies.
Let's take a little bit closer look at the various opportunities we have in these spaces across the short, medium, and long term. Both Simon Younger and Jon Wetmore will talk more fully about some of these opportunities in their segments. As you can see, there are multiple pathways towards reducing emissions with a range of possible scenarios.
What we're looking at here is opportunities in renewable opportunities, renewable fuels, next-generation solvent-based activities and technologies, and of course tested and true carbon management technologies like carbon capture and storage. I talked earlier about some of the short-term opportunities in Cold Lake with the laser technology of the liquid addition to steam for enhanced recovery and non-condensable gas. If I looked further up the road to Kearl, we're also working to create significant opportunities as well.
We've commissioned our first full-scale boiler flue gas unit in Alberta's oil sands, and we were awarded an Alberta government grant to deploy an additional five units, waste heat recovery units to be installed on the five boilers at Kearl.
These six units have the opportunity to reduce 220,000 tons of emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, which is the equivalent of saving energy in 26,000 homes in a single year. It's also creating progress around reusing up to 700,000 cubic meters of condensed water per year. If we're looking to the right-hand side of the chart at the short-term customer solutions, we're investing in expanding our advanced fuels and lubricants and our biofuel and renewable blending fuels capabilities.
We've also recently completed some co-processing opportunities at our Sarnia and Nanticoke refineries, taking agricultural feedstocks and mixing that with conventional feeds to create a co-processed fuel at a lower emission. We're also working with ExxonMobil around evaluating opportunities at Sarnia to take waste plastic as a feedstock through advanced recycling at our Sarnia refinery.
Moving further, Brad has already and myself have talked about our participation with the Oil Sands Alliance, and we're deeply engaged in policy discussions with both the Alberta and the Canadian government around how we can create the right fiscal frameworks and economic support to see these opportunities come to fruition, especially in the next decade. In the medium term, we're assessing carbon capture and storage opportunities across our facilities, evaluating as well further opportunities for renewable fuels into our operations to support emissions reductions at our assets.
For our customers, we're evaluating new product opportunities, and we certainly see opportunities in sustainable aviation fuel. It's one of the areas today where we don't have a long-term solution, and sustainable aviation fuel is a way to meet that growing jet demand as we look forward.
When we look at game-changing technologies, certainly Imperial's focus on creating low-emission opportunities has been paramount. Our cyclic solvent process, which replaces steam with propane, reducing the energy requirements and water use, is expected to lower greenhouse gas intensity emissions by 90%, as well as reduce the water usage. We started piloting this technology at Cold Lake facility in 2014.
One of the things we're very optimistic about is that if we couple that with a modest amount of carbon capture and storage at Cold Lake, you could actually see incremental barrels being produced with net zero emissions. Moving to the long term, we're certainly evaluating a greater integration of hydrogen at our operations and evaluating the applications for customers as well.
We're also exploring greenhouse gas-emitting energy and power sources, including small modular reactors, to provide heat and power from nuclear fission. Our relationship with ExxonMobil also adds significant benefit, as we can leverage their more than 30 years of experience and leadership in carbon capture and storage. The company continues to also collaborate on carbon capture and storage technologies, including carbonate fuel cell technology, as well as direct air capture for the longer term. Lastly, there's the concept of bitumen beyond combustion.
Diversifying and producing non-combustible products from our oil sands presents a significant opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while garnering an economic advantage. Our own Sarnia research facility is looking at opportunities of creating feedstock for carbon fiber produced with a competitive advantage.
Hopefully, you can see a series of plans that we've outlined really look to drive Imperial towards both the short, medium, and long-term goals that we have to reduce emissions in our operations. More specifically into our oil sands facilities, where we see some of our highest emissions today. We approach these opportunities with measurable objectives and very specific plans to be able to achieve them. We're on track to meet our greenhouse gas intensity target of a 10% reduction by 2023 versus 2016 levels, building on the already 20% reduction from 2013 to 2016.
Through the plans that I've outlined this morning, these form the framework for us to work towards achieving the new goal that we've set earlier this year, which is a 30% reduction in our greenhouse gas intensity by 2030 versus 2016 levels.
We're continuing to build the road maps and the framework to achieve net zero in our oil sands operations by 2050. While much work has been done on the upstream part of our business, we are also working diligently on our downstream business to build out those road maps as well to 2050. I'd like to take an opportunity to just talk about a couple of additional items around what we're doing to focus on our our assets, our customers, and our longer-term plans.
Carbon capture and storage is certainly one of the proven technologies to help decarbonize energy-intensive industries. It's a complex undertaking, and it requires significant amount of investment, expertise, and collaboration. The good news is those are things that we have in spades and strength, both in the Alberta industry but also in Imperial.
Extensive knowledge of subsurface and reservoir management is key, and oil and gas companies have some of the strongest resources and assets to understand those complexities. Alberta also has a very established, and proven geology for carbon storage. The Basal Cambrian, where Cold Lake is sitting today, is one of the key areas for long-term safe storage of CO2.
In joining the Pathways, we're looking at those opportunities to collect the carbon from the assets and from the more than 20 assets between Fort McMurray and Cold Lake to inject into common infrastructure pipe, CO2 pipeline, and collect that CO2 into the storage hub in the Cold Lake area. We're certainly working to develop those opportunities for Imperial to be able to create the appropriate scale and do this all at the most affordable cost to ensure we can provide that low-cost energy to society.
We're also looking at expanding the use of carbon capture in our downstream as well that could help to support emissions reduction opportunities into the future.
Our recently announced plans for the renewable diesel manufacturer at Strathcona Refinery will also source low carbon hydrogen that is produced with carbon capture and storage to reduce the carbon intensity of our fuel being offered. You can see the opportunity for carbon capture and storage across the integrated value chain. Let's now talk about how we're working to help our customers reduce their emissions by advancing the development of low carbon solutions. John will talk more about this in his segment, but I wanted to touch on the strategic approach.
Electrification is certainly front and foremost on everyone's mind, but electrification of vehicles doesn't necessarily meet all needs, especially when you start looking at different applications, particularly into long-haul transport or heavy duty. Biofuels is quickly becoming probably the most attainable quickest solution, but also providing opportunities for the long term.
You can see that the demand for biofuels is growing exponentially out over the next 10 years. Additionally, the other area of growth is for jet. While it needs to still recover from pandemic lows, you can see that there's a significant opportunity as well for jet. With Imperial supplying 7 airports across the country and our 34% market share, looking at opportunities to create sustainable aviation fuel certainly becomes important.
We're also focused on producing advanced fuels to improve fuel efficiency through products like our Synergy Supreme and our Diesel Efficient, but also growing our biofuel blending and distribution capabilities across the country and piloting those agricultural feedstocks to produce co-processed commercial fuels. Now, just to talk a little bit further about the investment that we're making into our Strathcona Refinery with the renewable diesel production.
Again, this is something we're exceptionally proud of, and it's because it's designed to create meaningful reductions in emissions, but it is also a very impactful investment. The reason that it's going to create value for our shareholders is that it provides a low carbon intensity option for our customers, particularly in the heavier segments where there isn't a clear answer, as I mentioned before, about electrification. Today, traditional biofuels do not necessarily have the operability to be successful in the Canadian climate.
This drop-in premium fuel allows performance of heavy-duty equipment and commercial transportation to operate at the same levels as if they're running a more conventional diesel product. It creates significant value by ensuring that we have a solution to our core customer base to provide that opportunity for them to lower their emissions into the future.
As I mentioned, the Strathcona project will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tons per year as we look forward and can perform in the harshest of Canadian climate in our winters. We're also looking at opportunities to be able to use this fuel into our own operations, lowering our own greenhouse gas emissions. I hope over the course of my presentation this morning, you've been able to see that we have a series of opportunities across the value chain to lower our emissions and provide solutions for our customers, and keep that momentum going forward.
For all of you that watch and analyze our company know that we don't put plans forward without having specific ways in which we can work to achieve them.
The strategic approach we have for our in-situ technology development, our advanced customer offerings through renewable products and sustainable aviation fuel, and our evaluation of emerging energy sources is grounded in expertise and experience. Our strategy is to leverage this expertise into our integrated business model and our advantage technologies through the skills and innovation of our people to build that competitive business for the long term.
We plan to play a key role in the energy transformation while retaining investment flexibility across a range of opportunities to ensure we can deliver returns and maximize those returns for our investors. Many people believe that a net zero future means a turn away or no fossil fuels.
I believe that Canada, and specifically Imperial, with the plans that we've laid forward, can be the provider and supplier of choice for sustainable, reliable, socially responsible produced energy to supply to both Canadians and to the world. I want to thank you for your time today, and I'd like to turn it over to Simon Younger, our Senior Vice President of Upstream, to talk about the upstream business. Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, Sherri, and good morning, everybody. It's my pleasure to be with you this morning, providing an overview of our upstream assets and strategies. It's a real honor for me to once again represent Imperial's upstream and its many wonderfully talented and dedicated people. I'm gonna start at an overall level. We'll talk about some of the success that we achieved in 2021, including some key parameters like volumes and unit costs.
I'll discuss our outlooks, including our capital plan. That will be followed by our asset-specific strategies and outlooks. Along the way, we'll look at our expanding portfolio of digital and how we're deploying new technologies to improve our performance. Throughout, I hope you'll get a real sense of the priority we're placing on improving our greenhouse gas intensity.
Of course, we've been working this for many years, but I think you'll see that we're accelerating our plans. With that, let's get started on the upstream. Just a quick reminder of our upstream strategy, which is to be the best-in-class producer, maximizing value from the assets we have while we position the business to compete in a lower carbon future. One of our key advantages is our long life, low decline assets that offer decades of cash flow potential, enabling a focus on continuous improvement, technology, and innovation, which in turn supports our strategy of targeting industry-leading unit cost and reliability.
A capital discipline is key to our strategy also, and I think you'll see that clearly in the upcoming slides. We're pursuing only select capital-efficient projects that create long-term value.
We've got many compelling opportunities that grow and sustain our volumes as well as profitably lowering emissions. Another key part of the strategy is the enormous potential we see in digital and research. Our digital portfolio continues to grow, and our research and development efforts are enabling transformation at Cold Lake and further upside at Kearl. The photo you see on this slide is of the Mahkeses LASER project startup from early 2021. We'll talk more about this later, but it's part of the greenhouse gas intensity reduction journey at Cold Lake.
Finally, and most importantly, in everything we do, we continue to pursue excellence through safe, responsible operations. As Brad discussed at the outset, 2021 was a very strong year for our business overall, and certainly upstream played a significant role in that, as you can see here.
With sustainment of the gains made in 2020. I'll speak to the numbers in the table in a moment, but it bears highlighting that the team delivered a very successful year while managing COVID and maintaining priority on safe operations. We also maintained our capital discipline and focus on cost amidst the strengthening commodity price environment. Now, looking at the table. On the left, I'd like to draw your eye to the three green arrows, which highlight some trends that are within our control.
We're showing results for 2021 and comparing them to 2019, which of course, was a much more normal year than was 2020. At the top, you'll see we raised production by 8% or over 30 KOEBD, which as Brad mentioned, was a record for the Upstream.
Next, while our total cash costs in absolute dollars were up around 5%, our unit costs were down 3%. What I'm really most proud of is the unit cost excluding energy, which is down 10% over the same time period. Also, you can see on the table that our greenhouse gas intensity fell by about 12% in 2021. We also made great progress on GHG-advantaged projects such as Mahkeses LASER, which has already been mentioned, and the Kearl Boiler Flue Gas.
We remain on track with our intensity reduction targets. I'll share more background on some of the key GHG projects throughout the presentation this morning. This chart emphasizes our high quality, long life, stable production base with low decline.
Production is predominantly represented by our core oil sands assets, Kearl and Cold Lake, and of course, our non-operated ownership in Syncrude, all of which have low sustaining capital requirements. Underpinning our production profile is a large reserve space. At year-end 2021, proved and probable reserves stand at approximately 4.3 billion barrels, supporting decades of remaining life. This year, we expect production to average between 425,000-440,000 oil equivalent barrels per day, and I'd certainly expect growth versus the 428 delivered in 2021.
