Hi, everyone. Sorry. Welcome to our Investor Day. Thanks. Obviously virtual this year, and I'd like to welcome you. Online with us today is Mr. Chuck Magro, President and CEO of Nutrien, Mr. Pedro Farah, our CFO, and the heads of our three business units. Our goal today is to provide an update on Nutrien's business, our long-term goals, and strategies. As we conduct this webcast, various statements that we make about future expectations, plans, and prospects contain forward-looking information. Certain material assumptions were applied in making these forecasts and conclusions, therefore actual results could differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking information. Additional information about these factors and assumptions are contained in our current quarterly report to our shareholders, as well as our most recent annual report, MD&A, and annual information form filed with Canadian and U.S. securities commissions to which we direct you.
Our market outlook presentation has been sent and posted to the investor relations page this morning as background for today. The format will be to hear from each of our executive leadership team speakers for an update on the business and outlook, and then we will have a fulsome question and answer period after all the speakers have finished up as per the agenda. We invite you to submit your questions at any time, and I will be putting them forward to our executive indicating who the question is from during the Q&A session. With that, I'd like to turn the mic and the video over to our CEO, Chuck Magro.
Thanks, Richard. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Nutrien's 2020 Investor Update. First off, I hope that you and your loved ones are all safe and healthy. We held our first Investor Day back in May 2019, and wow, has the world changed since then. In that short period of time, we have experienced everything from trade wars, African swine fever, to now the worst pandemic of our lifetimes. With respect to COVID, virtually every sector of the economy has been impacted in some way. Agriculture and demand for fertilizers have been more resilient than most commodities. In fact, looking at 2020, what you will see is that most of the ag industry has actually performed quite well. In fact, global crop inventories haven't been this tight or the outlook for crop prices this strong in a very long time. For Nutrien, some things remain the same.
Our strategy and our business model are built to weather market volatility and to take advantage of the strengthening agricultural fundamentals that we are seeing today. We plan to cover a lot of material in a concise format today, including some of the more exciting areas of our growth, including Nutrien Ag Solutions, our digital platform, and the exciting new strategic announcement we made just this morning. There are four key messages that I'd like to highlight for you. These will be the themes for our next two hours or so. First, despite the challenges that the ag economy has faced over the last couple of years, our business model has provided significant value and stability, and we have made good progress towards the 2023 targets we set last year.
Second, we are now targeting $ 1 billion of additional value by 2025, with investments and actions that are within our control. This excludes any impact from higher fertilizer prices. Third, if the market fundamentals continue to improve as we have seen lately, the value creation could be very significant. It's been six years since we've seen this strong of an ag outlook, with crop prices this high, tighter stocks to use ratios, and much improved farmer profitability. Fertilizer supply-demand is also improving, especially in potash, where the spot prices are up in the last six months in most major markets. Finally, we are committed to becoming a global leader in carbon management and sustainable agriculture. We've made numerous investments over the last few years to develop a climate-friendly products and services portfolio and believe the time is right to bring a carbon economy to agriculture.
Looking at our strategy, you all know that Nutrien is an integrated crop inputs company. We have some of the best assets in the business, all working together to bring full acre solutions to the farm to help growers produce abundant, healthy, and sustainable food. We also have the supply chain capability to bring products and services, but more and more lately, technology and people to the farm quickly and at a lower cost than anyone else. Now, and this is the new part for today, we can provide leading sustainability solutions to the ag industry. Our business model provides more stability through the ag cycles and significant leverage to improving agricultural fundamentals. You have seen the result of this stability through the recent cyclical lows where Nutrien had stronger EBITDA and free cash flow than most of our peers.
With a strong balance sheet, we were able to make capital allocation decisions at the bottom of the cycle that few other companies in our industry can make. In fact, since the merger, Nutrien has increased our dividend by 13%, bought back 12% of our shares outstanding, and have grown our ag solutions business by 20%, as well as having one of the best health and safety records in the industry. Looking back for just a minute, you can see the benefits of the merger and the actions we have taken since then have created a lot of value, even in very tough market environment. If you look at the chart, you can see that the pre-merger pro forma EBITDA was about $3 billion in 2017. This was when most fertilizer prices were higher than they are now.
If we normalize the 2017 EBITDA for 2020 fertilizer prices, the result would actually be closer to $2.7 billion of EBITDA. With our 2020 guidance midpoint at $3.6 billion, this means a total value creation of almost $900 million in three years. This is a simple way to illustrate that we not only captured the ongoing $650 million in synergies from the merger, but we also generated additional earnings at the bottom of the cycle from our investments. After we delivered the synergies, we set operational targets at our last Investor Day back in May and have made very good progress since then. You can see we are headed in the right direction on all fronts. In retail, we've increased the EBITDA margins and are making good progress towards our 2023 target of 10.5%.
We were able to grow our EBITDA margins despite low crop prices for the last two years. The margin improvement is also impressive when you consider that we are also building out our digital platform right now. The other area in retail, which I will call out, is the improvement in working capital. We are already approaching the target levels we set last year. This has come partly from our investments in our hub-and-spoke model as we realize the benefits from our network optimization efforts. Looking at our digital platform targets, there's a lot to talk about here. I'll leave the update to Mike Frank to cover, except to say that we continue to be very pleased with the progress and we have surpassed even our own high expectations.
In our production businesses, our potash cash cost hit record lows this year and we expect to have our best year ever in 2020. We continue to invest in new mining automation technology to take us to the next level of performance. Ken Seitz will talk more about this in his section. In nitrogen, we've increased our nitrogen operating rate significantly over the past three years, as well as increased our nitrogen sales volumes by about 800,000 tons, with more volume expected as we finish up the brownfield expansions in 2021. Raef Sully will discuss this more in his section. Looking forward now at our plans, we now see an opportunity to create an additional $1 billion in value by 2025.
We plan to grow the retail business an additional $300 million-$400 million in EBITDA by 2023, and then another additional by $200 million-$300 million in EBITDA by 2025 through organic growth, continued network optimization efforts, cost management, and of course, through M&A. In Potash, we expect to achieve cash cost of production of $50-$55 per tonne in 2023, and these are in today's dollars. Now, it should be noted that these are all-in costs that include everything including maintenance turnarounds, carbon taxes, and Canadian resource taxes. We also expect to grow our Potash volume as global demand continues to grow. We now expect global Potash demand to reach 73 million tonnes by 2023 and somewhere between 77 million and 78 million tonnes by 2025.
In nitrogen, we will continue to improve our reliability and our controllable cash cost position, which is already among the best in the world, and sell the higher volumes from our brownfield projects currently underway. Of the 1 million tonnes of total capacity, we expect approximately 300,000 tonnes will be added in 2021. Turning to the market conditions for just a minute. The last two years have been at cyclical lows, and you can see that from this chart that we are close to 10-year average lows. Clearly, there is much more upside than downside as we look ahead. Our price sensitivity is very strong. For every $25 a tonne increase in fertilizer prices, Nutrien would generate an additional $650 million in EBITDA.
If you consider that we are currently about $100 a tonne below the 10-year average price, the torque of the fertilizer price is very, very significant. What sets us apart is the volume leverage we have in potash. We are one of a very few companies that have excess volume, about 6 million tonnes to be more exact. For every 1 million tonnes of sales volume, it is worth about $100 million in EBITDA, and that is at today's prices. Much, much more than that as prices improve. As the market fundamentals improve, Nutrien will be one of a very few companies with excess volumes, adding EBITDA from both higher prices and higher potash volumes. This next chart goes back to my opening comments that agriculture has been more resilient than many other commodities.
You can see global grains and oilseeds and fertilizer have all seen growth in demand, while most industrial commodities have seen significant declines. This is because industrial commodities are really driven by economic activity or GDP, while agricultural demand is driven by population growth and the need to feed people. The only ag commodity that gets caught in the middle is nitrogen, with approximately 75% of nitrogen demand coming from agriculture and 25% of demand from industrial, which tends to be directly tied to the global economy. Let's look at the U.S. farmer, the chart on the right. How are they doing? Well, with today's crop prices, farmer cash margins are now the highest we've seen in many years. In fact, you have to go as far back as 2014 to see cash margins this good.
We expect that this will provide strong support for demand for our products and services as we move into 2021. The last topic I'd like to touch on today is the importance of sustainable agriculture and what we are focused on as a company. This year, we have seen an approximate 20% improvement in our overall ESG ratings, and we are now in the top quartile of our peer group. Today, Nutrien is the world's largest producer of controlled-release fertilizer products with our ESN, which can reduce NOx emissions by up to 50%, and with our Loveland proprietary products portfolio, where we have developed a suite of environmentally friendly products. We are also one of the world's largest producers of so-called blue or low-carbon ammonia, with about a 1/3 of our net ammonia sales coming from this category.
