All right. Welcome everyone to our 2021 Investor Day. Thanks for coming. It's great to see you finally, all of you live in person. This is, if you would've told me I'd be out of New York for two years, two years ago, I would've been shocked. It's great to see a lot of old and new friends and thanks for coming. We've done a lot since our last Investor Day in 2018, and we're looking forward to presenting it to you and telling you everything that we've done, but really where we are today and going forward, and I'll let Peter get into that. Before we get started, just wanted to encourage you to look at the disclosures and read them.
encourage you to look at our SEC filings for risks and everything associated with that. Instead of Peter asking me to read every word, I will just skip it and let you get to it. Just to give you an idea of how this day is gonna go, it's gonna be pretty typical. We're gonna do Peter's gonna have some words up front and go through some slides. We're not gonna do Q&A with him right after that. Then we'll go into the divisions. After each division president and our sustainability, which was the first time that Huntsman is having specific its own qualified section, which we're very excited about having.
We're gonna have 5-10 minutes of Q&A, and then we'll have lunch, 20-minute lunch break where everyone could go get a boxed lunch, bring it bac k, and then we will wrap it up with polyurethanes, Textile Effects, and we'll go into Phil's. Then after Phil's, we'll do an all-in Q&A with Peter, Phil, and any division president. Everything will be welcome in terms of the Q&A. Everyone, I'm sure you've noticed QR codes on the tables, the presentations online. There's no printed copies, and I encourage you to go online to see, to get it if you'd like. Also, there's notebooks, so if you wanna take some paper if you need to take some notes, paper's there. Wi-Fi code is also on cards around the table. Without any further ado, I will pass it off to Peter.
Wow, it's wonderful to see so many of you here. It's great to see so many familiar faces. Just take it all in, being here face-to-face. In the past, it's been a very daunting experience for me, 'cause my father would always attend, and you know, he'd never attend the pre-briefs or anything. Then, like, two minutes before I'd come up here, he'd always pull me aside and say, "Now make sure you include the following." There was a list of, like, 20 things. I miss my father immensely, but it is somewhat liberating. Then I look down here and I see Purna Saggurti.
It's like having my mother here that and I see Bob Kort, who reminded me that, you know, I had to come all the way from Houston to come here, and the tax authorities are waiting downstairs for you, Bob. He gets taxed every day he's in New York, so we're trying to keep him here for a week. Aziza, 26 years trying to become an American citizen, and it's you're almost there. You should've just come over to the southern border. You could've done it all in one day. You'd come to Texas instead of having to go to New York, and it would've been done. Anyways, it's great to be here among so many friends. I wanna
We got a lot of information, and I think we've got a great presentation today. I don't think that we're going to be saying anything all too shocking, but I think that we are committed to a path that we've started. Unlike other Investor Day presentations where I think that we came here perhaps with a little bit of a burden to try to convince you that we were right and we're going in this direction, this Investor Day, I think that we have a great deal of feedback from the analysts, from shareholders, from investors, policymakers, that we've been engaged with a great deal here over, particularly over the last year and a half. I hope that you see your fingerprints, your input.
This is not our, meaning just our management's presentation, but I'd like to think that it's also the presentation and the input of many of you, and we greatly appreciate that as we've been on this transformation, particularly over the course of the last two years or so, in selling off nearly 40% of our business and kind of buying back 15-20%, refocusing on costs, and refocusing on creating value and so forth through uplift. Before getting into my presentation, I would like to just take a moment and thank Ivan Marcuse, though I'd be lying if I said he's the one that had a great deal to do. Sharon Coe, who's in the very back of the room, if you'd raise your hand.
Many of the slides and presentations from her. She works in our IR. Kristina Henshaw, she's in the back, of course, making sure that we look better than any of us deserve. I wanna recognize them. You're also going to be hearing from some newer officers today. Chuck Hirsch, who's Divisional President of our Performance Products Group, will be presenting for the first time. Brittany Benko will be presenting for the first time, not just in person, but talking about sustainability for the first time and the steps that we are taking in this area. Phil Lister, he is the third chief financial officer we've had since being public, whose job it is as the third CFO to break me in.
I'm very glad to have him here as well. I think that most of the other, Scott Wright, you've heard from before, and Tony Hankins, you've heard from before. Of course, me, you've heard from before. I would like to talk a little bit about perhaps updating the guidance and that we had a earnings call just a few weeks ago. We gave guidance in the fourth quarter of around $320-$340. We now have our October numbers are done and completed, so we are almost halfway through the quarter, but have the financial information for a third of the way through the quarter.
Just so that we can speak openly, we wanna reaffirm the direction and that guidance that we've given. There's kind of winds going in all directions and so forth, and would encourage you to keep in touch. If we have any public opportunities to update the market, we certainly will be doing that. But as we sit here today looking at our October results, our November, December order book and so forth, we still feel that we're kind of in the middle of that range that we've given here. We've seen quite a bit of noise here in the last literally in the last day or two around impacts of our economy, around global trade, around issues that are political and some that are economic.
I think that they all will have an impact in one way or another on this company. As I think about the constituencies as to where we need to be communicating to, you'll see a series of videos in each of the presentations that will be given today. More so today than at any time, we've had to make sure that our communication to analysts and shareholders, investors and people who live in communities around our facilities, that we're able to articulate better what it is we do as a company. We need to do a better job as a company, I believe, in communicating to our customers, to our suppliers, to what we're doing around sustainability, what we're doing to make a difference in society and creating value all at the same time.
More so than any time in our past, we also have an opportunity to affect policymakers. In the recent infrastructure bill that was just passed, I'd like to ask that Christine put this single slide up here that we put together just this morning. On the facets of the infrastructure bill, that some of them may be just a bit remote, and others of them from rebuilding, re-insulating, wind, pipe and pipe insulation and hot water, and clean water transformation, solar, batteries, EV vehicles, recharging stations, all of these are going to be an opportunity for our company.
Our company spent a great deal of time up on the Hill, starting with me, up on the Hill to make sure that we have a piece of this, make sure that we have legislation, that we have tax credits, we have incentives and so forth. As we go through each of these presentations and you have an opportunity to see these vignettes, two-minute long videos, it's a real opportunity. In the last couple of months, I've had an opportunity to both have Adam Schiff and Garrett Graves, the two very influential members of the House of Representatives. They're both from L.A., one from Los Angeles and the other from Louisiana. They're both on political extremes of the aisle, if you will.
They both have engaged our company in areas around energy conservation and wanting to work around tax credits and what we can be doing with spray foam, what we can be doing by bringing solutions to the marketplace. We're looking at this as a real opportunity. Before I get into my slides, I'd like to just take two minutes and just show you a very brief, what I believe to be a very well done introduction of our company as to what it is, where our focus is, and how we're communicating this story, not just to our shareholders and analysts, but also to policymakers and the customers and suppliers. If we could run the video.
How do we enable human potential and sustainably move society forward? How do we innovate our way past today's problems to be a part of tomorrow's solutions? How does a chemical company help the world do more with less? Huntsman knows how. Every day, we bring together the people, ideas, and technology to answer the world's biggest questions, like, how do we build smarter while making carbon footprints smaller? By making entire industries cleaner, more efficient, and more sustainable one molecule at a time. We take plastic waste and turn it into the world's most effective spray foam insulation to save energy. We make cars and airplanes lighter, stronger, and safer, improving fuel efficiency. Another important question is. How do we save water, our most precious resource? By innovating advanced dyes and digital inks for the textile industry that require dramatically less water.
We make your favorite clothes and shoes last longer, stay brighter, and perform better. How do we save energy and make it cleaner? By creating technologies that make today's and tomorrow's energy sources work better. We make the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles lighter and longer lasting. We make electric grids more efficient, paving the way for greater use of renewables. We keep the world's food supply safe and plentiful by making the cold chain possible and reducing food waste. Altogether, Huntsman makes thousands of products for over 10,000 customers around the world. Jon Huntsman Sr. founded a company with family, entrepreneurial spirit, and human chemistry at its core. Those values have inspired a diverse group of philanthropies, including the Huntsman Cancer Institute, among the world's leading cancer research centers.
Today, the Huntsman Corporation includes over 9,000 professionals operating in more than 70 manufacturing and R&D locations around the world. All of them focused on the same urgent question: how do we use science and innovation to make everything on this planet better than the day we found it? That's how Huntsman does business.
Thank you. Again, I want to thank those of you, in particular our shareholders, who have been instrumental in allowing us to do what we've done over the course of the last couple of decades. I also would like to just answer one question right up front. Our company does not put money into the Huntsman Cancer Foundation or the Huntsman Mental Health Institute. That's paid for by stock that's been donated, largely by my parents' foundation. Please don't. I don't want you to think that we're somehow siphoning funds off this. I want to just go back in time, just momentarily, and focus on where we are today and a little bit of where we've come from over the course of the last couple of years. I do think that it's just important to note that this company ain't the old man's company.
It was built up on polystyrene, polyethylene, polypropylene. I don't say that in a derogatory or pejorative sense, but I hope that we realize the transformation that we're going through as a company and what we've been doing and what we are doing. Let's just take our Performance Products business, for example. That business, when we were here just two years ago, would have been selling LAB, ethylene oxide, ethylene glycol, US PO and MTBE, surfactants, and I might be missing one or two others. As we look at the opportunity here, we see a great opportunity, not just about selling more chemistry, but about selling better chemistry and higher value-added chemistry.
As we look at the various components of that, and we start to see more and more opportunity for cross-linking chemistry, cross-linking customers, cross-linking value and opportunities. As we look at our basic proposition of today, number one, around delivery of cost optimization. We've announced $140 million of cost cutting as a company. So far, we've delivered on about $95 million of that up through the last reporting period. Today, we'll be outlining the completion of that, and we'll also be announcing another $100 million of cost cutting that will be coming throughout the company.
As we do this, we believe, as we've said for many of these presentations all along, at a minimum, we need to be offsetting the cost of inflation, which we see that as being, at a minimum, $tens of millions a year on a payroll on a global basis. When we think about that cost, our margins don't rise at the rate of inflation. Our costs can't either. We go back 15 years ago, and we look at what our SG&A was on a per pound basis versus where they are today. Even with all of that inflation taken into account, the regulatory, IT security, everything that's taken into account, the further downstream, selling more SKUs to more countries, we're flat to where we were at that time on a per pound basis.