This outlook includes Kearl at around 265-270 KBD gross and Cold Lake at around 135-140 KBD. Speaking of Kearl, we are expecting to see a relatively lower first quarter this year.
A typical plan would see us in the range of 220-240 KBD in Q1, although last year we were well above that with a record-breaking quarter, as you might recall. With the weather challenges from earlier in the year, we definitely won't be matching last year's Q1, and I'd expect to be around or even a bit below the bottom of that range that I mentioned. A bit of a slower start to 2022, but certainly I have no concerns about delivery of our full-year production target at Kearl.
You can see in the chart the noticeable impact of improvements at Kearl in 2021, driven by the addition of supplemental crushes and also moving to a single train annual turnaround.
Cold Lake is also performing exceptionally well relative to the outlook we shared at the last Investor Day with a number of base optimization improvements. Moving on to our cash flow outlook. We have strengthened the upstream's cash generation versus the outlook we provided at our last Investor Day. The chart here is based on a $60 WTI scenario. What you can see is that we now expect to generate more cash than we forecast previously.
In fact, about 15% more, excluding the additional help from market factors. The bar on the left-hand side represents the prior outlook averaged across the 2021-2025 period shown at our last Investor Day. On the right-hand side is the five years, 2022-2026.
The improvement is driven predominantly by cost reductions and efficiencies, which have been reduced by a very significant 9%, and also higher production, which has grown by 3% versus the prior outlook. The bridge also includes a benefit from market factors, such as in modeling a $2 narrowing of the WCS differential, offset by a Forex rate change, and you can see those assumptions noted at the bottom of the chart there.
The combined effect of growing production and reducing costs, supported by a pipeline of attractive investment opportunities, is to lower the unit cash costs or dollars per barrel of our upstream business. This, in turn, is improving our resilience to lower prices. Over this window that I'm showing, our averaged unit cost has decreased by around $3 per barrel versus the prior outlook.
On the flip side, of course, our portfolio has significant leverage to higher oil prices being predominantly liquids, unhedged, and bitumen-based. Based on this improvement, we are confident that our strategy is really delivering results. Next, just to give you a bit of an overview of our investment outlook for Upstream. The key message I want to leave you with is that beyond our sustaining capital needs, we're investing for value through select and GHG-advantaged growth.
On the chart, sustaining capital is represented by the blue bars, and GHG advantage growth is represented in green. The red diamonds show the outlook that we shared at our last Investor Day for the years 2022-2024. As you can see, we are down a bit from that outlook. Really just reflecting plan updates as we continue to refine and focus on capital efficiency within the planned activities.
Our sustaining capital requirements remain low, and even as we execute on several large mining projects with a five-year average of around $5 per barrel. Some of the key sustaining investments in the outlook include the Kearl In-Pit Tailings Project, autonomous haul at Kearl, the Mildred Lake mine expansion at Syncrude, and also Cold Lake infill drilling. Our GHG-advantaged capital includes things like Cold Lake Grand Rapids Phase One, Cold Lake Leming Field redevelopment, which is a little bit new, and I'll talk a little bit more on that later, Kearl boiler flue gas projects and Kearl secondary recovery projects.
Importantly, these investments support our plan to achieve a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas intensity from our operated oil sands business by 2030 relative to 2016 levels, as outlined by Sherry. Okay, shifting focus a little bit.
I'm really pleased to give you an update on our digital program. We continue to see enormous scope for value creation here, and relative to the last detailed update I gave, we are actually accelerating value with a rapidly growing portfolio of digital opportunities. At our last update, cumulative value realized was CAD 150 million. That has now grown to over CAD 400 million. Our portfolio of defined projects has grown to CAD 750 million of cumulative annual value potential by 2026, as you can see on the chart, up from the CAD 500 million that we shared at the 2020 Investor Day.
We also see upside of over CAD 1 billion, including future potential. Now, these are very large numbers, obviously.
As you can see on the slide, though, near-term wins are underpinned by over 30 successful initiatives to date. As a reminder, we evaluate our digital projects under the lens of three key principles. They must be capital efficient. They must have a very fast payback and think in terms of months, not years. The way we deploy the technology must be flexible and integrate with our existing operations. The implementation of digital technology is spreading across our organizations, not just limited to our digital team. Over 50% of the value last year has come from analytics work.
To be honest, this is the most exciting focus area for us going forward. I'll highlight a few of those examples on the next page here. Starting at the top left with enhanced mine planning.
We've leveraged our vast set of plant and mine data to enhance our understanding of our resource and optimize mine plans. This optimization has already supported roughly 8 KBD benefit and will enable a total of about 10-15 KBD in the future. Moving to digital well downtime tracking, we've built a tool that integrates our well production data, downtime information, and delivers repair team execution priorities to minimize time to repair and optimize production. At the top right, I'll touch on surveillance and failure analytics.
Observing about a 1.5 KBD difference between our two trains at Kearl, regular troubleshooting was unable to determine the cause. Our digital teams applied advanced analytics to vast amounts of historical operating data and correlations to reveal the discrepancies. The resulting recommendations closed the gap, resulting in about a $17 million per year benefit.
Analytics enable numerous other opportunities, many related to equipment failure analysis and production optimizations through building and applying machine learning algorithms. In total, we can see benefit here that exceeds CAD 40 million a year. The bottom left example refers to our annual maintenance plan tool, which through digitization enables enhanced work prioritization and elimination. This tool integrates with SAP, which is our maintenance platform, providing increased definition of tasks and enhanced screening.
These optimizations ensure that only the highest risk and highest priority work is selected into the plan. Another example of maintenance improvement is providing real-time management and feedback to maintenance execution. This tool extracts tasks from SAP and enables efficient worker assignment and tracking to drive increased time on tools. Lastly, I'll touch on an opportunity to further optimize Cold Lake's water balance.
Cold Lake, as you might know, has a complex network of wells, pipelines, and plant facilities. The amount of water produced back from the field has to balance with the amount of steam that we're sending out to field, otherwise production constraints arise. This is another example of where computers, provided with the right data and optimization algorithms, can help us make much faster and better decisions. Okay, let's shift gears and I'd like to focus on our key assets, starting of course, with the strength of Kearl.
The volumes performance at Kearl last year was outstanding. We achieved 263 kbd, which was over a 40 kbd increase versus the prior year on a gross basis. New production records were set in nine of 12 months.
We achieved the best ever month in June with production across that month of 311 kbd. The chart at the top left illustrates the key factors that contributed to that enhanced performance. First, in 2021, we were able to realize the full benefit from our supplemental crushers, including enhancements to capacity that we didn't realize in 2020 due to the market constraints. We also achieved record reliability in 2021, supported by the new crushers.
These factors combined resulted in 24 kbd of growth. Second, the shutdown interval extension achieved a year earlier than planned, resulted in a 7 kbd uplift. Lastly, grade in recovery factors contributed 9 kbd of growth. Equally important, I wanna highlight unit cash costs with the bottom-left chart. Unit costs are down around 21% versus 2019.
In 2020, Kearl achieved a unit cost of $20.56 per barrel. In 2021, we further reduced that by about $0.70 per barrel, though that was more than offset by Forex and energy cost increases in the substantially higher price environment. As you can see from the chart, excluding the impact of increased Forex and energy cost in 2021, Kearl's unit OpEx was below $20 per barrel. Now, if I broaden things out a little bit and take a longer term look at the Kearl journey. We are accelerating optimization based on the foundation of stable and reliable operations. We are now targeting 280 KBD in 2024, a year earlier than our prior outlook.
The factors that are driving that are achieving our single plant annual turnaround strategy a year ahead of plan, debottlenecking, reliability, and maintenance improvements, such as in our ore prep plants, where we continue to optimize materials used and refine maintenance execution strategies. Enhanced mine planning and improved recovery, and the digital initiatives that I've already discussed. We're also laser-focused on driving down unit cost to below $20 per barrel. This will be achieved through a focus on structural cost reductions.
Think everything from maintenance to third-party contractor spend to consumables. Also, of course, efficient volumes growth to 280 KBD, and focusing our digital and technology on cost improvement, such as the autonomous haul initiative, which I'll update you on shortly. Beyond that, we continue to evaluate further production potential at Kearl above 280 KBD.
On the next slide, I'll highlight some of the technologies that are supporting that. First, starting on the left, an update on advanced wear materials. We continue to push hard on testing and trialing different materials to improve the longevity of parts such as shovel teeth, ore screens, pump impellers, and sizer teeth. At the last Investor Day, I shared an overview of our successful pilot for shovel teeth. Since then, we've landed on the optimal design, which will double the life of our teeth.
We're currently adding tungsten carbide onto ore screens to quadruple their life, and similarly for sizer teeth, with a plan to implement that by 2023.
Later this year, we will begin upgrading our large hydrotransport pumps to contain embedded tungsten carbide rods that we expect to extend the life, which currently, believe it or not, is only about three months, and these rods will increase the life three- to four-fold. These reliability improvements support a 4 kbd production uplift. We're on track to realize some of that this year, but we'll see the full benefit being achieved by year-end 2023.
Next, shown on the slide are two secondary tailings recovery projects, which have the potential for over 10 kbd of production benefit, supporting Kearl's journey beyond 280 kbd. Both projects will apply column cell technology. Column cells provide additional separation of bitumen from tailings by air countercurrent, which offers a second opportunity for bitumen flotation.
One opportunity is recovery from coarse tailings, and the other is recovery from flotation tailings. Both of these secondary recovery projects are anticipated to start up in the mid-2020s. These projects will reduce bitumen in tailings ponds, reduce operating costs, and improve GHG intensity. The center photo actually shows you our coarse tailings bitumen recovery pilot at Kearl. We recently completed this successful field trial. It ran from July to October of last year.
Okay. I'm pleased to give you a brief update on autonomous haulage or AHS, where our ongoing conversions are improving both profitability and safety. This technology application has been in progress since 2017, and we're on track to convert about 70% of our fleet by the end of the third quarter of this year. We're currently working on converting our 44th truck.
In 2021, we achieved record material movement, tripling the amount moved in 2020 with AHS. Consistent with our prior communications, the unit expense savings of autonomous haul are around $1 a barrel. Factors that drive this are the productivity uplift, reduced staffing requirements, and higher utilization. The autonomous platform is not just about optimizing the trucks. The platform also improves shovel productivity through enhanced dispatching capabilities, and it supports broader fleet productivity through automated queuing, spotting, and dumping.
As I shared with you last year or last Investor Day, this technology really works at Kearl. In addition to unit cost improvements, AHS supports safety by reducing the number of people in hazardous areas. Additionally, the platform provides collision avoidance and enhanced safety for all of the other networked but staffed mobile equipment in the mine.
I'm very proud to say that we are on track to be the first fully autonomous oil sands mining operator by 2023. Next, a quick spotlight on boiler flue gas, which you've heard a little bit about already. This is an emissions reduction effort that also delivers value to the bottom line. A schematic of the process is shown at the right. This technology recovers waste heat from a boiler's exhaust to preheat process water, resulting in less steam usage and lower GHG emissions.
This emissions reduction technology has been successfully deployed on one boiler, which was started up in May of last year and will now be applied to five additional boilers by the end of 2023, as Sherry shared.
This project has robust economics and drives significant greenhouse gas benefits, eliminating a total of 220,000 tons of CO2 across all six boilers, as has already been mentioned. It also creates significant cost savings of approximately CAD 40 million per year. It's already been mentioned, but I would also like to add my acknowledgement and thanks to the Government of Alberta for providing grant funding of CAD 20 million. This funding was granted through the Alberta TIER Program, which is designed to incentivize technology and innovation that reduces emissions.
Okay. Now I'd like to move to our Cold Lake asset. Performance in 2021 at Cold Lake exceeded expectations. We surpassed 2020 Investor Day volumes guidance by a full 10 kbd. As you can see on the top chart, production was increased by 8 kbd year-over-year from 2020 to 2021.