Early next year, we will be coming out with our overall ESG targets, which will include very ambitious environmental commitments focused on operational Scope 1 and Scope 2 reductions, which will provide us with a pathway to become Paris compliant. We intend to release this in the first half of next year, so please watch out for that. However, just this morning, we announced an exciting new initiative, the introduction of our carbon program for farmers. We believe this is a first-of-its-kind program to unlock the true potential of agriculture to help address climate change. To set the stage, there are nearly 3.5 billion acres of farmland on the planet today, and our population is expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050. Agriculture needs to produce enough food to feed that population and needs to be part of the solution to tackle climate change.
Sustainable agriculture and carbon incentive programs really need to be a big part of the answer as we combine science and technology, plus smart government policy, to create an efficient carbon economy. One where farmers actually get paid to reduce emissions and sequester carbon, moving carbon from being just a cost on their expense ledger to becoming a source of revenue. We believe that's our best chance of success. Looking at the carbon market, we expect demand for carbon credits will grow exponentially in the coming decade as the world increasingly focuses on climate action. Agriculture can be a major source of those credits, representing up to 30% of the total carbon market by 2050, and by offsetting up to 85% of the current emissions from producing crops. Some experts have forecasted that the global ag carbon market could reach $100 billion by the year 2050.
Nutrien is in a unique position to implement a carbon program, given who we are, what we do, and our position in the value chain. We will provide full-acre solutions directly to farmers and use our digital platform to measure and generate the carbon credits, having them verified along the way. Then we will facilitate the purchase of those credits through a carbon marketplace to provide cash back to farmers for these credits. We see the potential in the short term for farmers to achieve about $50 an acre in margin, $20 from carbon farming, assuming carbon is valued at $10-$20 a ton, and as much as $30 from higher productivity and yields. This impact will vary, of course, based on crop, soil conditions, and weather, but this would be our expectation for growers who embrace this program.
Nutrien benefits from bringing full end-to-end solutions to growers with our agronomists working together directly with farmers to make all of this seamless and efficient. In 2021, we plan to run a series of trials across North America to prove out our technology and our platform, and we expect to roll this out fully in 2022. Finally, this Carbon Initiative will be an open program, and we invite others across the ag value chain to join us on this journey. Now is the time for the ag industry to come together to solve these big challenges of feeding a growing planet while tackling climate change. With those comments, I'll hand it over now to Ken Seitz to talk potash. I will be back at the end of the presentations to make a few closing comments and then answer some questions. Go ahead, Ken.
Well, thanks, Chuck, and good afternoon, everyone. We are the largest soft rock miner and potash producer in the world with a network of six mines located here in Canada, one of the limited geographies in the world with abundant and economical potash reserves and a stable geopolitical operating environment. The potash industry has the highest growth expectations of the three primary nutrients and is highly consolidated with significant barriers to entry, including the time it takes to bring on new projects, as well as significant capital required to do so. Within this industry, Nutrien is best positioned to create value.
We expect to produce approximately 12.5 million tons this year, but more importantly, we have 6 million tons of available capacity we expect to deploy as demand grows. We also have line of sight to an additional 5 million tons of low-cost brownfield opportunities beyond that 18 million tons of available capacity, giving us both scale and growth optionality that is unmatched in the industry. We operate the most reliable, safe and efficient assets as part of a diverse and flexible mine network that allows us to assess the market and position the right tons at the right time. We've seen long-term historical global potash demand growth of 2%-3% per year, driven by strong potash consumption trends in all major export markets, and we expect to continue to see that level of long-term growth.
We know there is variability from year to year, and while temporary pauses can occur in certain countries, the underlying fundamentals of food demand that supports increased potash application remain. In 2019, we had a pullback in demand, and we expect the growth we're seeing here in 2020 to continue as the market reverts to historical trend levels over the next few years. We see significant growth coming from the key regions of Brazil, China, India, and Southeast Asia, and we've provided ranges of expectations in each of these geographies, supported by our fundamental views in those areas. I'll note that we could see any combination of regional demand growth within those ranges to occur. Based on these underlying fundamentals and growth expectations, we expect global annual demand to be in the range of 73 million tonnes in 2023, and we see significant potential beyond those levels.
Based on our market outlook, we expect to sell 14 million with upside to 16 million tonnes in 2023, increasing our asset utilization by opportunistically flexing capacity from our lowest cost assets in response to demand growth and volatility. We have an extensive distribution network for domestic and offshore markets, allowing us to support our mine network and cost effectively maintain share or opportunistically capture short-term demand surges while we increase our volumes as the market grows over time. We currently see a number of paths to accelerate the utilization of our excess capacity, as outlined on the right-hand side of the slide. We remain positioned and ready to increase our volumes in the event we see above-trend demand growth, continued slower ramp-up of new supply or mine closures.
The industry is not immune to supply shocks from sinkholes, political unrest or water inflow that has caused an average of 1 million - 2 million lost tons over the last decade. When one or any combination of these scenarios occur, we are the beneficiary of not only volume, in which we see a $100 million increase to our annual EBITDA for every 1 million tons, but we are also the beneficiary in price, where we see a $300 million increase to our annual EBITDA for every $25 per ton increase. Nutrien is well positioned to leverage our capacity and benefit from any supply or demand scenarios which impact prices and volumes. At Nutrien, our goal is to operate the safest, most reliable, most efficient, lowest cost potash operations in the world.
Last year, we introduced our Next Generation Potash initiatives, which are focused on achieving just that, by leveraging technology and making improvements from the mine face right through to the mill. We disclosed we are investing to improve safety and efficiency, and while we've deferred some capital over the past 12 months due to COVID-related precautions, and as a result, extended the time horizon for our expected progress, we remain focused and continue to see an immense amount of value and potential as we look to 2021 through to 2023 and beyond. We currently have 100% of our mining fleet at the Rocanville site enabled to run with the operator not present during shifts, and we have two of our mining machines at our Lanigan site outfitted with surface remote operation capabilities.
While it's easiest to associate our next gen program with autonomous mining machines or tele-remote capabilities that allows you to control the miner from surface, we are advancing much more than that. We're implementing machine vision monitoring to things like our conveyor belts as part of predictive maintenance, which is only one example of the progress we're making on a substantial, broad, predictive maintenance program. We're leveraging advanced process controls to optimize our product quality, recovery, and environmental footprint with line of sight to reducing up to 50% of leach water usage per site per year. We are digitizing value-driven planning and scheduling, and we're currently constructing and progressing self-generated heat and power at our Rocanville site, which will improve reliability, reduce CO2 intensity, and lower our cost per ton.
We are currently moving these initiatives into the scaling and rollout stage, which will accelerate value delivery, move our network down the cost curve, and support our position as one of the lowest cost potash producers in the world. Driven by our Next Generation Potash initiatives, we expect our cash cost of product manufactured to be $ 50-$ 55 per ton in 2023, or $ 53-$ 58 per ton when including inflation. Despite the deferred capital over the past 12 months and adjusted cadence, we see a $ 3-$ 6 per ton benefit from these initiatives and further savings as we continue to scale, roll out, and deliver value to 2025 and into the future. Earlier this year, we took additional steps to further optimize our network by shifting tons from our higher cost Vanscoy site to our lower cost operations within our network.
These steps have positioned us to run our network more cost effectively without sacrificing flexibility as we ramp up our volume over the next few years. While we believe our all-in definition of cash cost of product manufactured is the most relevant number for your consideration, if we were to exclude turnaround costs, carbon tax, and Canadian resource taxes, our costs would be $ 40-$ 45 per ton in 2023 before inflation. We look forward, we expect to be increasing our asset utilization by ramping up our available capacity of 18 million tons. Not only that, we continue to evaluate the timing of an additional 5 million tons of brownfield expansion opportunities, which would bring our total operational capability to 23 million tons to ensure we are positioning ourselves for growth well into the future.
New greenfield projects here in Saskatchewan are facing capital costs of $2,500-$3,000 per ton and a decade to fully ramp up. To put that into perspective, the shafts alone usually only represent roughly 25% of the required capital to bring a project to completion. In comparison, our expansions can be brought on for $500-$700 per ton, significantly cheaper than greenfield projects. As these opportunities are spread across our network of mines, we have the ability to bring on these tons in increments as needed, quicker than any other project currently being discussed and with significantly less risk. Our scale and growth optionality is unmatched in the industry, and we will continue to evaluate the timing of these brownfield opportunities as we increase our sales volumes. In 2019, we saw a pullback in demand and some new supply enter the market.
This year, we're seeing higher demand and more robust price environment despite additional supply tons. I can tell you with the fall we've had in North America, the market is tight as we close out the year, and we are fully committed for 2020. Looking ahead, we see a balanced S&D outlook next year and tightening dynamics as we move beyond 2021. However, due to our 6 million tons of available capacity, we have the unique ability to strategically surge tons into the market similar to 2018, when we sold an additional 1 million tons over the previous year. We are the only producer with the excess capacity and flexibility to sustainably capture demand growth, and we intend to continue to strategically utilize our excess capacity to optimize value for Nutrien.