As we think about that is gonna continue to be one of our number one drivers of value creation. Unlike so much else, we control that. We think about the projects that we can control, and I wanna just make sure that you understand some of our investing philosophy. We're talking about today, and we're gonna be talking a little bit more as we get into the division-by-division basis. Some of the investments that we do are internal and are organic investments we do, including our Geismar expansion. Again, you're going to see where we're taking existing MDI molecules and upgrading those. It's not about adding more. You're gonna hear about our E-GRADE and our Ultrapure carbonates that'll be going into the high-tech semiconductor industry. They'll be going into the car batteries and so forth.
Again, we're gonna be adding minimal amounts of new product, but taking existing formulations and upgrading them. Why are we building instead of buying? Well, in the case of the splitter, in the case of our E-GRADE, in the case of what we're doing in the semiconductors, we will be the only producer of these products in all of North America. Marilyn, you'll see that as an opportunity again, as we see that as an idea as to what's in the pipeline. Again, as we look just as a basic rule of thumb, I said this publicly over the years, and I'll say it again, I am not a fan of adding new capacity into the industry, especially if that capacity already exists. I look at an opportunity like our MDI business. We have 3 billion pounds of MDI.
When our last pound of production reaches an area where we can have a high-teens margin, mid- to high-teens margin on the lowest-value pound, then perhaps we need to be looking at investment. I don't see that happening in my career, where Huntsman goes out individually on our own with our own balance sheets, makes a $1.5 billion-$2 billion bet on a project that won't even be up and running for another six or seven years. Typically, when that capacity comes into the market, when you think about the low- and high-margin products you're buying, when that capacity comes into the market, typically it's sold down here. If you can take new capacity and sell it right here, then you ought to be taking your lower-end margin material and selling it there today.
By virtue of that cost curve, by definition, whether it's a polyolefin or an olefin or an aromatic, most of the capacity in this industry, when we add it, we make the mistake that somehow we're adding it at an average margin up here, when in reality, it usually comes in down here. That's usually why, I say usually, because there are some exceptions to this rule. That's usually why new capacity in this industry is oftentimes never meets the economic hurdles. I'm not a big fan of that. We think about our bolt-on acquisitions. What are our plans going into the future going to look like? Look at our past. I think that we're focused into that area where we're thinking about a sub-$500 million value when we think about how large that should be.
We think about our balance sheet 2x debt. Now I know that we can talk about it getting up to 3x debt and so forth, and we'll quickly push it back down to 2x debt and so forth. I struggle to think of a scenario where we would depart from where we've already started, where we've already been in the past. When we think about that targeted amount on M&A, what should you be expecting on that M&A? We're looking at something at a maximum around that $500 million and smaller. That string of pearls, adding where we can have immediate synergies, technology opportunities, and an opportunity to globalize and expand. When we think about upgrading our polyurethanes portfolio and upgrading our other products and so forth, again, I think that we've got plenty of tonnage in this company.
This is an opportunity for us to be able to take that tonnage and to move it upwards. Now, it's not all just about margins. It's also about the quality of those margins. Thus, with the exception of this past year with COVID and with the rising raw material prices, we've hit our 40% free cash flow to EBITDA that we've talked to you about. We've hit that for 5 years consistently before that. We believe that as we go into 2022, we do not see anything on the horizon that would tell us that we shouldn't be able to hit that 40%. We will calibrate CapEx, we will calibrate our manufacturing footprint and so forth around meeting that.
That is a top priority for us, to not just have the margin expansion, but also to have the quality of that. What do we want out of this investment? What do we want out of this meeting? We want to be able to be moving into a future where the value of a dollar earned from Huntsman is par to a dollar that's earned from an H.B. Fuller, from a Celanese. No, we're not the same companies. We don't produce the same products. But we want to see that we can have that margin, that consistency, that reliability of cash generation, and that the value of a dollar coming from this company will be lifted up.
As we look at where we've come over the course of the last couple of years, we're also going to continue to see a shifting where we see the share buybacks coming back, where we're at about $75 million here. We're just under seven hundred million here on share buybacks. Obviously, with the announcements that we made in the third quarter of being back into the market, this is something that's going to be very important to us. We're also gonna continue to focus on our dividend and returning money to shareholders, not just in the form of buying back shares, but also in the form of a higher dividend. We're gonna be focused on that adjusted EBITDA margin and how do we continuously improve that. That can also be, you know, if we start getting too focused on just statistics alone.
Let's just look at when we think about 2018, the difference in volume, 2018 was a record year for this company previously. Difference in volume between 2018 and volume in 2021 will be less than one half of one percent. We have the capability of producing more volume this year, but when you take into account the storms, the freezes, and turnarounds, none of those three things we had in 2018, we see a 1% variation between these two. Yet we see almost $175 million of higher EBITDA in 2021 than we will see in 2018. Again, virtually the same volume, uplifting that volume and creating greater and more value on that on a per pound basis.
Since we last met at our last Investor Day, I just wanna go over. I'm not gonna read all this, don't worry. I can't stand when people do that to me, and I won't do it to you. A couple of points I'd like to just point out. Starting in February, shortly after our last Investor Day, we brought on Vice Admiral Jan Tighe, who's here with us today. She also was the chair of our sustainability committee. Anybody want to know just how much the Navy is tracking your computers and targeting any of you, she was over all that stuff. It was great to have you here, Jan. Acquisitions, divestiture, I think we've talked about all that before.
We also added Cynthia Egan and Sonia Dulá, both of them with an investor background, one coming to us from doing work with BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, Bank of America. We finished off a deal to divest the last of Venator. I would just remind you that that was a perhaps long time in making. I'd also just remind you that when we sold that for the tax credits that we have, that last tranche was sold at just slightly over $5 a share. Okay? Just as a reminder, because we were able to get in some tax benefits. Not sure that that window would have been open in the future to have gotten that. And then, of course, this last February, we put Jeanne McGovern on our board of directors.
Jeanne was just appointed the Audit Chair this last meeting, so this is the first time publicly we're talking about that. Toni Burns, the Audit Chair that she is replacing, will not be standing for re-election. When we think about this board refresh that started back here in 2019, this is something that's going to be on an ongoing and continuous basis. We will see over the course of this next voting and for 2023, you'll continue to see this transformation of our Board of Directors. We announced just this last couple of days ago, $665 million from a settlement with Albemarle. I'm gonna be talking more about that in just a few minutes.
Announcing, well, literally just today, we've taken our share buyback program that has about $300 million left in that. We put in a new program that will have $1 billion in that, and we would expect to be through that, depending on market conditions and so forth, hopefully in about the next three years. This is something that we wanna stretch out over the next 10 years or so. We think about the company, and we think about, again, the transformation on a product-by-product basis. Having these names up here, I don't want them to be looked at as necessarily our competitors. A lot of these are our customers. A lot of these names are our competitors. A lot of them are our suppliers. Like I said, some are our customers.
I think about the polyurethanes business and where that is. I think that it, you know, traditionally in the past, we've tried to compare ourselves with the Dow and with Covestro. We're much more now looking at a further downstream business. You look at our, the companies that are impacting our selling price and who I would consider to be more of our customers as we think about that competitive arc. Companies more like a Carlisle and a Kingspan. You think about some of the TPU and some of the downstream businesses, such as the LANXESS. Think about Performance Products.
Again, we're still gonna be competing with the likes of somebody like Dow, but when I think about the margins and the focus and taking that into more and more to differentiate it into a specialty, sort of an evolution, looking more like an Evonik going forward. As we think about Advanced Materials, we used to be head-to-head with Hexion. We'll be looking much more like an H.B. Fuller or a Henkel as we move more and more into the adhesives and so forth. Scott will be talking about that more in the future. Textile Effects, again, think of that arc. We wanna still be competitive. We wanna be a market leader when it comes to sustainability, when it comes to meeting customer demands. We are not going to be an industry consolidator when it comes to Textile Effects.
That's not where our M&A focus is gonna be, and it's not where our investment is going to be going into the future. Lastly, I would just note that as we think about this from a sales perspective, from an employee perspective, slightly a higher number of associates we have in Europe than we have in the U.S. I compare it to some of the European companies up here. It's not just a question of trying to pick companies around the world. When we think about a third of our headcount around the world, Europe is our largest area of both employment and a manufacturing base. By the way, these presentations are supposed to be very serious and so forth.
For the first person who can raise their hand and accurately tell me where this picture is, I'll give you a bottle out of David Stryker's wine cellar. Liverpool. Tim Wilding. Yes, that's the Liver Bird, the flightless imaginary bird. That's at the docks of the Royal Albert Dock. Phil, who's a big Liverpool fan, much to the chagrin of Tony Hankins of Manchester. Anyways, that's the Royal Albert Dock. We just wanna note that as we think about our growth and differentiation, how that's going to be. I'll go over this. By the way, he's got a wonderful cellar, Tim. Just go to David right here. As you think about that growth of differentiated M&A discipline, bolt-on acquisitions, again, of what I've said earlier, we see that as improving our EBITDA margins and driving that commercial excellence.
I wanna just emphasize, you're gonna be seeing that today. The generation of that 40% cash, making sure that we have that proper balance between spending and earning, and making sure that we have that sustainable cash flow, and that ultimately going into more aggressive shareholder returns, both in the form of dividend and share buybacks. If we think about our divisions themselves, this isn't just about keeping the divisions the same and just investing across the entire board on a division-by-division basis. Think about within the divisions, what we're doing. Growth in our. This is on a yearly basis over the course of the last 5 years. Figure in COVID and everything else that's impacted some of these numbers. Our growth, differentiated growth in polyurethanes.
We're seeing 5% growth. Lower end of the business on a volumetric basis, a 2% subtraction. We're getting out of the low end, and we're putting those molecules somewhere else. Again, this isn't about just always talking about the production of more chemistry. In some of our products, such as we see up here, maleic anhydride and our ethyleneamines being flat. Well, we've got the largest lowest cost maleic business in the world. There is nothing wrong with taking as high a margin and earning as much as possible out of that business. We don't need to go strangle the golden goose every time that we get in a position where we can raise prices, raise margins. You think about our advanced materials.
Again, that 2% is taking in the impact that we've seen in COVID on the aerospace business. Otherwise, we'd see about a 5-6% growth in our specialty volumes. At the same time, we've been deselecting, seeing a 16% drop in volume in areas like wind, where you're going to see in this division, wind is the adhesive that's keeping that wind blade together. It's typically a low single-digit return margin for us. May not be for everybody else, but for us. Whereas over on this end, the amines that are curing that very same wind blade that we may be saying we're avoiding over here, that amines chemistry over here is a strong double-digit return product for us.