Drivers of that increase were improved reliability. We saw reliability that was the strongest it's been in five years, and was supported by improvements we made to our water balance strategy, which together added 5 KBD of growth at Cold Lake. Three KBD was driven by optimization of existing wells and also production from new infills drilled to the Mahkeses Field, which started up in the second half of the year. Also on this slide, you can see we are highlighting many milestones that were achieved in 2021. To name a few, we started up the Mahkeses LASER project in the first quarter.
We progressed an innovative niche drilling program, which I'll share more on in a moment.
We progressed margin enhancements such as butane blending, which we're about to start up in the first half of this year, and progressed significant diluent optimizations that had a huge impact on the bottom line. As you can see on the bottom chart, we expect to sustain strong volumes and cash generation at Cold Lake, underpinned by strong operating performance and select investments.
In the near term, we'll be around 140 kbd, and longer term we'll be in the range of 140-150 kbd at Cold Lake. Now looking at a bit of a broader view of Cold Lake over a longer time horizon, and in particular, our strategy to maximize asset value and cash flow through a transformational GHG strategy. Cold Lake, of course, is our flagship in situ asset with decades of remaining production potential.
We've produced about 1.7 billion barrels to date, and we have about 1.1 billion barrels of proved and probable reserves remaining. We are progressing plans to accelerate the use of solvent technologies while increasing profitability and reducing our reliance on steam. The top left chart shows our production profile out to 2030. The wedge highlighted in blue shows the growth of lower emissions production over time, and by 2030, over 40% of our volumes will be lower emissions.
Our technology transition will reduce greenhouse gas intensity. Now if I draw your attention to the chart on the bottom left, you can see that our emissions intensity in the 2026-2030 period is expected to be about 25% lower than the period 2021-2025.
Also of particular note, intensity in that same period is significantly below our prior forecast, which is shown by the red diamond. As to how we are achieving this transformation, I would draw your attention to the table at the bottom right. This table is a high-level roadmap of the technologies that we're implementing that Sherry has already mentioned. We've already implemented LASER at Mahihkan and Mahkeses fields. In 2024, we plan to start up the Grand Rapids phase 1 solvent assisted SAGD project utilizing spare Nabiye steam.
Then we're also progressing a SAGD project at Leming, which I'll mention or to discuss further on the next slide. By mid- to late-2020s, we plan to deploy technologies such as non-condensable gas injection or NCG and our cyclic solvent process or CSP.
It's also really worth noting that the latest Cold Lake development plan includes no further new CSS developments. I'll highlight some of these technologies a little further on the next two slides. Now on this slide, I'm gonna start you on the right. It's a bit of my strategy to make sure you're continuing to pay attention. This is a pretty neat story. What you see there is a photo of our Leming field plant, where we are progressing the field redevelopment that I just mentioned. We plan to revitalize a core part of the Cold Lake Clearwater Reservoir.
Now Leming is where Imperial trialed and proved the Heritage CSS technology starting, of course, in the best part of the reservoir. Early pilots began in the 1970s and were successful. However, only a portion of the high-quality resource was recovered.
With this project, we plan to deploy SAGD to capture the remaining high-quality resource in this area. We anticipate 9 KBDs of peak production at about 35% lower GHG intensity relative to CSS. This efficient and resilient investment has a $20,000 per flowing barrel capital intensity. On the left-hand side, you see a photo of our infill drilling in action. Driven by a strong focus on maximizing value from existing infrastructure, we have collaborated with drilling contractor. This is a first for Cold Lake.
Up until now, we had not been able to restore existing wells on existing pads due to inability to position sufficiently capable rigs. We've now executed over 20 opportunities and have a robust inventory of opportunities looking forward. This is providing a highly efficient and flexible program that can flex to align with capital targets.
We expect to reach over 5 KBD of production from this program by 2024 with a capital intensity of about $10,000 per flowing barrel. Continuing on, I'd like to further underscore how critical research and development are to supporting our asset strategy at Cold Lake, and particularly the greenhouse gas transformation that I've mentioned. Here, I'm highlighting three technologies that will enable future greenhouse gas reductions. First, at the left, enhanced late life process will replace steam with butane in late life steam flood fields.
The technology reduces greenhouse gas intensity by roughly 70% and does not require water.
The photo you see there is a pilot that we've built at one of our steam flood pads where we will be shortly starting up injection through four butane injectors and flowing nine producers for a pilot period of about two years. Second, non-condensable gas is an opportunity where methane is co-injected with steam in late life low pressure pads. The technology can offset steam, which reduces water reuse and greenhouse gas intensity and improves cost efficiency.
Now NCG is used across industry for SAGD operations, but we will be trialing it in steam flood areas at Cold Lake. We plan to start up a field study this year that will utilize two horizontal injectors and 27 producer wells. As you saw in our strategy slide, we plan to apply NCG more broadly from about 2026 onwards.
The third technology to highlight is our cyclic solvent process or CSP, which was developed in our upstream research lab. This non-thermal process reduces GHG intensity by 90% relative to CSS. This technology has already been successfully piloted at Cold Lake, and as you saw, we are pursuing commercial deployment in the late 2020s. Before I leave Cold Lake, I'm excited to share a little bit more information with you on a carbon capture and storage opportunity that's based at the asset.
Now CCS has the potential to be an important component in Cold Lake's emissions reduction strategy applied in conjunction, of course, with the solvent technologies that I've discussed.
We are currently evaluating multiple options that will underpin the concept for our first CCS project at Cold Lake. The schematic on the bottom right shows you the type of concept under evaluation. Steam and diluent are injected into the reservoir to enable bitumen production as we do today. The two gas streams that we have, are evaluating for carbon capture are the produced gas that comes back with the bitumen, which incidentally has a relatively high concentration of CO2, and the flue gas that comes off the boilers, and the captured CO2 will be injected into the Basal Cambrian beneath our bitumen production reservoir.
Startup of our first CCS project is projected for the mid- to late 2020s, positioning this project to potentially be one of the first within the Pathways initiative.
Shifting focus now to our Syncrude ownership, where we are looking forward to capturing value from transition to the new owner-operated model. I'm really proud of the successful partner engagement and collaboration that delivered this transformational step in the asset strategy in 2021, and I particularly acknowledge all the hardworking and dedicated staff of Syncrude and Suncor who are working together to implement this transition on behalf of all the owners.
In terms of status, a detailed transition plan is underway for the full integration and consolidation of people, processes, and systems to enable the planned value capture and is targeted for completion by the end of 2023. This new model will result in roughly CAD 300 million worth of synergies, and the operator is targeting to achieve CAD 200 million of savings in the first 12 months.
Now, those efficiencies include annual savings in turnaround and maintenance costs, leveraging economies of scale from consolidated regional support organizations and integrated economies of costs of below $30 per barrel at Syncrude, representing a significant reduction from the actual unit cost that was achieved in 2021. As you know, Syncrude produces a synthetic crude product which trades at similar pricing to WTI. Imperial share of production continues to be predominantly consumed in our own refineries, creating integration value and advantage for us.
Okay, before closing, I just wanna remind you of our future resource optionality in the upstream, including a large and attractive portfolio of growth opportunities with net zero potential. We are employing a strategic approach to future development. Our multi-billion-barrel in situ opportunity set includes Aspen, Corner, Clark Creek, and Clyden, which is shown on the map there.
Our strategy is to maintain optionality at these leases, while in the background, we are progressing technologies aimed at making these large in situ developments more attractive, both economically and in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Now, one of the most attractive of these technologies is enhanced bitumen recovery or what we call EBRT. This technology has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas intensity by up to 60% relative to industry average SAGD, and also achieve lower operating costs and enhance profitability through faster recovery of the resource and higher production rates.
This technology has been proven by us at a lab scale in our research center, and we are currently progressing plans for a field pilot. While the current base plan at Aspen remains SA-SAGD and is ready to execute, the benefits of utilizing EBRT are obvious, as illustrated in the top left chart.
The further potential exists when combined with CCS being developed within the Pathways Alliance for net-zero incremental production. We feel really good about the future optionality in our in-situ portfolio. Finally, I'll just make a quick comment about our unconventional strategy. As you would be well aware, we are currently marketing our assets. Although interest is exceptionally strong, no definitive decision has yet been made to sell.
Future decisions will of course be aligned with our upstream strategy of maximizing value. As we conclude the upstream section, I would like to reiterate a few key messages. First, we remain focused on maximizing value from existing assets.
The team is focused on sustaining efficiencies captured as we target industry-leading unit cost and reliability. Next, I hope you got a strong sense for our capital discipline, our very attractive set of growth opportunities, and our increasing focus on reducing greenhouse gas intensity. Our industry-leading digital portfolio continues to deliver. At Kearl, of course, we continue to focus on efficient volumes growth, and we're on track to achieve 280 KBD by 2024. With that, I'd like to conclude the upstream section and certainly thank you for your attention.
Next, we have a break scheduled for 10 minutes, and then we'll resume with Jon Wetmore, our VP of Downstream. Thank you very much.
Welcome back, everyone. I hope you had a good break, albeit short. My name's Jon Wetmore. I'm the Vice President of the Downstream for Imperial. What I'd like to do now is walk you through an update for our Downstream and Chemicals business, which is always evolving. I'd like to start first with our key strategies for the Downstream and Chemicals business. Firstly, we strive to deliver industry-leading performance on safety, reliability, cost, and efficiency in all aspects of our operations.
Next, we invest in specific product delivery logistics, which we select on a strategic basis that's driven by our lowering our cost to serve and providing industry-leading supply reliability to our customers. We build upon our brand strengths in Esso and Mobil for both fuels and lubricants to create industry-leading product offers across a broad spectrum of customers in Canada.
We are putting increasing time, effort, energy, and investment into developing and implementing lower carbon products. Our customers want this, our regulations are asking more of us to do this, and our strategy is to provide compelling low carbon product offers that make Imperial a partner of choice during the energy transition. We're working relentlessly to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions in our operations. We take advantage of industry-leading refining assets by exploiting their ability to run flexible crudes as well now as renewable feedstocks.
Finally, we have a relentless approach to squeeze as much value as we can from integration between our assets, integration between refineries and upstream, between our two refineries in Ontario, and between our refining and chemical operations in Sarnia. On this next slide, we wanted to review something we've shown you before, but I think it bears repeating.
It's just showing a little bit of how gasoline and diesel crack spreads in Canada compared to the U.S. Here in Canada, crack spreads in Canada are really driven by the U.S. key markers in the U.S., Chicago and New York Harbor. What we've plotted here are crack spreads in Canada in the dark blue versus those New York Harbor and Chicago markets. We've used the same crude base in this case to keep things on an apples-to-apples basis, and in this case, a conventional crude called light sweet crude MSW.
We've used a 50-50 mix of East and West here. For Canada, that's 50% Edmonton and Toronto, and in the U.S., 50% Chicago and the New York Harbor.
What you can see here is that the product crack spreads in Canada are stronger than they are in the U.S. for both gasoline on the left and diesel on the right. This difference persists across an entire decade. If we plotted the data going back even further, it would show the same story. If you look closely at the dark blue layer between these two, you'll see that Canada has oftentimes seen double the crack spreads of the U.S., particularly since 2016.
One further point here is that these graphs are on a common crude slate between Canada and the U.S. In reality, roughly a third of Canada's refineries exist very close to the crude source of Western Canada in the area around Edmonton. Those refineries, of course, have very, very low cost of transportation considering their proximity to the crude source.
If you added that at our own Strathcona Refinery there in Edmonton, it enjoys that benefit. If you added that advantage on average to both of these charts, you'd find a further growing of the advantage for Canada on the order of $2-$3 a barrel. Imperial is very well-positioned to reap rewards from this advantage in the Canadian market as we are the largest refining capacity here in Canada. On this next slide, we wanted to provide an update on Canada's fuel demand following the pandemic.
You can see from the numbers on the left that gasoline and diesel have recovered to about 90%-95% of pre-pandemic levels. In this case, pre-pandemic, as we measured it, is the same period in 2019.
Jet fuel, you can see, is up to about 70%-75% of 2019 levels, and that's mostly driven by domestic air travel here in Canada. We're hopeful now that many of the COVID restrictions are being lifted including on air travel, and that may see now a lift in international air travel. Jet demand may continue to recover this year, but we would expect that the recovery does extend into 2023.
