Welcome to Albemarle's 2021 Investor Day: Making the World Safe and Sustainable. My name is Meredith Bandy. I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability. I'm joined today by my team, David Burke, Director of Investor Relations, and Katie Pyfer, Manager of Investor Relations. Today, we're going to go through a deep dive on Albemarle. We have a lot of material to get through. As you're working through these slides in the coming days and weeks, please don't hesitate to reach out to us to ask us any questions. We certainly welcome your feedback. As usual, today, we will be discussing some forward-looking statements. The safe harbor language you can see here on this slide also applies to this webcast. We'll also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures today. You'll find reconciliations of these measures to GAAP financial measures in the appendix of these slides.
Finally, the heart of the matter, our agenda for this morning. We'll begin with Kent Masters, our CEO. Kent will give a high-level strategic overview of Albemarle, and he'll also discuss how we're implementing our new operating model, the Albemarle Way of Excellence, to ensure strategic execution. We'll begin our business unit presentations. Netha Johnson, President, Bromine, will discuss how we're growing with our existing core markets, but also some exciting new opportunities we have in the bromine markets. Raphael Crawford, President, Catalyst, will discuss how we're pivoting in that business to ensure long-term value creation in light of today's changing energy markets. After Raphael speaks, we'll have the first of two Q&A sessions today. I'll ask that you please hold your lithium questions for the second Q&A session. There are two options for asking questions today. We can take questions via the web chat.
You'll see a chat functionality in the console of your screen. We'll also take questions via the phone lines, just as we would do during a regular earnings call. Following our first Q&A session, we'll take a brief break, and when we come back, we'll hear from Eric Norris, President, Lithium. Eric will discuss how we're accelerating growth to enable the EV revolution. Ellen Lenny-Pessagno, Vice President of Lithium Sustainability, will talk about how we're able to produce lithium sustainably all around the world. Jac Fourie, our Chief Capital Projects Officer, will speak next. Jac will explain how we've built the capabilities required to deliver our growth projects on time and on budget. Finally, Scott Tozier, our CFO, will talk about how we have the financial flexibility we need to accelerate growth. We'll finish our Investor Day with a final Q&A session and remarks from Kent Masters.
With that, I'll turn it over to Kent to begin our presentations this morning.
Thank you, Meredith. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our 2021 Investor Day. We're excited to be here to share the Albemarle story, our strengths and our strategy for growth, where we see opportunities ahead, and how we intend to capture them to drive shareholder value today and well into the future. Let's get started. We believe Albemarle has the right elements for a very strong future. We are a global market leader with solid competitive advantages. We have a resilient and reliable track record of performance over time. We have a long runway of growth prospects driven by global advancement of electrification and digitization, which we expect will more than double our revenues and triple our EBITDA by 2026. We have a clear strategy that has served us well and will continue to fuel our business and our sustainability ambitions.
We have a focused operating model, what we call the Albemarle Way of Excellence. This model helps ensure our execution is aligned with our strategy to create long-term value. You'll hear these recurring themes throughout the presentations today. Last Investor Day, I was sitting in the audience with you as lead independent director. Today, what a time it is to be leading Albemarle. Like everyone, over the past 18 months, we faced a great deal of uncertainty and change with the pandemic, but our resilience saw us through, and now we face great opportunity, and our strengths will lead the way. Since 2015, I've been actively engaged with my board colleagues to establish Albemarle's purpose and values, which are core to our identity. What excites me about Albemarle is the innovation and leadership we bring to our markets and the growth prospects ahead.
Lithium, for example, is an industry that is developing quickly. Albemarle is playing a critical role in shaping that development. We have earned an enviable position in our market, and with a strong strategy and values, we will build on that legacy for years to come. We are focusing our efforts in key areas to create a formidable company. By continuing to champion safety and progressing towards zero harm, by advancing sustainability goals and those of our customers. Ellen will talk about this in more detail. By using the Albemarle Way to establish clear goals and ensure focus and alignment for profitable growth. By globalizing our structure to move smarter and faster as an industry leader. For those who may not be as familiar with Albemarle, I want to take a step back and provide a quick overview. Albemarle has a strong legacy of leading, executing, and adapting.
We are a dividend aristocrat, growing our dividend for 27 consecutive years. We have a diverse portfolio of high-return businesses serving customers around the world with quality products that help drive secular trends. Each business has opportunities for growth, which you'll hear more about from our business leaders this morning, and we generate significant operating cash. As we implement our operating model, we'll build on the sustainable cost savings which we've captured to date. That's who we are. Let's shift now to what sets us apart. As I mentioned at the start, we possess a solid competitive edge anchored by our best-in-class global resources and assets, our industry-leading safety performance, and our thoughtful and active portfolio management, and our strong balance sheet that gives us financial flexibility. We differentiate and lead in the markets we serve with great minds, technological know-how, and strong customer partnerships.
We intend to differentiate further with a focus on sustainable goals and practices, which you'll hear about from all of our presenters. Albemarle's global footprint is also an advantage. We have access to a large and diverse set of world-class material resources to support our customers' growth. This includes brine and hard rock lithium resources to produce our lithium products. In addition, we are the only bromine producer with access to two world-class resources, in Jordan and in Arkansas. Resources are critical for our success, but resources alone are not enough to meet customer demand. We also have a diverse asset base of conversion and production facilities. These plants are in major markets around the world and produce a wide array of products. We are relentlessly focused on managing our resources and assets as efficiently and effectively as possible.
All of this helps ensure reliable and quality supply, and it puts us on the left-hand side of the industry cost curve. Our strengths extend to our leadership team. Our executive leadership team includes long-tenured employees and those who have recently joined us. Our new Chief Human Resources Officer, Melissa Anderson, joined us at the start of this year. She previously held long-tenured senior HR roles with global leaders like IBM and Duke Power. You can see that this is a seasoned team that brings a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences. They've also successfully managed through business cycles. I encourage you to read their CVs in the appendix of the materials to see the diversity of business experiences this leadership team offers. Our strength extend to our board of directors as well.
We have a diverse, engaged, and accountable board of nine members, of which eight, excluding myself, are independent. At our 2019 Investor Day, we were in the process of completing a board refresh. At the time, we had several planned retirements. We elected to use that opportunity to increase the diversity of our board. We're proud of our board's low average tenure and diversity in terms of not only race and gender, but also experience and perspective. Collectively, our board has the skill set and experiences to oversee the execution of our growth strategy. These global experiences include financial expertise and knowledge of emerging markets, geopolitics, manufacturing and operations, supply chain, R&D and innovation, and managing P&Ls for many years. Let's see how those strengths translate into meeting our long-term goals. At Investor Day in 2019, we laid out our performance targets for 2024.
Today, we'll give you an update on where we stand against those targets to date. For our corporate targets at the top of the table, despite all the challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic, we remain on track to meet or exceed those targets. This success is due in part to the highly successful cost savings program we announced in 2019. It has exceeded our expectations. We do expect to fall short of our 2024 free cash flow target, but only because we made the decision to accelerate investments to capture growth. These investments will be largely funded by cash flow from operations and our highly successful equity offering earlier this year.
In terms of the GBU progress since our last Investor Day, we now expect to achieve total lithium capacity of 175,000 metric tons early next year, have fast-tracked our expansion efforts to meet the rapid increase in demand ahead. Bromine was the least impacted by the pandemic, thanks to diverse existing end markets and growing new markets. Catalyst is the exception, due to a material impact from COVID and the accelerating energy transition. The team is charting a path to navigate that transition, which Raphael will detail in his presentation this morning. Let's turn now to the next slide. If you've been with us for a while, this will look familiar. We rolled out our long-term strategy in 2017, the overall strategy remains intact. In 2020, we shifted our focus to clearly drive sustainable value for our customers and shareholders. Our strategy has four primary pillars.
First, we will grow profitably. We have identified and planned a portfolio of low capital intensity, high return projects. Over the past five years, we have built the team and capabilities to execute these projects on time and on budget. Jac will go over this capability in more detail in his discussion. We have long-term commercial relationships with our key customers, and these projects align with our customers' strategic requirements while achieving appropriate returns for our shareholders. Second, we will maximize productivity. Over the past year, we have optimized earnings and cash flow generation across our business. We have streamlined our business and processes to create an effective and efficient platform for growth. Operational discipline is essential for generating cash flow and supporting growth, and we will not take our eyes off the ball, even as we move into an accelerated growth phase. Third, we will invest with discipline.
We are allocating capital to our highest return opportunities. We will also continue to maintain our investment-grade credit rating and support our dividend. Scott will talk about our disciplined approach to investing in more detail in his presentation. Fourth, we will advance sustainability across our businesses, which is not only strategic but core to our values. We aim to increase sustainability throughout the value chain, from the resource to the end use of our products. Our lithium products enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through the adoption of battery electric vehicles. Our Bromine products contribute to consumer safety by preventing fires in electronic equipment. Our Catalyst products help refiners produce cleaner transportation fuels. Now, let me spend a minute more on investment discipline and talk about portfolio management. Over the years, we have proven that we are thoughtful in our approach to portfolio management.
We have generated more than $4 billion in gross proceeds from recent divestitures. We have invested more than $2 billion to build our lithium business and have reduced our net debt by more than $2 billion over the last five years. Our portfolio decisions have served us well to create the company we are today. We actively evaluate our portfolio and review this with our board of directors on a regular basis. You'll see in Raphael's presentation that our Catalyst business is pivoting its strategy for growth in response to the accelerating energy transition. Our Catalyst business is fundamentally strong, and there are exciting opportunities for catalyst, but it will require meaningful resources and focus to realize its potential. We have to ask the question: Is this the right priority for Albemarle's capital at this time? We are assessing the best way to support the Catalyst business in this pivot.
This has prompted us to initiate a strategic review of the business. We will be thoughtful in our approach, as we always have, and I believe our track record of portfolio management demonstrates this point. It is too early to see the path for the Catalyst business at this time, but we will consider all options available to us. From a strategic standpoint, we are building assets for Lithium, which you'll hear more about from Eric, and for Bromine, which Netha will detail in his presentation. We are pursuing significant organic growth opportunities. We may also seek acquisitions if those acquisitions allow us to accelerate growth or complement our portfolio with additional specialized technology and materials, high caliber resources, or partnerships that help us compete and deliver for our customers. We will pursue inorganic growth only when the economics are strong.
As you can see at the bottom of the slide, we have defined a set of financial criteria to maximize returns and ensure value creation. Let's shift now and talk about our approach to strategy execution. For our strategy to be successful, we must execute well. To do this, every employee needs to be aligned to our values, our goals, and our approach to execution. This approach is the Albemarle Way of Excellence. This structured operating model will help us see where we need to pursue excellence now so we can run our enterprise better as we grow, set and communicate objectives that we know will change as we grow. We'll keep employee goals and work aligned to our strategy for growth. This model includes three performance priorities, our overarching objectives for our performance shown along the outer band.
Four operating pillars, the key competency areas to optimize our execution excellence. 12 execution principles, the channels of execution that strengthen our key competencies. We'll use this model for objective setting, KPI reporting, and as a blueprint to continually focus our attention to better execute our strategy and build a stronger company. On the next slide, I'll take you through the Albemarle Way in a bit more detail. High-Performance Culture ensures that we help our employees be safe, value-centered, focused, and empowered to be the best they can be. We'll do this through Health, Safety, and Environmental Excellence to ensure safety is always our top priority. Continued focus on our Purpose and Values, and an agile and engaged organization with diverse and empowered teams for responsive action. Competitive Capabilities defines how we differentiate and build advantage to remain a leader in our markets.
We will do this with best global talent, best-in-class resources with a low-cost position. Technology and partnerships that differentiate our products and services, a robust IT backbone that standardizes global processes, analytics, governance, and security. Operational discipline reduces cost and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. We accomplish this through manufacturing excellence, implementing lean principles, and embracing smart technology to improve HSE, cost, reliability, quality, and efficiency. Through business excellence, where we are focused on an effective and efficient back office, an advantaged supply chain, and differentiated customer service. Through capital projects excellence, where we'll pursue an optimized and standardized design approach to improve capital intensity and enable benefits in product cost, quality, and sustainability. You'll hear more from Jac on how we're advancing this work. Most importantly, our sustainable approach gives us our license to operate and creates long-term value for our stakeholders.
We'll do this through responsible management of our resources and materials, sound product stewardship and responsible sourcing, legal and regulatory compliance, and advocacy for fair and science-based regulation, a safe, inclusive, and diverse workplace, and close engagement with the communities where we operate. Staying on the topic of our sustainable approach for a little longer, our sustainability targets were disclosed in June as part of our annual sustainability report. In that report, we committed to reduce the carbon intensity of our Catalyst and Bromine businesses by a combined 35% by 2030, in line with science-based targets, to reduce the intensity of our fresh water usage by 25% by 2030 in areas of high and extremely high water risk, to grow our Lithium business in a carbon intensity neutral manner through 2030, and aim for net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
This morning, each GBU will discuss some of the projects that are currently underway to help us meet these targets. We are working hard to achieve these goals and plan to evolve our thinking and targets over time. We've talked about how we'll use our Albemarle Way of Excellence to accelerate our sustainable approach. We are taking similar deliberate actions in the operating discipline and high-performance culture pillars as well. As we were finalizing our operating model late last year, we knew that operational discipline was a pressing challenge with significant opportunity for improvement. With the uncertainty of the pandemic, we knew our work culture would change. In late 2020, we created our Journey to Excellence initiative. This initiative launched six diverse cross-functional teams who spent 100 days brainstorming and vetting ideas to solve the most complex problems we face.
These are challenging problems to solve, and the teams did a great job. Their plans encouraged us to be bold in our approach for great gain. We've assigned implementation leaders for each project, and the work is on an accelerated path. You'll hear more about these projects in the presentations that follow, but let me give you a couple of examples. Customer excellence is about enhancing the customer journey from an initial request to final product delivery. We are aligning cross-functional teams around customer segmentation to improve customer value and retention. The Future of Work project is about attracting and retaining a skilled and diverse workforce. We have established a remote ability framework that guides our approach to hybrid work. This framework allows us to manage cost while also meeting employee needs for flexibility, collaboration, and development.
Our goal is to create a stronger advantage position that we can build on as we scale to deliver our strategy for growth. Now we'll begin with an in-depth view of our global business units. I'll hand over to Netha Johnson, President of our Bromine business. First, we'll begin with a short video introduction to our Bromine business.
There's an irreplaceable element naturally found on the Earth. It is an essential component of fire safety, food safety, oil field drilling, high tech cleaning, water treatment, and more. It's time to get to know bromine. Bromine protects your home, family, and community by decreasing flammability in electronics, buildings, and cars, which increases escape time, helping you get to safety in the event of a fire. That's just the beginning. Bromine chemistry reduces water usage in industrial applications, reduces foodborne illnesses, ensuring safer meat processing, boosts fuel efficiency in rubber tires, allows for deep sea drilling, provides a key molecule for pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals, and is crucial for reducing mercury emissions into our environment. Bromine is considered one of the 28 essential elements for life, and at Albemarle, we're working every day to understand and apply this natural element to better our world.
Albemarle is proud to be a global leader in bromine supply. We've spent more than 50 years committed to research, building our global presence and a full array of products. Our superior technology, robust supply chain, and the most impressive team in the industry allow us to remain consistent and dependable. We're constantly looking to the future and preserving the environment, which means we're investing in sustainability initiatives to reduce the environmental footprint of our manufacturing operations, as well as developing new high-performance products such as next generation flame retardants. We have, we are, and we will continue to innovate new products to enhance modern life. Without bromine, the world as we know it would not be as safe, comfortable, and efficient as it is today. Get to know Albemarle and the way we're creating a better tomorrow for the world in which we live.
Good morning. My name is Netha Johnson, and over the next 20 minutes, I plan to talk about the strong performance of the Bromine business, our pivot of this business to a growth business, and the numerous opportunities we have to execute against growth over the next five years. The Bromine business within Albemarle plans to build upon our strong foundation of financial performance. We are a global market leader with value-added services and a growing customer base. The combined CAGR of the markets that we participate in over the next five years is 3.5%. What this means for us is that the global volume of equivalent bromine will grow from the 550 kilotons that it is today to over 740 kilotons over the next five years. We will execute against multiple capital projects to participate in this growth.
Even with those capital projects, we fully expect the Bromine market to be undersupplied for the next five years. The Bromine business expects to deliver greater than GDP growth rates while maintaining best-in-class margins and cash flow performance. This is a snapshot of our business today, but I'm only going to focus on 3 points in this whole slide. The first is our diversification. If you look on the right-hand side of the chart, you can see how diversified our business is. In fact, our business has never been more diversified than it is today. What this does for us, it provides us numerous opportunities to grow as well as protect us in case of a market downturn. This was evidenced in 2020 during the coronavirus. This business was able to grow EBITDA double GDP, even during those difficult market conditions.