There are gonna be products that in even applications where we're gonna be very focused on the growth of those applications. In other areas, we're gonna be looking at deselecting and taking more and more of that, as we look at the benefits of where we create that sustainable value. Now, if I had a single chart up here, aside from the Royal Albert Dock, if I had a single chart up here that could tell our story and we can be held accountable, it would be this. What are the steps that we're doing? I'd like to say that this is regardless of what happens to the economy. I'm not gonna be foolish enough to say that, but I do think that much of this is within our control, and that's why I feel confident about this.
How do we actually get from where we are today to closer to a 20% margin business? This isn't solely about, as we would have said in years past, EO is gonna be tightening. TiO2 margins are gonna come back in the next year or two. Read what TZMI, whoever they are, have to say. Cost optimization. I told you before, we have $140 million on the table. We've done $90 million. We've got another $35 million of that coming. That $35 million is going to be 40 basis points, and we are going to accomplish that. We look at the aerospace recovery. We're assuming that we get back to the volumes that we saw in 2018.
Again, that's not the volume on a pro rata basis that we'll see continuing from 2018, just getting back to where the volumes were in 2018. Why are volumes important in this segment? Because the margins are locked in, pricing is locked in, and upon that recovery of volume, we will see the recovery of the margins coming back. That's worth $45 million, roughly 40 basis points. We look at our return on announced projects at 60 basis points. That is around Project Patriot. That will be starting up, will be sold out. $45 million of benefit coming by the end, the exit of 2023. Be starting up the first half of 2022. Take us about 18 months to start it up, bring it up, sell out the capacity, and more importantly than selling out the capacity, upgrading that capacity.
We're also looking at the projects here around our E-GRADE, around the investments we're making around battery technology and high tech. Again, these are projects that are largely sold out. They're projects that are upgrading existing capacity. The projects, two of those, especially the projects in our Performance Products, we will be producing products that only Huntsman is able to produce in North America. It's not to say that we won't have import competition there, but in some of the high-end ultrapure products, we'll be the only people that will be producing some of these products. New optimization program. You're gonna hear this on a division-by-division basis. $100 million of newly announced initiatives. For the most part, that should all be complete by the end of 2023. So we exit 2023. Portfolio enhancement.
This is assuming that we spend over the course of between now and 2024. This is assuming that we spend about $400 million a year in M&A. Because I've said that, please don't hold me to that. We will not be buying assets if they are too expensive. We've already got a great company that we can be investing those proceeds in. That's our company. If there's something to be competitive with right here, and we wanna analyze something, that's the analysis. Now, dollar for dollar, if I could say, do I wanna buy in a dollar's worth of share or M&A? It would probably be M&A, assuming they were the same multiple. Looking where multiples are today, I don't see that happening anytime in the near future.
Again, that's not to say that we're not gonna be looking at M&A opportunities. It is to say that we're gonna be approaching that cautiously, okay? If there's one up here that I might quibble with a little bit, it might be the M&A strategy. Again, I don't think it's highly ambitious to be thinking $400 million a year on average for the next couple of years with our balance sheet looking for M&A opportunities. Again, that's what we've been doing over the course of the last couple of years here. I think I've already talked about our quadrant that you've seen so many times. I do wanna just emphasize, you see a net leverage basis, maintain that of around two times.
I think that we would look at that also as a ceiling on M&A activity, okay? I hope that the emphasis on where we are, on what we're looking to buy, that target size of what we're looking to buy, and what we're looking on the balance sheet and the impact that should have on the balance sheet, I don't want there to be any surprises. Look at where our cash has been going. As you'll see up to 2018, great deal of our capital went into debt reduction. This is something that we started back, trying to get out of debt. Well, I know that my great-great-grandfather had the Huntsman Saloon that was the number one selling saloon in all central Utah, and he was always in debt with that saloon.
Up till about 2018, most of the proceeds and profits went, as you can see, into debt reduction. I think where we are with the balance sheet right now, more and more of that orange will be coming over here into share buyback. We'll be continuously looking as to where do we want to and how do we want to be evaluating our dividends. You saw in the earlier chart that showed the three time periods in increasing that dividend to our shareholders. That dividend is something that we view as being something that we simply don't ever wanna have to cut back on. We'll be a bit cautious when we add it, and when we add it, we feel that it will be justified.
I would just like to say that we had a very good, I believe, settlement with this Albemarle trial, something that the company's been engaged with for the last four years. This was not just a couple of lawyers arguing with a couple of lawyers in front of an arbitrator. This is something that took a great deal of time, took a great deal of dedication from a board of directors that didn't flinch from doing the right thing here. I wanna commend our board for the support that we had throughout this. I also wanna publicly commend David Stryker, our General Counsel.
Without the internal management, if you will, the witnesses and so forth that were brought up, Jan Buberl, who's here, who's with our polyurethanes business, wonderful witness in this and others of us. This was a real effort. What do we intend to do with the proceeds? I'm not gonna sit up here and tell you where every single penny is going, but we are going to make the commitment that a minimum of 50% of the award within 12 months of receiving that award will go to share buybacks. That is in addition to the $1 billion that we've talked of already. Okay, we would say that. Again, I just wanna reiterate in case some of you weren't listening or weren't able to attend our last earnings call.
We talked about a minimum of $40 million of share buybacks on a quarterly basis. That would be a minimum. This last quarter, we obviously did, what, $102 million? Forty million dollars minimum, and we want to just basically match our cash dividend that's going out. When we think about that being a minimum of $160 million a year, we would probably look at this being within that 12-month period, be spending it again at a minimum for kinda the next two years. I may be off a few $10 million here or there. Kinda like at $300 million a year over the course of this year going into next year.
Phil, you can correct me if I'm wrong on that, but I think my math is right on that. Lastly, this is my last slide up here, and I'm out of time anyway. It's just a minute ago. There's been a lot of talk. We've been asked by a number of you around what is a normalized EBITDA? And I'm a bit loathe to just talk about normalized EBITDA. Normalized EBITDA would say that I'm happy with the portfolio where it is right now, happy with our earnings where they are right now, and I don't really see a lot of material change happening to that. To the contrary, we're gonna continue to evaluate this portfolio. We're gonna continue to evaluate our divisions.
There are more divisions that fit better than others. As we have an opportunity to possibly cash in and further restructure our portfolio, we're gonna do that. We need to wake up every day looking at our portfolio and looking where that portfolio can be refreshed. We also need to be waking up every day, and we need to be looking at our cost basis as to where and how that can be improved, and not only where the costs can be improved, but deployed in the right areas. You can't just simply cut your way to prosperity. We need to be spending money in the right areas around research and development and taking advantage of this changing world that we're living in right now.
As we think about each one of the divisions of the company, we think about where we are with our cost-cutting, where we are with new products coming on, where we are with value enhancements, where we are with expanding our margins and taking many year-old supply agreements and doing away with those or upgrading existing agreements with long-term customers and being able to have that benefit on an ongoing basis. I don't wanna sit here today and say 2021 is something of a plateau for us. We think there'll be some headwinds coming into 2022 and 2023. I don't know what they're gonna be, but they're always there one way or another.
I wanna make sure that we've got plenty of fuel in the tank to overcome those, to continue to execute, to continue to deliver on what we said we would do. As we think about this, I think this has been a good year. I don't see any part of the company where we're running at a record profit or an unsustainable level or anything. I think that, you know, if there were to be something of a normalized, sort of a level, I guess it could be argued that we're kinda there. I'm ignoring all of this, and I don't wanna do that.
I think that we've got a real opportunity to continue to improve on our asset base of what we have, what we could possibly be divesting of, what we could possibly be buying in, what we can be doing to our cost structure and opportunities that we have for growth. Thank you all very much for being here in person. Thank you all very much for the engagement and so forth. We're very excited, and I feel more confident today than I ever have about the future. I know that's something that everybody always says, but why do I feel that? I feel that because we have more control of these issues. I'm not sitting up here again telling you that we're hoping for that inevitable pop that we're going to see in pricing somewhere, or margin expansion.
It's gonna come in TiO2 or ethylene oxide or some other product. LAB's finally gonna recover. Procter & Gamble's taking in a price increase. Not the same as any of that stuff. I look at what we're doing today, where we're going, and what we control. I feel a great deal of confidence with this. I look at the exterior of the noise that's going on economically around high fuel prices in Europe and so forth. As I said before, there are gonna be headwinds here and there. What we can control, what we're focused on as a company, and what we're able to do, I think puts us in a unique opportunity to further transform this business.
As we look over the course of the last couple of years of what we've sold off, what we've brought in, and what we've changed, and I look at the next couple of years before us, we're just getting started, and I look forward to that. Thank you all very much. At this time, I'm gonna give the button over to, I think. Oh, Scott. Come on in, Scott. I hope that all of you will welcome Scott here. He is struggling with his Beaumont accent and, anyways, take it over.
Advanced Materials. Thank you all very much. Okay, good morning, everyone. Great to be here. Great to have the privilege to talk to you about our Advanced Materials business. As you're aware, the Advanced Materials business over the last few years has undergone a transformation from a commodity-focused organization into one that's focused on specialties, and that transformation is going to continue. Just recently done some acquisitions that further bolster our portfolio, and allow us to engage in industries that themselves are going through their own transformation. It fits very well with our value proposition, creates the ability for us to drive growth. Also here today to announce a very exciting step-out innovation regarding carbon capture and carbon use, and that's gonna create a great revenue stream for the business going forward. Moving on.
Advanced Materials is if you look back to the 2014, 2015 timeframe, had over 1/3 of its portfolio in commodity applications. Over the last few years, we've transformed that to be a 90% specialty focused. Focused in the areas of aerospace, transportation, and infrastructure. Now, when we look at these industries, our customers really don't care too much what the chemistry is. What the customers care about is the effects that the chemistry brings. So what our customer is less concerned about whether they buy a specialized epoxy, a curing agent, or so on and so forth. They're concerned about creating lightweight strength. They're concerned about bonding together new materials in a much more efficient manner than riveting and bolting.
They're concerned about managing electrical insulation in complex systems. They're concerned about taking heat out of applications. That's what our portfolio has now been designed around. With our new acquisitions where we've recently bolstered the portfolio, we've also reset our geographic footprint. We were very overexposed in the European market. The European markets grow less quickly than markets in Asia and the United States. By doing these acquisitions, we'll reset that geographical footprint for our business, puts us in a much stronger position to drive growth. As we look at our core specialty markets, you'll see after the peak of 2018, many industries went through a slight fall off that peak. COVID hit, but our markets have recovered and our business has recovered extremely well from COVID.