I outlined in an earlier slide a number of scenarios such as above-trend demand, slow ramp-up of new supply, or an industry supply shock, all of which lead to an increased need for more tons in the market. The arrows in this slide represent the potential impact of our additional 6 million tons of available capacity could have on global utilization rates under different S&D scenarios, highlighting the capabilities of our network. This scope of capability is unique to Nutrien and Nutrien alone. Finally, to reiterate my key points, we expect demand to revert to historical levels and grow at a long-term rate of 2%-3% per year.
We plan to sell 14 million with upside to 16 million tons of potash in 2023, with multiple scenarios in which we would leverage our 6 million tons of available capacity to surge volumes into the market and take advantage of opportunities as they arrive. We have line of sight to an additional 5 million tons of low-cost brownfield opportunities that can be brought on in increments, giving us both scale and growth optionality that is unmatched in the industry. Our Next Generation Potash initiatives will allow us to continue to aggressively drive down our costs, increase our capability, and improve our reliability and flexibility, leading to cash cost of product manufactured of $53-$58 per ton in 2023, with even lower costs in 2025.
Overall, we expect our actions to deliver approximately $200 million of value under our control in 2023 and $300 million of value in 2025, with a potential for much more upside considering for every $25 per ton increase in prices, we see an annual benefit of $300 million. We operate the most reliable, safe and efficient assets as part of a diverse and flexible mine network that allows us to assess the market and position the right tons at the right time, cost effectively, maintaining market share, and opportunistically capturing short-term demand surges while we increase our volumes as the market grows over time. We are well-positioned as we continue as the potash industry leader and the largest underground soft rock miner in the world. With that, I will pass it over to Raef Sully.
Thanks, Ken. Good afternoon, everyone. Raef Sully here, Executive Vice President and Head of the Nitrogen and Phosphate Business Units. Let's dive straight in and start with nitrogen. Nutrien has a large and diverse nitrogen portfolio. Our ammonia capacity is fairly evenly split between Canada, the U.S., and Trinidad. Our Canadian operations have one of the lowest cost positions in the world. AECO Gas has traded at an average discount to NYMEX of over $1 over the past few years. That equates to more than $40 per ton ammonia cost advantage. The majority of our Canadian product is sold within the Western Canadian market, where we enjoy a logistical advantage, further enhancing our overall margins. In the U.S., our sites are well-positioned to supply large agriculture and industrial customers.
We have an extensive network of more than 180 terminals and warehouses with over 1.3 million tons of storage capacity to help serve our customers across North America. Our operations in Trinidad supply customers in around 30 countries worldwide. In September, we made the decision to indefinitely curtail our smallest ammonia plant there, improving our cost structure and free cash flow during this period of market weakness. We've maintained the flexibility to restart this plant if market conditions improve. Turning to the fundamentals. Industrial nitrogen demand was impacted this year by the economic slowdown related to COVID-19. We are seeing a recovery in industrial nitrogen demand, although we are not yet back to pre-COVID levels. We expect that the recent increase in ag commodity prices will support higher planted acres and strong nitrogen fertilizer demand in the spring.
The recent increases we've seen in nitrogen prices reflect this optimism for a strong spring season. Over the medium term, we expect nitrogen fundamentals to tighten. There is limited new capacity additions in the pipeline. Demand is expected to grow by approximately 1.5% per year. Demand for industrial nitrogen products is expected to increase at a rate of 2%-3%. We're well-positioned to take advantage of this growth due to the product flexibility at our plants and our proximity to large industrial customers. The second fundamental to discuss is the outlook for energy prices. In 2020, we saw some compression of the cost curve. Oversupply in global LNG led to lower gas prices and higher than expected supply, especially in Europe. This, coupled with lower than expected industrial demand from COVID-19, led to lower global ammonia prices.
We do not view this as sustainable. In the second half of 2020, we have already started to see an increase in gas prices in Europe and global ammonia prices. Over the medium term, we expect prices for natural gas and coal to increase, supporting a steeper cost curve than we've seen in 2020. As the supply and demand tightens, we expect nitrogen prices will rise from current levels to incent new capacity that will be required over the medium to long term. While we expect a more supportive market environment going forward, our focus is on the factors we can control. Let me talk briefly about our three strategic priorities. First, our top priority is ensuring we have safe, reliable operations. We see this as the foundation to everything else we need to do. Second, we're always looking for.
First, let me talk about proprietary products. The reach and scale of our business provides Nutrien with unparalleled opportunity as an ag retailer, and one of our key advantages is our unique proprietary products portfolio. These products not only give us differentiation in front of our customers, they also contribute much higher margin than traditional third-party products. As we continue our tuck-in strategy, our proprietary products are accretive to the economics of that underlying business and they drive quick synergies. What's really impressive is that we've diversified our portfolio of proprietary products, and we are now growing fastest in plant nutrition and biologicals, which boost yields, improve soil health, and are a key part of our sustainability toolkit. We see strong contributions from this strategy, and we're on track for 29% of our gross margin coming from proprietary products by 2023.
Our digital toolset has advanced as the leading platform in ag retail, which facilitates our grower customers and our agronomists to collaborate in a new and unique way that drives efficiency, convenience, and a better outcome in the field. The key is that we've purpose-built the platform to work seamlessly across four vertical capabilities: field planning, digital agronomy, e-commerce, and sustainability. To help demonstrate the benefits and the new functionality, I'll run a short video so you can see firsthand how this works.
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All right, very cool. Everything you saw on that video is unique and proprietary and only available to customers of Nutrien Ag Solutions and, of course, our own sales agronomists. With more than $1 billion in sales generated through the platform year to date, the Digital Hub has enabled our employees to focus more time on the relationship with the grower and less time writing invoices. Let me remind you that our digital platform can generate the sales cadence and invoicing directly from the field planning stage. Once the plan is created, order entry and administration becomes streamlined and convenient for our customers and our branch operations. That digital connectivity with our customers allows us to serve them more efficiently and effectively. It also provides increased trust between our agronomists and our customers while making doing business with us more convenient.
It's all backed, of course, by our supply chain that reliably delivers products and services to our customers. In addition to the $1 billion in sales that we've already seen this year, we're also starting to see a number of other benefits. For example, customers who interact with us digitally are stickier, and they're spending more with us compared to a traditional customer. Even though our investments to date in digital have been largely foundational, we are seeing more and more value created as adoption increases. With all of that said, let's talk about the tangible benefits that we expect to see from both our optimization and digital initiatives. We'll walk through the key financial metrics that we introduced at the last Investor Day, and I'm happy to report that we've improved on all of them across the board.
First, we've been able to sell more and gain share with a lower proportion of costs. Excluding the impacts of the Ruralco acquisition, we've reduced our cash operating coverage ratio by 200 basis points in the last year. As we layer in a full year of run rate synergies that are already achieved in Australia, we expect to see our total results improve from 2019 levels and deliver $100 million per year of benefit by 2023. We've also been hard at work at optimizing our working capital, and we have generated significant efficiencies in our supply chain, and as we reported in our last quarterly results, that we've already achieved our 2023 target well ahead of schedule. That work's not done. We'll continue to look for ways to make further improvements, especially as we continue to expand our business.
Lastly, a point that I've already touched on, we see an opportunity in the U.S. to drive growth and create more EBITDA per branch, which we view as a strategic outcome and provides a clear indication of the strength of our business model. Finally, moving to sustainability. As Chuck described earlier, Nutrien is embarking on an ambitious plan to become a leader in sustainable agriculture. Nutrien is uniquely positioned to offer the industry's most comprehensive end-to-end carbon program, making it easy for growers to adopt sustainable agronomic practices that generate positive carbon outcomes, translating into additional earnings for our farmer customers. We've built and acquired the capabilities to do this end to end. It starts with our trusted relationship with growers and a focus on full acre solutions to enhance productivity, profitability, and sustainability.
Leveraging our digital crop planning capabilities, we build customized field plans that target agronomic practices and product recommendations that are both proven to generate positive carbon outcomes and drive yield efficiency. With our growers, we'll establish a carbon baseline using soil samples supported by our Waypoint Analytical business and provide season-long support, service, and advice to execute the crop plan and the carbon recipe. Throughout the season, agronomic data is collected from a variety of sources, including from our Echelon precision ag platform and our extensive custom application fleet, supported by AgBridge, our new fleet manage geospatial tracking tool. Data is aggregated into our digital sustainability platform, which is Agrible, and integrated with carbon quantification tools to reliably measure carbon outcomes. These outcomes are then verified, generating carbon credits available for sale by the grower.
From the grower's perspective, it makes every acre more profitable from the adoption of leading agronomic practices, plus the benefit of the carbon program. To give you some ideas of the practices that enable the farmer to drive yields and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions or improve soil carbon sequestration, they include things like slow-controlled release fertilizer, nitrogen inhibitors, yield and soil enhancing products such as biologicals and micronutrients, variable rate fertilizer application or targeted applications, low or no till cropping, and cover crops. Combined, these practices have the ability to improve grower margins by up to $30 per acre. Additionally, carbon credits are generated and become a new source of income for the grower and have the potential to appreciate substantially as the price of carbon increases.