The next area of the slide I want to focus on is our business characteristics. We have access to world-class natural resources with a low-cost position. This positions us well as a low-cost producer in our industry. We also have a plant that's able to deliver more than 16 products from the same value stream and same plant cost structure. This allows us to efficiently transition from product to product, to capture growth in markets, and insulate ourselves against markets that are down. The last piece I want to emphasize is our environment. We could not be more excited about the opportunities we have in this business in our markets. If you look at the macro trends of the future, from digitization, electrification, Internet of Things, increased health and safety, increased environmental remediation, and work from home and hybrid work, the Bromine business is absolutely well-positioned to take advantage of these.
We have the right business and the right environment to grow going forward. With the exception of our ability to forecast oil and gas prices, we have far exceeded every financial and performance metric I illustrated to you when I was last here in 2019. In terms of operational excellence, in 2019, 1% of OEE improvement represents $1.6 million. In 2020, we increased that to where 1% of OEE improvement equals $2 million-$3 million of EBITDA, which translates to us right to the bottom line and margin enhancement. By 2023, this business will have executed over $54 million of annualized productivity and cost avoidance projects, well ahead of the target we set for ourselves. In terms of financial performance, we beat every metric that we wanted to and listed in 2019 in the areas of growth, margins, and cash flow.
One of the fundamental tenets of the Bromine business is our access to highly concentrated bromides, and what that gives us is a low-cost position. Our business model is simple and straightforward, and we've been executing this model for over two decades. It's very similar to the Lithium business model. We extract Bromine raw materials from either a well or the sea, and we transform that raw material into higher value-added products via chemical processing. We sell those high-value products into global key account customers via a direct sales model, a very basic operating model that we know how to execute very well. We get our Bromine from two places, the Dead Sea in Jordan and Arkansas within the United States.
If you can see from the top right-hand slide, the concentration of bromine in the Dead Sea and Arkansas is the largest in the world. This also translates, if you look at the bottom left, into the industrial cost curve for elemental bromine. As you can see from that chart in the bottom right, the Dead Sea and Arkansas are the lowest cost sources of bromine in the world, and we are the only company that has access to both. This is the snapshot of which the markets in which we have an opportunity to play. The total addressable market and the growth rates only represent the bromine opportunity within these much larger vertical markets. When I see these markets, I see opportunity.
If you look at the visuals around telecom, electronics, energy, and consumer polymers, these are great opportunities for us to grow. In the next three slides, I'll cover three of these markets to give you insights into where we plan to grow. The first would be consumer polymers. This is where we have an existing product with existing customers and operate from a position of strength. The next would be telecom, where that's where we have opportunity to get new additional opportunities as we transition to 5G. The last one I'll talk about is the EV market, which is a new market for us, but a market in which we could not be more excited to participate in. If we look in the consumer polymer business, our HBR product is a catalyst that is necessary in the production of PET.
We are well established in this market, and we have lots of customers that we're very successful with. The expansion of PET plants is well documented all around the world, with a particular high number located in China. This is aligned with the new mega-trend of increasing consumer disposable income, which translate to an increasing demand for consumer polymer products. This is a great opportunity for us to build on a position of strength and grow as this market grows. Simply for us, if there's more PET, we grow as a bromine business. The next market I'd like to talk about is actually the telecom market, but more particularly a 5G application within that market. 5G is a capacity and communications protocol, which allows for the increased connections of multiple of millions of devices.
These devices are focused on virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, and IoT devices. If you think about the opportunity that this presents for Bromine, this is a tremendous opportunity for our flame retardant business to provide fire protection for all these devices executing within the 5G protocol. In fact, if you look at our growth by product, Albemarle is experiencing surging demand in our products that are associated with the 5G communication protocol. The final market I want to discuss today is the EV market. This is the new market for us that I've never discussed with you in relevance to Bromine. The EV market gives us a lot of opportunities to play. We have applications in the EV market which are the same as an industrial combustion engine market, such as displays, wiring harnesses, sensors, and tires.
The EV market also gives us additional applications in which we can participate, such as high voltage wiring, battery encasing, and charging stations. Albemarle's bromine products are absolutely on multiple EV platforms that are in the market today, and we look forward to expanding on that going forward. If you fundamentally believe in the transition to EVs, you have to be excited about the bromine business going forward for Albemarle. Kent talked about the company strategy. Albemarle's strategy is bromine strategy. We will grow profitably and capitalize on growth in existing, new, and expanding applications. We plan to maximize our productivity by introducing 21st century manufacturing principles to reduce costs through asset efficiency and productivity.
We invest with discipline. For us, that means executing high return, short payback opportunities in areas where we've been in business for over 50 years with products and processes we've known for 50 years, and in communities where we have great relationships. A new piece is our strategy of sustainability. Sustainability is the cornerstone for our strategy as well as our value proposition, not only for our customers, but also for our employees and our investors. We look forward to making improvements in safety, greenhouse gas reduction, air emission reductions, water, and waste reductions. Now I'd like to pivot to the Albemarle Way of Excellence. This is a new operating model that will transform this company and transform the Bromine business. It is absolutely embedded in everything we do in the Bromine business.
When Kent talks about the pillar of competitive capability of research and technology, for us, that means new product innovation. We've worked extremely hard over the last three years to revitalize our new product portfolio, now we have a new product portfolio that's based on true market research, has very strong IP position, and has a platform approach. This enables us to roll out multiple new product launches every year. We have over 50 ideas that have been through our funnel, vetted, and approved for action. In the next five years, in 2026, 12% of our revenue will come from these new products that we launched in the last five years. I'd like to talk about two specific examples. The first is SAYTEX ALERO . That's our next generation flame retardant product.
It is really creating a new, large, and stable molecule that has favorable mechanical properties for our customers and a superior environmental profile. The next product I'd like to highlight is our MercLok product, and this is used to remediate mercury in contaminated soils and sediments in Superfund sites. Typically, mercury leaches through the pores in the soil and goes back and forth, and it leaches out and creates a greater area where its contamination expands. Our bromine molecule, through a chemical process, actually locks onto the mercury and creates a molecule that's too large to come back through these pores, as well as trapping the mercury that's on the surface of the ground. This is a great opportunity for us and one of the most exciting, sustainable new product launches that we have in the company.
Our portfolio is diverse and healthy, these new products will be a foundation of our growth. The next pillar of the Albemarle Way of Excellence that I'd like to cover is around operational discipline. As Kent mentioned, this is fundamental to all the things that we do. For us, it's all about using 21st century manufacturing principles, really focused on maintenance and reliability, which in turn drives OEE, which in turn drives EBITDA for delivery to our bottom-line results. We have a strong record of delivering on capital projects in bromine. We like to do these projects, and I like to think that we do them very well. I'll give you two examples of just those that we delivered this year that are adding to the growth of this business. The first is our new well in Magnolia.
Right after the approval of the equity raise earlier this year, our board and Kent and Scott authorized us to drill a new well in Magnolia. This well was delivered on budget and started up early in July. Because of our intimate knowledge of our brine resources in Magnolia and knowing where and how to drill, this is the best producing well we've ever had in the history of the company, and it's the highest bromine concentration in our brine field by over 20%. We are absolutely sold out of tetrabromine from JBC. We've also executed a project there to de-bottleneck our tetrabromine production. Again, this project was completed on budget and started up on time in August of this year. The result of this project is we have the highest yield and production rates that we've ever had in the history of our Jordan joint venture.
We have the capability, and we have the commitment to deliver outstanding capital projects, which is the foundation for our growth over the next five years. The last Albemarle Way of Excellence principle I want to highlight is really around our sustainable approach. As I mentioned before, sustainability is the cornerstone of our strategy and value proposition. By executing some of the projects you see on the right-hand side, in Bromine Company, we will reduce our water usage by 41%, our greenhouse gas emissions by 14%, and our waste by 59%. In Magnolia, we will reduce our water usage by 20% and our greenhouse gases by 30%. These are material reduction targets that we will deliver by 2025. Finally, I'd like to move to our outlook.
When we look at our revenue, we expect to grow from our current base of $1 billion- $1.1 billion at a rate of 5% CAGR over the next five years. In terms of our margins, we expect to expand our margins from the 32%-33% we have today to 32%-36% over the next five years. We will execute against three brownfield projects in Magnolia over this timeframe to deliver this revenue growth, and we will also be implementing 21st-century manufacturing principles to drive the margin expansion. We expect to deliver strong financial performance for the company moving forward. In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with a few points. The first, Bromine is a global market leader with access to world-class resources. We are a growth business, and we have upside to generate attractive returns.
Our markets are exciting. We have the ability to grow in new applications and new areas as well as execute low capital intensity projects on time and on budget to feed this growth. We have a deep technical understanding of our products and are able to use this understanding to deliver new products that, again, add fuel to our growth. Finally, we create value-added solutions that help our customers be the absolute best they could be in their business. Thank you for your time this morning, and I'd like to transition to Raphael Crawford.
Albemarle is an industry leader of catalyst solutions.
It's right on time.
We drive innovation.
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And deliver value to our customers through FCC catalysts, polymer catalyst solutions, and clean fuels technologies. Our industry knowledge and deep application experience positions us as a valuable partner for customers in the refining and petrochemical industries. Our customers are doing important work, like shaping the future by finding better ways to supply clean fuel and other usable oil-derived products to a growing global economy. At Albemarle, we offer a diverse portfolio of refining catalysts. We provide flexible, performance-based solutions to help customers power the potential of their refinery. We are committed to making the world safe and sustainable to create a better tomorrow. Be a part of that future with Albemarle.
Growth. The focus for my team, for me and my team, is really on safe operations, efficiency, and never losing sight of the importance of our customers and meeting their commitments. I'd like to turn to what underpins our confidence in the Catalyst business. Fundamentally, we are a strong business with many growth opportunities. We have a diverse technology portfolio and strong customer intimacy. It's that customer intimacy and value creation which is really the core to what we do. Within the Catalyst business, we have a network of global assets, a direct sales force in emerging markets, and we have strategic joint ventures, which give us global reach to all the refiners around the world. I'd like to highlight one of those joint ventures right now. That's FCCSA. That's our Brazilian joint venture with Petrobras.
That joint venture for FCC catalysts and additives doesn't only give us access to South America and Brazil for sales and production of refining catalysts, it also serves as a global sourcing point that helps Albemarle extend its reach around the world. I want to take this moment, I want to pause for just a moment, and I would like to congratulate the FCCSA team for their safety record. Like the rest of Albemarle, all of our joint ventures focus on safety. FCCSA, as of today, is at 1,454 days without a recordable incident. September 16th will be exactly four years. I think that team is doing a great job, especially on safety. To that team, [Foreign language]. Also within our core competencies is really our product and application expertise. That's something that is core to what we do and creates value for our customers.
I think what's really exciting, so what we're going to talk to you about today, is how we're going to leverage our core competencies into new geographies, new applications, and in alignment with renewables markets. With that, let me tell you about how we see Catalyst as a leader in refining and petrochemicals. First, it's a high-quality business. The scale is very meaningful. We have three large-scale assets which service the world. We have seen an acute impact from the pandemic. What I'm very proud of is how the Catalyst team has stuck with it, focused on reliability, safety, operability, and never lost sight of what's really important, and that's our customers. That's enabled us to continue to drive strong margins and solid cash flow for Albemarle. We expect to continue to see sequential recovery in this business. We'll see it in FCC.
The FCC business will grow as fuel demand increases, as well as in the production of light olefins. Light olefins production has held up very well through the pandemic and will continue to grow at above GDP rates. The CFT business, which we also call hydroprocessing, is expected to continue to recover through 2022 through 2024 back to 2019 levels. The PCS business continues to perform very well. It grows in alignment with trends in consumer purchases, a growing middle class, electronics, and consumption of plastics. Let's look back at 2019s and the expectations we set then and how we're progressing. We're very pleased with our overall progress given the challenging macroeconomic conditions we faced. We have seen an unprecedented impact from the pandemic and its impact on fuel demand and on low oil prices.
Through all of this, we've delivered on low-cost manufacturing, innovation, and building on our customer relationships. We've taken the necessary actions as it relates to cost, asset decisions, and innovation to continue to perform during the storm. As I said before, we're poised for recovery. As the market recovers, we'll recover. We see that as one pillar of our growth. Additionally, we're focused on new opportunities to continue to grow this business beyond our core markets. We expect margins to recover to the mid-20% EBITDA margins. While the PCS business was a business we were considering for strategic alternatives at Investor Day in 2019, it continues to perform above expectations. Now let me turn to some descriptions of our three businesses, and I'm going to start with the FCC business.
If you're not familiar with the FCC business, FCC catalysts are used to crack oil into various end products from a refinery. That's fuels, chemicals, the array that comes from a refining operation. It's integral to the core function of refineries around the world. I want to be clear, this is a recurring revenue business. Why that's important is we'll talk about CFT on a future slide. This is a recurring revenue business, meaning the catalysts are continuously added every day into an FCC unit, and that enables our customers to tailor their yields and their product slate as time goes on, and almost do that on a daily basis if need be. Our particular strengths in this market for FCC are in bottoms cracking. That's really the heavier feed going into an FCC unit, as well as in olefins output.
Olefins, whether it be propylene or butylene, come from an FCC unit. C3 or propylene is used in durable plastics, and C4s are often used to produce alkylate. Alkylate is a blending component for octane enhancing in gasoline. As I said before, the olefin segment through the pandemic and now continues to perform very well given the macroeconomic trends that drive that. Overall, for this business, as well as what we'll talk about in CFT, the key drivers are around transportation fuel and petrochemical demand. We see the largest growth in this business in Southeast Asia and India, that being said, we're a global business. All of our customers are important around the world, and we continue to serve those customers now and into the future. I'm very proud of the team we have.
When I reflect back, when I go back to like, oh, well, when I joined this business, everybody told me that Catalyst is a different business. It's different than Bromine. It's different than Lithium. I see it. I really see it. The team of experts, what they know about how to service our customers and generate value, it's a different kind of an expertise. While I'm very proud of the team we have, they generate value for our customers, and I'm proud to be part of this business. If I turn to our hydroprocessing segment, we often call this our Clean Fuels Technology business. This is all about contaminants removal, namely sulfur from fuels. We often think of this, and we've referred to it on earnings calls in the past as being a lumpy business. Actually, if you have a better word, somebody send me a better word.
We use lumpy because of the cycle in which rebeds happen within this business. Catalysts in hydroprocessing are sold in discrete loads on a one to four-year cycle. It's difficult to make comparisons on this business in any one quarter. It's easier to look at it more on an 18-month basis because it takes out the variability often of that customer order timing. As I said, hydroprocessing catalysts are used to purify the streams in a refinery, whether it be the intermediate products, so the feed going into a hydrocracker or an FCC unit, or the outputs, being gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, bunker fuel. Again, primary drivers are around transportation fuel, but also the added effect of increasing sulfur specifications around the world, the regulations that drive cleaner transportation fuels. Our technical team is experts in this field. We have high performance catalysts.
A key point that I want to emphasize, which we're going to talk about in more detail, is the role that hydroprocessing is going to have in new applications in this business. It plays a critical role in the purification of renewable fuels and plastics recycling, and we're going to cover that in more detail. Before we get there, let's turn to the PCS business. The PCS business is comprised of two operating divisions. That's the organometallics business and the curatives business. Organometallics are used in the manufacturing of polyolefins, linear alpha olefins, as well as electronic materials. Whereas curatives are used in construction, furniture, and automotive markets. Both of these businesses are growing at above GDP rates. We create value for our customers, specifically through the service that we provide. That service relates to safe use and applications use, and the reliability of supply.
Now I'd like to highlight some of the macroeconomic trends in this business that underpin our strategy. On the top left, you'll see the demand outlook over the next few years for transportation fuels. Over the next decade, we will see some leveling out of overall global demand in transportation fuels. What I think is exciting, and exciting for our business specifically, is that the growth will continue in India and Southeast Asia. As those economies grow, as they start to import less fuel and produce more of their own fuel, it's a tailwind for our business. Most of the new refineries that are being built are east of Suez and include significant petrochemical operations. Those new refineries are highly complex, and they fit very well with our strategy on enhancing olefin production, as well as our go-to-market strategy in emerging markets.
To remind you, that go-to-market strategy is to have direct sales and technical service individuals in region that are close to the customer. I do want to highlight that the new refineries being built, as well as many of the existing refineries in India and Southeast Asia, are just bigger. The average refinery size in India, for example, is one-third larger than the average in the rest of the world. You can see the opportunity present for us to continue to strengthen our position in those markets. I also want to highlight on the bottom left, the growing demand for propylene. Propylene demand is largely driven by the end market demand for polypropylene, which is a durable plastic, and that is growing at above GDP rates.