Essentially all industries, with the exception of aerospace, are back at pre-COVID levels and really well poised for growth moving forward. You're gonna hear me talk today about four principal growth levers in our business. The first one is integrating our M&A acquisitions that we've made over the last couple of years. We bought CVC Thermoset Specialties, and we bought Gabriel Performance Products over the last 18 months. Integration of those two businesses is going extremely well. We've already delivered on the order of 50% of those stated synergies, with 50% to come by 2023. We've also created a capability within our business to do that integration, which creates a great platform for further bolt-on acquisitions, as Peter outlined in his remarks earlier.
The aerospace industry has gone through its own series of challenges over this last couple of years with COVID. What's absolutely clear is the fundamentals of that industry are strong. People want to travel, and the aerospace industry is recovering and will recover, and we will get to enjoy the benefits of that recovery. Already you can see domestic travel is almost back to where it was pre-COVID. International travel is starting to recover. That will feed its way through the value chain, and we'll be one of the first parts of that value chain to enjoy that recovery. I'll unpack that in a bit more detail going forward. We also have a great portfolio where we're going to be able to grow this business both organically and through innovation.
We're focused on a number of industries, aerospace, transportation, and infrastructure, that themselves are going through transformation such as the transformation from internal combustion engine in automotive towards electric vehicles. When you look at the Huntsman portfolio of products, we are very well suited to engage in that growth and move our business to a different level. We've also got an extremely strong pipeline of existing products with a much greater degree of focus on how we execute those projects, and our execution rate is increasing. We believe that both organically and through innovation, we will manage to engage in that growth.
Finally, we've got this pioneering StepOut technology that takes waste methane gas and creates from it a clean-burning hydrogen product, but more excitingly, a form of carbon that's useful across the whole host of different applications. You'll see lots about this in the press. People cracking methane, being able to create a clean-burning hydrogen stream. Nobody in the industry has the same ability to do something useful with the carbon. If all you do is create hydrogen, you have to do something with the carbon. If all you're gonna do is create soot, that has to be put in a hole in the ground, quite simply. What we've got is a form of carbon that has a tremendous number of effects that I'll unpack later that allow us to enjoy a revenue stream from carbon and a revenue stream from hydrogen.
It's extremely exciting innovation and one that I think is gonna be a real addition to our portfolio. Let's talk about the first of these four growth levers. Before I do that, let's just take a look at the position of the value chain. Our end customers are the OEMs that you see at the right-hand side on the bottom of the chart. Aircraft manufacturers, automotive manufacturers, industrial system manufacturers, coatings companies, and so on and so forth. As I said earlier, these customers are buying epoxies. If you're in the aerospace industry, you want to buy strong lightweight materials to increase fuel efficiency of aircraft or similarly in automotive.
If you're building a car and you're using a metal and a composite part, you don't want to drill a hole in that and weaken the structure. You want to stick that together efficiently without compromising the integrity of the material. If you work in the power generation and transmission industry, you want to effectively insulate these high-value components, give them a long lifetime, and make sure that you don't have product failures that brings the power system down. If you're in the coatings and construction industry, you want to protect the high-value infrastructure that you've spent time creating. You don't want it to be exposed to damaging elements, heat, rain, salt water, et cetera, and compromise the lifetime of that of that asset. We've got chemistries in our portfolio that allow us to provide those solutions.
If you look at our business today, we have what we call specialty components. Before we did our acquisitions, we're extremely strong in the area of resins and curing agents. By buying CVC Thermosets and Gabriel, we've expanded our portfolio. We've broadened that range. We now create a range of tougheners and other additives. What those things do is give formulators the flexibility to make solutions that are not just strong, but also tough and durable in application. We also have a formulations business where we make composite formulations, adhesive formulations, and a number of formulated resin systems. Together, the legacy Huntsman portfolio and the new acquisition is a much broader, stronger portfolio. If you look way over at the left-hand side, this is the business that we've exited over the last few years.
This is the base resins, BLR, that some of our competitors still operate in, or former competitors operate in. We're really not present anymore. You need to be backward integrated into upstream chlor-alkali, bisphenol A, et cetera, to be competitive in that market. We never have been. We are not competitive in that area. The only basic liquid resins that we now make today are basically used in our formulations, part of our business. The M&A activity over the last two or three years has been focused at transforming this area of components and formulations in the business. We conceived of a series of divestments and acquisitions that would allow us to transform our portfolio. We had an Indian DIY business, which was about $19 million of EBITDA.
It was a B2C business, which is very different from a B2B business, and one that really wasn't core to us. We managed to sell that business for 15x EBITDA, significantly higher multiple than the overall Huntsman trading multiple. We managed to redeploy those funds to buy CVC and, Gabriel, which post synergy will be a 7.2x multiple in their own right. When you put this whole suite of projects together, we basically purchased a $57 million increase in EBITDA at a net 5x multiple or less, which has been transformative to our whole portfolio. The integration is going extremely well. $11 million of synergy already delivered and another 12 to come by 2023. As I mentioned earlier, that complementary portfolio has really helped our business.
One area that we had anticipated, didn't expect to come quite so quickly, is that the chemistry that we bought in the specialty components part of our business is already providing benefits in the formulation side, where some of the toughening and curing agents that we bought from Gabriel are actually being used in formulations that have allowed us to access a market that otherwise might have been difficult. So really delighted with the progress of these acquisitions, and it's been transformative to our business. Okay. Second of our major growth pillars in our strategy is aerospace. Now, the challenges in aerospace have been very well documented over the last couple of years. I wanna just reiterate how strong an industry this really is.
If you go back multiple decades, and I've shown here back to 2000, that's a very consistent growth in air travel. People want to travel. They want to be connected around the world. Even with crises back in 9/11 and in the financial crisis, you can see it barely shows as a blip on the growth trajectory of aerospace. COVID changed all that. We saw a tremendous contraction in demand for travel for obvious reasons. As you can see, that growth has started to occur. Now it started with what we call short-haul travel or domestic travel here in the U.S. You can see airports are already back and running.
We're almost back to pre-COVID levels in terms of domestic travel, both here in the U.S. and China, and getting that way in Europe. What's been compromised for longer is the long-haul international travel. Now we're present in two parts of the commercial aerospace industry. Single aisle, so think about Airbus 320, Boeing 737, and we're also present in the long haul or twin-aisle aircraft. Think about the Airbus 350, the Boeing 787. We've traditionally been more predisposed to being on the twin aisles, where you get the bigger value benefit from weight reduction in the aircraft. So you'll see more composite loading on a twin-aisle aircraft than you will on a single-aisle aircraft.
What you're gonna see over the next few years is the composite loading on single-aisle aircraft increasing at a faster rate, because, again, energy efficiency, sustainability drivers are very important for this industry. The chart on the right, what that's showing you is the size of exposure that we'll have to Airbus 320 and 737 going forward, which will be much higher than it is today. Largely because we'll be present on platforms like the LEAP engine, the neo option on the Airbus 320. To come beyond this timeframe are more applications such as the wing of the future in Airbus.
What you see is a continual demand for lightweighting, energy efficiency in the aerospace industry going forward. People still want to travel. This industry will recover back to pre-COVID levels we think around 2024. Because of where we are in the value chain, we'll see that a little bit earlier than you'll see it on the OEMs, and we think this is gonna be a great industry for us going forward. One other thing that's worth pointing out, when we saw demand come off in the aerospace industry, all we lost was volume. We didn't see any compression in margins because of the way our contracts work. It's still a very high margin profitable business for Huntsman Advanced Materials.
To boil all that together, where we see this business going over the next few years is a greater than 15% compound annual growth rate from where we are today, significantly higher than the average Advanced Materials margins. Really happy that this industry is on its way back, and it's gonna be a great business for us going forward. Moving on to what's becoming an even more exciting business for Advanced Materials. If you look at the Advanced Materials portfolio and where we're actually present on an automobile, it's really quite staggering. On the right-hand side of the chart, you'll see we're in the electronic systems of a car. We make insulating materials for printed circuit boards. Very highly specified, very highly qualified, and very lucrative and profitable business.
We're also in adhesives, joining parts of the car together. We're also actually in the primer coatings of the car that protect the car from rust and corrosion and so on and so forth. We're also in composite applications where the automotive industry has tried to remove weight from the car. What we see as an opportunity going forward is in two areas. One, the number of electronic applications in an electric vehicle compared to an internal combustion vehicle is about 4x. You're gonna see much more electrical systems in your car as you transition from a combustion engine to an electric or a hybrid vehicle. The second one is in the powertrain, and that's actually where some of our new products come into play.
If you look at an electric vehicle, you'll either have an electric motor on two wheels or on four wheels, and each one of these electrical motors has to be able to insulate the charge on the wheel. Now if you think about what a car goes through when it's driving around, that electrical motor is gonna get up to incredibly high temperatures. It's gonna have high voltage, and it's also going to be subject to high stress, high temperatures, rain, salt water, and so on and so forth. It's actually quite a technical challenge to create a solution that allows that motor to run safely. What we've developed in Huntsman is a technology that allows that to happen. We're currently in qualification, close to the end of qualification with a number of OEMs and tiers.
The one of the things that we've managed to do to make that formulation work better and work more quickly was actually chemistry that we bought from or inherited from the Gabriel acquisition. Here's an example of where a chemistry that we've bought with our knowledge of the science of the chemistry and the knowledge of the formulation has allowed us to achieve qualification in an industry that's going to grow very, very quickly. If you look here on the left-hand side of the chart, you'll see the projected decline in internal combustion vehicles, largely made up for by the growth in EV and hybrid.
When you look at the amount of material from Advanced Materials, if I can say material 3 times in one sentence, the amount of material that we've got present on your average automobile goes from about 7 kilos per car to about 30 kilos a car as we move forward. That's what's gonna drive growth in our automotive business. Again, boil all this together, what does it mean for growth? It means that we'll be growing this business about 7% annual compound growth rate at above average margins in Advanced Materials over the next 4 or 5 years. Moving on to the infrastructure part of our business. Again, our infrastructure business is really split into the two main parts. One is in the power and energy generation, transmission, and distribution.