To give you an update very recently, here in the first quarter of 2022, the COVID Omicron variant definitely had an impact on fuel demands in January and February, but we are now starting to see those demands diminish or demand impacts diminish in March. We're pleased to see that jet fuel demand recovery, which is our numbers here, Imperial's numbers at 70%-75%.
I wanted to mention that those are above the industry average, probably 5%-10% better than the industry average, as we have had some competitive gains in Eastern Canada by aggressively bidding on airline contracts as we saw the recovery starting to spool up last year. For the Canadian refining business, Imperial is advantaged by having larger refineries than our competitors in Canada, and we gain further access by having access or benefit from access to world-leading technology and expertise through ExxonMobil.
Our refining assets are all greater than 100,000 barrels a day in capacity, and they're all in the top half of refining capacity in Canada in terms of both size and complexity.
Our two Ontario refineries, Sarnia and Nanticoke, are run in an integrated fashion with pipeline connections between them that allow each site to process hydrocarbons that are best suited to its configuration. One of our greatest strengths is the huge amount of operations and technical support that we get from ExxonMobil. They are a globally recognized leader in refining. We have the benefit of not having to invent our own solutions to problems that we encounter in this business. Instead, we always reach for best practices from ExxonMobil.
This is a massive, unique advantage for Imperial here in Canada. We maximize heavy crude processing at our facilities, particularly at our Sarnia site, where we have the only coking unit at a refinery in Ontario. We invest at scale for energy efficiency in our assets as well. We've got cogeneration now at all three of our refineries.
At our Strathcona site, we also manufacture diluent for our upstream operations at Cold Lake. That provides a nice secure source of supply of diluent for Cold Lake and an option for producing gasoline versus diluent at the Strathcona refinery. It helps us avoid some of the more expensive costs of diluent that are imported sometimes into Canada. The chart on the right, you can see that we've achieved about 90% utilization in 2021, and that's averaging about 380,000 barrels per day of throughput. Next year, for 2022, our guidance sits at 93% crude utilization or about 400,000 barrels per day of throughput. Okay.
Next, what I wanted to talk to you about is the combination of our premium brands that we put together over many, many years of effort that we've combined with customer service, technical support, and advantage partnerships that are really unparalleled in the Canadian industry. Our branded wholesaler method of business and retail allows us to work with some of the world's most accomplished gasoline retailers. To name a few, Couche-Tard, 7-Eleven, Parkland, and others.
This method of business allows us to avoid CAD hundreds of millions of sustaining capital for the retail assets themselves, and it still allows us to grow profitable market share in the retail business across Canada. Our lubricants business carries equally strong brands, including Mobil 1, which I'm sure you've heard of, and it leverages ExxonMobil as the world's largest marketer of finished lubricants.
In our lubes business line, we not only use globally recognized brands, like I mentioned, but we've also got a very strong distributor network and a highly trained workforce who are backed up by a field technical support team in our Sarnia research facility. That provides them with unique troubleshooting customer support for particular lubes applications here in Canada, and that's very unique to Imperial. No one else has that.
We are the largest producer and seller of asphalt here in Canada. We've got production of asphalt at two of our three refineries, and we sell that product all across North America via rail car shipments. We produce asphalt from all of our two facilities that I mentioned, always with Cold Lake crude. Cold Lake crude is recognized in the world markets as the highest quality asphaltic crude available.
Our strong fuels brands are further supported by a strategic loyalty partnership that we've worked in recent years with Loblaw in the PC Optimum program. Loblaw have more than 18 million PC Optimum members, which is almost half of Canada's population. By our own estimate, that equates to 70% of Canadian households being members of the PC Optimum program. We're incredibly pleased to be involved with PC Optimum. We are the only fuel supplier in that program, and just recently, we've added the capability to purchase fuel at the point of sale by redeeming points.
That puts us on par with how Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart treat their customers for points redemption at the point of sale.
Our marketing position is among the very best of Canadian downstream competitors, and it gives us compelling brands upon which to improve and reshape our product offers as the energy transition continues. Now on the energy transition, as I mentioned before, we are spending an increasing amount of time and energy to develop low-carbon product offers. More than 75% of all the gasoline and diesel currently sold in Canada already has some biofuel content to lower its carbon intensity.
I think sometimes that statistic is a surprise to people that think that biofuels are perhaps a vision of the future. It's much more correct to say biofuels are here today, and they're around us all the time.
At the same time as we are expanding biofuel blending, we're working with customers to maximize the benefits of these lower carbon fuels and offsets any debits in energy that they may get associated with biofuels. Most biofuels, whether it be ethanol, biodiesel or renewable diesel, do not have the same energy content per liter of fuel as a fossil fuel does. Our customers end up buying more fuel with bio content than they would otherwise.
We provide solutions for them in this space by additizing our products to improve combustion efficiency, and some examples of that are Synergy Supreme Gasoline and our Esso Diesel Efficient. The additives work to improve mileage for the customer, whether it be on cars, trucks, or even locomotives. That reduces their fuel costs and helps the customer manage the more expensive cost of the biofuel content.
I wanted to mention in particular our Bio Protect product, which is a new launch for us. It contains the Esso Diesel Efficient additive, which again, directly goes to offset any energy debit that comes from the 20% biodiesel content in that product. Again, that lowers the customer's costs, and it helps build their acceptance for growing amounts of biofuels as the energy transition continues. Our advanced lubricants equally provide energy efficiency gains that competitors cannot match and reduce emissions even further.
An example is our Mobil 1 passenger vehicle lubricant that can improve fuel economy as much as 4% depending on the application. Our next venture is going to be into producing sustainable aviation fuel. You'll hear the acronym SAF or SAF. To get a better position in this emerging fuels market, we've recently joined the Canadian Council for Sustainable Aviation Fuels.
We expect to be producing our own SAF from our facilities using vegetable oil feedstocks in the near-term years to come. Okay, I wanted to shift gears now and talk a little bit about innovation in the downstream. I think many times people look at the refining and downstream sector and think that it's a little bit of the old history of the business and perhaps not doing a lot of innovation. In fact, the opposite is true.
There are a tremendous number of initiatives that are going on that are truly changing the footprint of how we operate. On the left side, I wanted to start first by talking about a very interesting initiative that transforms plastic waste into fuel. We're looking at a project that will take plastic waste into our Sarnia facility, into our coker unit as a feedstock.
That will make the plastic a valuable raw material for that unit, and that will allow us to make gasoline and diesel and feedstock for the chemical plant from that plastic raw material. We call this advanced recycling. We're using plastic here, as I mentioned, as a raw material, and it's very different than conventional recycling, which seeks to take waste plastic and blend it into virgin plastic to really blend it away.
This has clear advantages over mechanical plastic recycling, which often results in final plastic products that have degraded performance. Our method of advanced recycling allows us to help remove contaminants, which is a chronic barrier to recycling plastics across the world.
ExxonMobil has recently announced plans to build North America's largest plastic waste recycling facilities at its Baytown facility, and their plan is to initially start with 30,000 metric tons per year of plastic being recycled through the advanced process that I described. Imperial's project at Sarnia will build upon that as a proof of concept, and we seek to create similar facilities here in Canada. Next, we're looking at vegetable oils being brought into our refineries' feedstocks.
The industry calls this co-processing, and what we'll be bringing in would be vegetable oils like soy, canola, possibly also waste oils. By processing these vegetable oils alongside conventional fossil fuels, we are creating diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel, all which would have lower carbon intensity.
We held two successful trials this year or last year with Sarnia and Nanticoke refineries. We were able to prove that as much as 5%-10% of the fossil fuel being fed to a cat cracker can be replaced with vegetable oil. We're looking to expand that into permanent facilities at all three of our refineries using small, nimble, efficient capital projects. One customer trial in the third column here that we're especially proud of is working with CP Rail to test our Esso Diesel Efficient product. They came to us asking if we could provide a diesel fuel that would help them achieve their sustainability goals.
We then collaborated with them with the Esso Diesel Efficient project to test an idea and a theory, which is if Esso Diesel Efficient improves mileage and performance of engines in the truck transport world, could it also do the same for locomotives. We tested the theory at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio last year or in 2019, and we did it on a test locomotive that represented CP's typical locomotive fleet. The theory did prove to be correct.
Our additized fuel resulted in significantly lower GHG emissions, and it also reduced particulate matter or soot coming from the locomotive stack. CP soon decided to replace all of the purchased diesel that they were buying from us previously with the Esso Diesel Efficient product. Finally, on the right-hand side, we are working with a partner in Sarnia to build North America's largest battery.
It's what's called a behind-the-meter battery energy storage solution or BESS. This large battery will improve our Sarnia site reliability by filling in gaps in electricity supplied from the grid during grid disruptions. It will reduce our cost for electricity using battery as a source of electricity when the grid is most expensive at peak periods. Our partner there is Enel X, and they provided us with battery technology here that is at world-scale industrial size. In fact, 20 MW of capacity. The battery will be charged at night when demands in the grid are lower and the price of electricity is lower.
That's also the time that the lower carbon sources in the Ontario grid are most dominant. That would be nuclear, hydro, and wind. The battery will then discharge during the day, when electricity costs are obviously more expensive.
This technology is a win-win, not just for Imperial to reduce our costs, but also for the grid in Ontario by having some of our power in Sarnia provided from that battery during times when the grid is at its peak and needs to be managed for other customers. For Imperial, it saves us electricity costs, but it also directionally helps us reduce our Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. These four examples are just some of the examples we're working on in the downstream and chemical business lines, which can provide us with sustainability benefits as well as competitive advantages going forward.
Okay, now I'd like to walk you through a little bit of the capital portfolio in the downstream.
Looking at the bar chart, you can see that we're spending at levels around CAD 400 million between here and 2024, and then expecting to be a bit lower around the CAD 300 million range for 2025 and 2026. You can see the split there between sustaining capital versus growth and GHG emission capital. In this case, growth would not mean adding to refining capacity, but rather growth in logistics, product offers, improving our market access and supply chain capability, and adding to biofuel blending projects across the country.
Our portfolio is focused on smaller projects like the examples I reviewed on the prior slide, co-processing with vegetable oils, blending more biodiesel and renewable diesel, adding sustainable aviation fuel to our mix, advanced recycling, and other small, high-return projects. Now I'd like to just cover the two largest investments in our portfolio.
The first is the closure on our Sarnia products pipeline in Ontario. This project is approaching its commissioning phase with an anticipated total spend of CAD 470 million versus the just over CAD 400 million in our original plan. The spend rate is now tailing off, and in here in 2022, we expect to spend about CAD 70 million to wrap up the project.
We are very pleased with the project performance, considering the fact that the 63-kilometer segment that's being replaced here is in the middle of Canada's most congested urban corridor, literally downtown Toronto, with dozens of stakeholders, governments, landowners, communities, and Indigenous groups. We're on track to commission the project in here in April.
The new segment will allow us to pump more product into the important Toronto area market, and it allows us to save CAD 40 million a year of cost as we shed the more expensive layers of logistics like truck and rail that are currently serving the Toronto market. Okay, now to cover the largest project in our downstream portfolio, the Strathcona Renewable Diesel Project. We're very excited about this one. Here we are investing about CAD 500 million in building facilities that will convert vegetable oil feedstocks to produce renewable diesel, and you'll hear me use the acronym RD.
This conversion requires a lot of hydrogen, and so we are working with a third party to provide a new blue hydrogen facility, blue meaning that the hydrogen production plant will have carbon capture over it to reduce its own emissions.
This hydrogen plant, combined with the new vegetable seed crushing facilities to create the vegetable oil that will be needed to supply this facility, put the total investment for the venture at well over CAD 1 billion. Our objective is to produce 20,000 barrels a day of renewable diesel, which will be Canada's largest production source. We will need to use this to comply with the new Clean Fuel Regulations or CFR. Renewable diesel is not the same as biodiesel.
I know sometimes the terminology gets mixed up. Renewable diesel is a drop-in fuel that can be used year-round across Canada in almost every engine application at high concentrations as much as 80% or greater.