As you look at demand for polyurethanes on the bottom right, you can see that because of growth in construction, automotive, and furniture applications, that's also growing. That's a large part of the demand for curatives. Now, it's our focus to leverage the strengths that I've talked about to drive sustainable growth. First, we're definitely looking at how do we expand geographic presence. We've covered that, talking about Southeast Asia and India. We also want to grow in new applications like crude-to-chemicals in renewable space. That's really an exciting place for us. To be very clear, that's very exciting for our customers. We're all in this together.
How the refining market goes and how we adjust to the changes in refining, that's a driver of our success, and we are here for our customers to help them succeed as they are pivoting, we pivot with them. We're going to continue to maximize on productivity and efficiency. A little bit later, we'll talk about an example of operating efficiency with artificial intelligence. The applications that we have are sustainable applications. As Kent had mentioned, we're focused on using catalytic processes for higher resource efficiency, getting more out of a barrel of crude oil, as well as catalytic processes to purify fuel. It doesn't stop there because the things that we're working on are also new applications that adjust to a new energy economy, more renewables and recycling. In summary, our catalyst strategy is twofold.
It's expansion in our core markets, and it's building on new platforms in emerging sustainable applications. When we look at growing our core business, as I mentioned before, Southeast Asia and India are critical. I do want to talk about the crude-to-chemicals opportunity. As you can see on the chart, wanted to give you a sense of what's the differential value in chemicals versus fuels from a refinery. If you go back, I know that everybody on this call, everybody went back and reread the 2019 Investor Day script before they got to this. This isn't new news for you, but I want to let you know that I did that too. When I went back and looked at the same chart in 2019, the difference is $100 per met ton of value, which is greater now for chemicals versus fuels than back then.
As much of an opportunity as it was two years ago, it's a growing opportunity for refiners today. Again, we're going to align to our refining customers in this space, helping them with new builds, retrofits to be able to capitalize on the chemicals opportunity. To put in context, a traditional refinery today is somewhere between 10%-12% chemicals output, namely in olefins. Refineries being built are somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%-45%, and the aspiration is to get to 70% conversion of crude-to-chemicals. Albemarle is a leader in this space. In high-severity FCC units, which are really designed for max propylene output, we have the highest demonstrated yields with our customers in generating olefins output. Working on all this requires that we have good partners, those partners be technology licensors, and that we continue to innovate.
The good news is that the technologies for crude-to-chemicals are FCC-like. The technical support that we provide, the innovation that we know we can do are very transferable to the opportunity. Now let me pivot to biofuels and pyrolysis oils. I want to give you a glimpse of the things that we're working on. Two major markets that are exciting for us are really in renewables, hydrogenated vegetable oil, as well as pyrolysis. Hydrogenated vegetable oil is going to grow at a 33% CAGR over the next five years. Pyrolysis oil represents an opportunity to participate in the purification of a feedstock. For those who aren't familiar with pyrolysis, it's the use of thermal or catalytic decomposition of waste plastics into a usable oil.
It enables Albemarle to participate in a space related to the circularity of waste plastic, which is a growing opportunity for the industry and for our customers. Our strengths in hydroprocessing directly relate to this. Both of these markets are about using hydroprocessing technology to purify the inputs and outputs in those processes, and the demand is certain to grow, and we are aligned to participate. I do want to highlight that Neste is our key partner. They've been a partner for us for 20 years in the renewable fuel space. They're a key partner for us in the past and one in the future. We've partnered with them on NEXBTL and other technology platforms to enable their success and to participate in that success with them. While growth is the overall key priority, business priority for the Catalysts GBU, we continue to focus on operational efficiency.
I want to give you a case study from Bayport. At the Bayport site, we're using artificial intelligence and machine learning to advance our use of data for the operating performance of the site. It's enabled us to automate Six Sigma. We're able to focus in on the highest impact data to enable our engineers to make good decisions real-time. I want to share my own personal experience with this. First of all, in fair disc. I am not an expert on artificial intelligence. I'm very thankful that people in our company are. Every Monday morning we get on a call. It's actually a tradition that's been in Albemarle, predates me probably by a decade, of getting on the call with our manufacturing sites to talk about the performance of the sites.
It's amazing how often now on Monday mornings, we hear of examples at our sites of use of data to run the plants better. We have a staggering amount of data that we now can distill into the highest impact themes to enable the engineers to run the plants. While that's really exciting for Catalysts, and we're just giving you one example, it represents an opportunity for all of Albemarle. Really, for the Lithium and Bromine businesses, which are in a sold-out position, you can imagine what the higher uptime, higher efficiency means to a sold-out business. It's a great opportunity that we're learning at Bayport, rolling out through our Catalysts, and learning to implement throughout the Albemarle network.
Now pivoting to sustainability, I want to give you some highlights of what we're working on as it relates to contributing to a more sustainable world through our Catalyst business aligned to Albemarle. As I mentioned, the products we have, they contribute. The existing portfolio contributes to cleaner fuels and higher resource utilization. The innovations we're working on in pyrolysis, hydrogenated vegetable oil, catalyst circularity, and biomass co-feed, all of them are new opportunities to be part of the new energy economy. Within our own operations, as Kent mentioned, we're very proud of our plans to get to a 35% reduction in greenhouse gases, carbon intensity by 2030, and net zero by 2050.
The teams at Amsterdam, Bayport, and Pasadena have spent a tremendous amount of effort and have detailed plans on which projects to execute to be able to run the plants differently and have identified green sources of energy which enable us to do that. Now let's turn to our financial outlook. As I mentioned upfront, we see recovery coming. We see it in our markets as transportation fuel demand increases. We feel like 2021 is a low point, and that we'll be coming off that low point into future years. As we grow, we'll see that drop through to the bottom line in margins that return to the mid-20%. In conclusion, I'm very excited about the future of the Catalyst business. I am proud to be part of this business. We see a strong rebound coming in our core markets.
We're leveraging our strengths into adjacent areas, and we're aligning what we do operationally and innovation-wise with Albemarle's sustainability priorities. Above all, we're here for our customers. In the petrochemical space, in the refining space, we're here to help them be successful in our existing fuels markets that enable them to have a long future. With that, I want to thank you for tuning in, and I'm going to welcome our panel to the stage.
All right. Great. We'll begin our first two Q&A sessions. As a reminder for our audience, there are two ways to ask questions. One is the web chat. You can use the console chat function on the console on your screen. You can also dial in and ask questions just as we would on our regular quarterly calls.
Okay.
I'll also ask you to please hold your lithium questions just until the next session when Eric Norris joins us. We do have a number of questions, both from the chat and from the phone lines. We'll start with the chat, just a few questions. The first question comes from Kevin McCarthy, Vertical Research Partners: Regarding our new strategic review for Catalysts, can you comment on the impetus for that decision, where you are in the process today, and the potential timing of any decision?
Yeah. I guess the driver for that, you heard that in Raphael's presentation. From the strategy, there's a requirement for investment and to shift in the market. That has us ask the question: Is that where Albemarle should be putting our capital today? We'll review that. We wanted to do that strategic plan first to understand the opportunity. The timing, we're on the strategic review. The strategy of the business is one thing, but now the strategic review from a portfolio standpoint, we're just getting started. I'm not ready to give you a timeline for that. We'll take the time that is necessary, but it's something that we're focused on and actively working on.
All right. Great. The next question, also from the chat. Mike Harrison at Seaport Research Partners asked for Netha. Of the key markets that you list on slide 27, where does Albemarle see the largest share of total addressable market, and what markets do you see as the most profitable for Albemarle?
Yeah, I think if we think about your question, the opportunities for us are really biggest in electronics and in the consumer polymers. Those are our traditional markets that we've been in a long time. We just know them best. We have customer relationships there that give us great insight, and we have great products that fit what our customers need. Those are the ones we are probably most confident in going forward.
All right. Great. One more from Kevin McCarthy at Vertical Research Partners. Kevin asked, again regarding bromine: How much capacity have you added? Are you able to run at full rates given various supply chain constraints evident in today's global market? Perhaps you can also address any inputs, e.g., chlorine, as well as any constraints among customers' abilities to operate. That may be referring to Hurricane Ida, which people have asked about a little bit recently.
Kevin, we typically don't disclose the capacities. We are definitely adding volume for the market. I think our plants are ready to go. What I mean by that, we've done the things we need to do on our side to execute. What you're saying is absolutely true. Ida has really put a challenge in our supply chain. We had challenges before Ida in BPA and chlorine. To be quite honest, we're living day to day with force majeure notices from our suppliers, especially those in the region hit by Ida. We're trying to get and understand exactly how this would impact us. From a production standpoint, we're ready. We're ready to go. As these supply chains get fixed, which we know they will, we'll be ready to deliver that additional capacity to our markets and to our customers.
All right. Thank you. We'll take one more from the chat, and then we'll go to the phone lines. Seth Goldstein at Morningstar asked, again, two questions on bromine: What is the total addressable market for SAYTEX ALERO, and will this cannibalize existing products? Walk us through that scenario.
Yeah. The service addressable market, which means we have opportunity for SAYTEX ALERO, is around $300 million. We don't see this as a cannibalization. The market growth fundamentally supports both products, and now we have the opportunity to offer multiple products depending on the customer's choices when they're in application. That's the ideal scenario we want to be. There's definitely room for growth for both products over the next five years, and we feel just as good about both of them going forward.
All right. Great. Operator, let's go to the phone lines for a few questions.
The first question comes from Joel Jackson with BMO Capital Markets.
Hi, good morning, everyone.
Hi.
On the bromine side, tell me if I'm wrong here. Historically, bromine has grown kind of a GDP-like kind of growth rate. Maybe you had a couple of good years, a couple of bad years. As you're looking out over the next five years, you could see bromine earnings come to higher levels and kind of plateau around these levels. Now you're projecting like another $100 million development in earnings. Is there something fundamentally changing in the bromine market? You talked about some of your company-specific things that you're looking at, but do you think the GDP-like history I mentioned is there? Do you think it's changing going forward? Maybe you can comment on that, maybe.
Yes. I'll start on that, and then Netha can give a little more detail. We've been talking about this a bit for the last almost year, six months, I would say, that the market is changing. I think it's really driven by digitization and electrification. It's across a lot of our markets, but you saw the slides that Netha showed. There are more chips in everything. Your doorbell has chips. EVs have more chips than ICEs. Everything has more electronics in it, and that's just a fundamental driver. We were surprised at how well bromine held up during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it really held up well. Since then, we've seen that transition, and I think that's something that has been building over time.
It's really come into our visibility in the last, I would say, year or just at the end, maybe six months ago, we started really forming the view that the market had changed, and it just wasn't something unique to the pandemic.
Yeah, Kent, you're absolutely right. To expand a little deeper, our diversification has been stronger than it's ever been. We have more opportunities to grow than maybe traditionally we had in this market. The company's management and leadership has put us in a financial position where we can invest capital in this business. For us, capital equals growth. We've been sold out for a number of years, and now with the capital raise and equity investment and the allocation of 10% of that to the Bromine business and the way the company's positioned itself with its capital structure, we have an opportunity to expand and grow with the markets we serve.
If I could follow up on that. This is not a trick question, but your partners in Jordan seem to be wanting to look at now over the next two years, trying to quantify the lithium resource in the Dead Sea, in the pond there, and seeing that they can maybe expand into lithium there. Is that something you'd be involved in?
We have access rights to the minerals from the Dead Sea on the Jordan side. We could look at that. We've not spent a lot of detail. There's a lot of resources from a lithium standpoint that would probably be more attractive than the Dead Sea. We have rights to that with our agreement with the Jordanian government.
Thank you.
The next question comes from John Roberts with UBS. Once again, John Roberts with UBS, your line is open. The next question comes from Matt DeYoe with Bank of America.
Hi, thank you. Question for Raphael. You talked a bit about expansion into Southeast Asia and India. This maybe goes hand in hand with some of the investment requisite comments made earlier by Kent. Would you need to expand footprint and capacity in the region? What kind of capital outlay might that look like?
Matt, thanks for the question. I think over the next five years, you won't see a demand for capital outlays for expansion from our business in Southeast Asia or India. When we get to the point of needing expansion, and I would say likely for anybody doing an expansion, that's the target market for adding capacity. Right now, we're fortunate that we have the sufficient capacity to serve the market and our key customers. We also have debottlenecking projects for our existing plants to enable greater output, which can help us serve those markets in the near future. It's certainly a longer-term opportunity to put assets on the ground closer to where the markets are growing.
All right, thank you.
The next question comes from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.
Thank you. Good morning. Kent, back to the portfolio, what makes Bromine core for Albemarle and Catalyst potentially not core? Is it just a matter of how much capital's required for the Catalyst business going forward, or is there something else behind that potential decision?
Well, I think, between bromine and lithium, there's a lot of similarities. The resource base, you convert that and derivatize it into special products. There is a link there, and so I think that is the Bromine business fundamental. Don't forget, there's lithium in the Smackover formation, which we have rights to. We just talked a little bit about the Dead Sea, same thing. There is a kind of a fundamental link between bromine and lithium from a resource standpoint.
Kent, I would add that some of the macro trends for both of those businesses, the digitization and electrification of the economy are square for both of them in that. I think that's what one of the separations as well with Catalyst.
Very good. Netha, just on the potential margin expansion in your business, can you give a little more detail on the drivers of that margin expansion over the next few years?
You're talking about Bromine?
Bromine, yes. The Bromine, sorry.
Netha, you want to take that?
Yeah, I think it's really a combination of two things. The first is we're always driving operational excellence. As you mentioned, it's part of the Albemarle Way of Excellence. It's what Kent focused on, and it's what we're doing every day. We think we have a chance to lower our cost as we continue to go out into the future. We think the market's going to be fundamentally undersupplied, which will allow us to have some pricing opportunities in particular products, in particular markets, going forward. Those two things will drive our margin expansion.
Yeah, David, if I could add. The Bromine business has a contribution margin of somewhere in the 60%-65% range. When they're able to expand with these brownfield expansions, that comes at a very nice premium to what we've been doing in the past. I think that's some of what you're seeing in the margin expansion as well.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Chris Kapsch with Loop Capital Markets.
Yeah, good morning. Thank you. Question on bromine. First of all, the revised outlook from the 2019 investor event. On the top line, you had talked about 2% CAGR. Now you're talking 350 basis points higher, 5%-6%. Can you parse that out by the contributors from market growth versus market share growth versus the anticipated, sounds like more favorable pricing given the constraints of the supply of the industry?
Maybe I can start with that, and then Netha can jump in with some details. As we look at that growth, it is primarily driven by volumetric growth. There's a little bit of price in there as we see the continued need for bromine in the short market, but it is primarily a volume story and one that we'll need to invest in order to get at it. Netha, maybe you can provide some additional detail.
Yeah, as we talk about the capacity projects we are going to execute on over the next five years. We see opportunity to place that product in multiple markets, right? We're really diversified. All of our markets are growing, we have a great opportunity to place products in all of them. That's also driving the growth that we see coming. We're going to have product from the capacity expansion and the markets that get placed, those products are also growing, which is a great combination for us going forward.
Yeah.
Is there another question from the phone line?
Yeah, for Bromine.
Oh, go ahead.
The next question is from John Roberts with UBS.
There he is.
Thank you. Sorry for the earlier glitch. W. R. Grace generated primarily financial sponsor interest when it did its strategic review and very little strategic interest. Is there any significant differences with your business that you might generate different interest as you go through your strategic review?
Yeah. We'll look at that. We think there will be strategic as well as interest from financial sponsors. We've got to go through the process. I don't want to jump ahead of it and anticipate what'll happen. I think we'll go through that. We think there'll be interest from a variety of those, and we think there are a lot of options, and we have to really work out what we want to do. That's part of the process.
Okay. On the Bromine business, you had a chlorine issue last quarter, and I assume Hurricane Ida maybe exacerbated that a little bit. Do you need to do anything longer term to deal with some of the more recent issues you've had with chlorine?
Yeah, I think Netha can jump in on this, but we'll have to look at chlorine. We've had issues around that. That market is changing, particularly in North America. We've got agreements with the key suppliers, and we've got to think through that. Whether we have to do something from an investment standpoint, I don't know. We have to look at that. That market has changed quickly, and we didn't see it coming probably as well as we should have.
The next question comes from Jeffrey Zekauskas from JPMorgan.
Hi, good morning. I've got a question for Raphael. Is the growing demand for electric vehicles something that will impact diesel fuel demand or gasoline demand over longer periods of time? That said, does it change your longer-term growth rate? As you look for hydrogen in trucks, how does that change the story?