Think about how we create energy and distribute that into our homes so we can have the lights on and the air conditioning and so on. The second part of our business is in the area of infrastructure protection. If we talk first about the energy generation part, huge transformation going on in this industry right now. We see the replacement or partial replacement, at least, of fossil fuels for renewable energy. Those two parts of the generation, energy generation, going in very different places.
If we take Germany as an example, when you see that today they are using French nuclear power and coal power, largely in mid-Germany, trying to transition to a more wind-based economy where the wind farms are traditionally in the north, there's a huge amount of infrastructure investment required to take that energy from the north and get it to the south. That plays into our electrical insulation business. That business actually grew during COVID, and what we're seeing is about $150 billion of infrastructure investment going into essentially resetting the grid for a renewables future. We think that's gonna drive growth in that part of our business going forward. If you look at the second part of our infrastructure business, we have the protection side of things.
Again, one of the most sustainable arguments for one of the most sustainable ways to run our infrastructure is to protect it, so you don't need to replace it every so many years. We've got technology in our coatings portfolio that we've taken from aerospace extremely durable multifunctional resins, which when used in coatings applications, can triple the lifetime of a coating. If you're operating an oil rig or a manufacturing asset in hot weather, close to the coast, et cetera, we can protect these assets for three times longer than traditionally possible, which saves on operating costs, capital investment, and so on and so forth for the operators of those assets or that infrastructure. Again, innovation from one segment being redeployed in another to drive growth.
Again, boil all that together, what does it mean for growth for Advanced Materials? We think that we'll be growing this business at about 6% compound annual growth rate at about average EBITDA margins over the next 4 or 5 years. Three segments, very strong growth in all three segments, leveraging innovation, our new portfolio, and the fact that the markets that we're operating in are transitioning into certain areas where our value propositions are very resonant. Moving on to this exciting, what we're calling here, pioneering step-out technology. Before I unpack this in any great detail, I'd like to just show you a short 2-minute video that explains it rather well. Cue video. Okay. As a former scientist, I promise I'll do my best not to geek out on you on this one.
Look, the industry's got a problem here with methane. Okay, our economy, whether we like it or not, is reliant on oil and gas to produce our energy and to create our raw materials for almost everything we use in the world today. The problem is that by exploring and extracting oil from the ground, you have a lot of uncontrolled methane emission as a result of that process. Methane, as the video said, 28 times more damaging to the environment from a global warming perspective than CO2. We think Huntsman's got at least a very large part of that solution. What are we doing in this process? We're taking methane gas in the presence of hydrogen, burning it at high temperature, and we're essentially cracking methane to carbon and clean burning hydrogen.
We create more hydrogen through this process than we consume in the burning of the methane. It's net hydrogen creating. Clearly, that creates a value stream from hydrogen gas. You'll see lots of this in the press, and that's been the main focus of what people are trying to do, is to take this dirty methane gas and convert it into something that burns clean. Basically, the only byproduct is water. Trouble is, you've got a huge amount of carbon to then deal with. What are you going to do with the carbon? Well, most of the technology out there, at the very best, creates something that is equivalent to carbon black. Trust me, the world does not need more carbon black, okay?
What the world needs is structural material that can go into a whole host of applications that are more environmentally sustainable. The carbon nanotubes that we make through this process fit that bill very nicely. If you look at that middle section on the slide, right at the very top, it might not come too clearly on the slide here, is actually a satellite. What this material is used for today is when you flow a current through this MIRALON® material, it creates heat. You put that on a satellite to keep the components of a satellite warm during the very cold temperatures that you get in space, extending the life of the satellite. This material is actually flying around Jupiter today on the Juno satellite, okay? That was something we made several years ago.
If you move down that central section of the slide, you'll see some of the other applications we can use MIRALON® for. It's got antistatic dissipation capabilities. Now, that might sound a little bit technical. Basically, what that allows us to do is in an environment where sparks can create a hazard, like in a flammable environment, you tend to use antistatic protection. MIRALON® in adhesives and MIRALON® in floor coatings achieve this. That's another use for these materials that are active today. One of the big opportunities for us going forward is in the area of batteries. Now, Chuck will talk to you in more detail about battery technology in the Performance Products business.
Our MIRALON® material in the anode and the cathode basically helps to hold together the cathode, the terminals of the battery more effectively. It stops the battery getting as hot as it otherwise would. If you've ever used your mobile phone, it gets too hot in your pocket, that's a sign of the battery degrading. The MIRALON® technology will help that last longer. We can also use this material as a lightweight structural carbon fiber. One of the problems with carbon fiber is it's actually not very bendy. You can't make complex shapes from it. This material is, and you can, and it's almost as strong as aerospace-grade carbon fiber.
The really exciting part of this is, we believe we can make construction materials from this MIRALON®, whereby instead of using wood, particle board, and so on and so forth, we can actually use MIRALON® to construct houses, other buildings, and so on and so forth. A really vast array of technical properties that we can achieve with this material that otherwise you'd be using less sustainable solutions for. We're really excited by that. The key to making this happens is scale. When we started this technology or the precursor company that we acquired a couple of years ago, they started in about 2010. First lab development was in around 2015, and they were making material that would be selling about $10,000 a kilogram or $20,000 a pound.
Not a lot of applications will support that sort of a cost base. We've developed that technology. We've built a bigger set of reactors in 2019, brought the cost down to about $2,000. Another one this year, we're down to about $1,000. We've got plans being drawn up now. We've got capital that we'll be spending next year that will get us down to the kind of $100-$200 per kilo level. Our next plan after that will get us to the thousands of tons a year level, which will give us a sub-$10 per kilo manufacturing and selling cost. We believe that within a few years, we'll be able to develop a business that's generating on the order of $50 million a year revenue at attractive margins.
It's a question of how we deploy that technology into the larger marketplace. This is a real game-changing opportunity for Huntsman and also for industry. Again, waste gas, clean burning, fuel, and a material that's actually useful. Very exciting. Just to close up, we've got a very strong specialty market position in advanced materials. We're present in transforming markets that are gonna create growth for our business. High degree of qualification in all of our portfolio, and an ability to see the aerospace market recovery fueling our margins over the next couple of years. Great bolt on acquisitions for our business. We've got a lot of great innovation opportunities like the one I described in the automotive industry. I'm very excited by that.
Obviously, I've just spent a bit of time going through our step-out innovation opportunity. Again, boil all that together, what does it actually mean for Huntsman Advanced Materials? We see 2022 being a meaningful expansion in margin over where we're going to be this year. We see on the order of $225 million-$240 million of EBITDA. We see over the next three or four years an opportunity to get our margins in excess of 20% EBITDA towards the 25% EBITDA margins going forward. With that, I'll take some questions. Thank you.
A couple questions.
Thank you, Dave Begleiter. MIRALON®, very exciting opportunity. Are there competing technologies that do similar things like MIRALON®? What other applications can this go into longer term?
All right. Look, there are lots of people cracking methane to create hydrogen. Lots of technology out there doing that. Some of that's getting done at scale. I mean, just methane pyrolysis by steam reforming. It's just you're actually creating more carbon to create the hydrogen. It's just not very efficient. There are some people who are looking at making a more useful form of carbon like we are, but are at nowhere near the scale that we are. We think we're significantly ahead in the marketplace in terms of being able to create this useful form of carbon. Just to give you some context, our pilot reactor that we've got just now is a meaningful unit. It's three stories tall.
It's a real manufacturing asset, and we've got a very clear plan about how we're gonna scale this.
Thanks. To kind of piggyback on Dave's question on MIRALON® a little bit, the NASA application seems really cool, but I'm guessing NASA can pay for that. How far along are you on kind of making this a more commercially viable product from a cost perspective?
It comes down to scale. We're now making it at scale where we can open up certain applications. The best example I can give you is anti-static floor coatings, where we're already selling dispersions of our MIRALON® material into our ARALDITE® formulations in order to create an competitive anti-static floor coatings. Another one would be pipe systems, where if you've got fuel lines in any particular application, you need to protect from static discharge, so the fuel line doesn't blow. That's quite a complex process. What we can do now is we can take MIRALON® in our pipe coating applications, which basically give a more cost-effective solution in the marketplace. That's even at the $1,000-$2,000 a kilo level. That's a competitive application.
The next stage for us is to take that and get it into applications that have got much larger volume at lower cost, and the scale will do that.
Aleksey Yefremov, KeyBanc Capital Markets. You were talking about content gains for advanced materials in electric vehicles to get to about 30 kilograms of content
Yeah.
in electric vehicles. Is this something that you already sell in existing EV models, or is this a market opportunity that you need to still develop?
Yeah. Good question. It's a combination. As I highlighted on the slide, we're already present in the electronic applications on an EV, on an ICE vehicle. We'll also be present on the EV already in the coatings and so on. We are now almost qualified on this electric motor application, and you'll see that on EV over the next one or two years.
All right. We'll take one more question.
When you talk about the aerospace recovery and the opportunity there, could you just outline a little bit about what has to happen? Is that the wide bodies get back to 2018, 2019 production levels, and that's how you'll recover, or you're not expecting that to come anywhere near that, and it's all on narrow bodies, you know, blowing through the prior peak?
It's a combination. We think that the wide body industry will get back to the levels the wide body aircraft were going to around 2019. If you recall, Boeing had reduced their production before COVID from 14 ship sets a month down to somewhere around 10. Similarly, Airbus did something similar. We see them getting back to that sort of level by around 2024. But then you've also got the growth coming through in the single aisle, which offsets any gap back to the 14. We're gonna be more present on the single aisle than we were back in 2018, 2019. It's a combination of effects that we see us getting back to that 2018 level by about 2024.
All right, great. We're gonna move on to Performance Products right now. Thanks a lot, Scott. Scott will be around during lunch and also in the general Q&A if you have any further questions. Chuck, it's all you.
Good morning, everybody. It's a great opportunity to talk to you about the Performance Products business in Huntsman, and happy to be here today, my first Investor Day. I need my clicker. Okay, let's keep going. I think first of all, to talk about with Performance Products, this division is going through a transformation. Peter spoke about the kind of the catalyst for that transformation, and that was the sale of the chemical intermediates and the surfactants business to Indorama in 2019. That was really a catalyst for change. That part of the business was actually larger than the remaining parts of Performance Products. That part of the business was also less differentiated, heavy assets, higher volatility. Kind of a challenge for the leadership to kinda manage that along with what was left of the business.