Our carbon program will provide growers with an economic advantage and help them to adopt to a rapidly evolving compliance and regulatory landscape. What makes Nutrien's program unique is that we have the products, services, and capabilities all in one place, and that we utilize science-based measurements and outcomes to create new opportunities for growers to monetize carbon at scale and reward adopters as this landscape evolves. Nutrien will launch this program in 2021 with North American pilots across Western Canada and in several states in the U.S. There you have it, the Nutrien Ag Solutions retail business. We will continue to consolidate and grow in the U.S. and expand in the high growth Brazilian market. We'll be an industry leader with a more diversified business. We'll become more efficient and demonstrate the opportunity we have to drive growth.
Over the next five years, we expect to grow our Ag Solutions retail business, targeting $2 billion of EBITDA in that timeframe. We are unmatched in size, scale, and opportunity with a clear strategy to drive superior growth and lead in agricultural sustainability. With that, I'll turn it over to Pedro.
Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone. Nutrien's financial strength is based on a strong balance sheet, disciplined capital allocation, and significant earnings strength, which I'll talk about today. First, capital allocation. Our approach works and remains unchanged since Nutrien's formation. Our first priority is to sustain our assets. Preserving the physical safety of our employees is a key company value, and it is critical we operate safe and reliable assets. Next, we're committed to retaining an investment grade credit rating to preserve our financial security. Nutrien has excellent access to capital markets, which funds our long and short-term liquidity needs at very competitive rates. Third, providing our shareholders a sustainable and growing dividend, establishing a floor on our returns. The recent crisis tested many companies' ability and resolve to keep their dividend policy.
Nutrien never wavered, and looking ahead, we remain confident in our ability to return capital to shareholders. Lastly, Nutrien will evaluate potential investments across numerous growth opportunities. We apply a rigorous compete for capital allocation process based upon a minimum 12% risk-adjusted hurdle rate. Opportunities are always evaluated against share buybacks to maximize shareholder value. We believe that this solid framework addresses all company stakeholders and will continue to position Nutrien as a top investment in the ag input space. We are often asked why our depreciation and amortization exceeds sustaining capital expenditures. And the answer is simple, accounting, largely resulting from the merger, which makes us unique relative to peers. In particular, fair value balance sheet write-ups from the merger and recent acquisitions must be amortized, and IFRS now requires that our lease assets be capitalized, further increasing depreciation relative to U.S. GAAP peers.
Our core depreciation has been, and continues to be in line with our sustained CapEx at around the $1 billion mark. We believe that this is the right level to keep our asset base safe, reliable, and competitive. Our balance sheet is built on two principles, securing reliable access to low-cost debt and preserving sufficient liquidity through the cycle. Our target is to be BBB flat investment grade, which we have maintained since inception. This rating provides us ample financial flexibility and access to commercial paper market, which is important to fund our seasonal retail working capital requirements. Our strategy was tested in the crisis, and we are pleased to see that we are able to preserve and even increase our access to contingent capital while continuing to reduce our cost of debt. This is a testament of the market's confidence on our earnings capacity and earnings quality.
Moving to Nutrien Financial. The creation of Nutrien Financial launched late last year is a competitive advantage. While we have offered short-term financing to our customers for decades, formalizing our credit and collections process through Nutrien Financial has provided three key incremental benefits. First, it supports Nutrien Ag Solutions revenue growth globally in a trusted brand. This attracts new customers, increase our share of wallet, and entices repeat sales. Secondly, it is favorably rated by credit agencies as a finance company, improving our leverage capacity and lowering our cost of debt. Third, it generates incremental interest revenue contributing approximately $30 million to retail earnings. Our U.S. and significant portion of our Australian receivables have already been transitioned into the captive in the last year. We want to grow prudently, and we have many checks and balances to ensure our growth is both profitable and sustainable.
We are proud of the fact that we have seen improvements in our key metrics, including a reduction in the 90 days past due receivables to 5%, which is impressive in a difficult market. We know that a sustainable and growing dividend coupled with share buybacks is also important to our investors, and it so remains a core part of Nutrien's capital allocation strategy. Nutrien dividend provides the highest yield of its peer group and in aggregate has comprised a fourth of the peer group's total dividends paid. Equally important, our investors can rely on this income stream. Our dividend is affordable, currently representing just under 60% of our forecast free cash flow. Let me complete our capital allocation session with Nutrien's compete for capital approach.
Nutrien's vertically integrated business model and comprehensive product and service offering generates a multitude of options that compete for the company's strong cash flow generation. In retail, we have made significant investments rolling out the industry's first end-to-end digital offering to farmers, which has seen a tremendous success in 2020, as Mike just spoke. Currently, over 40% of all of our products and services are being ordered and offered through the platform. We also continue to expand our geographic footprint in Brazil, and we are focused on organic growth in Australia. In wholesale, our focus is on opportunities for next-generation technology enhancements to reduce costs and optimize performance and high return brownfield investments in nitrogen. We understand and we are committed to proactively managing the environmental impacts of our business as this is an important strategic component of our investment decisioning.
Lastly, as discussed in the last slide, Nutrien is committed to total shareholder returns as evidenced by the $6.6 billion of returns just in the last three years. Nutrien is also a leader in controlling our controllables, and in particular, containing SG&A. Relative to our fertilizer peers, Nutrien has consistently outperformed on wholesale and corporate SG&A as a percentage of adjusted EBITDA. We believe this requires constant examination and will not become complacent. As Mike covered in his presentation, we are also committed to improving our retail SG&A and coverage ratios. In addition to controlling our controllables, Nutrien earnings also have significant leverages to fertilizer prices, as alluded to by Chuck in the beginning of the presentation. For every $25 increase to net realized selling prices across our wholesale operations, Nutrien adjusted EBITDA increases by $650 million and adjusted EPS increases by $0.90 per share.
On a percentage basis, a 10% increase from today's fertilizer prices increases our EBITDA by 20% and EPS by 50%. Simply put, we have a huge torque when prices rebound from the lows experienced in 2020. Based on recent fertilizer price recovery and stronger ag fundamentals, we are confidently optimistic in our global benchmark outlook. Finally, increased crop prices not only means upside for our wholesale business, but also for retail. When farmers make money, we make money. We believe now is an attractive entry point to invest in our company. To summarize, before we wrap up, 2020 marked a period of global volatility not seen since the financial crisis, and Nutrien was not deterred. We preserved a strong balance sheet and demonstrated commitment to our dividend. Paraphrasing Chuck's opening comments, we look at 2021 with great optimism.
Crop prices and cash margins are as strong as they have been in many years. Fertilizer markets have seen solid demand this year. The future looks bright for our customers. What is good for our customers has always been good for Nutrien and our shareholders. Nutrien is an outstanding investment opportunity with our retail operations powered by best-in-class digital platform, generating consistent earnings through the cycle. Our safe, efficient, and low-cost wholesale business have significant leverage. Our strong cash flow supports a stable and growing dividend. We are resilient on the downside. More importantly, offer great torque on the upside. Thank you for your time. I'll pass now back to Chuck for his closing comments.
Thanks, Pedro, and thanks to the rest of the team here. I'll wrap up very quickly so we have time for Q&As. Nutrien is a great business. Hopefully, you've taken that away from the speakers today. We have the right strategy, especially for these volatile and uncertain times. We have created significant value since the merger, and we've made very good progress on the metrics and targets we identified back in 2019. If you look forward for the next few years, we have a clear pathway to create an additional $1 billion within our control of earnings. We believe that we are best positioned in the ag sector to capitalize on the improving market fundamentals with significant price and potash volume leverage.
Finally, we are committed to becoming a leader in sustainability and carbon management in agriculture, and the new program we announced today is an exciting step forward in that ultimate vision. Thank you very much for listening, and I'll turn it over to Richard for Q&As.
Thanks, Mike. We have a lot of Q&As, so why don't I go to the first one, and I think this is for you, Chuck. On the carbon program announcement, Andrew Wong from RBC and a number of other analysts have asked, how does Nutrien expect to share in the benefit from a potential $50 per acre increase in farmer cash margin as the program is implemented? They also want to know about the agronomic practices needed and what does that really mean for fertilizer applications?
Good. Look, I'll answer the first part, and then I'll have Mike Frank just talk a little bit about the specifics and the application. Look, what we tried to do, and we've studied the agricultural carbon market for the last few years. We really wanted to make sure that this was a rallying cry for the industry. We can't do it alone, nor would we ever think about that, and we really need the agricultural industry now to step up to tackle climate change. After our extensive studies, what we've determined is the best way to do that is to create a carbon economy. That's the basis. The other key learning that we have found after looking at this for a couple of years is that the majority of the value needs to accrue to the farmer.