Hey, Jeff. Thanks for the question. It's certainly the electric vehicle demand, though it's small today, it's a growing piece of the transportation network. That will have an impact. Fuel efficiency probably even more will have an impact on overall fuel demand. Most of the electrification right now is in light passenger vehicles, so it's probably more on the gasoline side than on the diesel, but I think you'll start to see it in both places. We would see that while that's happening, there's still large pieces of the world population that don't have access to an electrical grid that would support that or the disposable income to have an electric vehicle. There's certainly going to be growing demand in places in the world for some time for transportation fuel. That's why we see if we do the right things, then we have a good business.
We have to execute well on our strategy in order to do that.
Yeah, let me just add. I think. Sorry, just I'll add to that. The strategy that Raphael laid out was really in response to that transition, right? We're moving to the East where there's still demand in transportation fuels and then moving toward more renewable fuels. We recognize that electric vehicles will have an impact, but in the long term. In the near term, there's still a growth opportunity and then new applications for us and opportunities to use the expertise that we have on traditional transportation fuels and apply that to the new ones.
Is there any way to quantify the effects in any form on the business?
Well, certainly that's something that can be quantified just based on the estimates on what are the miles driven that will be in the future based on those trends, and then how much of the fleet will be an electric vehicle, and how much of that is passenger vehicle versus otherwise. It's not a number that I have an exact number for you right now, Jeff, but that's certainly something that we built into our forward-looking forecast. When we forecast our business, we look at Eric's forecast for what he's estimating for electric vehicles, and what's that balance of electric vehicles, other transportation sources, and traditional fuels. That's what we build into our view. Again, as Kent said, that's why we're looking to pivot in some ways to other markets so we can continue to have a growth business.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
The next question comes from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.
Thank you. Raphael, on Catalyst, how do you expect the recovery to occur, both from an earnings as well as from a margin recovery? Do you expect to return to prior margin levels fairly quickly, or is it a little bit longer over the five-year timeframe?
I think we'll get into more of that guidance when we get closer to next year. Certainly, we see strong sequential recovery, David, in FCC. FCC is very ratable to miles driven. Our business is specifically just given our focus on bottoms cracking, resid, FCC resid processing. As utilization rates increase, our business recovers at an accelerated pace. At low levels of recovery, low utilization, we probably feel it more than maybe some of our competitors, we really benefit at higher utilization. If utilization continues to increase, which it has been into 2022, you'll see a pretty strong recovery in FCC. Hydroprocessing, as I said, a little bit lumpy. There's some turnarounds that they're delayed into 2023 and beyond. I think it'll take a little bit longer to see it in hydroprocessing, sequentially, you'll still see improvement.
Thank you.
That concludes the Q&A questions on the phone. I will turn it back to Meredith Bandy.
All right. Great. Thank you. We do still have a number of questions on the chat, so we'll go back to the chat questions. First up, Vincent Andrews at Morgan Stanley asked, "Your bromine growth outlook is much stronger today than it was at the 2019 event, though the growth drivers such as 5G or EV are not necessarily new. What are you seeing that's different today versus 2019 that's allowed you to increase your growth forecast? Was 2019 a conservative forecast, or has something changed structurally?
Yeah. Again, Netha, let me start, and then you can add in the details. I think when we talked about it a little before, coming out of the pandemic, we didn't drop as much as we'd anticipated, as much as our other business had turned down, and I think that is about digitization, electrification that's happening across the industry, and that was when we first noticed it, and then it has continued to build. 5G is an element of it, Internet of Things, but it is about electrification everywhere. The breadth that Netha talked about, the diversification we have in the applications. It surprised us, too. In 2019, we didn't see it that way, and we kind of really picked up on it out of the pandemic because it didn't drop as much as we'd anticipated.
It's just as Kent mentioned, we're learning more. These markets are more mature now than they were in 2019, and our customers are putting more products in there that they're asking for us to have flame retardant solutions around. The last piece, we have capital now to capitalize on that and get expanding and capture that growth. It's a combination really of all those things that make us much more bullish on those markets than we were in 2019.
All right. Great. Another question from Laurence Alexander at Jefferies: "For bromine, can you sketch the capacity expansion you would need to undertake in terms of size and cost?" I know, Netha, you already said that you're not going to give the exact size, but maybe you can just give us a little more color.
Yeah. I think Scott and Kent were very clear when we raised capital that 10% of that will be allocated for Bromine. I think that's our plan. We have three defined projects, two of which have already started, and those are in Magnolia. Again, brownfield projects in places where we've been in business for over 50 years, with processes we've known for 50 years, and in communities that are very supportive of us. We feel really good about our execution opportunity around that. That's really where we're putting the capital right away. We have other capital projects, too, that will continue to get funded throughout the planning period. All those will be in the total plan that enables us to grow at the 5%-6% that we said.
Okay. Let's see. P.J. Juvekar at Citi asked, "How big is the pyrolysis opportunity? What's the market today? What growth do you see, and what's the catalyst used in that process?
Thanks, P.J. We're probably in the last year our understanding of pyrolysis has expanded exponentially. We're still at the start of building out the portfolio of catalysts that we think we need for that. To be clear, P.J., there's multiple catalyst applications in pyrolysis. What we're specifically talking about is on hydroprocessing. That's like the cleaning up of pyrolysis oil so it can be fed back into making virgin plastics or fed into a refinery as a feedstock. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of a catalyst opportunity by 2035. It's somewhere between like $200 million-$400 million.
In value of hydroprocessing catalyst. It depends on how the market plays out and what technologies are used, but that's what we're looking at. It'll build slowly, but as pyrolysis oil use becomes mainstream, and as you know, P.J., that's the key mode for getting recycling plastic into something usable. As that builds steam, as folks need to purify that to blend it into making new plastic, that demand is going to increase. We're excited about the opportunity, and I personally know our team is working on it from a technology standpoint, and it fits very well with our expertise in hydroprocessing.
Okay, great. Let's see. The next question, there's one from John Roberts at UBS. Does bromine make it harder to recycle the plastics and textile that bromine is used in?
Hey, John. On the recycling side, I think we're still learning about the opportunities to do that. I don't think bromine makes it harder. I think there's a lot of things in the plastic in which bromine is just one component. All those multiple components make things challenging on the recycling side. I think as we move forward in the future, and we all get better at that, the plastic industry knows that's part of the go forward way, and everyone's looking at opportunities to do that.
Okay. Another one from Laurence Alexander at Jefferies. A question for Bromine. What do Albemarle's longer-term EV outlook imply for total Bromine demand for electrification and charging stations to support that infrastructure? In other words, what could EVs represent as a share of the Bromine market, say, in five years?
Yeah. I think we're learning, right? For us, this is the new market, right? We're capitalizing on every learning that Eric's group gets in lithium. We have an opportunity to go back and look at vehicle platforms today and deconstruct them and see which of our products are in there, specifically in a high voltage cable. I think as the planning period goes on, we'll be able to quantify that more. As I mentioned, this is a new market, and it's the first time I ever talked about it to investors. I think as the time goes on, we'll learn a lot more and provide a lot more clarity about the specific bromine opportunity in EVs.
Perfect. Okay. Ann Gurkin at Davenport & Company asked, with increased recent government regulations in China, how does that change your forecast for economic growth and/or market demand in China over the next few years, i.e., the demand for PET or other products?
Let me start and we can talk. I'm sure everybody's got a view on the regulation in China as it impacts the different businesses. As far as us doing business there, we don't see it stopping us from doing business there at all. I'm not sure it's changing the demand for the product. In lithium, as an example, where probably our biggest opportunity, that's still the largest EV market in the world and a big driver for lithium growth in China. We see opportunities to invest there, and the regulation for that we see have not impacted our view on our ability to invest there or participate in the markets. Netha, you may want to talk about Bromine.
Yeah. When I look and just take China and slice it to a very, very small slice, which is Bromine. The market opportunity is growing. What's changing with the regulation is where that Bromine's going to come from. Maybe it's changing a little bit from a self-sourced market to an import market. We have opportunity to import Bromine into that market to capitalize on that domestic growth. That's a little bit of the dynamics of China in our business. As Kent said, we're continuing to think that's a very positive place to do business, and we'll be right with Albemarle as Albemarle grows in China.
Netha, I think it's fair to say that our customer base continues to be an Asian-focused customer base in Bromine, particularly with the flame retardants and the electronics manufacturing that happens in Asia.
Yeah.
Okay. Michael Sison from Wells Fargo asked, Bromine is now considered a growth business. Growth was raised or almost doubled. Is there upside to margin? In the updated goals? Are there any synergies for selling Bromine to EV customers with Lithium?
Yeah, again, I'll start, Netha you get the real information. I think we talked about the margin, and Netha talked about that. There is margin expansion in there, mainly about kind of scaling and the efficiencies we're driving through manufacturing excellence and productivity improvements. I don't think there should be synergies as we do this through EVs, but in the EV market between lithium and bromine, we haven't gotten to that yet. We're still pretty early from a bromine standpoint, selling into that supply chain, and we sell down a couple of levels below the OEMs traditionally from a bromine standpoint. We would look for those synergies and hopefully optimize those over time, we really haven't gotten to that yet. Netha.
I think about the Bromine business just from the history from when I've been here. We went from a GDP light to a GDP, now GDP plus. I think we'll prove really good about the guidance that we provided and that there's fundamental opportunities in our market growth and our capacity expansion plans to deliver that. I think we're always going to try and do the best that we can. We're very prideful of our results and proud of our results, and that's just what Albemarle does. We do our best to outperform, we feel very confident with the guidance that we gave going forward over the next five years.
Okay. We'll close with a couple of Catalyst questions here. Christopher Perrella from Bloomberg Intelligence asked, what is the sustainable capital spending for the Catalyst business over the next five years?
Christopher, thanks for your question. The business does need capital. It certainly needs somewhere in the 3%- 5% per year of just maintenance capital to make sure we maintain the safety and operability of the sites. It's hard to pinpoint exactly how much on an average amount. Then there's a specific amount. As we look at the new areas of growth for our business, it will require some investment in capacity to be able to service the needs of growing olefins demand. That's a specific type of FCC catalyst. There's an investment that we're anticipating in additional capacity for those catalysts. There's investments in our PCS business to meet the needs of electronics customers within that space. It's hard to pinpoint it.
It certainly doesn't look like as much as what the lithium business needs, or even the bromine business needs in order to be able to meet those demands in our business. It's variable, but all the projects that we look at have high returns and would justify the investment.
All right, great. I think the final question of this session will be from Emily Ketch from Goldman Sachs. Can you talk through the main drivers of how Albemarle plans to return to margins in its Catalyst business in the mid-'20s?
Yeah. Thanks, Emily. I really think it's about drop-through, meaning as volume recovers, we have fixed costs at our assets, and that leverage creates higher EBITDA margins. As we get incremental business, of course, our contribution margins don't look like Netha and Eric's, but they're very good. It's still a very profitable business with good margins. As you get higher volumes, higher utilization at the plant drops through, and that increases the earnings quality of the business going forward, back to what we were accustomed to 2019 and before.
All right, great. Well, that concludes our first Q&A session of the day. We're going to take probably about a 15-minute break, and then we'll come back, and Eric Norris will tell us more about the Lithium business. Thanks so much.
I never noticed.
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For thousands of years, the inhabitants and visitors to the Salar de Atacama in Chile have seen the sun rise, witnessing the beauty of this natural landscape in its purest form. That history continues today and reminds us of the importance of sustainability and social value and provides the promise of a better future. This is where much of the lithium that powers the world is found. We are Albemarle Corporation, a global company driven by innovation that is committed to the health of the environment. As one of the largest lithium producers in the world, we have world-class lithium resources in Australia, Argentina, the United States, and Chile. In order to preserve the environment, the world needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Advancing clean transportation is critical to this goal, and lithium is one of the most important resources required to achieve this goal.
In the Salar de Atacama, we use one of nature's cleanest sources of energy, the sun, to extract a key element that today offers humanity a better quality of life and a more sustainable future. Lithium is essential for the technological revolution that is now underway, especially for electro-mobility. Europe, China, and the United States have each stated they are determined to boost their fleets of electric vehicles as part of their effort to reduce the impacts of climate change. One of our key areas of focus at Albemarle is to find more efficient systems that can increase our lithium production in a sustainable way, because how we produce lithium is as important as how much we produce. At the Salar de Atacama, we do not use fresh water in the extraction of lithium from brine, a liquid rich in minerals that has no known alternative use.
The brine has a lithium concentration of 0.2%, which we are able to naturally concentrate using solar evaporation to 6%. This is then transported to our La Negra conversion plant in Antofagasta, Chile, where we have developed unique processes to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate and lithium chloride. In 2022, we are scheduled to start up a new plant at La Negra, which will use a thermo evaporator that will enable us to significantly reduce the amount of fresh water consumed in the conversion process. Being sustainable is not an option. It is an obligation. We have the responsibility to protect the environment, and our commitment to this is demonstrated in how we use water, in our business ethics, and especially in our relationship with the Indigenous Peoples of the Salar de Atacama, to whom we contribute 3.5% of annual sales in Chile.
These funds are used by the community with self-determination in their development projects. It is not enough just to say what we are able to do. We must prove it, and not just to ourselves. For that, there are international standards. One of the most demanding is IRMA, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, which recognizes Albemarle on the organization's responsible mining map as the first lithium company in the world to complete the organization's self-assessment process. We also plan to soon begin the same journey at our Greenbushes facility in Australia. In addition, Albemarle adheres to the United Nations Global Compact, the largest corporate sustainability initiative in the world. It encompasses 12,000 companies and other interested parties across 155 countries.
Our commitment is demonstrated in our goals of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, growing our lithium business in a carbon intensity neutral manner through 2030, and reducing fresh water use by 25% by 2030 in areas of water risk. Today, we can proudly say that at Albemarle, we sustainably produce lithium for the world.
Good morning, and welcome back from the break. I'm Eric Norris, President of Albemarle Lithium. I've been with Albemarle since 2018, and I've been in the specialty chemicals industry for almost 30 years now. The second half of today will focus largely on the Lithium business. I look forward to sharing what is really an exciting time in the industry, and an even more exciting time at Albemarle, as we enable the EV revolution. As I talk about that strategy today, I'm going to hit several key points. One, the strength of the franchise we have in the lithium space. Two, the acceleration of growth and the increasing and stronger outlook now that we have for our business.
Finally, I'm going to get into the details of our strategy of how we're going to sustain a leadership position in this market while increasing share and driving significant shareholder value. I have never been more confident in the growth prospects for this business. Today, you'll hear us use a word, you've already heard it a couple of times, acceleration. Probably a very appropriate word for the end markets we serve. What we're talking about is an acceleration of our strategy to meet increasing needs in the EV space. We do this from a position of strength. We're diversified across geographies, products and resources, low cost, world-class resources. We're playing in a market whose growth is now stronger than we thought just a few years ago.
Right now, we see in 2025, for instance, 1.14 million metric tons on a lithium carbonate equivalent basis, a 30% growth from where we stand today based on increasing EV sales. We have a proven track record that we have honed in building world-class, high-quality, battery-grade lithium plants, and we're taking that forward in this strategy. From a base of 175,000 metric tons next year, we plan to more than double our capacity over the plan period that I'm going to be talking about today through 2026. Importantly, we're doing that in partnership with our customers, driving quality, technology and sustainability, and helping them set the standard for what's to come and enabling the sustainability ambitions of these customers and of indeed the world itself. We are well-positioned to accelerate growth and nearly triple our sales over the next five years.
As a leader in this space, we stand on a foundation of high quality, differentiation and low cost in a market with attractive characteristics and a favorable business environment. The starting position, as depicted on this slide, $1.2 billion in sales and 36% EBITDA margin. That is comprised of a full range of products that are sold everywhere from lithium salts, high-grade and industrial-grade quality salts, all the way through derivatized organometallic materials served in specialty chemical markets. Vertically integrated, as I indicated earlier, for all of our production back to low-cost resources that drives a low-cost position. Importantly, developing industry-leading standards for sustainability, which our customers are pushing us towards. We are well-positioned to lead in, and Ellen Lenny-Pessagno later will talk in detail about that with you. We're playing in an environment that is very favorable.