If you look at what's left of the business, we have essentially amines and maleic anhydride. We split the amines into performance amines and ethyleneamines, and I'll explain why we do that later, and then maleic anhydride. Those three simple portfolio, we have leading positions across all three of those. Across the portfolio, we have leading positions, whether that's globally or whether that's in North America and Europe in Europe. What else is different? Well, leadership, I'm guilty of that. I'm a new leader coming in from Textile Effects, where I used to have a leadership role there. But also our strategy. Our strategy previously was more around volume, right? When you've got these big upstream assets, you tend to worry about volume a lot, and that kinda carried through the business.
Today, we're really looking at value more than volume, and that's a theme that you'll hear kinda through the presentation and really why the business is performing better now than it has before. In fact, I'm pretty happy to be able to say that what's left of the business today is essentially a third of the volume of the prior division, but it's actually delivering 25% more EBITDA dollars this year than in 2019. That's a huge improvement, but we're not done yet. The transformation continues. Just a little bit about the business dynamics of Performance Products. First of all, I probably wanna start with last year with COVID, difficult year for most industries, most businesses. This business actually weathered COVID very well, actually better than the other divisions within Huntsman even.
Largely in part due to the fact that we have a broad end market exposure. You have some end markets that are impacted more than others. Some are less impacted. In fact, our performance amines, which is really the specialty and differentiated, more differentiated parts of our portfolio, did very, very well last year. This year we have growth, margin expansion, not in one area, but literally across the portfolio and across all regions. There's not a point of weakness. Yes, we have great demand dynamics, a very, very strong COVID recovery that we've seen and we've benefited from.
It's really allowed us to kind of look at our pricing and our pricing discovery and really learn more and more about, you know, where we stand with our customers, with our competitors, and really take some risks and look at what's possible. A little bit more about Performance Products, and being an outsider coming into this division, I often scratched my head and truly didn't understand the business as well. Again, the new Performance Products is fairly simple in that amines and/or maleic anhydride are essentially key building blocks that get further reacted, further derivatized, and go into different end markets providing important properties for our customers' formulations. Our largest segment, and Scott talked about Advanced Materials.
Our largest segment is coatings and adhesives, and advanced materials is one of our internal customers, an important customer, but we also sell to others. Fuel and lubricants, fuel additives, lubricant additives, very important segment for us on the amine side. Polyurethane additives, similar story there. Which Tony Hankins will talk about polyurethanes. Polyurethanes is an important customer of ours, HBS, Huntsman Building Solutions, but we also sell outside of that to their competitors. Maleic anhydride, I think most of you are all familiar with maleic anhydride. We have a very, very strong position in. It's a very important business for us where we have technology and a kind of leadership position.
The largest end market for maleic anhydride is unsaturated polyester resins or UPR, and that's going into your molded tubs, bathroom fixtures, which are mainly what we would call construction. That's the largest market, but also into boat hulls on the marine side, and other end uses, including things like sealants for food. It's a really interesting product that goes into many, many different applications. Again, kinda helps you weather the downturns when they happen. The end of last year we actually performed a strategy update for the business, which was the right time to do it with the sale of the upstream assets and new leadership coming in.
We really put a high focus for growth on the performance amines where we're really able to differentiate. We're able to command higher margins, and we actually sell into some very important high growth markets, which I'll speak to later. The other parts of the portfolio, the maleic anhydride and the ethylenediamine, we wanna run these businesses focusing on our customers, focusing on our operational excellence, focusing on commercial excellence, and running these leaner. That's really important that we understand across the portfolio how do we behave and how do we manage the different parts of the portfolio? I have to say it's a very strong portfolio, primarily of differentiated and specialty products. Where do we wanna grow? Growth obviously is very important for any business.
Growth for me, it's always about you have to make choices. You can't be too broad-brushed. As a part of our strategy, we clearly define the opportunity was in our what we call our performance amines. Within our performance amines, we saw some important end markets that we had the ability to penetrate further, to grow our margins above average, and to continue to drive the business more towards a specialty business, less cyclicality. As a part of that, we defined really where do we wanna focus on? Where are we gonna invest more? Where are we gonna do capital projects? Where are we gonna invest in people?
The two areas that we've put the highest degree of focus, and actually I'll speak to the capital projects that we've already announced, is in our polyurethane additives business and in what we call our advanced technologies. Peter spoke about this already. Our step into the electronics, the semiconductor business, which is the semiconductor cleans part of the market, and our electric vehicles and our ultra-pure ethylene carbonate, which is going into the electrolyte for lithium batteries and electric vehicles. This is really where we're making choices. We're gonna invest further in to ensure we have growth, not only growth, but profitable growth and higher margins. Sustainability, and Britt will talk more about sustainability within the corporation, but sustainability is core to Performance Products.
Almost everything we do ends up into a solution from our customers and their customers into sustainable end uses. For example, I've already mentioned is the Ultrapure Ethylene Carbonate, which is an important solvent that goes into the electrolyte for lithium batteries. That's a very important business for us. I'll speak more about with our project. But we also have amine solutions for gas treating, which provides the ability to produce low sulfur fuels, excuse me, and removing CO2 and sulfides. We'll also play a key part in the wind industry, and it's within our polyetheramines, a part of our portfolio, and we sell an important ingredient that allow you to manufacture larger wind turbine blades and make them more durable. Again, that's in the wind.
There's other examples on this page, and there's more beyond that. Sustainability is very, very important for the business. Innovation is also important. We have a very strong innovation background since the origins of the business. We have a pipeline of greater than $100 million in terms of revenue, which we will deliver by 2024. Some examples of where we're focusing, again, all centered around these high growth markets and related to performance amines is, again, our E-GRADE amines, which are amines that we manufacture today, we sell to various industries. For the semiconductor market, we actually purify these amines into parts per billion, which is very challenging to do when you're trying to remove things that are already in the product.
We have technology around that, and that's an important area of growth. Fuel additives, on the other side of ICE vehicles. On the other side of that, fuel additives is an important business for us, where we have, again, our polyetheramines, looking at deposit control agents, for increased fuel economy. Our new polyurethane catalysts, which are designed to work for environmentally friendly blowing agents like the new HFO blowing agents, to provide that compatibility in the formulation for those spray foam insulation solutions. I'm gonna talk about the next few slides, actually the next three slides, about where we're investing, for organic growth, which is very important for us going forward. The first one I've already mentioned a bit.
It's our investment in our facility in Conroe, Texas, which is our largest facility for making performance amines today. We've announced an investment that is about $35 million that will deliver $10 million in 2024. What is this investment about? First of all, it's a business that we're in today. We're selling to the market leaders. We're selling globally. For us to move forward and expand our portfolio of amines, purified amines, and to be able to take this business to another level in terms of growth and profitability, we needed an investment. That investment is essentially a clean room environment for a packaging facility on site at our Conroe facility. That's really gonna enable us to do a lot more.
We've also got a duplicate of that in our R&D center in HATC, in The Woodlands, Texas. We're poised to really take this business to a whole nother level. The formulated cleans market is an exciting market. Number one, it's in electronics. Number two, as semiconductors get smaller, 5 nanometer, below 5 nanometer, this market's gonna grow faster because it requires more sophisticated amines, more sophisticated formulated clean solutions that are replacing more commodity cleans of the past. This market's growing 8%-12% and we're poised to grow above that with this project. The next project is centered around electric vehicles and batteries. Before I talk about that, I know Scott already talked about electric vehicles and the importance for advanced materials in that space.
Maybe just to step back a bit, the automotive sector as a whole is really important for Huntsman. If you look at Scott's business, the Advanced Materials, they're really more about the structural components of the vehicle. You think of all the exterior, lightweight composites, the adhesives. If you look at Polyurethanes, it's really about the acoustics, the seating, the dashboards. It is really core and a very important part of that business as well. For us, for Performance Products, we're selling components into and additives into the coatings and the paint on the exterior of the car. We're certainly involved in the interior of the car as catalysts and PU catalysts for the polyurethane part of the automotive sector.
We probably have a smaller exposure today in automotive versus polyurethanes. But with this project, this is really gonna step us forward in a bigger way in automotive and particularly in electric vehicles. Before I continue on, I'd like to show you a short video about the automotive end mark-
That's how Huntsman does business.
All right, thank you. Hope you enjoyed that. Getting back to the project around batteries and electric vehicles. I think as Peter mentioned, ULTRAPURE™ Ethylene Carbonate is a product that we manufacture in Texas, in Conroe, Texas. We are actually the only producers of that in the U.S. today. We all know the story about electric vehicles and the growth in the future. Today, a lot of the technology and a lot of the infrastructure and supply chain sits in Asia, but we know it's gonna regionalize. We have a unique position where we're the only producers. We are actually selling today into the market. The opportunity here was an expansion of our capabilities around UPC.
It's a volume expansion because it's required for what's coming and the battery makers and the electrolyte producers that are coming to the U.S. It's also about taking ethylene carbonate, which we actually sell today into the lube market, and upgrading and purifying. It's a higher grade of material that goes into the battery, and that's something that we're building a higher degree of capability with this project. $25 million investment with a $10 million EBITDA by 2024. Very important project for us. Last project, I'll cover quickly, is on polyurethane catalyst. This is really kind of the sweet spot of our business and portfolio. Commands great margins. Another high growth market, 5%-6% polyurethane, whether it's in insulation or automotive, furniture, and bedding.
It's a great growth story. This project will give us further capability to build the next generation catalyst for spray foam and for insulation. This project is actually in our plant in Pétfürdő, Hungary, where we manufacture these products today and have done so for decades. It's a $60 million investment with a nice return of $15 million by 2024. Really important project for us as we take the business forward. Last slide for me. You've seen this one from Scott as well. As we look into next year, we are seeing the demand dynamics continue to be strong, particularly as we talk to our customers for the first half of the year.
We're expecting to continue the transformation in terms of value over volume, commercial excellence programs that we've put together. We're looking at a $360 million-$380 million EBITDA business next year with margins better than 20%. We believe those are sustainable. We also believe growth will continue into next year, and we are anticipating. Again, I've already covered kind of our strategy across our portfolio. We're gonna drive that harder, and we're gonna deliver a better year than this year, next year. Thank you.
Thank you. Do you have any questions?
Hi, good afternoon. Michael Sison, Wells Fargo. In terms of the adjusted EBIT margin target of 20%-25%, you know, not a lot of businesses get to 20, and even less get to mid-20s. When you think about just getting to that high end, I see a lot of interesting singles in terms of your new product development. Do you need one or two of those to become home runs to get there? Or is it just executing well on all of them to get you to that mid-20s EBITDA margin target?