Our facilities would be fully integrated with the Strathcona Refinery using their infrastructure, their utilities, their staff, their expertise, and we know that the Strathcona Refinery is world-class in terms of its cost and reliability performance. In this case, we are not repurposing equipment at the refinery for this venture. Our new facilities will be built at top quartile capital efficiency, and we will use industry-leading catalysts and other technology. That compares well to others that are literally trying to shoehorn in new technology to older equipment that was never really designed for that purpose.
We received a considerable amount of funding in this case from the B.C. government's Low-Carbon Fuels Investment Program. Our objective is to have the production of renewable diesel flowing by the end of 2024 to manage our CFR compliance.
Working back from that, we anticipate to get a final investment decision later this year. Now to talk a bit about the business case for renewable diesel. The primary objective, as I mentioned, for the project, is to produce competitively advantaged compliance with the Clean Fuel Regulations, CFR, and do that using renewable diesel, but do it at a cost of compliance which is lower than anyone else's use of renewable diesel for compliance in the industry. Renewable diesel is a very flexible compliance option within the reg.
As I mentioned, unlike biodiesel and unlike ethanol, there are very few limitations on where it can be used. It can be used at very high concentrations in many locations. Renewable diesel is already here in Canada. It's been used for many years, and it's always been imported from other countries.
It's currently present in the diesel around the country in quantities ranging from 0% all the way up to greater than 40% in some cases. It's a very well-proven fuel for our use. The project is driven by very strong economics to make renewable diesel instead of buying and importing it. The map on the left shows an orange arrow depicting what is happening today. Renewable diesel is being manufactured in the U.S. Gulf Coast, made from crop sources and waste oils that are gathered from all over the U.S., but predominantly in the Midwest area of the U.S. The cost of moving all of that feedstock in the U.S.
down to the Gulf Coast, then manufacturing it into Canadian specifications, and then transporting it all the way back to Canada, makes the landed price of renewable diesel in Canada very expensive, often well over $150 a barrel. Our plan is to make renewable diesel in Canada instead and drastically reduce this complex supply chain cost by using local crop sources.
Those local crop sources have been deemed by the Government of Canada as having highly sustainable, low-emissions farming practices. By using advantaged local crop sources, we estimate our cost to produce will be far below the imported cost of renewable diesel, and that will create strong returns for the project and deliver very short pay-back period in almost all the scenarios that we've studied.
We're currently working on the hydrogen and vegetable oil feedstock agreements for the project, and we need to see the final CFR regulation in the summertime to really narrow down the economic and market scenarios that we're studying. For everything that we've looked at, this project is high return. It's highly competitive, and it's very resilient to all the regulatory outcomes that we've studied thus far. We remain very confident that it'll be fully sanctioned later this year. Our refineries and chemical plant are here in Canada are cost leaders in the business.
We work relentlessly to improve the cost of our supply chains downstream of those facilities in lowering our cost to serve. During the pandemic period in 2020, we had doubled our efforts to reduce cost, to improve cost efficiencies.
Considering the challenging markets we were in, I think it was very necessary. I'm happy to report that the majority of these savings have not only been sustained in 2021, but we've actually made them bigger. You can see in the bar charts on the left side, cash OpEx declined from CAD 2.6 billion to CAD 2.1 billion between 2019 and 2020, and then it further reduced to about CAD 2 billion in 2021. In the orange line, you'll see that our refining throughput actually grew from 340 thousand to 380 thousand barrels a day during 2020 to 2021.
So what's at stake there is that we've completely offset the added variable cost from the higher refining throughput. We've also offset higher costs that came into our business from electricity and natural gas pricing.
Putting all that together, we were still able to deliver 2021 as the lowest cost in that three-year period. That is industry-leading cost performance, and we are fortunate to have that fantastic performance in all aspects of our business. In the bottom left, you'll see our net income results, and they will show a strong recovery in 2021, with the second half of the year showing a continued improvement versus the first half. In the current environment, we expect to see the first half of 2022 be even stronger still.
Regardless of the very volatile market conditions that we're currently in, we are gonna continue to focus on what we can control, growing profitable sales, improving our margins on key products, and continuing to grow our low-carbon offers.
Okay, that's just CAD 10 million in feedstock costs versus purchasing third-party ethane or propane to feed that ethylene production. Our net income history is shown there in the middle, and you can see that tremendous growth and profitability in 2021 versus 2020, and it's of course driven by very strong prices. The chart on the right shows a U.S. domestic Platts quote for high density polyethylene, HDPE, in U.S. cents per pound.
You can see that polyethylene price record profitability in our polyethylene business, and we're very pleased to see that our operations were very reliable through this period of high pricing to take full advantage. Equally, we are proud of the number in 2020. Although it's lower, it shows the resilience of our business in some of the most challenging bottom of cycle price conditions that we've seen in decades.
On this slide, I wanted to shed a little bit more about the unique nature of our polyethylene business because I don't think it's really well understood outside of Imperial. In many ways, our polyethylene business is the opposite of a commodity business. We create custom-built grades of polyethylene based on unique customer needs, and then we work directly with customers to trial the products and ensure that they deliver maximum benefits.
The type of high-density polyethylene that we produce is for a specific set of customers, namely rotational and injection molded products, or what the industry calls RIM or RIM products.
In RIM applications, the resin pellets are melted and then injected at high pressure into large-sized molds, often as big as an SUV, and they are then spun or rotated in order to use centrifugal forces to push the liquid resin into all the corners of those large molds. That provides very large, formed plastic products with very few seams, with unique strength and durability. For many years, Imperial has cultured a group of engineers and scientists which have built a very unique knowledge of how to modify polyethylene resin to uniquely fit these rotational and injected molded products.
The team works directly with its customers to trial new grades of resin and directly respond to customer needs for lighter, stronger, and more durable products.
This is a customer intimate business model, in many ways the opposite of a commodity business where customers flip suppliers on some frequency based on price bids of the day. The margins for these niche rim products that we produce are clearly better than commodity PE margins that are being realized by most other PE producers in Canada. We continue to grow our customer intimate approach, and you can see there from the bar chart, we are planning on growing the number of customer trials this year to approach CAD 50 million in additional net present value generated from those trials.
To close, manage versus our competitors. Finally, we're leveraging ExxonMobil's strongest brands, technology, and best practices throughout our operations here in Canada. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I know I went through that quickly.
look forward to getting some of your questions during the question and answer session. Now I'll hand over to Dan Lyons to cover our financial outlook.
Thanks, Jon. Good morning, everybody. I will jump right into talking about Imperial's advantaged financial profile. You know, you can see on the upper left there, we've shown this pie chart before, but we have a great balance between the upstream and downstream. This is looking at 10 years of cash flow. Clearly, that balance, upstream, downstream integration, gives us more resilience and lower volatility on our earnings. Additionally, as you heard about from Simon, we're growing our upstream production. We have long life, low decline assets that need relatively small amounts of sustaining capital.
Jon just talked about the advantages of our downstream and chemical businesses. On top of all that, as part of our balanced integrated model, we have a relationship with ExxonMobil, which provides us greater scale than we'd have otherwise.
We have access to their global expertise and know-how, which we apply here to our businesses at Imperial. We also have a low corporate break-even. Now, part of that is obviously our large and successful downstream and chemical businesses. We are also pursuing low-cost volume growth. We've been delivering that. You've seen the outlook in Simon's presentation. Across our business, we're pursuing structural cost reductions. You know, we believe we're built for the cycle. We have a strong balance sheet, industry-leading leverage. You can see the little graphic on the lower left.
That makes us very resilient, certainly in the downside, in the downturns. We also have unhedged production, which Simon talked about, and we are reaping the full benefits of the higher prices we're seeing now.
Now, on the refining side, we have a flexible network which can adjust its crude runs and its product and crude slates according to what's going on with prices and margins. All this together allows us to provide reliable shareholder returns over the long run. Before getting into some of that in a little more detail, I do wanna talk about our financial performance in 2021. As it says on the chart, it was a record-setting year. All of our businesses performed strongly. As you've heard, we had record cash flow from operating activities. You can see that charted there on the left.
As was already mentioned, record Upstream production, record Chemicals earnings, strong recovery in the Downstream, and you know, the highest ever shareholder distributions of just under CAD 3 billion, driven by our largest dividend increase in history, as Brad mentioned, along with accelerated repurchases under our NCIB programs. We wanna note that this isn't a one-off event. I mean, if you look at that chart on the left, you can see we've made steady progress over the years in making our business both more resilient and more profitable.
Moving to operating costs, this is cash operating costs specifically. As you've heard, we've had sustainable cost reductions across all of our business lines. Just looking at the bridge there on the left, we bridged pre-COVID 2019 to 2021.
You can see we have over CAD 1 billion in cash OpEx efficiencies. That was partially offset about CAD 250 million in OpEx associated with volume growth, which of course, we're very happy to have those volumes. We also had significant energy price escalation. We're happy to have that too on the revenue side. That's about CAD 400 million in terms of OpEx in the bridge. As you also heard, you know, this is not the end, this is really the beginning. We're continuing to progress additional cost reduction opportunities.
You know, I'll just call it out 'cause it's a big bar on the chart. That includes a focus on energy efficiency. We've always focused on energy efficiency, but clearly at higher prices, the returns on those projects are even greater.
I mean, Simon talked about our boiler flue gas project at Kearl and the solvents project at Cold Lake, which will make us more energy efficient going forward. On a gross basis, our total cash OpEx has come down, as you see, and we've also had cost-effective volume growth, which Simon talked about, lowering our unit costs. You roll all of that together, and looking at our corporate breakeven over the next five years, our outlook for that has come down since our last Investor Day. On a cash basis, US dollar WTI $25 a barrel, we can break even. $35 WTI US per barrel can cover our dividend-sustaining capital.
That was $36 at our last Investor Day, but I think it's notable that we've had some significant headwinds in terms of the forex rate. Last time, we were looking at 75 cents, now we're looking at 80 cents, and we significantly increased our dividends. Despite that, with our structural cost reductions and our low-cost volume growth, we've lowered our breakeven, and we're gonna continue to progress that going forward. Looking at capital expenditures, you can see this is, you know, obviously for all of Imperial. You saw the pieces for upstream and downstream separately. It's the same sort of scheme.
The blue is sustaining, the green is growth and high-return GHG projects, the red diamonds are, you know, prior year outlook.
Just looking at the chart, you can see in 2022, we have a target of CAD 1.4 billion of CapEx, down CAD 200 million from our previous plan. Looking out over, you know, the years after that, it's similar to our plan in the CAD 1.4 billion-CAD 1.5 billion range. Sustaining capital over this period averages about CAD 1 billion a year, predominantly in the upstream. You can see we have a tick up in sustaining capital in 2022. That's really driven by the Kearl In-Pit Tailings Project. 2022 will be the highest year of spend for that project, and you can see the sustaining capital come back down.
As Simon mentioned, I think it's worth repeating, we have a relatively low sustaining capital requirement, just CAD 5 per barrel, which you know, to sustain our current high volumes. Looking at the green wedge, about CAD 400 million over the period. You know, the key projects making up really you know, the majority certainly of that CAD 400 million are listed there, and they were talked about earlier. The Kearl debottlenecking work, the boiler flue gas project at Kearl as well. At Cold Lake, our Grand Rapids project and other solvent projects.
In the downstream, our Strathcona Renewable Diesel project. I'd like to spend a moment talking about capital allocation.
You can see the slide is titled Reaffirming Our Capital Allocation Priorities 'cause that's what we're doing. These have not changed since we talked a year ago and all the interim discussions I've had with many of you. You can see it starts with a reliable and growing dividend, and that's graphed there on the upper left. You can see it grows consistently over time, particularly very recently. If you look back from the beginning of 2021 till now, we had two dividend increases, one in the second quarter of 2021 and one in the first quarter of this year.
That's a 55% increase over that period. Given our cash flow growth, we feel quite comfortable with that.
You know, next in the capital allocation priorities comes sustaining capital, which we talked about, and then the select high-return, capital-efficient investments in our core assets which we have discussed. We come to, I think, maybe, all you all's favorite line, returning surplus cash to shareholders. You know, you can see on the lower left that those are millions of shares outstanding. You can see we've come down 20% over the last, you know, five years or so. That's really from utilizing the NCIB programs, you know, pretty hard.