It is very important that we change practices on the farm, and the only way to do that is to ensure that they are properly compensated and incented. That was the basis of the program. How Nutrien will benefit, it's our people, our products, and our technology that's going to drive, I think, a lot of the success. We will naturally benefit by supplying services, products, technology, using our platform, all of those things, we will benefit. The vast majority, we want to ensure that of that $ 50, the $50, when I referred to it, that's to the farmer. It's a margin, so that we will obviously benefit, but it will be behind that $50. We think that it is so very important that the majority of the benefit accrue to the farm.
On the specifics on what you can expect for some of our products and services, Mike Frank, why don't you just give a little bit of a view on that, please?
Sure. Thanks, Chuck. Look, I think there's going to be opportunities both for proprietary products of our own, whether they be crop protection products, biologicals, micronutrients, as well as working with our key suppliers, whether it be seed trait or crop protection products that can also add value in what we're calling the carbon recipe. As I talked about a little bit in my prepared remarks, there's a number of technologies that are here and now that really will drive this carbon outcome that we're talking about, and it starts with things like slow-release fertilizer. For example, our ESN nitrogen fertilizer or nitrogen inhibitors, which we have some in our proprietary products business. There's other value-added products like biologicals and micronutrients that help create a more healthy root structure and create a plant that is more efficient at the uptake on nutrients.
There's things like variable rate fertilizer application, which today, if you look across North America, there's probably somewhere between 30% and 40% of the acres that are doing some level of variable rate. There's lots of opportunity to continue to grow that. Those are some of the opportunities. Of course, no-till cropping, planting cover crops are also opportunities to drive more carbon sequestration as well.
Thanks, Mike.
Richard, sorry-
Yep. Just queuing up. Actually, Mike, if you could continue, there's a second question here. One question that's coming in is about U.S. crop expectations for next spring. Vincent Andrews from Morgan Stanley wants to know why Nutrien only expects a marginal increase in corn planting in 2021 given the strong margins.
Sure. Well, look, as you saw on slide 35, we're expecting a more significant bump in soybean acres. With soybean prices today over $11 per acre and even on next year's crop around $10.50 per acre, we think there's upside to the soybean plantings. I do think we'll get back to that 180 million acres of corn and soybeans and depending on the price over the next several months, we'll determine exactly what the ratio is. We're expecting upwards of a 0.5 million - 1 million more acres of corn, but probably more like 5 million more acres of soybeans next year.
Thanks, Mike. Just give me a second. For Chuck, we have a question from Joel Jackson at BMO. He's wondering, with the $1 billion of EBITDA under your control, what is your forecasted EBITDA for 2023, and what are the main differences from your last Investor Day in 2019?
Okay. Thanks, Richard. Look, the major difference, if you go back to the material we put out last May, is just the starting point for fertilizer. I think the best way to answer the question, if we just look forward, and let's talk about a couple different targets, whether that's $4.5 billion of EBITDA for Nutrien, or $5 billion or $6 billion. The pathway to $4.5 billion, there's multiple paths. The first is we simply just need to get back to 2018 pricing because we've built a better, stronger, more profitable business in this period of time. 2018 prices, if we were to see that now with the business that we have, we would see $4.5 billion. We can deliver on the $1 billion that we just outlined in today's session. Either way gets us to $4.5 billion.
How could Nutrien get to $5 billion of EBITDA? Well, if you think about that baseline of $4.5 billion, mid-$300 fertilizer prices would take us just north of $5 billion. How about $6 billion of EBITDA? We would need the upper end of the $300 range, so say $375 fertilizer prices, and that would get us very close to $6 billion of EBITDA. It goes to the point that we've made today that we have significant torque to fertilizer prices as well as, of course, potash volume leverage. That's the journey we see. Could any of that happen by 2023? Absolutely. It's going to have to depend on supply-demand and the recovery that we're seeing to sustain itself, but we're feeling better today than we did even last May when we put those original forecasts out.
The market fundamentals, as I mentioned, they haven't been this strong in six or seven years. This takes us back to, say, 2014 from an overall farmer health perspective and the supply-demand that we're seeing. I'll leave it there for now.
Thanks, Chuck. For Mike, there's a lot of interest in organic growth versus M&A growth to 2023 and 2025. I think Joel asked specifically if you could sort of bucket some of the main areas that you can see yourself achieving organic growth from.
Sure. Thanks, Richard. Let's take it out to 2025. As we've shown in slide 50, we expect about 40% of that growth to come from acquisitions, 60% coming from organic growth. We do believe we have a strong runway of organic growth opportunities. They're in four big buckets, and they're all pretty important. The first one is driving our proprietary products business. As I talked about, we believe we can drive that to be about 29% of our gross margins by 2023. We believe we can increase share in all of our mature markets in North America and in Australia. Obviously, the digital tools are a big part of that, and we're seeing that right now that we're on a two-year path of pretty significant market share gains in our core markets. We also see an opportunity to drive cost out.
Again, that's from reviewing our portfolio of assets, including all of our branch network, and looking at how can we continue to consolidate our branches to be more efficient, and also looking at how can we use the digital tools to drive efficiency as well. Finally, as we grow in Brazil, we know Brazil is a growing ag market, and so we will participate in the natural organic growth that's taking place in Brazil. Those would be the big buckets of where we see opportunities to significantly grow organically over the next several years.
Thanks, Mike. For Chuck and Ken, from Mike Piken, do you have a certain price or global demand target in mind before you would consider restarting some of Nutrien's unused potash capacity? How do the costs look like if you restart that capacity?
I can go first here, Richard. Yes, we're obviously watching the market closely with respect to the tons that we're going to deploy into the market. One of the signposts was really both price and volume. We have an expectation of 2%-3% growth rates into the foreseeable future. As we've said, we maintain 18%-19% market share in that growing market. We have producing 12.5 million tons today, but 18 million tons of capacity at the moment. As we've said, we expect to deploy 14 million-16 million tons into the market in 2023. We have great line of sight at the moment to increasing our volumes with the capacity that we have and surging tons into the market when it's required. Beyond that 18 million tons, we have identified 5 million tons of brownfield capacity.
From a capital stewardship perspective, we'll be watching the signposts in the market as volumes and demand continues to grow as we maintain market share, but the price signals as well, of course. We have said that for us in this part of the world, we can develop that new brownfield capacity for about $ 500-$700 per ton, that's in contrast to a greenfield opportunity of $ 2,500-$3,000 per ton. Significantly more competitively from a cost perspective on those brownfields opportunities. I can tell you we're looking at that today. We're looking at how we would stage capital, phase capital, and deploy that additional 5 million tons in a growing market beyond our 18 million tons and deploy that much more competitive brownfield capacity prior to greenfield opportunities.
The last thing I'll say is we have heard others cite potash costs of $ 375-$ 400 per ton to incent that new project development in different parts of the world. Of course, the potash price is a long way from that today. Again, we'll be watching the evolution of both price and volume and deploying our 18 million tons and then efficiently with capital, the additional 5 million tons after that.
Yeah. My perspective on this question is our strategy really hasn't changed a whole lot. We're going to match supply with demand. If you look at with 73 million tons in 2023, we're going to have another 2 million tons into the market. That's how we think about it. As we bring on the tons, they're very economic and they're almost free to bring online when it comes to the capacity because currently we're running the six potash mines and really we need five to meet today's demand. We do that because of the situation we saw in 2018 when we had a shortage of potash globally and the prices ran up quite a bit. That may sound attractive in the short term, but the volatility isn't something that we like. It's not good for our farmer customers.
As for the sweet spot question, the way Ken has answered that is for brownfield economics is we may start to see once we get about $400, some more brownfields being considered, but they would be multiple years before we would see the tons. Greenfield economics, you would need well north of $ 450, approaching $500 a ton to make any sense of the economics. Then, of course, with a greenfield plan, any decision that is made today, taken today would be about a decade before we'd see those tons in the market. That's why we're very constructive about the potash market fundamentals right now. Demand has been growing quite nicely. We expect further demand growth next year. We've done a great job of optimizing our network since the merger.
The automation program we have is taking our cost down even more, and I think any price that we do see will drop right to the bottom line. I think overall, we're very optimistic about the potash business, certainly over the midterm.
Thanks. The next question is from Jacob Bout. He is asking about the Nutrien Ag Solutions digital platform. He wants to know how much of the increase in use of the digital has been due to COVID do we think. If COVID goes away, does that take away some pressure or the expected future growth of the utilization?
Maybe I'll jump on that one, Richard. Hi, Jacob. Basically, we do believe that COVID accelerated the utilization of the digital tools. It pretty much, I would say, forced all of our people and many of our customers to reach out to the tools. The feedback that we've gotten from both agronomists and our customers, and what we're seeing is once they use the tools, they realize it's a more convenient way to conduct business. I actually think that this will accelerate our increase in using the tools. We'll come out in February and talk about what type of targets that we're going to set for 2021. We do believe that we're going to continue to see accelerated utilization of our digital tools.