It's a great question, Mike. I think the reality is we're not needing to hit home runs, although we're anticipating that all of our organic projects are gonna deliver on those. We've approached the business with a bit more structure and discipline in terms of our approach, and we believe that the margin improvements that we've made this year with our commercial excellence programs are largely sustainable across the portfolio, whether it's maleic, whether it's ethyleneamines, whether it's performance amines. Clearly, performance amines is our opportunity to grow, and it's growing in a more specialty area. We're not talking rail cars or tanker cars. We're talking drums and totes from a chemical point of view.
There's an opportunity there to really continue to drive our margins further up. Smaller part of our portfolio today, some of that, but we fully intend to continue to drive our leading positions in maleic and our leading positions in ethyleneamines to a higher margin than they have in the past. I would also remind you that we were at 26% in Q3. This is largely about locking in, maintaining, and keeping what we already have. As we look at next year, there are two things in mind, the structure of this industry, how many plants have been shut down, how many people are selling maleic anhydride. There are two merchant sellers in North America. The industry's never been that way. These are plants that cost $ hundreds of millions, take many years to build.
When you look at the pricing dynamics, I mean, over the next year, if anything, we're gonna be seeing raw materials probably plateauing and coming down in many areas. That's an opportunity to even grab more margin. Again, just keeping what we've got kind of in margins, sales prices, and so forth today, we're at that 26%.
Right.
Hey, Chuck. Matthew Blair from Tudor, Pickering. I think the increasing EV exposure that Huntsman's been talking about today is pretty appealing. You mentioned the Ultrapure Ethylene Carbonate. Could you just talk about, you know, as you take share in this, how do you protect your position? Is it through patents or I'm not sure what else. Then also, are the margins on the EV products higher than traditional ICE vehicle products?
Good question. Thanks, Matthew. Thanks for the question. I guess the first part of that is on the ULTRAPURE™ Ethylene Carbonate. Sorry, it was about growth? Yeah. How do we ensure the growth and-
Just protect your market position.
Protect our market position. Okay. Today, it's really is pretty small business for us, even though we've been in the market quite a lot. Today, we actually sell more ethylene carbonate to other industries, a smaller portion of ultrapure, which is the purified version for batteries. Obviously, we're seeing that flip around. In fact, we're gonna plan to make only ULTRAPURE™ Ethylene Carbonate, which is of higher value going forward. It's really about timing because as, you know, today there's a handful of producers in Asia, China and Korea, and other places, but only a few of those can make the battery grade because it's more difficult to make. We have the technology, we have the know-how, we've been making it for a number of years.
The project is gonna help us make it more consistently, and it's gonna help allow us to make almost entirely the purified version going forward. It is about timing. You have to move faster. We're fortunate because we can actually expand and move quicker than competition can come in, sooner because the investment takes time to make.
Remember, all this will be sold when this plant comes on, it'll all be pre-sold, so it's under contract.
Yeah, sold out.
These will be at low- to mid-20s% sort of margins and be done on a tolling type of basis. The electrolytes or the carbonates will be going right into electrolytes for the battery production in Texas.
Right.
All right. We'll do one more question.
Great. Thanks.
Yeah.
Mike Leithead here from Barclays. I guess the question, given all of these really favorable macro trends you point to, whether semiconductors, EVs, I guess when we add it all up, what's the right top line growth algorithm for this business? Should it be growing GDP plus 1%, two times GDP?
Right.
I mean, just kind of how should we in aggregate.
Right.
Think about the medium growth opportunity here?
Thanks for the question, Mike. I think if you look at our ethyleneamines, you know, kind of our differentiated part of the portfolio, ethyleneamines and maleic, there, we really don't want to grow aggressively volumetrically. We wanna really maximize and make sure we're capturing the value of the business. Peter talked about the markets are a bit more structured. We've had a competitor exit the market on ethyleneamine side. So that's about half the business. The other half is performance amines, and that's really where we're targeting growth. But it's a smaller, the more specialty part of that business is a smaller volumetrically business, but delivering higher margins. So I think we need to be looking at two times GDP for that piece that we're really targeting growth. The maleic and the ethyleneamines, we're GDP kind of growth.
We've got kind of below the specialty within our performance amines, we do have a differentiated part of the business which goes into the wind turbines and other applications. We're probably looking at 1.5 GDP, something like that.
Great. Thanks a lot, Chuck.
Great. Thank you.
I'll give you that. Next thing we're gonna do is sustainability.
I don't want you to fall.
Brittany Benko, who just joined us a little over a year ago, is our Chief Sustainability Officer, and she's gonna spend a little bit of time telling you what we're doing here.
Thanks, Chuck. I was worried that I'd fall flat on my face and completely undermine my entire presentation. Since I'm over safety, but thankfully, Chuck helped me navigate the stairs, although I probably shouldn't get too frisky, I gotta get back down them. As Ivan said, I'm the Senior Vice President of Environmental Health, Safety, and Manufacturing Excellence, as well as the Corporate Sustainability Officer. I'm really happy to be able to discuss sustainability with you today. I've been with Huntsman just a little over a year, and my previous 20 years of experience were in the oil and gas industry, working mostly on these kinds of issues, environmental issues, sustainability, engaging in climate change legislation, and et cetera.
You know, I was really proud to be a part of that industry, providing affordable energy to the world, improving people's quality of life. I've never been more excited than I am right now to be at Huntsman and to be a part of the sustainability efforts that are going to transform the future. If you think about it, no matter how hard you try in the oil and gas industry, ultimately, at the end of the day, you end up with a barrel of oil or a standard cubic feet of gas, and the value in it is you're gonna combust it or burn it, so you're gonna end up with emissions. Instead, we take that barrel of oil or some of that natural gas VOCs, right? We add a little energy, maybe a catalyst, and it's like magic, right?
We come up with the solutions that are gonna enable the future. We know it's not magic, it's chemistry. I think this is really important, and I wouldn't have taken the time to go into this because I think fundamentally, people have not thought about the chemical industry's role in enabling that future. Here is the emission inventory for the United States. Looks very similar in Europe. Worldwide, pretty much proportionally the same. Chemical industry emissions go up just a tiny bit. This is really critical. The chemical industry is 3% of the emissions in the United States. We're providing the technologies that will enable emission reductions in 80% of the economy because the economic sectors that are where the emissions come from is the buildings sector, transport sector, and other industries.
The chemical industry is the enabler of getting at 80% of making the rest of the economy more efficient. I think this will be really clear and important as we go through this presentation as to what role Huntsman is going to play in this. Just taking a look at four of our products, when we look at it from a system standpoint, what are we doing now versus what do our products enable for the future? Just four of them. We will be avoiding 750 million tons of lifetime emissions by the application of in lithium-ion batteries, by what we provide into windmills, by our home insulation, and by what we provide to the airline industry. Before I delve into that in a little bit more detail, everybody goes, "Okay, fine.
That's what you do, but what about how, you know, how is your house? Let's talk about that just a little bit. Huntsman has been on a journey to transform ourselves, right, into a more differentiated specialty company. As a part of that, you know, recent divestitures and acquisitions, we have reduced our on-site emissions by 80%. Everybody goes, "Okay, great, but then somebody else is just emitting that." Fair enough, but we have been moving in the sector, the demand sector towards sustainability, and so therefore, our portfolio is less emission-intensive, right? You know, if you want to look at it and go, "Okay, but how have you been doing internal to your own company in reducing your emissions?" Then you can look at an intensity metric.
We've also lowered our intensity, meaning the number, the amount of emissions we have versus our production, right? We've gotten more efficient there as well. I think it's important to just point out that Scope 1 emissions are your operations emissions. We've reduced those. Now we actually are seeing more Scope 2 emissions, which is emissions associated with electricity purchase or steam purchase, right? That changes your strategy in how you're going to address this issue going forward. I think at the end of the day, what I want to point out is that the chemical industry is a very small emitter, and they have the solutions.
Huntsman within the chemical industry is one of the lowest emitters of any of our peers, and we have the solutions in Huntsman to address what needs to happen to change and transition to a lower carbon future. I will also point out that we are not unaware of the entire supply chain. We are performing life cycle analysis, and we are constantly reviewing our portfolio so that we understand what this means for the future and what products are sustainable and what products may become non-sustainable. Again, just a little bit broader view, how is our own house? Well, we're doing great. Going into 2020, we set Horizon 2025 targets around greenhouse gases, which we've already discussed, but also energy consumption, waste disposal. We are 75% of the way to meeting those targets.
I'll just give you a couple of examples. In Rotterdam, all the electricity that we purchase there is renewable electricity. We've entered into a contract to do that. In Baroda, we have switched from coal-fired power to natural gas-fired power. In Caernarfon, which I'm not very good at Welsh, so I hope I got that right, but we have installed a reed bed system to reduce water consumption and to reduce waste disposal. We are ongoing making ourselves more energy efficient and, you know, better and better performer in this space. Again, we are the lowest emitter pretty much in the industry, and so any effort we have here is really on a very small amount of emissions, but we're continuing to do that.
I also do want to point out that a company cannot be sustainable unless it's safe and reliable. I did show you one metric up here on our OSHA recordable incident rate. We have been safe, and through our zero harm culture, we will get only safer. I could have put up process safety events. It shows the same downward trajectory in having incidents. I could have put up life-critical incidents, same trajectory. In comparison to industry, we're in the top quartile. You really can't be sustainable unless you're safe, and we have a commitment to everybody going home at the end of every day safely. That's the shorter-term objectives. Let's talk about longer-term objectives for ongoing greater sustainability. Today, we are announcing that we are aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050.
I will say that, I've been in this space talking about this specifically for my entire career, and I've always wondered what that pathway was. If you talk to a lot of people, they say we've got to have several moon shots to get there. I believed that up until I saw Miralon. Miralon is a game changer. That actually could be the path through to where we need to go. We are a part of that effort. We are aiming for full circularity, and a lot of what we do makes things last longer. We build to last, makes things more durable. We are a huge part of that effort.
We are committed to and already doing sustainable chemistry, as you have heard already from Scott and Chuck, and we'll hear from Tony and Peter. For our strategy, we are looking at the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure framework, and we're running scenarios for our strategy. You're probably familiar with these scenarios. They look at what is the climate policy gonna be, what is the oil price gonna be, what's the gas price gonna be, what's gonna be the price of carbon. The International Energy Agency puts these out there. There's a 2-degree scenario, and then there's this carbon neutral scenario. I can absolutely say in the current conditions with stated policies, we're resilient, and we are resilient in every one of these scenarios.