Going forward, you know, market conditions permitting, which they certainly seem to be doing, we can plan to continue to fully utilize our NCIB.
Given where our cash balances are, and our positive outlook, we anticipate supplemental returns, including a potential substantial issuer bid. Now, at the bottom here, you know, we will keep our aperture open and scan the horizon and look at if there's highly attractive growth opportunities, we'll consider those as well, and those could be organic or inorganic. But they have a high bar. They have to be strategic. They have to be highly attractive, as I said. They have to be, you know, clearly accretive. So let me move to the next page.
You can see here on the left, it's just a graph of our average share annual cash distributions from 2016 to 2020, and then showing 2021. You can see a very substantial increase, both in dividends, but particularly in share buybacks.
If you look to the right, this is our free cash flow outlook over the next 5 years, you know, at 4 different oil prices. It includes, you know, about CAD 1.5 billion in each case, dollars, from our downstream and chemical businesses. You can see that, you know, looking at the 60 dollar case, that little red diamond, you can see our outlook for free cash flow is higher this year at $60 than it was last year. Obviously, that reflects the unit cash operating expense reductions we're seeing and we're planning, as well as the volume growth that Simon talked about. Clearly $60 is well below today's prices.
Today's prices aren't even charted here, so you can figure out where that graph goes if prices in fact stay higher. Looking at the $60 case, you know, both these charts on the left and right are sort of the same scale. If oil is $60, we will generate more free cash flow than all of the cash we returned in 2021, if you look across on the left chart. We have substantial capacity, not only to generate cash flow, but to return free cash flow to the shareholders, and that is what we plan to do. This is my final chart, and I won't say a lot on this chart. On the left, this is our corporate guidance summary.
On the left is the guidance we released the latter part of last year. It's unchanged. On the right, we lay out our turnaround schedule for 2022. Upstream is relatively normal. I mean, we have a couple of Syncrude events, one of our plants at Cold Lake, and our new normal of one turnaround per year at Kearl. But you can see the Downstream, the turnover, I'm sorry, the turnaround, schedule is actually quite light, which should support strong capacity utilization and cash flow in the Downstream in the coming year. Now let me turn it back to Brad. Thanks.
All right. Well, it's great to be back with you again, and I really hope you've enjoyed the presentations from the management team over the last couple of hours. I hope it's not only kind of reinforced the great successes and achievements that we delivered over the last year, but I hope it also painted a clear vision for you of where we're going as a company and the strength that underpins our journey. You know, all five of us that are here today representing the management team, we're very proud of what our company has achieved.
But we are just five of over 5,000 employees that are working extremely hard every day to deliver these results, and I think it's worth acknowledging them.
We're also supported by a great contractor workforce, and obviously we've got a very long-standing relation with very important customers. It's really bringing all that together that has allowed us to deliver these results and give us confidence as we go forward. You know, at the start of the session, I talked about what you could expect to hear today. Before we move to the Q&A session, I'd like to take just a moment to reflect on some of the key messages from the day. At the center of the diagram on the left, you can see our key priority, maximizing shareholder value.
This is central to what we do, and we believe our strategies and actions reflect this. It really starts with our assets. You've heard a lot about those today.
They are high quality and long life, and maximizing their value is central to our strategy. You heard through the morning about some of the opportunities we have in this area, such as continued cost reductions, low capital, high return growth opportunities, and continuing to enhance reliability. I hope the discussion this morning underscored the value of our integration. Being integrated on several levels provides opportunities for synergies across our businesses.
We are certainly integrated in the sense of having material Upstream and Downstream businesses, which offers us some insulation from commodity price swings, but integration goes far beyond that. For example, our chemical manufacturing is fully integrated with our Sarnia Refinery. Access to economic, reliable chemical feedstock certainly contributed to the outstanding results the chemical business delivered in 2021.
The quality of our assets and the integrated nature of our business are key to our ability to effectively manage through the various business cycles our industry sees. 2020 was a perfect example. While it was a very difficult year for all, and likely the most challenging any of us have seen in our careers, Imperial fared relatively well and went into the recovery in a much better position than many others. We delivered outstanding results in 2021, both operationally and financially, and expect to continue that momentum through 2022. We continue to take pride in our balance sheet strength.
Not only did this contribute greatly to our ability to weather the pandemic storm while maintaining our dividend and not incurring incremental debt, it provides us optionality to pursue opportunities that we see as critical to continuing to deliver increasing shareholder value. The strong balance sheet is also one of the things that enables our historic focus on shareholder returns. Our dividend history is unparalleled, and in recent years, we have returned a significant amount of cash to our shareholders through share repurchases.
Our views here have not changed. As you are aware, we announced our largest dividend increase in history in early February.
You would have seen that technology is a common theme across our businesses and throughout our future plans, whether related to our ESG sustainability commitments or our focus on continuing to improve the capability and reliability of our existing assets. Our ability to leverage ExxonMobil's technical expertise and their world-class research capabilities makes this a true differentiator and provides real value to Imperial. So again, all of this adds up to maximizing shareholder value, and I certainly hope that is what came through in our discussion this morning.
So let me just wrap up with this slide on our winning strategy. While this chart may look a little different than what we shared at last Investor Day, the messages should be very familiar. They really have not changed much since I spoke to you back in November of 2020. They really shouldn't change that much.
We have been very committed to the strategy we outlined at that time, and it has delivered substantial results, and I believe will continue to do so. Our focus continues to be on getting the most out of our current asset base, and we continue to do this with a focus on the most efficient use of capital. While we have made significant progress on our cost structure, we continue to see further opportunities as we strive towards industry-leading performance. Sherri provided a lot of detail on our ESG plans and focus areas, but you would have also heard some specifics from Simon and Jon in this area as well.
This demonstrates a commitment across our entire organization to achieving those goals and a focus on doing so in a way that drives value for our shareholders. We remain steadfast in our commitment to returning more cash to our shareholders.
Our view forward is one of robust free cash flow, bolstered by our plans to continue to optimize our existing assets. This free cash flow will support our history of a reliable and growing dividend, and we will continue to return cash in excess of these requirements to our shareholders. As we've stated many times, capital discipline is a guiding principle for us. However, this does not mean we will not consider growth opportunities.
We will continue to scrutinize them and integrate them into our portfolio as we see warranted. While large-scale organic growth remains a low priority today, and our asset optimization and debottlenecking plans are delivering meaningful growth at low cost, there may be a time for organic growth in the future, and we have optionality around that with our large resource base and with progressive technologies.
We've not changed our view on M&A. We continue to keep our eyes open for opportunities that can potentially add incremental value for our shareholders. Finally, resilience has been a common theme today. In markets that have been and continue to be as volatile as they have over the last couple of years, it is a key that we remain agile and able to quickly adapt. Throughout the pandemic, we were able to demonstrate this, and this puts us in a position to react quickly as market conditions change in order to capture maximum value.
In closing, I would say that my one disappointment over the last year has been limited ability to meet with you face-to-face. When I stood here in November 2020, I was optimistic that that situation would change by last year. As we all know, that was not to be.
While I've certainly enjoyed engaging with you virtually, I also believe that in-person interaction is most valuable. I'm cautiously optimistic that this will become the norm for us in 2022 to return back to face-to-face, and I'm very much looking forward to that. With that, I would like to thank you for your ongoing interest and support of our company, Imperial. We're now ready to move to the Q&A session. I'm gonna move back to my seat along the panel with the rest of the management team, and collectively, we look forward to your questions. Again, thank you very much.
Our first question coming from the line of Manav Gupta with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Thank you guys for all this additional information. It's very helpful in modeling. I had a couple of quick questions, and I'll ask them up front. This is the first time we have seen you guys actually come out and say that Kearl's potential can be increased to 300. If you could help us understand what gets you there. Given the environment where we are, is there a way you could accelerate that development plan and get to 300 faster? Then second is a quick follow-up here, sir. It looks like your CapEx hasn't changed since last guidance. If you look carefully, there's an entire renewable diesel project which has snuck in.
Essentially, it means that although the CapEx looks the same, it's actually lower because now for the same CapEx, you're actually doing a renewable diesel project in there. If you could just address those two issues. Thank you so much.
All right. Thank you. Thank you for those questions. I might turn to Simon to talk a little bit about our journey at Kearl. He spent a lot of time on that. As you recognize, you know, we continue to have aspirations beyond 280,000 barrels a day. Maybe I'll let Simon talk to that, and then I'll come back and answer the question about CapEx.
Yeah, certainly happy to talk a little bit more about Kearl. As I shared in the prepared remarks, we are starting to evaluate production potential above 280 KBD, as you've noted. I shared some of the details on what's gonna enable that. You know, I talked about enhanced recovery, plant debottlenecks. The two examples that I gave you of secondary tailings recovery were exactly examples that could help with that journey beyond 280 KBD at Kearl. You know, bringing those online in the sort of mid- to late 2020s is entirely consistent with that plan.
Then the other piece that we'd need to look at is certainly mine fleet expansion. Yeah, very much part of the plan.
Looking forward to evaluate that. I think the other part of your question was, you know, any opportunity to accelerate. You know, the way I would respond to that certainly is that our first step is to get to 280. You've seen us accelerate that already by one year versus the outlook that we shared at our last Investor Day. I think we need to get there first by 2024 and then, in the meantime, evaluate these additional steps and obviously, you know, acceleration, just like we did with the 280 milestone, would certainly be part of that evaluation that we'd complete.
All right. Thanks, Simon. Let me come back to the question on CapEx. Thanks to you for recognizing that we have slightly reduced our outlook for capital relative to our last Investor Day. I think it's important to acknowledge that, you know, when we build these, our CapEx plans, we're very much focused on how do we deliver the greatest value from our opportunity portfolio. We are constantly reassessing what those opportunities are, how they compete in the current market environment. That's just an ongoing process for us.
What I'm pleased to say is, on top of that, you know, as we execute our capital programs, we're continuing to apply significant discipline and rigor to achieve efficiencies in those projects, just like we do on the operating expense side. You heard us talk a lot about cash expenses today and the very significant improvements in efficiencies there. We also bring that same rigor to capital expenditures. It is through those efficiencies that we are able to deliver the same scope of projects, high return projects, at a lower capital cost.
That allows us to then integrate new opportunities, like the renewable diesel project at Strathcona, within essentially that same level of capital spending. Again, it all just is reflective of our discipline.
Also worth noting, as Jon talked about, the cost as we see it today of that renewable diesel project is about CAD 500 million spread over about 3 years. In any given year, you know, it's a very nominal amount, and we're able to keep that within that CAD 1.4 billion-CAD 1.5 billion dollar spend level.
Thank you so much for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Our next question coming from the line of Greg Pardy from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Thanks. Good afternoon, and many thanks for the thorough rundown. Brad, if Pathways was finalized tomorrow, what do you think the earliest year you'd see when you actually start to spend material capital on CCUS?
Yeah, thanks for that question, Greg. You know, I wish it were finalized tomorrow. We still have a lot of work we're doing, both internally to finalize our plans and optimization. We are also, as we've talked about in the past, heavily engaged with both the provincial and federal government around their level of participation, the support we need from them, in order to move these very large scale investments forward. We're also working with the provincial government on finalizing access to pore space in the Cold Lake area. So we're not there yet, but we're making great progress.
Once we, you know, have more clarity on those areas, then we will be progressing really multiple projects in parallel.
There is the core foundation project around the CO₂ pipeline. You know, that needs to go through the same steps that any major pipeline project would go through, in terms of all the design work, all the necessary consultation work, the environmental studies, the permitting, you know, that is typically a multiyear effort. We fully expect that we could deliver that pipeline, you know, within kind of the second half of this decade. That's what we would be working towards.
In parallel to that, there's several other kind of asset-based projects that would need to be progressed as well that are at the capture side of that overall program. We need to install facilities at sites to capture the carbon.