I don't think I have to recount what's going on, but let me just say that it's a remarkable environment in which every major region in the world is driving incentives towards EVs, from consumer incentives to incentives on the supply side to incentivize building capacity for electric vehicles. If you'll look at the pie chart on this page, you can see today our starting position is 60% of sales into energy storage, things like electric vehicles, grid storage, consumer electronics. That will be over 85% through this strategy that we're executing by 2026, a significant transformation of our franchise. A lot has changed since 2019, a mere two years ago when we were talking with you last, when I spoke about our targets.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, and there were some indeed in the recent past, I am proud to say that the execution of our strategy remains on track. Let me break it down. Firstly, we are executing on our capacity growth. We will bring, as we said, 175,000 metric tons of capacity online for sale next year, a month or two late, several months late, based upon difficulties from the pandemic, particularly in Western Australia. More importantly, our path forward from there is a more than doubling versus what we told you last in 2019 of that capacity by mid-decade. Secondly, the outlook is better than it was in 2019. Technological improvements in the battery, investments by EV producers, incentives from governments, consumer preferences broadly are all stimulating a stronger growth environment for us.
While the pandemic did set us back in the last year or two, our outlook actually looks better than it ever has. It's stronger than we thought a mere two years ago, as I'll describe through this presentation. While energy storage is at the core of our strategy, we participate in a broader addressable market, as depicted here. Certainly, energy storage is the biggest and the fastest-growing, with expected growth rates of 35%-40% over this period. We gather this data from a variety of sources and data analytics techniques that I'll describe later when we get into the details of that demand. Other important markets, though, for us, are the industrial markets. Markets where we, for decades, have served the specialty glass, ceramics, lubricants participants.
Importantly, a third market we play in, a specialty market, a niche market where we have highly derivatized products, a very strong competitive advantage to play in with differentiation in attractive GDP plus growth markets in the life sciences space. Our aim, sustain leadership across all of these markets. That's going to take a significant investment in driving our capabilities, and it's going to be based upon our strengths historically and going forward of quality, low cost, and technical differentiation. At the heart of this is an integrated conversion network, as you see depicted on this slide. From the lowest cost resources noted on the left, all the way through to the production of high-quality lithium chemicals on the right. Two key streams for you to appreciate that we're driving our strategy from.
One, largely a spodumene supply chain, hard rock supply chain, largely enabling the significant growth we see in hydroxide. We are operating at a low-cost resources in Australia and driving that into plants production in China currently and soon in Australia. The second stream is the world's lowest cost resource, the Salar de Atacama, leveraging that to produce carbonate in Chile in what is the low-cost operation. We do the same at a smaller scale, giving us a domestic presence, which we are going to be increasing in Silver Peak, Nevada. We can take that into the market for carbonate, and that's a very big market for us, has been, or we can process it further through hydroxide, as we do in at least one plant today at Kings Mountain here in North Carolina. Our conversion network provides low cost leveraging world-class resources. I'm excited.
I'm excited by the scale and global diversity that we uniquely are able to bring to our customers who are around the world. We operate in multiple resource sites, as I've described. We're operator of two sites in China, making us one of the largest producers in China today. We're the only producer in the E.U., operating out of Germany now for over 100 years. We're the only multi-site operator in the U.S. integrated to the resource, and we've done that since the 1950s. Full vertical integration, three resources, four additional possible resources I'll talk about for the future that we look to develop, operating in six conversion sites and three specialty chemical plants positioned strategically around the world.
With this diversity and scale, we are creating value-added products and security of supply that helps our customers sleep well at night, gives them peace of mind in what is a rapidly growing market. That growth is even stronger than we'd anticipate just two years ago, driven by EV penetration and driven by light-duty vehicles in a light-duty vehicle fleet and increasing battery size. As a reminder, we have built a world-class data science and analytics capability to generate the data you see here and that we've shared with you consistently over the past years. We leverage hundreds of data sources, our own unique insights. We employ modern techniques, sophistication around Monte Carlo simulation, historical training models, and statistical modeling to come up with this model.
What it's showing us today, and we've been, I would have to say, very consistent in leading the way in showing where this growth is coming from, is that demand is even stronger than we thought. From a base of 300,000 metric tons in 2020, a growth to 1.14 million by 2025. We're introducing here today a growth of 2.5 million metric tons by 2030. The driver of all this, the biggest driver on the left-hand panel of this chart, the blue bar, EV battery-grade lithium. What's underneath that is the accelerating shift to higher energy density towards larger battery sizes, and fully a third, as depicted in the middle, of all vehicles produced in the world by 2030 or more being electric vehicles. What's important also to understand is energy density is what unlocks this.
We see growth for both carbonate and hydroxide, but the growth for hydroxide over this period, we expect to be stronger. What's exciting about it all in the end when you put it together, is not only is this a five-year growth story, it is at least a decade or more story in the making from a growth standpoint. Strong growth clearly through the end as far as we can see through 2030. As a consequence, there's going to be a great demand on the supply side. We expect more supply needed in this market. We are accelerating our strategy to add our own capacity to this market. We, in fact, expect that hydroxide could very well be at a deficit, a structural deficit. Let's break these cost curves down between carbonate and hydroxide. Some key differences. First, on carbonate.
We expect that capacity to nearly double over this period of time. It is largely from low-cost brine resources as depicted here. As a consequence, the marginal cost that comes in outside of that is at a significantly higher cost, but very steep cost curve in carbonate. Contrasting that to hydroxide, this is a capacity because of demand I just described, it's going to need to quadruple over this period of time. Even at that, if you look at the demand curves with the sensitivities we have on this chart, we'll be short of what is needed as best we can see it here today with what we know. Overall, hydroxide comes at a higher cost profile. It's processed more often from rock, and when it's processed from brine, it requires two steps that adds cost to it. It tends to be a more level cost curve.
There is a difference. There are low-cost producers. That's my second point in looking at this chart. Albemarle's position, as Kent earlier said, at the left-hand side of the cost curve. We have operational flexibility to operate from different resources and make different products. From either resource sourcing, we can make carbonate or hydroxide. We choose a setup as we do to optimize our cost structure. Finally, I reference the demand curves. You can see the tightness in the market. It's tight for both product lines, but tighter and indeed short for hydroxide. As a result, we expect the need for more capacity to come into this market than has been announced to date. We are going to accelerate our strategy to sustain our share of that growth.
We expect that on the hydroxide side, some carbonate may need to be transitioned over to support the hydroxide side. We come at this with strong margins, a low-cost position, and an ability to really accelerate our growth strategy. Let's talk about that strategy. A similar format to how everybody else before me, Kent, Netha, and Raphael described their strategy. Our strategy is all about growth with a strong wing around driving productivity, innovation, and most importantly, sustainability. Near term, it's about expanding conversion capacity that we can fully leverage and utilize the resource base we have. We're also working with our customers to innovate and to drive sustainability to meet their ambitions and needs. Ellen will talk more about that in a moment, but one of the important programs we're looking at as a future resource for us is recycling.
We're, as Kent talked about, implementing the Albemarle Way of Excellence. For us, that is about manufacturing excellence. I'll give you a case study in a bit about how we're driving that. We're also looking at commercial excellence, how we drive greater partnership with our customers through our contracting and the customer experience we create. I'll talk about that as well. M&A. M&A is important for the long haul. It's important to either accelerate our strategy and being able to acquire conversion assets near term to give us future resources as we exhaust the very strong set of resources we have over the coming decade, what comes next from a resource standpoint. Technology partnerships, looking for partnerships that can help accelerate our customers' value proposition. Sustainability is the bottom line. It's foundational.
As I said, we'll talk more about what we're doing to drive a more sustainable product and supply chain for our customers. This strategy all starts, the whole business starts at the resource level. While there are a number of large-scale resources, small and large, depicted on this slide, few are of the size and scale to support the rapid growth from a low-cost position that Albemarle has. Albemarle sits on three of the world's best resources, and for the better part of the last decade, we continue to look at what other resources we should add to our portfolio. We've studied the landscape, we've assessed the key criteria of what makes a resource successful, and this slide, this graph, depicts two of the three characteristics we think are important. The one, scale, the X-axis.
That's the size of the resource to support a continuous investment stream, such as the one we're pursuing in our conversion strategy. The vertical, the Y-axis, is the concentration. The higher up that line you are, the richer the source of lithium and the less expense and the better sustainability profile generally, because you don't have to deploy as much energy or water or by-product to get to that product. You can see, as you look at Albemarle's resources noted in gold, we tend to be on the top right corner. That is what I mean by world-class resources. We have access to those. Another characteristic, though, is extremely important in this puzzle of what makes a resource successful. It's the chemistry, the process know-how to take that resource to a high-quality product. That's know-how that Albemarle has built over decades in this period of time.
As we look at that, we look at building that conversion capacity from that 175,000 tons I talked about early next year. We actually have 2x the available resource in this resource base to keep expanding. That is what's depicted on the right-hand side of this chart, is that substantial resource base that we can leverage. On the left, and a key part of the narrative, is how we have done that. A proven track record of adding capacity through acquisitions, through organic activities to debottleneck, through capacity additions. What's exciting about this is that if you look here, fully half of what's coming in this trajectory comes online in the next six-plus months. The expansion at La Negra III/IV for carbonate and the greenfield plant Kemerton 1, 2 for lithium hydroxide through our MARBL joint venture.
We have a proven track record to build capacity, which I'll talk a bit more about here in a moment, and Jak will talk a bit more in a lot more detail later about how we're executing that progressively. I consider our capability we're building one of the best in the world at doing this today. All of this sets the stage for what's to come. What's to come is exciting and depicted here. We're investing to align our capacity with that strong demand I was telling you about. Few in the industry are planning to build the capacity at the scope, scale, and diversity that Albemarle is. Our aim is to accelerate that investment in order to keep pace with our customers' needs. There are two key waves that are here as we leverage off of this base of 175,000 metric tons.
Both of these waves have two important characteristics. They're geographically diverse, helping us to enable localization over time of our supply chain as our customers start to move increasingly around the world from where they're generally based today, which is in Asia. A repeat skill that I talked about, and Jak will describe, of being able to drive down the capital intensity over time. Wave 3, the first step, is a very good example of this. At the start of Wave 3, where we are today is doubling our capacity in Silver Peak. That's giving us a first step towards increased localization in North America. However, most of Wave 3 is about a single plant design, repeated, perfected, and accelerated. What we're talking about doing is building repeat spodumene to hydroxide plants in Asia using Australian resources.
Both plants will be in China and in Australia, leveraging the know-how in that region to build 150,000 tons of capacity over a three-to-five-year period at $1.5 billion. Wave 4 is the next step. It's different. Wave 4 is more diverse. In Wave 4, we anticipate needing to look to other sources to get hydroxide. We may need to build plants that are carbonate to hydroxide. We have the capability today. We do it in Kings Mountain. We could increase that in North America. We could bring that to Europe. That's a localization strategy. We are also talking about completing Kemerton 5. That will make 125,000 metric tons on a single site. That's almost 1/2 of last year's demand. That is a massive site which will have incredible scale and be world-class in all kinds of characteristics, including sustainability, which Ellen will get into in a moment.
Finally, we can continue to localize our production in North America by looking at North American resources, such as Kings Mountain and Magnolia. As we refine the execution capabilities, we are also looking at our operating capabilities. We are honing our playbook so that we can repeatedly, consistently, effectively, and efficiently bring on plants one after the next. I want to talk a little bit about that as a case study. It is part of the operational discipline that Kent talked about in the Albemarle Way of Excellence. When I came to Albemarle three years ago, I felt we had a huge opportunity to build a manufacturing excellence competency. What that would mean in practice is improved safety, lower costs, greater yields, higher quality, greater reliability out of our production. We today have become very skilled at that. It is becoming a differentiator for us, and it is a journey still.
We have a ways to go to be the best in the marketplace. We expect to really have some exciting programs to deploy. Let me describe that here in this case study. First, we're building a manufacturing excellence management system. That's a key pillar. Second, we're building a predictive maintenance capability, and third, a continuous improvement mindset. We started a number of years ago by building a team from throughout Albemarle. Albemarle had a lot of world-class manufacturing excellence in our other GBUs. You've heard Netha and Raphael talk about that. We pulled that into this GBU to build that skill. We went out and hired some of the best people in the industry in terms of their knowledge of Lean Six Sigma manufacturing.
Finally, we have brought in external consultants to accelerate programs at our largest plants, from La Negra to Langelsheim to the Salar. We're going to be doing Xinyu next year and building Kemerton from the ground up with this capability. The results to date are impressive. We have cut our injury rate by 75% since 2018. We have taken operating rates at legacy units and pushed them to levels that are 10%-15% higher and are top of class in the lithium industry in terms of their capabilities and cost profile. Going forward, we're talking about taking $70 million or greater in cost cumulatively out of our supply chain. Perhaps more importantly than anything, we're going to be driving effectively a train out of our network through this effort of 20,000-25,000 metric tons. That's real value to our customers.
What's also important to this case study is what we do from a technology standpoint. Extraction and process technology are essential to drive productivity, reliability, and quality. I look to extraction technology to increase the quality of our product, to improve our sustainability, and to make less economic resources more competitive. This is our process map of what we're up to. I appreciate it's complex, let me just try to break it down. Again, move left to right. From left, mine source of spodumene, brine, or clay within the industry. Albemarle's denoted in gold. What's in blue here is what's commercial. As you move from left to right, you move from concentration to conversion to lithium hydroxide in this particular example. Let me draw your attention away from what's commercial, away from what Albemarle is doing, to what's in gray here.
This is where we're investing in knowhow. One example, in spodumene, we're looking at crystallization technologies. The crystal structure of high-quality battery-grade product is essential to higher energy density in batteries. We're investing in this to drive higher quality for our customers and improving that continuously for them. A second example, also in the spodumene supply chain across the top, is leaching. We're looking at alternative leaching chemistries. Why? In order to drive better cost and better sustainability of the byproducts that come from making lithium. A third example on this page is important. Now looking at brine, we are looking at direct lithium extraction technologies to improve the cost competitiveness of less economic resources where on that Y-axis, they weren't as high in the lithium concentration. Magnolia is an example of that.
We are looking to develop technology to improve the cost effectiveness and sustainability of processing lithium from Magnolia. Together, all of this helps us drive, as I said a moment ago, quality, sustainability, and cost effectiveness. While technology is important to how we manufacture, it's also important to our customers. We are developing novel materials to enable next-generation batteries. This slide here depicts that, and everywhere you see an A is where there's an opportunity or a product for Albemarle today. Let me digress for just a moment. From my experience in specialty chemicals, I find it very valuable, and I am pushing our organization to know how our product is used in our customer's application as well as or better than the customer does themselves. That's a very powerful value creation mechanism in specialty chemicals. It's something that Raphael talked about as a skill in his business.
What makes our Catalyst business special? For us, it's something about how we're going to develop to be an innovator, to be differentiated, and to enable the ambitions of our customers. We are building this capability today at Albemarle. We have been, for the past number of years, recruiting world-class talent in technology. We just earlier this year completed a battery materials, both metal and materials, innovation center in Kings Mountain, we are now adding people now, world-class talent around the world, to partner with and develop new products with our customers. This is that field that you see in this chart here. This is the field of development. There's a lot here, let me break it down. Again, you move from left to right. Left is the legacy technologies. Right is the next frontier. The middle is state-of-the-art today, what's being used in technology today.
What you generally see as you move from left to right is higher energy density and lower cost per kilowatt hour. What you also see is decreasing use of cobalt, increasing use of nickel in terms of the metal oxides used in the cathode, and the shift from more carbonate use to increased hydroxide use. It's giving us that higher growth profile. Finally, what you see is an opportunity for product development. As you look particularly to the far right, to the next frontier, you will see multiple lithium opportunities. Opportunities for lithium now in the anode as well as in the cathode, as well as in the separator. The amount of lithium in these cells would increase, the amount of energy density would increase, and the cost per kilowatt hour therefore would drop.
This is exciting stuff that will really enable the EV revolution, and is very important to our customers. Speaking about our customers, let's talk about the approach we want to take. We are taking a very, in some regards, similar approach as we have. Our long-term agreements will continue to partner with our customers in that way. The specific approach underneath that is changing. We are changing to be more segmented, to be more differentiated, to enable what Kent described as that customer experience in a Journey to Excellence. Let me just get into details of what's not going to change. We're going to continue to have a majority of our business under contract, 70% or more. We are going to have three to four years in average duration, generally, and there'll be a staggered expiration. The approach is going to be different.
We're evolving that approach. That's because our customers, there are a lot of reasons for doing this, but among others, our customers are changing, and that's depicted at the bottom of this slide. They're becoming more global. They are becoming more varied in the supply chain. They have different needs. Among them, yes, there will continue to be price buyers. Some component of this approach is going to be price-driven, purely price-driven, where we're exposed to what's going on in the market, and our mix will move as a result of that. That'll be a minority of our portfolio.