Thanks, Mike. This question is for Raef. A few questions on nitrogen, more specifically our Trinidad assets. With the 2023 ammonia cost curve that's shown in the market outlook slides, where would Trinidad reside on the cost curve, and what would it take to bring that indefinitely closed plant back online?
Yeah, thanks, Richard. Look, just a couple of considerations here. When we talk about the cost of production, obviously, we've got the plant efficiencies, and then we've got the cost of the gas. If you look at the four plants that we've got in Trinidad, there's quite a range of efficiencies there. One of the plants is very close to first quartile, second quartile, and then we've got some others that are second quartile, third quartile. One even that's probably third quartile, fourth quartile. Then when you look at the gas prices, we've seen gas on the island go from first quartile globally to second quartile. Recently with European gas prices being at Henry Hub, Trinidad gas prices have been third quartile, fourth quartile. Going forward, we're starting to see it now.
We're starting to see European prices head towards a Henry Hub plus transportation, and handling, which is probably $ 2-$ 2.50. If we get to some kind of economic equilibrium around that where we see European prices in that range, Trinidad gas prices will be between them. The other combination, the other things we've got to consider here, the length of the contract we've got there and getting that renewed in about three years' time. We've got to consider the availability of supply recently. In the last two years, we haven't seen supply at 100%. We have been curtailed at up to 10% for a lot of the time. We've also got the market price of ammonia. I guess what I'm signaling is that the plant will remain down while we see problems with availability and price.
However, Trinidad's position is moving from third or fourth quartile in terms of ammonia production back into second quartile, because of the way gas prices are moving globally. If we see that, plus an increase in global ammonia prices that we expect, we'll see that production come back online. I would note that the slide in there, 26, is actually global urea production and not ammonia, which is just slightly different. If you look there, you can see a very thin red sliver for Trinidad, just slightly past the 20 million tons on the X-axis. It's very small, but it's been doing quite well. We continue to run urea there flat out, because we're making some pretty good margins on despite the gas problems, and ammonia situation. Richard, back to you or Chuck, if you've got anything to add.
Thanks, Raef. For Chuck, this question's from Ben Isaacson at Scotia. TELUS recently announced its entrance into the digital ag space. Are they a competitor or a customer, a vendor? What is the overlap with their offering, and your digital ag?
Yeah. Thanks, Richard. What I'd say is that we don't know yet. We've seen this before in the ag industry where you'll have some new incumbents wade into the agricultural industry with the intent on sort of shaking things up or fixing it. For us, we're not really focused on what others are doing. We've seen this before in the many, many years we've been in our industry. All I would say right now is that if you look at our carbon program, we wanted to make it an open program. Those that want to collaborate with us, we'd love to talk to you. We also think that what's most important is that what we build is to help farmers actually move from having carbon as a cost to more of a revenue stream.
If you look at our position in the industry, we are on the farm, and agriculture is still very relationship-based. What we've seen over the last many years is that those that try to enter somehow as an asset-light company and have just the digital offering doesn't usually take a lot of traction in the industry. Really what's needed is a full-service delivery of products, technology, and having people on the farm working day to day with our farmer customers. Our approach is very different. I think what you're going to find is that because it's an end-to-end program, we're going to be able to help our farmer customers go and make every decision that they need to make to, of course, maximize productivity of yields, but also to get some benefit from actually using these sustainable practices and get compensated for it.
That's what's so exciting about the program that we announced today.
Thanks, Chuck. For Mike, we have a question on the recent Brazilian acquisition that you highlighted in your remarks. Steve Byrne wants to know whether the, and I'm going to not say this name right, BRA Agroquímica transaction includes the expertise to acquire and develop additional registrations in the country.
Hey, very good. Yeah, thanks, Steve, for the question. So we are acquiring both the registrations, and some people that are required to both maintain and apply for new registrations. As I said, right now, we've got CADE approval on the deal. We are now waiting for the registrations to be technically transferred to Nutrien Ag Solutions. When we look at the over 100 registrations that we've acquired in this acquisition, they contain the products that we're interested in right now in terms of developing formulations and our own proprietary products. Over time, I'm sure we will be applying for additional registrations, but this really gives us a good head start to now developing the supply chain in order to bring these products to market and through our channel.
Mike, since we're sort of on that topic, another question pertaining to the strategy to achieve the optimization metrics that you provided, such as operating coverage ratio, working capital, EBITDA per U.S. selling location. To sort of put a couple of questions together, how important is proprietary products and what are the other strategies, including potentially closing some additional locations in the U.S., to achieving those metrics?
Yeah. Driving proprietary products is really critical. Driving pure organic growth at the branch, which includes increasing share of wallet or gaining new customers, is critically important. Obviously, the digital tools, and we believe the sustainability strategy will help us do both of those things. We also look for opportunities to consolidate branches, not necessarily just low-performing branches. If you saw the end of the video that we showed on digital, there was a picture of a branch. That branch is in Dyersville, Iowa. We actually consolidated five fairly well-performing branches into this one mega site, which now serves a radius of about 100 mi from Dyersville. This is another way that we also increase incredibly the efficiency of our operation and helps us achieve that metric of getting to $1.1 million of EBITDA per branch.
Thanks, Mike. This question is for Ken on the potash optimization. The question is whether there is an opportunity to improve potash margins through the optimization and shifting the destination where you sell. How does the China potash contract market evolve over the next couple of years?
Two questions there I heard. On shifting the portfolio, I would suggest that to the extent that that can be done, it's being done today. As the largest supplier of potash in the world, there are limited opportunities to shift the portfolio. When you see these price disparities in different markets, shifting from lower priced to higher priced markets has some appeal, like I say, there's limited opportunity to do that, and also a reluctance to build inventories in certain corners of the planet artificially. That's one of the reasons that when we see softness in demand, really all of the large suppliers pull back as opposed to artificially building inventory. To the extent it can be done, I would say it's being done today.
I will say that Nutrien has invested heavily over decades now to develop the most sophisticated and low-cost supply chain, potash supply chains, on the planet, both internationally via Canpotex and then domestically ourselves, so that we can serve all of the major and growing markets on the planet in a cost-competitive way. That would then be on a delivered cost. Again, you will see us competitively delivering potash in the big growth markets around the world and with some ability to shift the portfolio as prices move around the planet. With respect to China, we're seeing a number of things and watching a number of signposts in China over the next two to three years. Certainly, an increased demand for food and food security, which is playing well into the crop nutrient story.
If we looked at consumption in China, we expect demand to grow in China over the coming next few years and into the future. China today is the largest consumer of potash in the world, albeit they have some domestic production, we're watching that domestic production as well as they deplete those mines and the depletion curves make it more expensive to produce domestically in China. Certainly, we would say that some of that production at today's prices is underwater, as is some other international production. We're watching domestic production in China, we're watching our competition in China as well. Today, we're optimistic about the China contract. We're heading into the fall with inventories at that sort of 3 million ton mark, we expect to come down to about the 2.5 million ton level by the end of the year.
Recall that a 1.5 million tons of that are in the so-called strategic reserve. We also are of the view that inland inventories are actually low. If we look at what's happening in the world to spot prices in the spot markets, we've seen the U.S. come up dramatically since our summer fill program, about $50. We've seen the same in Brazil. The spot markets have come up, and we've actually seen domestic prices in China come up as well with the port wholesale price today at above $300 a ton. That's come up dramatically.
Finally, I'll say that we have not been delivering potash since the close of the Canpotex contract at the end of October, and no provisional tons going into China as well, so that as we head into the new year, we expect a negotiation that will lead to a substantial increase in the China contract, and then going forward, those fundamentals in China that we expect will lead to a robust both demand and price environment.
Thanks, Ken. Our next question is for Raef. Some of our competitors are assessing opportunities for blue ammonia as a fuel source in Asia, consistent with Japan's stated CO2 goals and a shift away from coal. What's Nutrien's own view on its alternative ammonia opportunity in the immediate, as well as the long-term?
Yeah, thanks, Richard. Look, we're looking closely at our portfolio. I think both Chuck and I mentioned that we actually have quite an amount of blue ammonia available today. When I talk about blue ammonia, I'm talking about something that has half or less of the carbon footprint of normal ammonia. We produce it at Redwater and Geismar today. We can call it blue because we sequester the CO2 that comes off the process. We also have a low carbon product coming out of Joffre. Geismar is uniquely situated for export. I guess like our competitors are doing, we've been talking with potential customers to export some of that blue into Asia, and we'll continue to pursue those opportunities.
We're also looking at other opportunities, augmenting our existing plans to reduce their carbon footprint, looking at electrolysis and pyrolysis to see what other opportunities there could be for even lower carbon footprint ammonia or green ammonia. We think, though, that blue will be a transition product. We think we could see blue ammonia being used in marine transportation fuel, for example, in the next three to five years. We think ammonia being used to carry hydrogen and then used in fuel cells for road transportation is probably longer term, but we certainly think there's an opportunity there. We have blue ammonia available today. We're pursuing some of those opportunities, and we're considering how we would build our capacity for both blue and green ammonia over time.