We need to transport it in the large pipeline that I just spoke to. We need to have the appropriate injection facilities at the hub in Cold Lake to inject the CO₂. You know, we're targeting to have very material emission reductions by the second half of this decade. Again, pending continued progress with the government agencies, both provincially and federally.
Okay. No, I think that addresses it. Thanks for that. Maybe just to come back to Simon, you know, completely appreciate you just flagging Kearl's perhaps a little slower start to the year. Could you maybe just explain a bit around causality on that and then just whether you're basically back up and running at good rates today, or is this something that's lingering a bit?
Happy to, Greg. Really it relates to some of the commentary that we provided as part of our fourth quarter call. You might recall that we talked about some really severe cold weather that impacted us in December at Kearl and also impacted some of the other operators in the region. Then Brad had mentioned that, you know, some of that lingered into January. We saw continuing effects of that into January. A really tough start to the year because of that early year cold weather. Now when we talked towards the end of January, operations had essentially returned to normal.
We did subsequently have a couple of additional downtime events early in February, but certainly nothing lingering now.
If you look, you know, every month progressively through the quarter, our production has continued to strengthen and recover. Certainly as we sit here today, very much normal operations.
Thanks very much.
Our next question coming from the line of Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Hi. Thanks for taking the time. This is Nicollette Slusser on for Neil Mehta. The first question would just be on capital returns and around the timing of a potential SIB. Would it be fair to say it would be around the May timeframe after earnings? Any color you can provide there would be helpful. Thank you.
I'll turn that over to Dan to kind of discuss our current planning basis there.
Like we talked about this a bit on the earnings call. I mean, clearly, with our plan to renew the NCIB. You know, we plan to renew the NCIB. You know, we've exhausted our NCIB in January with about CAD 450 million returned then in that month. Our next opportunity to renew is at the end of June. We certainly plan to do that. But clearly, given our cash balances and our cash outlook, we anticipate supplemental returns before that is, before we renew the NCIB.
You know, as we've said, we've heard the feedback from the market. The substantial issuer bid is the strong preference, and that's our base case. That's what I can say about timing.
Okay. Great. That's helpful. Thank you. Just a quick follow-up would be on the cost side. Long-term CapEx seems to be around the CAD 1.4 billion-CAD 1.5 billion range. Can you talk about any inflationary effects you may be seeing and how IMO is planning on mitigating those impacts?
Yeah. It's a really good question. You know, like, I think kind of many elements of society right now, there are inflationary pressures. We are seeing those in our business as well. I would say they have not been as substantial as what we've heard in other parts of kind of consumer affairs. Certainly we see increased cost from energy. That does impact us. We are seeing higher cost to steel. That has not been as big of a factor just because of the nature of where we are with many of our projects. You know, Jon talked about the Sarnia products pipeline.
That has a lot of steel associated with it, but it's mostly all in the ground now and ready for commissioning and startup.
You know, we haven't seen big effects there. One of the largest projects we have in the portfolio currently and for the next couple of years is our Kearl tailings project that Simon talked about. That though is mostly kind of an earthmoving project. Again, you know, we're not seeing huge inflationary pressures there either. In other basic, you know, supplies and services, we are seeing some moderate increases.
But I think what you also heard today was this kind of relentless commitment to managing our cost structure and continuing to strive for opportunities to lower that cost structure. I think because we've been so successful in achieving that over the last two years, you know, we talked about this billion-dollar improvement in our costs.
You know, that gives us some, you know, continued opportunity to offset, a significant portion of this, you know, inflationary pressures that we're seeing, with maybe one exception being some higher energy costs. Obviously we're in the energy business, and so, you know, while there are some debits on, you know, on our costs, for higher natural gas prices, we do benefit, more broadly from the higher commodity prices as well. I hope that answers your question.
Yep. Thanks for the color.
Thanks.
Our next question coming from the line of Menno Hulshof with TD Securities. Your line is open.
Good morning, everyone. I'll just start with a question on emission reduction targets. Does the Oil Sands Alliance's target of a one-third absolute reduction to industry emissions allow for any production growth? I'm asking that in the question in the context of calls for increased supply from the North American producers.
Yeah. I didn't quite follow the first part of your question about the one-third reduction. You know, the Pathways to Net Zero Alliance, we're focused on a reduction to net zero by 2050. Now obviously that will be you know, a journey from here until 2050, and we've laid out a program that would achieve about a third of the emissions reduction by 2030, another third by 2040, and the last third by 2050. Maybe that's what you were referring to.
Yeah. That's what I meant, Brad. One-third by 2030.
That is our objective, and that's underpinned by, you know, a range of projects and many assets across Alberta, as well as additional reduction initiatives. You know, I think it's always important to keep in mind that as we progress on this journey to net zero, we're not just focused on capturing CO2 and injecting it, but we're also working very hard at eliminating emissions before you have to even think about capturing. That's where these, you know, in situ solvent technologies play such a substantial role in our portfolio, and enable us to minimize how much CO2 needs to ultimately be captured and stored.
Okay. That's a good segue into my second question just on CSP. That's always been a really exciting technology for me, given the potential for a 90% intensity reduction. I believe you mentioned that it's already commercially proven. Why is it only being deployed in 2028? Is there any potential to accelerate this timeline? Maybe you could also just remind us of scalability.
Yeah. It's a great question. I'll ask Simon to comment on that.
Yeah. Happy to share a bit more detail about CSP. You're absolutely right. It is an exciting technology. We have already successfully piloted. In fact, we've had a pilot, an active pilot up and running now for a number of years at Cold Lake. What it is it's a cyclic solvent process, so, similar in concept to our heritage CSS process, but using instead of steam a propane solvent. Now what actually though is true is that it is uniquely suited to the thinner sections of reservoir that are typically later in life in an in situ reservoir like we have at Cold Lake.
It is not as well suited to, say, for example, a large, you know, greenfield, you know, large resource, multi sort of billion barrel resource, that you might see in some of these undeveloped, leases that are out there. It's really the timing is really related to when does that technology make sense in the overall development plan of that, in situ resource that we have, at Cold Lake, and other operators would have around us, in that Cold Lake, region.
You know, it's certainly not a case that we're pushing it out for any other reason other than when is the optimum time to bring that into the overall development plan in such a way that it maximizes value and minimizes, or maximizes the emissions reduction potential.
Thanks, all.
Our next question coming from the line of David Fernandez with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Hi, thank you for taking the questions. David Fernandez, in for Doug Leggate here. Wanted to ask first on the CapEx on the upstream side. It looks like the outlook for 2023, 2024 looks slightly below what you guys had last Analyst Day. Production obviously isn't impacted, so kinda wanted to get some insight around what's driving what looks to be some pretty resilient production volumes at a lower cost, particularly given the inflationary pressures that we're seeing.
Yeah. I'll ask Simon to comment on that.
Yeah. No, absolutely, happy to, and thanks for the question. You're exactly right. I mean, really, that plan on plan reduction in our CapEx profile really just reflects the updates that we've made as we continue to refine and focus on capital efficiency that Brad's mentioned and really strongly emphasized. Essentially it's the same activity plan, but we see lots of opportunities to not only offset the pressures like inflationary pressures, but actually further reduce the cost. I'll give you one really excellent example of that, and that's the Grand Rapids phase one project at Cold Lake that we continue to progress.
As we've taken some of the time to pace that investment, and certainly the base performance of the field being much stronger has enabled us to do that. We've actually gone back and more thoroughly benchmarked and optimized the scope of that program and reduced the full program costs by over 20%. Versus the last time we talked in November 2020, I communicated that Grand Rapids phase one had a capital intensity of around or just below $30,000 per flowing barrel. You know, we have subsequently reduced that by 20%. That's one example.
We see a number of other examples across our upstream business where we are laser-focused on capital efficiency and, you know, squeezing more out of every capital dollar that we plan to spend.
Perfect. That's really helpful. If I can ask on the breakeven. As you guys noted, the FX rate went against you guys, but you're still able to lower that breakeven. At $35, it's about half of what the back end part of the curve is kind of trading at right now, around $70. Can you provide some insight around how you assess what is the right breakeven target, particularly as it concerns managing the dividend, which relative to peers might be seen as not as competitive on a yield basis?
Thoughts kind of around how you manage that breakeven target, with both kind of like a long-term view on where you see oil prices as well as, where you wanna see that dividend and the role of that dividend.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I'll maybe make a couple remarks, and then I'll ask Dan to supplement that. You know, I would say, first of all, you know, our objective is to drive that breakeven, all things being equal, as low as possible. The reason for that is that, you know, we operate in a commodity price world, and, you know, we need the business to be resilient at a wide range of prices. What we saw in 2020, you know, really kind of tested that. As a result of, you know, the discipline we've brought for many years, we were able to weather kind of through the many financial challenges of the pandemic.
We're always gonna be looking for ways to fundamentally drive that breakeven lower 'cause that ensures our long-term resilience and competitiveness. Now, obviously, part of that breakeven, if you look at the $35 number, includes, you know, not just cash breakeven for the operations but then sustaining capital and our dividend. You know, what we've demonstrated is our ability to raise our dividends substantially but still achieve a very competitive breakeven. I'll maybe pause there and see if Dan wants to add anything to that.
I mean, as Brad said, we don't have a specific breakeven target. Sort of lower is better. I mean, we don't wanna, you know, we don't wanna fritter away good opportunities. You know, breakeven itself is not a target, but generally speaking, lower is better. You know, at $35, we're saying we can not only cover sustaining capital but the dividend. Look, we also have a capital structure, so if there's some period where it's worse, we can still weather that, right? We feel pretty good about $35 in our current dividend. You know, regarding the dividend philosophy, it's reliable and growing.
You know, we don't wanna get ahead of ourselves, but given our strong cash flow outlook, we thought the significant increase the last couple years were warranted. We do think about sustainability always, but I think the fact that we've increased the dividend shows our views on that. I mean, that's a little bit of adding to what Brad said. No specific target, and we also have a capital structure to help us weather the storms should they occur.
Got it. That was very thorough. Thank you so much for the time.
Thank you.
Our next question is coming from the line of Dennis Fong with CIBC World Markets. Your line is now open.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions, and really appreciate the color and incremental details today. The first one just is related to In-Pit Tailings. You've obviously made a fair amount of significant progress in terms of reducing unit operating costs, so congratulations on that. Understanding that peak spending is here in 2022, and the kinda timeline for the project kind of proceeds through to 2025.
I was hoping to get a little bit of incremental color around what some of your expected cost improvements associated with the In-Pit Tailings happens to be, as well as how that potentially helps with mine planning and the timing of further potential production increases.
All right. Great question, Dennis. I'll turn it over to Simon.
Yep. Happy to give you a bit more detail on in-pit tailings. We're probably about halfway through that project, maybe a little under that. Total spend will be in the range of CAD 750 million over the next number of years. Of course, we've already, you know, we started a year and a half ago. We'll first go in-pit with the tailings in 2023, so start up in 2023. Really everything is remaining on track. From a capital efficiency standpoint, we are identifying and securing some cost savings as we execute the project. They're by no means as significant as the 20% example I gave you at Cold Lake.
We are seeing some cost efficiencies and do expect to bring that project in a little bit below the full funding estimate. Really positive news story there. Safe, reliable execution is ongoing and very well. It's moving to in-pit tailings is not so much a part of the unit cost story. The reason to move in-pit is just a natural transition of the mine plan that was always part of the original Kearl plan. Right now we have an external tailings area which really covers a start-up phase or sort of first 10-ish years of the mine.
Ultimately, the safest and lowest cost opportunity or option for long-term storage of tailings is in the pit that you've obviously dug out to mine the ore. But not a, you know, long term it's certainly in-pit is the safest and lowest cost option. It's kind of baked into the long-term mine plan for the asset. When we transition from external to in-pit, that is not gonna have a significant driver or impact on the day-to-day running or unit costs of the asset. I hope that answers your question.
No, that definitely does. Appreciate the incremental color there. My second question here just relates to Cold Lake. We're seeing, or from your presentation, there seems to be a fairly significant GHG emission intensity reduction while kind of maintaining production relatively flat or even growing slightly between the 2021-2025 period versus 2026-2030. Was just curious if you wouldn't mind commenting a little bit about your expectations around absolute emission levels, and whether or not that includes, I think that there was a small inclusion in terms of CCUS within that.