Because of the needs I just described and the trends we see with our customers around sustainability, around product needs, around innovation, around quality of product, security of supply to underwrite the investments they're making, we are seeing more customers who want to do different kinds of price or contract arrangements. Some may be a high fixed price. Others may be a fixed price with a movement around a collar. We are developing that portfolio. One thing I can tell you, as we take this approach forward and look into next year, considering particularly the expiration of pricing concessions that we offered during the hardship of the pandemic, we see at least a 15% increase or more in our selling prices year-over-year. Again, certainly the strength of the market, the market fundamentals are part of that scenario and what's driving that as well.
Our segmented approach, what it's aiming to do is to preserve the opportunity for upside while providing strong minimal returns to keep investing and grow aggressively in this market. I'm excited about the outlook this all affords for us and is described on this page, the value creation we're going to bring. We've talked about an accelerating market. We've talked about our efforts to move our strategy forward. What that means is 24%-28% growth over this period of time, and an EBITDA margin into the mid-40s, based upon the scale, cost reduction, differentiation, and customer contracts we have in our business. An exciting growth profile that I hope you share with me. Just to recap, we are enabling an EV revolution, accelerating our strategy to invest in capacity while driving quality and innovation and helping our customers achieve their sustainability ambitions.
We have a diversified and broad range of products. We're playing in this accelerating market that's an exciting place to be. We've got three of the world-class resources required to drive this revolution and a proven track record to build capacity to support them. Most importantly, as Raphael said, the customer. In the end, it's about serving the customer with quality, innovation, and helping them achieve sustainability. This is a business about a sustainability value proposition for the consumer in the end, for our customers. We're here to help enable that. I'm very pleased and excited next to introduce Ellen Lenny-Pessagno, who heads up our sustainability efforts, a partner of mine on the leadership team, and turn it over to her for a discussion of that topic. Thank you.
Great. Thank you so much, Eric. My name is Ellen Lenny-Pessagno. I'm the Vice President of Lithium Sustainability, and I've been with Albemarle for three years. Prior to that, I was a U.S. diplomat for 26 years, and during my service, I lived overseas for almost two decades, helping U.S. companies grow their businesses globally. As Kent outlined, sustainability is not only strategic, it is also core to our values. It really is an honor for me to be able to present the Li thium GBU strategy, their achievements, and our future plans. I'm doing this in representation not only of the Lithium GBU, but the entire company. We see an overwhelming support and commitment within the company to drive sustainability. It really begins, of course, at the corporate level with Meredith Bandy, who leads the Sustainability Strategy.
In the Lithium GBU, everyone is proudly aligned with the concept that how we produce lithium is as important as how much lithium we produce. We are focusing on three principal pillars regarding how we produce lithium. First, we have committed to growing our Lithium business in a carbon intensity neutral manner through 2030. Now, while this may not seem like an ambitious goal, it is. Without this goal, our carbon footprint would actually increase during this time frame due to our product mix. To meet this goal, we will have to reduce our hydroxide carbon footprint by approximately 30% in this time frame, and we have a plan to achieve this. We have also committed to responsible water stewardship by reducing our fresh water intensity by 25% in Chile.
Today, we are the only lithium conversion plant that recycles water, and we're doing that in Chile in the desert. This significant investment will allow us to reduce our fresh water intensity by approximately 30%. We're at our goal with just this innovation, but yet our team wants to do even more. There's a team today in Chile studying the possibility of bringing desalinated water to our conversion plant in 2026. Finally, we drive sustainability by contributing to the well-being of the communities in which we operate, and I will talk about that in a few minutes. You can see that in Albemarle, we believe sustainability is not an option. It is an obligation. Let's do a further deep dive on how we manage our carbon footprint and are reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.
Our brine resource extraction technology utilizes the power of the sun to concentrate the brine. Today this is the most cost-effective and most sustainable way to produce lithium. We're quickly moving to greening our energy mix as well. Our plants in China use natural gas rather than coal, which truly sets us apart from our competitors there. We have ambitious plans to convert our plants in Australia and Chile to renewable energy. Finally, we are integrating electric vehicles into our operations, not only to reduce our carbon footprint, but also to showcase how our lithium products enable the EV revolution. Let's turn to some specific examples of how we sustainably produce lithium by taking a look of how we produce lithium in the Salar de Atacama. First, let's look at the facts.
We have less than 1% of the fresh water rights in the Salar basin. We only use a fraction of those rights because our production processes do not require water. Our brine resource is 10 x saltier than seawater, which means that it cannot be used for human consumption or for agricultural consumption. If you turn to the drawing of the Salar on the right-hand side of the page, you'll see that our brine is located at the bottom of a closed basin. The fresh water enters from the mountains. Our brine extraction does not affect the upstream groundwater for two reasons. The first is because the saline interface acts as a barrier between the groundwater and the brine. The second reason is because there is actually a chemical barrier as well, because brine is denser than water.
Let's think about oil and water in a glass. You've seen it before. You know that the oil and the water don't mix because water is denser than oil. That is the exact same situation between brine and fresh water. I'll now focus on how our environmental management is unique. We developed a model of the Salar that is recognized by Chilean authorities as one of the most sophisticated hydrogeological models of the Salar. Yet another thing that makes our natural resource stewardship unique is our voluntary agreement with the 18 indigenous communities who've lived around the Salar for more than 12,000 years. Three quarters of this agreement outlines how we will work together to be good stewards of the environmental sustainability of the Salar.
Every month, we jointly monitor more than 150 points in the Salar to understand the impact of our brine pumping to the ecosystem. We recalibrate our model with this data to understand the evolution of the resources as well as our potential impact to the surrounding environment. This data, which we share with the authorities and communities, shows that our brine pumping does not affect the environmentally sensitive areas. While all of our monitoring points are important, I'd like you to take a look at the graph on the right, I'd like to explain why this point is very critical. It represents one of the fresh water monitoring points that is closest to the community that's closest to our site. We're talking about over 15 mi to give you a sense of scale of the Salar.
What you see in this graph is that the green dots represent the monitoring results, and the dotted orange line indicates the trend, and you can see that the orange line is actually moving up. That means that the fresh water level is rising in that point. Also, our measurements of a lagoon close to that same site give us the same results, that the size of the lagoon is actually getting bigger. This data confirms that our brine pumping does not impact environmentally sensitive areas of the Salar. I'd like to turn to how we create social value in the communities where we operate, and I want to continue talking about what we're doing in the Salar, and then I'll talk about what we're doing globally.
We have this unique agreement with the Lickan Antay people, and we share 3.5% of our Chilean sales with them. Our agreement is based on the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and as such, these communities choose which projects they would like to fund. The community stewardship of these funds has been remarkable, and it really makes us feel really proud to witness how the projects that they are funding and implementing are truly improving the daily lives of residents of the Salar. Rather than hear it from me, if you look in the Investor Day page, you will see a video of one of the leaders of one of the communities. She does an amazing job in terms of talking about how our funding has improved the lives of residents from her community. My guess is you probably haven't looked at it yet.
I'm going to ask you to raise your hand and say, "I commit to viewing this video." Thank you very much for doing that. You can put your hand down now, and I really hope that you'll follow through with your commitment. We are equally as proud of the positive impact that we have on our communities globally, whether it be in the U.S., Germany, China, or Australia. Today, it's not enough to say that we operate in a sustainable way. You have to prove it. At Albemarle, we have taken a leadership role in the lithium industry by being the first lithium company to commit to assessing our sites through IRMA. IRMA, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, is the most holistic and rigorous mining standard out there.
Since our announcement, a number of our current and potential customers have announced they will require IRMA certification for their minerals purchases. Earlier this year, we also hit another first. We became the first lithium mine site to finish our IRMA self-assessment. NGOs, civil society, unions, and companies who buy minerals develop the over 800 IRMA standards, which we must meet. IRMA considers all aspects of our operation, environmental and social responsibility, business integrity, and ensuring the site is managed to deliver positive impacts for our workers, communities, and companies. Just last week, we became the first lithium site to begin our third-party audit. We're really proud of that. It has been so rewarding to see how leaders in Chile, including HR, environmental community management, finance, and of course, plant management, have already driven improvements in our sustainability and our operations, thanks to these rigorous standards.
We are committed to carrying out IRMA audits in our joint ventures as well because we want to drive the same positive changes in those operations. I'll conclude my presentation by addressing recycling, which is another important pillar of sustainability. Recycling will allow us to meet the growing demand for lithium with less lithium extraction. We are well-positioned to leverage our existing assets to utilize recycled lithium as a sustainable feedstock, and we are doing this by developing partnerships across the value chain. The E.U. recycling regulations, combined with the availability of end-of-life batteries, will accelerate the market for recycled lithium in the last half of this decade. Albemarle is planning to have a significant and strategic role in this new market.
To sum it all up, we are the global leader in sustainability because our leadership and our employees passionately believe that how we produce lithium is as important as how much lithium we produce. Now I'll turn it over to Jac, who will talk about how we are developing a world-class capability to execute projects. Thank you.
Thank you, Ellen. Good morning. My name is Jac Fourie. First, let me apologize for the neck brace I'm wearing. I'm still recovering from a small back surgery, and for now, the neck brace is helping accelerate my recovery. I'm responsible for Albemarle's Global Projects function. I joined the company at the beginning of 2019, and before then, I worked for 20 years in the mining and minerals industry. I've covered roles in operations, M&A, marketing, and of course, very importantly, major capital projects. As Netha and Eric have spoken about, Albemarle has an exciting growth program ahead. Today, I'd like to tell you about the journey we are on to improve our capital projects capability to successfully deliver the projects that underpin this growth.
Our improvement journey started approximately four years ago when we saw that organic growth through capital projects would form a bigger part of our growth strategy going forward. Since then, we have made significant progress towards building a world-class projects delivery capability. We have launched a board-level capital investment committee to provide strategic oversight of our projects. We have created a single global capital projects function to build deep functional expertise and discipline. We have launched the first version of our Albemarle Project Process, a standardized way to develop and execute projects. We've strengthened support from other business functions for our projects, for example, support from finance and procurement. We've built expert major project teams in Chile, Australia, and China. These improvement efforts are already delivering results.
Over the last two years, our teams in Chile and Australia have overcome tremendous challenges to deal with COVID-19 disruptions in the global supply chain, and labor shortages to keep our projects on track. Both of these projects at La Negra III and IV is now in the commissioning stage and nearing mechanical completion. At Kemerton 1 and 2, we are also in the commissioning stage and nearing mechanical completion towards the end of the year for Train 1. Going forward, we have structured our improvement journey in three areas, processes, people, and technology, and these areas directly link to the Albemarle Way of Excellence. I will cover each of these three areas, starting with the Albemarle Project Process because it is so fundamental to how we deliver projects and how we improve over time.
The Albemarle Project Process is a standardized phase-gate process for developing and planning projects, and it's based on industry best practice. It drives consistency in how we develop projects to ensure that our projects are optimized and delivered predictably, on time, and within budget. The Albemarle Project Process creates a common language for the company. Whether we are doing projects in Santiago or in Shanghai, we speak the same project's language. This allows us to accelerate the cycle time of our projects and to quickly share lessons learned from one project to all our other projects. A strong project process is important, but not sufficient to be successful. We also need great project teams, and this is the part of our improvement journey I am personally most excited about.
In each country where we operate, we build strong and experienced local teams, and we support them with a small network of global experts. We have taken this a step further. We have created growth pipelines which allow us to transition key team members from one project to the next, thereby retaining knowledge and capturing efficiency improvements. Let me tell a quick story of how this is working in Chile. In 2017 and 2018, we implemented the La Negra II project, which was hard because we were inexperienced. When we started the La Negra III and IV project, key team members from La Negra II transitioned to La Negra III and IV. Over the last three years, I've had the privilege to walk the improvement journey with the La Negra III and IV project team on the ground in Antofagasta and through the weekly review cadence which we use.
While the project has not been perfect, it has already been significantly better than the La Negra II project. Over time, we have become even better at solving difficult problems, capturing improvements, and honing our project delivery skills. With this higher level of capability, key team members from La Negra III and IV are now transitioning to senior project lead roles on other projects, including the Salar Yield Improvement Project, which is the next stage in our lithium carbonate expansion program. This gives the Salar Yield Improvement Project a massive head start, and it shows because of all the projects we have started, it is definitely the fastest start we've had. We are following the same growth pipeline approach in Australia, in the United States, and in China.
Together with the two capability building blocks of the Albemarle Project Process and expert project teams, we are leveraging our deep technical expertise to deliver high-return projects. This is a unique and important part of our work. As Eric said, Albemarle has a long history and extensive expertise in chemical processing technology. Recently, we have added to that so that we have expertise from the mine to the final product. On top of this expertise, we are leveraging the capability of world-class project delivery companies. We have formed partnerships with two leading multinational engineering, procurement, and construction companies. In China with two local design institutes who are world leaders in lithium processing technology. Over many years of operating and improving our plants, we have developed best-in-class engineering standards, which we use to make our plants safer and more sustainable.
At the same time, we have flexibility to apply local codes when we design projects to capture the benefits of low-cost local supply chains. Lastly, most importantly, we have combined our deep process expertise with the know-how of our partners to develop standardized, optimized designs for our lithium plants, which we can repeat rapidly and at lower capital intensity with each iteration. When we replicate a design, we save time and money in the design phase. We save time with permitting because we already have most of the information. We save time and money with procurement because we buy the same equipment from the same suppliers. We save time and money with construction because we already know the best sequence for constructing the plant. Of course, we are able to ramp up the plant faster because we are already familiar with how it operates.
All of these benefits reduce risk, reduce capital, and accelerate the speed at which we can build new plants and bring new capacity online. This combination of processes, people, and technology is a multilayered and differentiated capability that translates into lower capital intensity and higher return projects. Let me illustrate this with a final example. By replicating proven designs, leveraging the continuity of our teams, and building in low-cost jurisdictions, we are able to reduce the capital intensity of our lithium projects by 40% when we compare Wave 3 to Wave 2, and by up to another 20% when we compare Wave 4 to Wave 3.
The journey we are on to improve our capital projects capability gives us the confidence that we can keep on investing in profitable growth in our lithium and bromine conversion assets, and that we can achieve attractive returns at all points in the price cycle. In short, Albemarle's capital projects capability is a core part of our growth strategy. On that note, I'd like to hand it over to Scott for an overview of our financial outlook.
Thanks, Jac, good morning, everyone. I'm going to close our prepared remarks today by focusing on a critical part of our strategy, investing with discipline. At its heart, this part of the strategy is to maintain our financial flexibility to be able to invest in growth in both lithium and bromine. It is having the discipline to say no when the returns are too low or the risk is too high. As Kent highlighted earlier, it is about generating shareholder value by assessing the portfolio and acting when the time is right. I will share with you our history of execution and investment in high return projects that lead us to the great outlook that we have today. We are reaffirming our 2021 outlook, and more importantly, sharing our long-term outlook to 2026 that reflects the acceleration of our growth investments in lithium and bromine.
I will talk about how the Albemarle Way of Excellence will impact our results and ultimately allows us to demonstrate our low-cost position in the market through low-cost resources and low-cost operations. I will show the significant cash generation of this business and reaffirm our capital allocation priorities. Ultimately, I believe our financial position gives Albemarle a competitive advantage in three key ways. First, it allows us to accelerate our investments in high growth, high return opportunities. With our strong balance sheet and cash generation, we demonstrated that we could continue to invest even in the depths of the pandemic in 2020. Second, our financial position allows us to invest in innovation to support our customers' product roadmaps and create new advanced technologies, as you heard both from Netha as well as Eric.
Finally, our financial flexibility allows us to invest in sustainability that are so important to our customers, the communities that we operate in, as well as our investors. Albemarle has demonstrated time and time again the great revenue generation and EBITDA margins that we deliver. We have taken deliberate, transformative steps to position us for the substantial growth that you see in our projections. First, we have invested in world-class resources and chemical conversion plants over the past several years. We will start benefiting from those investments as we go into 2022 and can start to sell that volume to our customers. Second, we have deliberately divested lower-margin and lower-growth businesses, and this has resulted in a portfolio that will generate significant cash flow and a portfolio that can withstand market shocks.
In 2020, in the heat of the pandemic and at a low point in lithium pricing, we generated EBITDA margins of 25%. That allowed us to continue to invest through that challenging year, unlike many of our competitors who had to shut down their investments. Third, we are leveraging our focus on operational excellence. As you have heard today, the Albemarle Way of Excellence is a key lever for us to keep the organization focused on the priorities that will lead to our success. You have heard some excellent examples of this in action during today's discussion. I am very excited about our long-term outlook. As you know, it all starts with short-term execution. We are reaffirming our 2021 full-year guidance with sales growth of 9%-11% versus 2020 on a pro forma basis.