Thanks, Raef. The next question is for Mike and Chuck related to the carbon program. Jonas Oxgaard from Bernstein wants to know the benefits of cover crops have been known for years, but it's still only used in a small percentage of total acres. What's the main obstacles for widespread adoption, and what is Nutrien doing to overcome them? Part two of his question is, would Nutrien provide certification of the carbon credits?
All right. On the cover crop question, it does depend on the geography. If you go further north, whether that be Western Canada or even the northern states, you're not going to see as much benefit from the cover crops because they're going to obviously freeze over the winter and not provide the benefit and the nutrients in the soil. If you go south of, say, I-70 in the U.S., you're going to see a lot of cover crops. Look, we're working with growers. We're selling cover crops ourselves. Typically, what we have seen and experienced is it takes about three years of planting cover crops to get both the organic matter benefit and the economic benefit that growers are looking for. It does take a little bit of foresight.
You have to either own the land or know that you're going to be renting the land for several years before you're going to start investing in something like a cover crop. In terms of carbon certification. Look, that's a more technical question. We're working with certification groups right now. I would say that when we look at the protocols on how to certify a carbon credit, those protocols were not developed for agriculture. We think this is an area of opportunity for us to engage with them to make sure that we can simplify the protocols so that we can work with them to ultimately get third-party certification. This is an area that I would say is developing, and we're going to lean in and cooperate, and collaborate with others to try and get to a point where we can certify.
Yeah, just a couple more on that last question. When we've looked at the framework to certify or verify credits, some of the jurisdictions, the documents are literally 250 pages long, and they're extremely complex. You really need to have a PhD in carbon to figure it out. That's, I think, the benefit that Nutrien plans to bring is to facilitate the journey for a farmer to get credits created, first of all, certified and probably third-party verified and then to facilitate the monetization of those credits. That's our journey. We have a lot of work to do still to kind of unpack that. The reason we're excited is because we do think there is a strong business need on behalf of farmers to help work through these really complicated framework.
At the same time, our government relations effort is to engage with governments, both state, provincial, and the both federal governments in the U.S. and Canada to help simplify the policy framework. The policy framework does need upgrading, and we think now is a perfect time to sort of engage at that level, and so both work, it will happen through 2021.
Thanks, Chuck. The next question's for Pedro, from Michael Tupholme from TD, asks, "Early in large parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nutrien paused its share repurchase activity earlier this year. Can management comment on how Nutrien is thinking about potential resumption of share activity in the future?
Thank you, Michael, for the question. We are looking at that, of course, similarly to when we looked the first time around. Now we are facing a second phase of COVID, which seems to be even higher than the first one. We don't think right now is the time to resume the share buyback program. However, I think differently than the first time, we now see the sort of the light at the end of the tunnel with all the vaccines. We also see a very strong ag fundamentals taking place. We are hoping that, in the middle of next year or maybe even the end of Q2 or thereabouts, we will have a lot more visibility, and we can resume our compete for capital and look at all of our alternatives at that point in time, including the share buyback.
Thanks, Pedro. A few other questions on the potash market. Ben Isaacson from Scotia's noting that the 2020 potash cost curve shown in the market outlook deck and the expectation for 2023 global potash demand seems to create a floor price that is much higher than today, all else equal. I guess just looking for a comment along those lines.
Thank you for the question. Yes, fair enough, when you look at the cost curve today, and the current potash price, you would say that there is certainly production underwater. The point I think is that today's prices are unsustainable, and in order for that production to continue to come to the market, we're going to have to see prices increase. We're also seeing a few other things in the industry. You would've seen that Russian production taxes have gone up, in that part of the world, costs have gone up as well. By definition, the cost curve for some producers is shifting out to the right, and certainly, you'd have production underwater today.
I think it's a fair comment that as demand grows, we will see a more robust pricing environment, one that supports the cost curve as we know it today. We know also how that cost curve is going to change through 2023 with the additional new supply, it doesn't change the comment.
Thanks, Ken. Since we're on potash, I'll just ask a follow-up question. How do you see the landscape for new potash capacity coming on over the next few years and longer term?
Over the next few years, we really have some projects in the FSU that I think we're all familiar with. EuroChem wrapping up at VolgaKaliy and looking to deploy tons at Ust-Luga, but also Belaruskali with their Petrikov project, which we expect to bring about 1.5 million tons a year to the market. We have some smaller tons here in North America where Mosaic is ramping up, finishing up K3, and we expect to hear from them on when that will be ready and of course, K+S with their Bethune project as well. Those are the projects that are more in the near term, and we say that between now and 2023, we would expect about 1 million tons a year coming to the market.
Of course, the market growing, demand growing, we believe, at a greater rate than that. Over the longer term, you're really starting to talk about certainly our brownfield expansions, then if you look at the greenfield opportunities as we get beyond into the latter half of the decade, we've heard talk of some potential out of Russia, and that's really, again, EuroChem looking at expanding a phase two at their Usolskiy mine, but also Uralkali has talked about their Ust-Yayva greenfield mine. That would be about 500,000 tons a year that we expect would just replace production out of their Berezniki-2 mine. We've heard Acron talk about their Talitskiy mine, 2 million tons a year in the latter half of the decade. Again, both of these projects have been talked about but deferred or pushed out, pushed back multiple times.
We've heard Belaruskali talk about their Slavkali project, and that's been pushed out again due to water issues. Finally, in the latter half of the decade, we've heard BHP talk about the Jansen mine. Again, that discussion's been deferred several times. As we know, the investment decision pushed back into the middle of 2021. On balance, again, some tons coming in the first half of the decade here in the back half. It's really greenfield projects that have been discussed, pushed back. Again, those are going to have to compete with some really strong brownfield opportunities, obviously, that we've talked about.
Thanks, Ken. A couple more follow-up questions to Mike. On the Brazilian acquisition, are the registrations that you've recently acquired, do they have some registrations in the United States as well as Brazil? What is the proprietary product sales as a percent of Brazilian sales, compared to what it looks like in the United States?
Sure. In the U.S., almost a third of our crop protection products are proprietary crop protection active ingredients. BRA Agroquímica does not have any registrations in the U.S. What it does provide, though, it not only provides this opportunity in Brazil, but it also makes it easy to get clone registrations in Argentina, where we also have a retail branch network. Today, based on our crop protection sales in Brazil, 0% of it is proprietary active ingredients. We think with this acquisition in the second half of 2021, we will start bringing to market our first proprietary active ingredient products into the Brazilian market. That'd be the timeframe.
Thanks, Mike. We've got two questions here on gas hedging and gas and energy. Raef, we're getting questions on our gas hedging program and would it change? What's our expectation for natural gas and for coal prices out to your 2023 window? If Jason wanted to jump in, he could too on this one.
Yeah. Thanks, Richard. First, look at gas pricing. We're starting to see a little more normalization in terms of relative pricing, where pricing in Canada remains below the U.S. and NYMEX, although that gap is closing a little. We're starting to see Northwest Europe and Asia get back to a point where it's Henry Hub on NYMEX plus the transportation. I think we'll see as LNG tightens through 2021, we'll see a normalization back to those kind of levels into 2021, 2022. That's good for us. We expect our relative gas position to improve versus our competitors outside of North America. We think that'll be pretty stable for two, three years there as we get into 2023. Prices in North America may move around a little bit. They're up a little bit at the moment.
I don't think we'll see lengthy excursions past $3 simply because of the volume of dry material that is economic at that $3 mark or below. I think gas prices will probably remain largely below $3. Coal, of course, is tied to gas prices globally. If we see extended excursions of gas prices in North America beyond $3, you will see some coal production come back on. I don't think that's going to happen, and I think what we'll see is a reversion again to gas prices in North America being at the $3 or below, and coal production being pretty stable. Just a point on China there, I think obviously there's an implication here for what we see in China. We see the exports in China kind of bound, I think, in that 3 million-5 million ton range.
I say that because there's been a lot of pressure there by the government to really crack down on the polluting inefficient coal plants. There's always a market for export there in China, just to smooth production, offset their own internal demand. I think we'll continue to see some export from China. I don't think we'll see the investment there that would lead to a large-scale expansion of urea product from China simply because of the cost. If you look at a 1 million ton plant or a 1.5 million ton plant, you're going to be paying $2,000 a ton for that capacity, and prices would have to be $400 or above, or well over that, to justify that kind of expense. That's kind of where we see the energy market for the next two to three years.
Thanks, Raef. More questions on the carbon program. Mike, what is the capital investment needed for this program? How does the carbon program ensure the carbon is captured in a season remains in the ground in subsequent years?
All right. Firstly, from a cost standpoint, as Chuck mentioned, we've really assembled a lot of the assets that are needed to run this program from an end-to-end standpoint, including having the people and the products, including our proprietary products, and then also having the digital tools to track and monitor what's going on. We don't expect a large cost associated with introducing and scaling our carbon project, because we've really built our business that's really well-suited to drive this program and this opportunity. Look, in terms of the idea of carbon is around additionality, the more carbon you can sequester or not use when you produce your crop, that's how you get rewarded, and that's how the system works. It doesn't really look ahead into future years.