Just how much of a relative impact versus the application of lower energy-intensive technologies versus the implementation of CCUS within kind of those relative emission intensities.
Yeah, certainly. Happy to give you a bit more color there. You know, really, we are very proud of the transformational development plan that we've been able to put together for Cold Lake in this past year. You know, on the back of a couple of years of pretty intensive work to rethink the development plan, look at where we could bring in more solvent technologies and SA-SAGD and then some of the other, you know, NCG and CSP that we've talked about as well, where we could accelerate those into the plan and really replace some of the CSS, you know, developments that were in our sort of previous and historical plan. We even tested things like, rather than redeploying steam, shutting that steam in as we go forward.
We're, you know, we were able to find and optimize that development plan. Really what that told us was that, you know, kinda holding Cold Lake in that 140-150 KBD sort of plateau range, but accelerating these solvent technologies in really gave us a fantastic outcome from a value standpoint in terms of profitability, you know, greenhouse gas compliance costs, things like that, so unit cost for the asset and also, of course, emissions. You're absolutely right, the intensity is projected to, you know, drop by 25% in that second half of this decade versus the first half. I don't have explicit absolute numbers for you across those same time frames.
What I could tell you is that specifically at the Cold Lake asset, the absolute emissions certainly are flat to down, based on that rethink of the development plan. More broadly, we're sort of starting to look at what that looks like, and how that impacts the overall Imperial portfolio, obviously from an absolute emission standpoint. The transformation at Cold Lake really quite significant, and one that we're very proud of.
Great. Really appreciate the incremental color there. Thank you, and I'll turn it back.
Our next question coming from the line of Billy Kretch with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. First one, I guess this is for Dan. When I went back to the last Analyst Day, I think I asked a similar question around downstream and chemicals. How do you think about the contribution to the overall cash flow profile that you forecasted there at the different price decks from downstream and chemicals? Has that changed at all from the last Analyst Day when you consider how strong the fundamentals appear to be, particularly on the downstream side?
No. I mean, over the 5-year period, you know, it kind of washes out. We had about CAD 1.5 billion of cash flow per year in from those businesses. And it's about similar in the most recent 5-year outlook. I mean, when we did it a year ago, you know, we were looking out to the future and thinking about normal, you know, sort of, you know, normalized margins and recovery. We look at it a bit of a long-term basis. It hasn't. In our outlook, that particular outlook, it's about the same.
Now, if you were doing a near-term outlook, you might goose it some more, but we're going over 5 years. Chemicals is obviously has some cyclicality to it. No, not much change.
That's not what drove the breakeven lower. What drove the breakeven lower is OpEx reductions, higher production, you know, which I said more than offset the dividend growth and the Forex headwind.
Got it. I recognize this is looking at 2024 and beyond, but as you look at the RD project, how do you think about the range of possible outcomes in terms of the financial contribution from those? Do you have a view around what the carbon intensity scores could be based on your feedstocks, the use of blue hydrogen, et cetera?
Well, I'll let John take that one.
Sure. Yeah, those are great questions. You know, the project has the ability to make some substantial improvements to the profit loss for Downstream. You know, there are a number of scenarios that we need to look at there, including, you know, the actual Clean Fuel Regulations final version. It's difficult for me to quote you a number today around that P&L impact just because we do need to very much see what that regulation provides us with.
The carbon intensity of the product, we're shooting in the low-20s range for the RD itself. We think that's competitive with anything available in North America, and it certainly will be better than an imported RD that goes through that very tortuous supply chain that I mentioned coming from the U.S.
From a carbon intensity point of view, there again, we need to see the final regulation to really get a confidence around how the government would see us pin a CI number to the product, but we believe it will be very competitive in North America.
Got it. Dan, I guess given that it's in 2024 startup, you probably don't really have much of anything embedded into your expectations there.
No. Well, we do embed, you know, the Downstream projected earnings, which do include, you know, the renewable diesel project. As Jon said, the, you know, the returns that we're projecting are pretty attractive. That definitely is a positive effect overall.
Okay. Got it. If I could ask one last one just on operating costs in the upstream business, recognizing that you have targets to continue to reduce the operating costs. In this type of inflationary environment, it sounds like you're pretty well contained on your capital spending. How do you think about the ability to achieve those targets in this type of price environment and you know, on a per barrel basis?
You wanna talk about that, Simon?
Sure. I can do. Yeah. I mean, I think the short answer is pretty confident, feel pretty good about it. I mean, I think if you look at an asset like Kearl, as I mentioned, I think we reduced our unit operating cost in 2020 relative to 2019 by over 20%. So we carry a lot of momentum through that and are continuing, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, to focus on bringing those costs down below $20 per barrel to be sustained for the long term. Absolutely, there will be headwinds, and we currently see headwinds from inflationary pressures.
You know, there are other, you know, more physically related effects in the mine itself, like expanding the mine footprint and longer haul distances and things like that we also have to overcome. You know, that's where technology comes in. That's where our innovative and talented people come in. I feel very confident that we'll be able to continue that focus. The same goes for Cold Lake, I think, as well. You know, this sort of GHG transformation strategy that I've spoken a lot about today really is a big part of enabling that as well.
We are seeing, you know, plenty of potential to reduce our unit operating costs at Cold Lake that certainly goes beyond, you know, what would be required to offset things like inflationary pressures.
I might supplement that. You know, Simon also highlighted in his presentation some of the objectives at Syncrude. You know, we are clearly striving along with the operator to achieve more efficiencies there, a lower cost structure. Again, all that enables more ability to offset inflationary pressures.
I appreciate your thoughts. Thank you.
Our next question coming from the line of Patrick O'Rourke with ATB Capital. Your line is open.
Thank you for taking my call this morning. First time caller, longtime listener here. A very thorough rundown that you guys have had so far today. Couple of quick questions here. Number one, with respect to the return of capital, or the capital allocation priorities, obviously, you've got the dividend NCIB, SIB, and then growth to your sort of, high-quality opportunity set. Thinking about the current context and potential context of the egress balance here in Western Canada, what sort of structural, commodity price outlook starts to float capital allocation to growth priorities up the ranking here?
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I would say we don't have a specific threshold. You know, we are constantly evaluating new opportunities relative to our existing portfolio of opportunities. So we're testing their competitiveness within the portfolio. We're testing them across a wide range of prices. You know, so I think that's more of an ongoing process. You know, we're obviously benefiting from some high crude prices today, but we don't take that for granted.
You know, our experience has been that you know, we're in a very commodity-driven market. There's volatility to those prices. You know, it wasn't very long ago that prices were below $40, and now, you know, just a short time later, they're above $100.
When we make choices around growth opportunities, we're testing them across a wide range of prices. We're gonna continue to do that. I don't know, Dan, anything you wanna add?
No, I would just maybe emphasize, you know, we don't just look at today's prices. These are long-term, you know, if you're gonna build something, it's a long-term deal. It takes four years plus just to build it. You've gotta have a balanced view on longer-term prices when you think about that, and not be too biased by what's going on at the moment.
Okay. Thank you. You just touched on the strategic value of the Strathcona Renewable Diesel here, expecting sort of an FID in 2022. Can you walk us through the remaining sort of hurdles and pressure points in terms of getting to FID on that project? Wondering if the, you know, agricultural commodities here have seen considerable volatility and strength, how that plays into the decision process.
All right. Well, John loves talking about SHRED. He's immersed in it every day, so I'll let him talk about it.
Okay. Thanks, Brad. Yeah, you'll hear that name SHRD. Apologies for it. It's not maybe the best acronym we chose for a project, but it stands for Strathcona Hydrogen Renewable Diesel. But the renewable diesel project for the work that's coming ahead to get to full financial funding and final investment decision, it's really about seeing the regulation. As I mentioned, we've gotta have a good hard look at the final details of that. It's got very important facets in it about the CI numbers of the crop sources, both in Canada and the alternative we have to actually bring some in from the U.S.
I currently am biased that I would really like to see almost all or effectively 100% of our vegetable oil feedstock come from Canada, but we need to see how the government will treat those two different localities. We've gotta go our way through looking at the hydrogen project itself. It's a complicated project. We've gotta look at not just the tier of hydrogen that we're gonna take from that new blue hydrogen facility, but understand how it can build out its carbon capture steam, again, with the regulatory framework that the Government of Alberta is still working on pretty actively in the Edmonton area.
Lots of good work there. Between feedstock, hydrogen, and certainly the facilities that we need to build at Strathcona, you know, those are the big things between here and a decision later this year.
To your question about agricultural commodity prices, it's an excellent question. I've learned a lot about this business having dug into it for a couple of years now. I would still say that we need to continue to grow our sophistication and maturity around this. We've got plans within the agreements with the vegetable oil producers to look at how to manage risk around the volatility in their seed prices going through to the vegetable oil markets. Vegetable oils are produced in Canada, but oftentimes exported to China and to Europe.
Those export values have a material impact on what we would pay for the vegetable oil coming out the seed crush facility.
Equally, as the owner of the trading business here at Imperial, we've got opportunity to look at hedging and other risk management processes to manage that agricultural volatility. Lots of work in that space to sort it out. I know certainly probably the origin of that question is looking at very high canola prices and other commodities certainly recently like grain have really shot up in and around the global geopolitical issues that are there.
We're gonna try our level best to make sure that we are insulated from a large majority of that, looking at the different options we have through the agreements and through other hedging mechanisms. I feel good that we're going to be able to keep the project's strong economics within a tight boundary going forward.
Thank you very much.
Now, next question coming from the line of Travis Wood from National Bank Financial. Your line is open.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my question here. I'm wondering if you could give us an update on the sales process of the conventional portfolio that you had announced recently and, to the extent, you know, color around what types of buyers, private, public, and maybe the size of the potential buyers as well. Then with that, as you think about the already robust free cash profile and the proceeds from a potential sale, you know, how should we think about that recycling back into the business? And is there a scenario where we could start to talk about oil sands growth?
Do you look to potentially look at extending the portfolio through M&A in the oil sands assets, or do we start to talk about Aspen potentially coming back into the conversation as well?
I'll leave it there.
Yeah. Thanks for that question. You know, as Simon mentioned, we are very far down the path in marketing those unconventional assets, primarily in the Montney and Duvernay resource spaces. We've had just tremendous buyer interest in those assets.
You know, I won't get into any of the details due to confidentiality, but you know, it's a wide range of potential buyers from, you know, smaller players to larger players, you know, Canadian-based, international-based, some that are mostly focused on Montney, some that are maybe more interested in the Duvernay, some that are interested in both. Just tremendous interest.
We expect to kind of finalize the bids here before the end of the month, you know, with sufficient time for all those interested parties to be in the data room and make sure they fully understand the assets and, you know, best position them to submit a competitive bid. As Simon said, we haven't made any decisions yet on whether we will sell ultimately or not. Again, the interest is very high. In terms of what we would plan to do with the proceeds, you know, it really will just continue to support our strong cash generation strategies that we've laid out.
We are obviously reinvesting in the business with our existing oil sands operations and also in the downstream and chemicals business as you heard as well. In terms of, you know, does this fundamentally change the picture for M&A? I would say it doesn't change the picture for M&A because as we've said in our strategy, our core focus is with our existing assets. But having said that, the aperture is open. We are regularly evaluating other potential growth opportunities which could include M&A. It could include things within our undeveloped resource base.
You know, you mentioned Aspen as an example. So, you know, we're continuing to evaluate those and test them against the efficiency of our existing capital program, which is already delivering growth.
You know, as Simon laid out, Kearl has delivered tens of thousands of barrels a day of growth over the last few years at a very cost-efficient manner. That's what we're weighing things against is how do they compete? But the aperture is open.
Okay. I appreciate that color. Thank you.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. I will now turn the call back over to Dave Hughes, Vice President of Investor Relations.
Thanks. Thanks, operator. That brings us to the end of our program today. On behalf of the management team of Imperial, I'd like to thank everybody for joining us on our webcast. Look forward to seeing you all hopefully in person in the very near future. Thank you very much.
Thank you.