That is excluding the Fine Chemistry Services business that we divested in June of this year. Our current order patterns point to a strong Q3 and a weaker Q4, with lithium and catalysts having their strongest quarters of the year in Q3, on an EBITDA basis. Increased costs from the startup of the new plants, inflation in raw material, energy, and logistics mean our fourth quarter sales will grow, but our EBITDA will not. 2022 will start to reflect the benefit of our investments over the past several years. We expect our EBITDA to grow between 25% and 35% on a reported basis, and if you remove Fine Chemistry Services from the results, that growth is expected to be between 30% and 40%.
This is driven in part by lithium, where we expect EBITDA growth of 40%-50% as the La Negra III/IV and Kemerton plants come online and start to generate sales. At this point, we're expecting lithium volume growth of between 10% and 15%. Further, we expect the pricing environment to remain favorable and expect that favorability to translate into Albemarle's pricing of an increase of at least 15%-20%. Catalysts is expected to grow EBITDA by 50%-60% as their markets continue to improve. This is off a very low 2021 that was impacted by the winter storm costs as well as a U.S. customer changing their buying patterns. Lastly, we expect Bromine to grow between 4% and 10% on continued strong end markets. However, they do remain constrained on volumes.
We expect the chlorine shortage to resolve itself going into next year. That will give us a bit of volume tailwind. Ultimately, we'll have to see how the inflationary environment shapes up between now and year-end. Make some decisions around how we move that forward. On CapEx, we're expecting to spend between $1 billion and $1.3 billion as we ramp up our Wave 3 investments in lithium and initiate those investments in bromine that Netha detailed. As always, we'll give you a more definitive view on 2022 when we do our fourth quarter earnings call. We have benefited from our focus on operational excellence in 2021 by about $75 million of gross productivity. A key outcome of the Albemarle Way of Excellence is to make continuous improvement a permanent part of our culture.
Our supply chain is a critical part of how we serve our customers' needs and continues to be an area of opportunity going forward. With this year's focus on Journey to Excellence, we have reorganized our supply chains teams into a single global team, with best-in-class professionals to achieve that mission. They are supported by leading-edge systems such as SAP's Ariba Procurement Suite and SAP's Transportation Management Logistics module. This team now has a portfolio of actions that they are working on right now that will result in $80 million of run rate savings by the end of 2022. A vision to continue to find opportunities by negotiating better terms, perhaps even more importantly, finding opportunities to buy in different, more effective ways. For example, we're in the middle of changing how we buy operational supplies and equipment, such as safety gear.
By partnering with a third-party distributor, we are not only reducing our purchasing cost as we leverage their buying power, we are also increasing the quality and reducing the administrative burden on Albemarle. The last area of focus that we'll touch on in our Journey to Excellence in the Albemarle Way are our efforts in the back office. Our back office activities include finance, human resources, and other administrative functions. Our Journey to Excellence focus this year has been on leveraging our investment in a single SAP system that went live at the beginning of 2020, and our investment in the Workday human resources platform. We are building on these investments with a focus of both efficiency but also effectiveness. We are newly complete also with our initial pilots with more advanced technologies such as data process mining and robotic process automation.
Maybe more important than the back office process focus is building a continuous improvement engine that can support all of our non-manufacturing functions. The Business Process Excellence team will support the company with Lean Six Sigma, program management, and change management capabilities. They will also run the Excellence Academy. That academy will support and train the organization in these important continuous improvement skills so that it becomes a natural way of doing business. A great example of this in action is where we have implemented Lean visual management boards in our shared service centers in China, Hungary, and here in North Carolina. Used by over 300 employees, these boards provide a real-time look at performance and allow teams to set priorities each and every day. One result is that we've reduced the time that it takes to issue an invoice to a customer by over 50%.
We have seen some quick results from the introduction of the Albemarle Way of Excellence and the focus on the Journey to Excellence priorities. Our expectation is that these efforts would deliver value well into the future. Ultimately, we want to be an efficient and effective company that can claim it is the low-cost benchmark in operations, not just resources. This will allow us to weather the economic cycles that our company will go through, continue to invest in our future growth, and generate excellent shareholder value. The most impactful examples in my mind are the focus on customer excellence, getting our company focused on improving the customer experience, and reducing the friction that can be created with ineffective business processes.
The focus on operational uptime in our manufacturing and the use of advanced analytics to drive increased volumes from our existing plants, and a world-class supply chain organization supported by leading-edge systems and processes. You will see the results not only in our ongoing productivity, but also in our operational metrics such as OEE, raw material yield, customer churn, and increased value-add services to our customers. I look forward to sharing with you our progress as we continue the Albemarle Way of Excellence. Our high margins and high operating cash flow mean that we have excellent financial flexibility, and it's important to understand our priorities for using that flexibility. Our capital allocation is prioritized to support the growth strategy that we have and ensure we maintain optionality as we work to meet our customer needs through all economic cycles. Our priorities have not changed.
Our first priority is to invest in our highest return growth opportunities. Second, we continue to commit to our investment-grade credit rating. This offers the best balance sheet flexibility to handle the ups and downs of the market. Third, we continue to support a growing dividend and are proud of our track record here. Fourth, we continue to look to M&A and joint ventures to support delivering long-term shareholder value. Lastly, while we have the authorizations to do share repurchases, our organic and inorganic growth opportunities are so great, you should not expect us to use that authorization in the near term. A key source of our capital comes from our operations, the next chart is my favorite one in the whole deck.
This chart shows the tremendous operating cash flow power that we generate as a company and the impact of the significant growth going forward. You can see the several years of investments that we have made, and you can expect another two years of negative free cash flow as we accelerate our investment plans. We prepared for these investments at the beginning of the year with the equity raise. Using those proceeds, we de-levered the balance sheet, and now my expectation is that we'll re-lever by about $1.5 billion over the next two to three years to support the growth investments. With an expectation of about $1 billion in CapEx in 2024, we would start generating free cash flow in that year. Finally, I would point out the massive $2 billion-$2.2 billion of operating cash flow that is projected for 2026.
That is three times greater than our 2021 outlook. That is a significant opportunity for us to increase our rate of investment if the right projects are presented to us or generate cash returns to our shareholders. The outcome of this cash power is a balance sheet that has significant flexibility. We have a long history of taking the right actions to maintain our financial flexibility and expect that flexibility to pay off with growth. Our long-term leverage target remains at 2x-2.5x And is set to keep us in that sweet spot of the investment-grade credit. Our current leverage ratio at the end of Q2 was 1.5x , and I expect by the end of the year that we will grow into the bottom end of that range.
That's really driven by the completion of the Kemerton and the La Negra projects, and as we start to ramp up our Wave 3 lithium projects and the Bromine expansion projects. You can also see on this chart that our projection for 2026 is that that ratio will drop to around one time. Another demonstration of the options that we have to accelerate our growth investments. We have excellent liquidity, and the next page shows the flexibility of our debt capital structure. We have excellent support from the credit rating agencies, and our bank group and debt investors have been strategic partners supporting our growth. Our current debt maturities are well staggered, and I would expect to maintain a good balance between shorter-term and longer-term maturities as we increase our leverage in the next couple of years.
We remain committed to supporting our dividend, and you can see our payout ratios today are pretty well in line with our specialty chemical peers. However, as we prioritize organic and inorganic investments, the dividend growth will be slower than history, and expected net income and cash from operations will grow. As a result of that, I expect those metrics to lag over time. Today, you have seen all the components of our 2026 outlook, but this slide pulls it all together for you to show our exciting future. Our expectation is that our revenue will grow between 2021 and 2026 by 13%-17%. That means 2026 revenue will be double what it was in 2021.
Our EBITDA margins have the potential to approach 40% at a total company level, which would put our adjusted EBITDA between $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion, a growth of 25% per year, 3x what we were in 2021. As we talked about, our free cash flow will be around $1 billion. This growth is coming through volumetric growth of 10% and 13% per year across the company in all three businesses, with Lithium and Bromine growing with capacity expansions and strong end markets. Catalyst is growing off a weaker 2021 with improving end markets, but also with the pivot and strategy starting to benefit in that year. The pricing environment in Lithium and Bromine are both considered to be modestly favorable, approaching mid-cycle prices from the last cycle. We are modeling about 2%-4% of pricing improvement per year across the total company.
As you know, this assumption is the most difficult to predict, and we could see periods of overheating or trough as the supply-demand fluctuations change. We have included $100 million of gross productivities through 2024, so there is potential for upside as we see the long-term benefits of our operating model take shape. One big unknown is the tax environment. We have pegged the tax rate at 20%, but with the U.S. and global tax environment in flux, we'll have to see as the various proposals make it through the legislatures and into law. These projections are very exciting for Albemarle. We have a dedicated, enthusiastic employee base that is fully aligned through the Albemarle Way of Excellence on delivering these results.
Before we turn to the Q&A session and we get a chance to hear from you, and Kent closes our session with some high-level comments, I want to reiterate the importance of financial flexibility in our strategy and the competitive advantage that gives us. We are well-positioned with that financial flexibility to deliver the growth projections that you've seen over the next five years. With the continued growth in electric vehicles and the advancement of electrification and digitization through the global economy, there is every opportunity for us to continue that growth well past 2030. Meredith, let's go ahead and start with the last Q&A session.
All right. Great. Thanks, Scott. I can clearly see that we do have a lot of questions in the queue, both from the chat and the phones. I'll ask my phone callers to please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. For the chat participants, we'll get through as many of the chat questions as we can, and any that we can't get to, someone from the IR team will follow up with you next week. First, I'd like to start with two of the web chat questions, and these were ones that sort of came in in the last session, but we held for the lithium session here. The first one is from Tim Hoff with Canaccord. Tim asked, "Investment in lithium production is rising globally.
Given Albemarle's leading position and latent capacity, how do you view your role in protecting your market share and preventing external overinvestment in production, which may adversely impact lithium pricing?
Yeah. Let me start with that, and then Eric, you can add a little bit. I think, we are investing, and we're investing to maintain our share, grow with the markets, and satisfy customer demand with the relationships that we have. I'm not sure we have a role in protecting the market and stopping other people from investing. We're investing while we see the market and capturing that share and making sure that we're doing it efficiently and effectively. We can preempt others with investing to make sure that we're investing in pace. To be honest, the market is moving very quickly, and we're scrambling to keep up with our customer demand.
Yeah. I would just add, Kent, that this is a new industry that has not gone through a cycle like this before of such rapid build. As you can see from the demand charts, the industry needs that demand to come online. We're accelerating as quickly as we can, and that's just to sustain our position going forward. That proven capacity build that I talked about is a strength of ours, and it's going to have to develop further still in this industry in order to keep up. I think for the foreseeable future, we see it as a big effort just to sustain and build the capacity required to keep up with demand.
All right. Great. Another one from the earlier session: Do the Bromine operations have any plans to extract lithium in Wave 4?
I'll take that one, and then we'll see. We are looking at that, so I'm not sure. It wouldn't be Bromine operations, it would be lithium operations, but the businesses would be integrated. We will look at that, and in four we'll see. That's a bit out, and we have time before we get there. Definitely not in Wave 3. It's probably the back end of Wave 4 if we get there, and that's where it would either come in there or the phase after that. We're looking at the technology and the opportunities, but it's definitely either four or after that.
I don't know, maybe the question was asked before I spoke about that, but that's an area of focus from a development standpoint for us. Every brine is going to have a different sort of process technology to optimize the factors of sustainability, cost, and quality, and that's where we're looking at direct lithium extraction as a possibility. There's innovation ahead there. I think we have the capability, and we're looking to address it and make that a viable resource. As Kent said, we have other areas that'll come on before that comes to market.
All right. Great. This question was asked a few different ways, but this particular version is from Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners. Re: Lithium, what is the level of realized price embedded in your new financial guidance for 2022, as well as the new five-year lithium sales CAGR of 24%-28%?
You want me to take that one?
I think that's you.
For 2022, as we commented, both Eric and I commented, we're expecting at least a 15%-20% increase in lithium prices. That's really off the base of the contract concessions that we gave in 2019 and 2020 expiring, but also the strong increase in prices that we're seeing in both carbonate as well as hydroxide around the world. As you look at our longer-term projections for lithium, there's about a 4%-6% CAGR on pricing going forward. It gets us almost to the mid-cycle prices that we had in the last cycle, but not quite there. Like I said, this is going to be a big question mark of how does the market respond from a supply-demand fluctuation perspective. Difficult to predict. We decided to be a bit more conservative and just allow us to get back into that mid-cycle range.
All right. Great. Let's take one last one from the chat, then we'll go to the phones. This question is from David Deckelbaum at Cowen: Can you address your conversion capacity plans for China? Is the intention to build capacity versus acquire?
I'll start. Eric, you can add into that. We laid out those plans in our Wave 3 program, for the most part, and it will be a combination. We'll look to acquire if we find the asset and the deal that we want to do. We're also looking to build. It'll be either build and acquire or build, depending on if we find the assets and a deal that we want to do from an acquisition standpoint.
Yep. I don't know that there's a lot to add. It's part of Wave 3. An acquisition allows us to get to market faster, provided the asset, the target in question, fits our criteria from a sustainability, quality, and cost point of view. We also look to assets that we could expand. That's where that could be both acquire and build. It fits into Wave 3 and that repetition we talked about, and Jac further described, of building and successfully building, reducing capital intensity, and improving our execution capability to bring these assets to market.
All right. We're going to go to the phones now. It's my understanding that the phone questions were difficult to hear on the webcast. If you'll bear with me, I'll just repeat the question for the webcast audience before the presenters answer it.
Okay.
Operator, we're ready for the first question from the phones.
The first question comes from Chris Kapsch with Loop Capital Markets.
Yeah. Hi, thank you. The question is a follow-up, getting some more color on the pricing dynamic. I heard the 15%-20% guidance next year. Just curious how that is comprised by, say, fixed long-term contracts versus on a closer to spot or what might be characterized as evergreen contracts with escalators. Then also, how does that outcome compare to where your prior pricing floors were prior to the concession?
All right. The question is really around the new outlook for lithium and what that implies for our contracting strategy versus what's open to the market.
Sure. I'll jump in, Chris. Thanks for the question. This builds a bit off of what I was discussing towards the end of my presentation. Again, 70% of our business will be under contract. That's sort of a long-term goal, in and around that range. As we bring on this new capacity next year, that falls into that as well. We'll have more to sell next year than this year. This year, I would say greater than 90% is under some form of contract. We'll get closer to that 70% mix in the coming year or so. Within that 30%, that'll be subject to market conditions, that'll be at a price or a spot-based buyer. Even within the 70%, we'll have a minority of business that are a long-term commitment, but still have some variability on price.
As I said, the majority of that 70% will be under some more muted movement relative to the market. That being said, relative to that prior long-term price you were talking about that we gave concessions against during the pandemic, we'll be at or above that going forward next year.
Okay. The follow-up, Eric, thank you, would be just in terms of the order of magnitude, is it comparable for lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide or is there a little bit more of an outsized increase for lithium hydroxide given sort of the tighter supply demand fundamental outlook there? Thank you.
Well, it's maybe not as you might think in that carbonate is generally more subject to spot or price-based contracts. It's more of a China-based market where that's more prevalent. That's where you'll see more of the swing on price versus hydroxide, which is tight, but it's also a product that never moved down as low during the depths. It isn't going to have the bounce that carbonate would off of those depths as it moves upward in this strong market. It's tight and already at a high price. A lot more of the variability is going to be on the carbonate side in the upswing that we're talking about.
Eric, I would add.
Thank you.
Tech-grade product, the technical-grade products that go into grease and glass, that's primarily driven by a carbonate price as well. That'll be a part of the market that moves.
Yep.
The next question comes from Arun Viswanathan with RBC Capital Markets.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. I guess I just wanted to delve into the cost side a little bit. Obviously, a lot of pressures out there on transportation and logistics as well as raw materials. Maybe you could just describe what you're seeing across your businesses, if there's any extraordinary cost pressures. How do you kind of combat that? Is there pricing opportunities that you can undertake or is that mostly supply-demand driven? Thanks.
Yeah. I would say I'll start, and then I think the GBU presidents may have a view on it. I think it's different across the businesses. The challenges we're seeing, there is pricing pressure kind of a little bit across the board, but really it's kind of disruptions that we're seeing in particular chemicals and raw materials. Chlorine is probably the biggest example, but we have that and other materials where there's challenges, and that may turn into pricing issues in time. For now, it's a supply issue. We anticipate having inflation on our raw materials and our supply base, and that's part of why you see us focus so much on productivity and this operational excellence and driving cost out of the system. We're trying to be ahead of that. We've been working on this for a while.
We're trying to be ahead of that, but there are pressures. Whether we can transfer them in the market from a pricing standpoint, we'll see what happens in the marketplace. That'll be determined by the market, but we're trying to make sure we mitigate as much as possible by minimizing those costs. Anybody else? Okay, that covered it.
Right. Thank you. The next question comes from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.