It really looks at what did you do over the last year and how much additional carbon did you save? That's how most of the verification programs work, and that's how we're setting our program up as well.
Thanks, Mike. We have a question here about how you say your business model provides stability but also leveraged recovering fertilizer prices. Can you talk about that relative to the rest of the industry?
Richard, I assume you're directing that question to me.
I am directing that question. I thought I said Chuck, I'm sorry. This one's for you, Chuck. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you. Look, that's right. If you look at how the company's been built, as I mentioned in my opening comments, the strategy is to have an integrated business model. What we've seen is that when market conditions are at the bottom of the cycle or other influences on the industry, we hold up relative to a lot of our peers that are more pure-play. That's simply because we've got retail, margins don't move as much when we're heading up or down. That allows us to do a lot of really different and unique things. The balance sheet is strengthened. We can pay a leading dividend, which Pedro covered pretty well today. We can also make acquisitions at the bottom of the cycle, which many others can't. We've done that repeatedly in our history as an organization.
The merger was a product of that, but also the way we've built retail over the last three years. We've grown retail's EBITDA by 20% in the bottom of the cycle. As the cycle starts to turn up, we do have substantial leverage. We always refer to the $25 a ton equivalent to $650 million of EBITDA. I think the thing that most people forget, though, which we tried to call out today, is we also have very significant leverage to volume. Most of our peers run at full capacity, whether that's nitrogen, potash, or in many cases, even phosphate, whereas Nutrien has this excess 6 million tons of potash capacity. As the market conditions improve, you'll see torque to price, but you'll also see torque to potash volume.
That's why the business model, I think, is so unique, is you get this protection on the downside. You get a leading dividend, so you get paid to wait for the cycle to turn, and then as market conditions start to improve, you'll get a lot of leverage to the upside of the agricultural cycle, just like we expect to see in 2021 and 2022 and beyond.
Thanks, Chuck. For Raef, we covered a little bit of this before, but what is Nutrien's perspective on green ammonia versus blue ammonia?
Okay. Yeah, thanks. Let me pick up a couple of threads from before. We think the blue ammonia will be an important transition to green. I say that because blue is demonstrably lower carbon today, and we can produce it quite easily. It's available. Then I think if you look at where green is going, any green ammonia that gets produced in the next three to five years is going to be multiples of the cost of the blue that we produce today on normal ammonia. It's hard for me to see wide-scale pickup of green ammonia in the next three to five years, simply because of the cost differential to blue. I think you've got to build a lot of infrastructure. You've got to come down the cost curve, and I think that's going to take multiple years to do that.
Just to sum this up, I think, one, you'll see us transitioning to lower carbon products. Blue is the next natural step. We can certainly scale that up today, and there are already customers signifying interest. Green will take further advances in technology and will be much higher cost. I think the other thing about green is that you will see its adoption in industrial uses first before agriculture. If you think about green being 3x, 5x, 10 x the cost of ammonia today, really its industrial uses in transportation, where you might see an economic application for it in the 5- 10 year timeframe.
Once you get a lot of it being produced and you come down the cost curve and there is introduction uniformly across governments globally of a carbon tax, then I think you can get to a point where you can start to apply it economically in the agricultural market. The other question I did not pick up on before, Richard, the question about hedging. If I just address that quickly now, I think the answer is it is not going to change our hedging. Our outlook on energy is not changing what we think we are going to do with hedging. We do not do much of it today, and I think that will continue, particularly because we just see ourselves being in a relatively low-cost position in North America, and hedging is not going to help us that much.
Thanks, Raef. For Mike, where do the incremental Ruralco synergies come from? Is there something that is specific to Ruralco, or are there things that you bring over to other retail acquisitions in other countries?
Yeah, good question. Look, I think there's a couple of cost synergies that we're overachieving on and a couple of revenue synergies. On the cost side, we've been a bit more aggressive with branch consolidation. As we've got under the hood, we made more aggressive decisions to combine some branches under one roof, and so that's helped from the cost side. We were also quicker at integrating the IT systems, and so we've also seen an ability to more quickly lean out the back office and do it a bit more aggressively than the original plan. On the revenue side, we are seeing more opportunity for proprietary products, and so that's an opportunity that we are going to overexceed the original business case on. Then finally, I would say the area of sales incentives where.
By providing our approach to how we incentivize our sales agronomists to really continue to earn the customer's business year after year and grow the business has also resulted in higher sales. I would say those are the four areas that are driving the increase in synergies from $ 30 million to $ 50 million on an annualized run rate basis.
Thanks, Mike. Actually, just a follow-up question on another topic from Joel Jackson from BMO. Why have polymer and sulfur-coated urea products only had minimal success in North America and Asia? Are carbon credits needed to convince growers to pay for the premium for a product like ESN?
Sure. Good question, Joel. Look, I think, we've seen those products increase each year. They're still a pretty small part of the overall market, though. You're right about that. Yes, I do expect that with the opportunity for carbon credits, and in fact, if you look at ESN in particular, it can drive quite a bit of improvement from a carbon standpoint. We would expect to see more demand for our ESN fertilizer going forward because of the carbon credit opportunity.
Thanks, Mike. Next question is for Raef, and it's on the phosphate. Why is Nutrien the best owner of our phosphate assets? Has your outlook for phosphate changed given recent market developments?
Thanks, Richard. Let me just talk about the outlook first. We certainly have seen, despite Mosaic's petition, we've seen a tightening of supply for solid phosphate fertilizers over the last few months, which is good. We think that that will continue. That, plus the Mosaic petition has led to a premium within North America. Long term, that probably won't remain. We don't think we'll see a return to the very low prices we saw in the last 12 months, and we have some hope that it will be up from there over the course of the next three to five years. Just in terms of the phosphate business, look, I think there are three things to take into account here. One of my learnings from running the business is that the phosphate deposits are unique.
The uniqueness of the phosphate deposits drives unique approaches in mining and processing. Also, having multiple phosphate deposits does not necessarily lead to the type of scale benefits you might see. If I just look at our own two operating mines now, White Springs and Aurora, they're always quite different and requires quite different processes. Just tacking these two onto existing other mines doesn't necessarily give you the scale you might think. The second is there are some efficiencies from a sales perspective, SG&A. Our customers like being able to buy N, P, and K from the one sales force. So we like it, and we like being able to sell it to them. From that perspective, we like having those assets available to us. The third, probably most importantly, is that our business is a little unique in terms of phosphate production.
In the Western Hemisphere, we have the largest purified production facility in the Western Hemisphere. If you look at where our gross margin comes from our cash higher-end liquid industrial products as well as our liquid fertilizers, they only actually make up 30% of the products we produce. It's a little unique from that perspective. I think, if you look at those things, it's good for us to own it at the moment. Obviously, we would consider other things if we need to in the future. For the moment, it seems to have a good place with us, and we're happy to sell, as I said, to our customers, N, P, and K.
Thanks, Raef. Mike, I'm gonna combine a couple of questions. First, what is the current landscape for M&A in the U.S. and in Brazil? Secondly, what is the trajectory for growth in Brazil if you've already hit the $0.5 billion In run rate revenue?
Yeah. Right now, I would say the opportunities for acquisitions in the U.S. have slowed down as we've talked over the last couple of quarters. We believe it's primarily related to COVID. There's just not as much activity as there's been over the last several years, we are definitely seeing a slower rate of tuck-ins across our U.S. business. In Brazil, we believe that there's a number of interesting opportunities that we're engaging in. There we see a stronger opportunity. Now, as we articulated in the comments, today we have about a $500 million revenue business that's running close to 10% EBITDA margins. By 2023, we believe that our EBITDA will be over $ 100 million in Brazil. That gives you an idea of the activity that we think is in front of us from an acquisition standpoint.
However, we will also continue to grow our business organically there as the market in Brazil continues to grow year in and year out.
Thanks, Mike. Just I think we're getting to the end of the Q&A, Ken, a question on whether the marginal potash producer and potash cost curve will be a more significant factor to potash prices going forward. I think this relates to recent speculation of whether potash will become more commoditized.
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Fair question on the cost curve and probably, in this lower price environment, it is quite relevant. I will say that I think the commoditization discussion has been overplayed a little bit. Look at the last 20 years and the potash industry has been in an overcapacity situation, yet suppliers have experienced 30% margins or greater over that period. It continues to be the case that 70% of the world's potash comes from three potash basins. The suppliers in those basins have been doing it for decades now, albeit with a new entrant coming in, EuroChem coming in. We've seen that before. We look to the potash cost curve to inform some decisions.
If you look at the structure of the potash market, again, it is such that, again, the bulk of supply comes from those three basins, and that will be the case for the foreseeable future.
Great. That brings to a close the Q&A session. I want to thank everyone for joining us today. If you have additional questions, investor relations is, of course, as always available anytime. Thank you, and good day.