Hey, thank you. Eric, on the lithium volume forecast for next year, which I believe is up 10%, is limiting factor your own supply or the market itself?
It's our own supply, David. Pure and simple. This is a tight market. If we could get supply faster, we would be able to sell it as a team. It's a tight market, and we'd love to be able to do so. That's why we're so focused on capital execution and why honing that skill as we have is going to be important going forward.
Just on Wave 3, when can we expect the next announcement on capacity in either Australia or China?
Well, I may defer to Kent on that. We are actively engaged, and Jac's team takes the lead on this, so he could comment as well. We're actively engaged in looking at sites for greenfield expansion, and we've already elaborated and said we have an ongoing M&A evaluation that we're looking at for conversion sites. On the greenfield site side, which tends to have more certainty, I would say in the not too distant future, because we need to get those plants started. They'll soon become public, the site selection we go through and who we've chosen in China to proceed with. It would be inside of this year that we start.
Yeah, we're working on those actively, and we're in the early planning phases. When we get to a final investment decision and get board approval for an investment is when we would go public.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Joel Jackson with BMO Capital Markets.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking another question. I have a two-parter. When you talk about your expectation for 15%-20% at least higher lithium pricing next year because of not going back to minimum pricing, not giving concessions, how much of this is what you've expected academically, and how much are you actually engaging customers with? My second question is, I think in the past, under these contract discussions, contract set up, you've talked about longer-term lithium margins trending above 40%, because that was the kind of language you used. Now you're kind of guiding to 45% going forward. Can you talk about the difference and what seems like a margin guide up over the longer term?
Sure. I'm going to fixate on your margin question. Your first question was on. Sorry, I lost it. Joel, just give me a keyword, please.
Well, you talk about pricing being up next year 15%-20%.
Right. What's the dialogue with our customers?
How much of that is dialogue versus what you're sort of thinking academically?
Yeah. I would say it's dialogue. Remember what we've just talked about. We have contracts that were given concessions either through the middle of this year versus the long-term agreement or through the end of the year. Some have already come off, and the prices are rising, and that's been embedded in our Q2 guidance we gave. Others will come off at the end of the year. We are talking about that now, and the dialogue is about that prior price, and it varies by contract. We're moving to a different contract structure altogether aligned with the approach I described. On the margin side, the way I think about it, Joel, is we've always been in the mid-40s. You go back to the last cycle, we've been in the mid-40s.
I think as we've looked at our plan more closely, and even without pricing, you've got much higher utilization on our plants. You're getting scale. Scott earlier talked about contribution margin. When you think about La Negra, you're filling out a site. When you think about as we build out Kemerton going forward and add 3 and 4, you're filling out a site. You're getting leverage on that. That alone drives margin in addition to the operational excellence or manufacturing excellence things we talked about. That gets you into the 40s. Maybe the difference of getting into the mid to high 40s is price realization, what we can do with contract prices.
Yeah, Joel, I would just add, too, that if you go back to 2019, our outlook was to be north of 40%. At that point, we hadn't signed up for this acceleration of investment. To Eric's point, each individual plant is bringing significant contribution margin to the total P&L. Now with these Wave 3 investments starting to come into the planning period, that's why you can see these margin realizations.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Matt DeYoe with Bank of America.
Thanks. Perhaps this is beating a dead horse a little bit, you're very optimistic about demand growth and the need for new supply. Under certain scenarios, lithium seems like the limiting factor, right? At some point, if things are really bullish, lithium will actually reduce the amount of EV sales or lithium availability. Obviously, the market is expecting that's going to drive significant price increases. If we're at a period where, say, lithium is back at $17,000- $20,000 a ton for a period of time, how should we expect your pricing model to respond to that? Would you chase into the mid high teens, or is that destructive to what you think is the value proposition over time or supportive of new product coming into market?
Okay. I'll start, Eric. If I understand the question, our model has not really changed. It's still long-term contracts. We've kind of moved away from just fixed price to be more where it moves with the market, a bit of variability. It would move up if those prices go up, and it will move down if those prices go down. With kind of probably, in some cases, caps and floors, in other cases, not, and then some exposure to the spot market, and then our industrial business is exposed to the spot market. I'm not sure we're chasing it, but I think that's kind of where the market is. I think, this is really the second cycle. We had the one cycle, prices went up, and then they went way down.
Our anticipation, we may not be right, is that we don't have the highs and the lows that we saw the last time around, although the spot prices are moving pretty high at the moment. We're expecting that to dampen and not have such highs and such lows. Time will tell. We're early in that, and again, this is kind of the second cycle in this industry.
I would just add, I know maybe you didn't intend the question this way, but I would not think of it, I don't think of it at least, as increasing prices happening because there's just not enough supply. I think if you look at what happened in the last cycle, so much capacity left the market that was higher cost. Many investors, private investors in some of those assets lost their shirts that it was unhealthy where price went. When Kent says we believe we might be entering a new phase of maturity in this industry where pricing is not as volatile, that's one area we would expect that as economics improve to support higher cost resources needed in the market, that pricing traverses in a range that's more rational, vis-à-vis the economics that those investors need to earn in those assets.
Our picture that we gave today is where we see things coming out of a bad place from an economic standpoint. You see us accelerating our strategy. We have considerable financial resources that Scott described to do that. Here's hoping that other supply can come in to meet that demand. We believe that it's a fundamentally attractive market. There is lithium available, it's just at a higher cost profile to come into the market.
Okay. I appreciate that, Eric. If I can kind of ask one more for you. Can you give us a sense, like what your runway is at Greenbushes if both you and Tianqi kind of execute on the projects that you've laid out? Should we think about Greenbushes as operating for the next 30 years, 40 years, 50 years? What does that actual timeline look like if you get to Kemerton 5 and Tianqi kind of ramps accordingly as well?
I could talk a little bit about the expansion strategy. You had two questions there, I think, if I may parse them for you. One was how much can we get out of that asset? How much of a runway of growth can it support? The other is how long does the asset last? Addressing the latter first, we're going to be putting out our own report, per SEC guidelines, on It's basically like the Canadian NI 43-101. I've mispronounced that schedule. I can never remember the acronym. We'll be putting out our own disclosure for SEC purposes. It details that most studies are done against 20 years, because that's the usual requirement for an economic resource. We would believe that there's a long life, at least 20+ years in this resource.
In terms of its capability, it will support that growth rate we talked about, that top-line growth rate, and the volume growth rate over this plan period. It'll support us into the latter half of this decade. That and Wodgina will support us. We'll gradually start to hit capacity at that resource in about, I would say, 2027, 2028, in that period of time. If we're able to execute the conversion capacity as we've said we would, it would be in about that timeframe that we would look to other resources.
Yeah, and to make sure that's clear, that's just the growth part. That would still last the 20 years.
It would still last. We'd still feed those plants invested in for some 20 years beyond.
Good clarification.
Yeah. Thank you, Kent.
Yeah.
The last question comes from John Roberts with UBS.
Thanks. Eric, plug-in EVs use much smaller batteries than full electric, and some OEMs like Toyota have a big part of their business plan on plug-ins. What's the outlook embedded in your assumptions for plug-ins versus full EVs?
John, in that presentation there's a hash mark that depicts it. Obviously, it's not very analytical, and we could get with you subsequently and provide the details, but it's less than 20% now and less than 20% of the vehicle population as you go out to 2025 and 2030. That's not a sort of an idle thumb in the air sort of estimate. What that is based upon what Toyota's doing, what the U.S. manufacturers are doing, what the European manufacturers are doing, what the Asian production base. It's based on the whole picture, bottoms-up assessment. Really when it comes right down to it's just the technology will become so powerful. I mean that more in a figurative than a literal sense in terms of what it can do from a cost per kilowatt hour and range standpoint on the electric vehicle side.
We just see that being the predominant vehicle, as does the industry, based on the investments it's making worldwide.
Scott, you don't show free cash flow positive until 2025 in your slide. If you were to monetize the Catalyst business before you turn free cash flow positive, would we expect you to just run with really low debt until you're free cash flow positive, or would you think about, because you mentioned no share repurchase, I don't know if there'd be any deployment of any proceeds from the Catalyst transaction?
Yeah, John, good question. Just one clarification, our current projections are we'll tip into free cash flow positive in 2024. With a potential transaction with Catalyst, we would look to obviously invest in the growth opportunities in L ithium and Bromine. That's our first priority is if there's an opportunity to accelerate, perhaps accelerate additional M&A transactions, that's where our focus would be.
Thank you.
All right. Great. Let's go back to the chat questions for a little bit. Stephen Richardson from Evercore asked, "In light of the lithium market update and supply deficit in lithium you forecast, can you talk about your contracting strategy for new volumes available? How is your approach to cathode producers/OEM shifting?" It's a little bit different than what we've talked about so far, I think. "Do you expect more volumes to be sold directly to OEM counterparties?
Sure. Contracting has become very important, particularly for automotive OEMs, as well as battery producers. As you go closer to the point of consumption, consumer, I think you can assume that the level of investment and the risks are higher to assure security of supply. Our customer base sees that. They've increased contracting. That's why we foresee a long-term contracting strategy. Multi-year, majority of our business being under contract is the right thing to do, both for the customer and to underwrite and give us confidence in our ability to expand. In terms of the mix, it is shifting. We do have contracts now with OEM producers. We expect to have more, but part of our strategy will be to have balance across the supply chain because not every customer wants the same thing.
There are some automotive producers who prefer to have an established network of tier 2 or 3 suppliers that we would supply to. There's others that want to have the contract directly. We're working with various different types of structures based upon the automotive manufacturer's need. I think you could see from what I showed that it's a portion of our mix on that one slide, the customer slide. Don't remember the number offhand. We still are selling a healthy amount, though, direct to cathode and battery producers by 2026.
Okay. Thanks for that. A couple of questions now from Colin Rusch at Oppenheimer. His first question is, "Can you speak to the maturity of the lithium recycling technologies and how you're approaching investing in those technologies?
Well, I could get into it. Maybe Ellen might address this topic specifically in her presentation. For us, this is about participating in battery recycling, not being a full-on battery recycler. Our knowledge is in. I showed you that roadmap of extraction process technology. It's about applying that to a byproduct stream in that supply chain, in that recycling supply chain. That's important to our customers. Ellen can share a little bit about that in a moment. It's also important for us as we think about how we want to sustain and grow our business. We have know-how to provide. We are thinking we can build that into our relationships and into our supply network over time as this opportunity develops. Want to add more, Ellen?
Sure. As I mentioned in my presentation, the E.U. Battery Directive is really going to accelerate the recycling of all the minerals that are found in an EV battery. Working with our partners, it's really important, and our customers, to work with them so that we can meet these goals that the E.U. is going to set out. It's going to be really important, so that we can reduce the amount of lithium that we extract. That's something that consumers want. That's something that environmentalists want. It's good for the environment. It's also good for our business because this opens up a new market for us where we can both be sustainable and meet our customers' needs.
All right. Let's see. We had one more from Colin here. I think Colin's second question was around the evolution of different battery grades that we're seeing as battery chemistry continues to evolve.
Sure. I'll jump on that one as well for Colin. It is part of the strategy I described of building understanding, deep understanding on the application side of our materials. When we talk about the Battery Metals Innovation Center and the scientists we're building, yes, it's about new products, and I talked about that on the new frontier side. In the existing products, it's about continuously improving the grade of product to get more out, more energy density, more efficiency in the battery cell. Specifically, it's things like crystalline structure, and it's things like ionic impurity levels that you're looking to address. That's what we're building application capability around, and we complement that then with our process and extraction technology to drive the improvements in the actual process. It's a sort of an integrated approach to how we drive value there, Colin.
All right. Next question from Kevin McCarthy at Vertical Research Partners. "On slide 60, your base case forecast suggests that hydroxide will be even tighter than carbonate in 2026. Seems to be generally the consensus. However, given that circumstance, do you expect customers to shift demand towards carbonate, even if by necessity, and if so, when and in which applications might that happen?
I can answer that one again. I would say, actually, what we more likely would expect is the supply base to change its mix to being more hydroxide-oriented. We have that capability. We can repurpose our carbonate and process it the way we do a small stream today in Kings Mountain on a bigger way. Of course, we can add assets that do it as well. Similarly, we have the ability to produce on the carbonate side if that were to happen. We've got the flexibility. Where we see this, our projection, when we look at that detailed bottoms-up model, where we see carbonate as being in that legacy column when I talked about technology. Energy density, it gives low $100 per kWh cost, the compromise is a slightly lower range.
It really is a vehicle that's very affordable, but a vehicle that doesn't have the range. There's a segment of the market that many automotive producers have demonstrated that exists for that product, and we see that taking place. In order to drive full electrification and get 400 mi, which is on average in the U.S., what most of us like to have in our tank and have as a range, that's higher energy density that can only be accomplished with hydroxide, and that's the growth driver for the center and the high end of the market.
All right. Another question from Ann Gurkin at Davenport. You outlined lithium expected capacity additions. How much of that expected capacity addition is contracted at this point? Are you adding committed lithium capacity, or are you building capacity and need to fill orders?
I think, Eric can give us the detail on that, but we're building to keep up with the commitments that we have. They're not all contracted. If you look out the whole Wave 3 and into Wave 4, for sure, they're not contracted. We have relationships with customers that want to contract for it. It is not all contracted, but we have the relationships with people that want to buy. I think that's the right way to represent it.
Yeah, that's correct. Jac, on his timeline, talked about three years to build a greenfield plant. As we're approaching those investment decisions, our aim is to have a majority of that business either in active negotiations where we feel confident about being able to close or already closed.
All right. This question has come from a couple of people, but this particular one is from P.J. Juvekar at Citi. What signals are you waiting for the restart of the Wodgina mine?
Again, I'll start with that. P.J., it's a signal amount. We need the conversion capacity to utilize it, and that's either us building capacity or doing an acquisition. Once we have visibility on that, we'll start to process the lead time. It's tricky because the lead time to restart the mine is shorter than a build, but not necessarily shorter than an acquisition, depending on.
Right.
What that works. The conversion capacity is the trigger for that. When we have a line of sight, and we know we can convert it, then we'll restart the mine.
All right. Great. We probably have time for maybe one or two more. Michael Sison from Wells Fargo asked, are there opportunities for lithium to be produced or at least converted in the U.S.? What are the headwinds there? Could there be an opportunity for Albemarle if you got some government support, which is likely needed? Are U.S. EV players in the U.S. worried about a lack of domestic supply?
Yes. I'll take the beginning of that, and Eric can fill in again. I would say we're definitely interested in doing that. We've got resource here, so Magnolia, as we've talked about a couple of times today. A little further out, Kings Mountain, not too far from here, is another resource that we have that's a possibility. Government support for that would be helpful. Both European and U.S. automakers are pushing for localized supply, and I think ultimately that will happen, whether it's conversion of a resource sourced somewhere and converted locally. Some form of that, I think, will ultimately happen in both North America and Europe, and we're engaged in conversations around that.
I would say the capacity that we have in the U.S. to date is commensurate with the opportunity on the energy storage side. Our commitment to our customers is, let's engage in a commitment, and we'll have the capacity where you need it in the region. If you want to localize, then let's make that commitment, and we'll go ahead and build that capacity. We have the capability, whether it's taking carbonate from Silver Peak, which is expanding, or from the Salar de Atacama from Chile, and converting it through a unit like we have here in Kings Mountain. We could further add to the Kings Mountain footprint through the resource, which would be now shifting to a whole different process, now spodumene to hydroxide. Then, of course, we mentioned longer-term Magnolia. We have the opportunities.
Right now, most of that cathode demand, which is the point of consumption, is all in Asia still. We do expect it to migrate, and we'll be ready and here when that demand does start to materialize.
Eric, you've talked about in the past how recycling is a way to localize supply as well. You're actually importing the materials through the original battery, but then you keep it in region through that recycling stream.
All right. Thank you so much. For those of you that we didn't get a chance to get to your questions at the chat, we will get back to you through the IR team later this week. At this time, that concludes our Q&A session, and I'll turn it over to Kent Masters for final remarks. Kent?
Okay. Thanks, Meredith. You've heard a lot from us today, but to close, I'd like to go back to the strategy. We will grow profitably by building capacity in line with customer demand. We just talked about that. We will maximize productivity through operational discipline that optimizes earnings and cash flow, but more importantly, it builds that base for us to grow from. We will invest with discipline to maintain that financial flexibility that we believe gives us an advantage, and we will do all of this in a sustainable manner, from the resource through the end products, and that allows us to enable the sustainability ambitions of our customers. We're very excited about the opportunities that we have, and we hope after today that you understand those opportunities a little better, and we hope you share our enthusiasm.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for your interest in Albemarle, and please have a safe day. Thank you.