Actually, as these accelerate, there'll be more demand for our products. Let's circle back to this concept of avoided emissions. I would like to say that this is the direction the discussion needs to go more broadly than just here today, but in society. Where do we invest now to get to where we want to go? For example, our specialty amines that are made in our Performance Products business, those amines go into wind turbines. They make the blades longer, therefore more economic. As a system versus natural gas, it takes just a little bit more investment of carbon up front, but you avoid 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by changing systems, right? That delivers a 48 times return on invested carbon.
I think this is the way that we need to think about what we do and how we use the products that we make at Huntsman to get to that future that we're all aspiring towards. I could talk about our resins and hardeners in our advanced materials business. They go into the fuselage of the airplane. Also, they enable the winglets on the planes. This makes the planes weigh less, more fuel efficient. 1 ton of our resins and hardeners will go into a solution that avoids 14,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That's a 40 times return on invested carbon. Or I could talk about our lithium-ion batteries.
One ton of our carbonates that goes into making lithium-ion batteries more efficient avoids 1,300 tons of CO₂ equivalent, delivering an 8 times return on invested carbon. Not to undersell the polyurethanes business because this is critical. This is huge. If you saw that emission bar, the building sector is a huge source of emissions, right? If we can go in with spray foam and we make the building more efficient, in particular by reducing air intrusion, so there's less energy required for heating and cooling, then we're gonna avoid emissions over a broad sector of the economy. In this case, we avoid 10 tons of CO₂ equivalent, and we return on invested carbon 8 times. In conclusion, I would just add a few things.
I've spent a lot of time on greenhouse gases today, but every time you reduce those greenhouse gas emissions, and this is a particular passion of mine, you also reduce other air quality emissions. If people can't get passionate about carbon dioxide, well, you know, okay, I understand. Everybody gets passionate about cleaner air. Wherever you can get cleaner air, we should be applying those solutions. I will also point out that everything that I just showed you is where we're making investments because absolutely that's where the demand is going to be as we go forward. Those, just those four solutions by volume are 5% of our products, so we're just getting started.
When we do these calculations for all of our products, the amount of avoided emissions that come about because we are participating in the economy is significant. This is why I say sustainability runs through Huntsman. We are not just a part of the solution, we are the solution. With that, I'll take any questions.
Great. Thank you. Any questions? All right. Well.
I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
We'll take a 15-minute break for lunch. It's a boxed lunch, so you can bring it back. Then when everyone's settled back down, we will
Thank you.
kick it off with polyurethanes, and we'll make up some time here. Thanks. All right. Excuse me. We're gonna get started here for the sake of time in about one minute. I'm gonna get the door shut and let people file in here. We're gonna start the next presentation with polyurethanes, Tony Hankins, which I know that there will be a lot of questions around.
Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. It's wonderful to see so many old friends here today. Let me begin by just highlighting the benefits of polyurethanes and why they're such a special thermoplastic. They do three things particularly well. We insulate. We insulate heat and cold, insulate buildings, insulate sound in automobiles. It's a wonderful adhesive, coatings, industrial applications, and it's elastomer. Its elastomeric properties allow us to run in our running shoes and give us wonderful performance in many different industrial applications. Polyurethanes represents about two-thirds of Huntsman. Think of us as a $4.7 billion business on an LTM basis, generating $862 million of EBITDA. Truly global business, we operate in all three regions. One mic on. Truly global business, we operate in all three regions.
Self-standing MDI world scale plants in Asia and Europe and America. We sell in 103 countries. Two-thirds of our business is differentiated specialty solutions, our global platform franchise I'll talk about, and about 30% now is commodity components. Our strategy is very clear. It's not to sell more molecules, it's to sell more valuable molecules, to upgrade the portfolio, to improve productivity and profitability. 3 ways we'll do that. We up-value customer solutions through our splitting technology. Now, I'll talk in a few minutes about a major investment we've made at our Geismar facility in Louisiana, where we're gonna use proprietary splitting technology to drive a significant upgrade in our Americas portfolio. We're upvaluing earnings on long-term contracts, particularly our formula contracts to generate more value.
We're deselecting non-strategic markets, reallocating resources, if you will, from those lower value areas of the business to the higher margin, lower volatile segments that we operate in. We're gonna boost our differentiated platforms, our global franchises of building solutions, of automotive, and elastomers. Globalize, strengthen, and scale. Three areas where Huntsman is particularly strong. We're gonna be fit, and we're gonna be very focused. Focused on active portfolio management and resource realignment, executing on synergies and cost optimization programs. Great deal of learning there from the acquisitions we've done, the synergies that come through integration and scaling of those acquisitions. We're gonna accelerate our cost down programs, particularly in fixed and variable. I'll talk a little later on about a new program which builds on our existing learning to generate an extra $6 million of margin improvement over the next two years.
What are we doing differently today from last time we spoke? We're shifting lower margin volumes to higher EBITDA businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, we sold out and we're selling up. We're delivering lean, low CapEx productivity enhancements, capital light to generate more headroom, more productivity. We're driving a rigorous focus on variable and fixed cost improvements. The way to look at polyurethanes is a series of acquisitions and a continuum, if you will, of volatility and profitability. Our elastomers business at the top of that differentiated column, low volatile, high margin. Automotive, building solutions, furniture, adhesives and coatings, and then our polymeric-based insulation systems. At the bottom of that chart, the formula-based polymeric and components which are high volatility, swinging margin. Three very distinct platforms here. Global platforms and specialty solutions where our strategy is to innovate and to grow.
Those are where the average margins over the last five years have been 20% EBITDA. Building solutions, elastomers and automotive being a particular focus in those platform areas we talked about. Formulated systems, the majority of our construction business in insulation, in metal panels and boards, where we'll innovate and up-value those to generate consistently higher margins. Then commodity MDI, we will deselect and up-value. Exit or up-value with a very clear focus on those sectors where we can do that. Moving those lower value molecules to higher value, lower volatility applications. That's the intense focus of our strategy. The splitter in Geismar will be a key catalyst that will generate that portfolio shift upwards in the Americas. We'll make 30% less components when the splitter comes on stream in May of next year. 40% greater molecules in high functionality.
Those higher functionality going into insulation systems, into coating systems. Best of all, a 50% volume increase in our diisocyanate range of products, which truly go into the top end, the premium products in the polyurethanes industry. It also allows us to make VOC-free products, volatile organic compound-free products. This was the technology we developed with BMW five years ago, which won the BMW Supplier of the Year award. The VOC-free interiors for cars, for homes, for environments where people are demanding much clearer air and lower VOCs. The splitter will generate a unique capability to make those molecules in the U.S. We're leveraging technology we've developed in Europe and America and taking it to a whole new level here in Geismar. We're very excited about the Patriot splitter.
This will allow a significant upside in the Americas performance by growing and innovating in high-value downstream segments and differentiated platforms. The chart shows how we upvalue the lower-value components and through the splitting technology, give us a 40% volume uplift in the mid-functionality and high-functionality, and 50% uplift in the diisocyanate. Now, what does that do to value? Well, those polymeric molecules, when we convert the splitting technology to generate the higher-functionality, that's a 22% value uplift to the contribution margins from components. And even better, the diisocyanates will give us a 150% value uplift through the technology to allow the penetration and growth in automotive, into adhesives, into coatings. The splitting technology allows us to take those lower-value molecules and shift them into higher-value, lower-volume applications.
This will be the absolute catalyst that will allow us to regenerate and to reimprove the margin profitability and stability of the Americas business. Before I talk about our three global platforms, let me introduce that with a video that talks about spray foam insulation. Cue the video, please. Ladies and gentlemen, four years ago, we weren't even in the spray foam business. We're now the world leader. Acquisitions. We bought three great companies who were regional leaders in what they did. Demilec was the regional leader in closed cell insulation technology. Icynene-Lapolla were the leader in open cell. By taking those two companies, combining together and integrating the very best, we've now created a global leader in Huntsman Building Solutions. In 2019, we generated $40 million of EBITDA. This year, we'll do close to $100 million.
2025, the target is to globalize this business and to generate $200 million of EBITDA with margins of 20 or 20% and above. It's a huge addressable market. Today, spray foam only represents 7% of the total insulation used in the world. 7%. Vast majority being mineral fiber, polystyrene. Huntsman Building Solutions market share of that now is 17% globally, 31% of that in North America. The potential for growth in Europe and Asia is enormous. Not only that, but there are tailwinds growing the insulation market with global warming, with energy efficiency improvements, the standards are getting tougher, and polyurethane, MDI urethane, is the best insulation on the planet. The growth opportunity is significant.
We're gonna grow by building a global brand, by influencing the adoption of spray foam insulation as the insulant of choice with higher building standards, with higher energy standards, and by leveraging our existing global downstream footprint to grow the business internationally. We don't need anything else. It's all in place. The routes to market are there, the expertise is there. Since we bought these three great companies, we've delivered $25 million in synergies. Our original forecast was 15. We've learned a lot through the integration process. We've grown an international business from zero now to close to 20 million EBITDA in two years. We upgrade and source 100% of these components from Huntsman. Our polymeric MDI, which is being valued.
As you saw in the video, our TEROL technology, which upcycles waste PET bottles to make the polyol component that makes the total spray foam formulation. We're addressing two major needs in sustainability. We're upcycling plastic waste and we're reducing carbon footprint through better insulation efficiency. Over 40% of all energy in the world today is used to heat and cool buildings. This is gonna be a very, very significant solution to those problems, and Huntsman is the global leader. We're very, very excited about building solutions and the opportunity that it provides for upvaluing component molecules and growing in a very highly valuable market space. Automotive. For 35 years, Huntsman has led this industry for MDI seating, for steering wheels, for instrument panels, and now for acoustic insulation. We can tune the foam to let frequencies in or shut frequencies out.
Very, very important now in electrification of vehicles. We see growth in automotive coming from that electrification mega-trend. Key thing here being lightweighting and safety to allow electric vehicles to have a longer range and to have a safer range. Ultra-thin seating, acoustics for those electric cars, lightweighting and composites and adhesives. Both ICE vehicles and electric vehicles need urethanes, and we're increasing the amount of urethane in a car today from round about 16 kilos to over 25. The growth is significant. The electrification process, significant tailwind. We're doing it sustainably through low-emission interiors with our VOC-free product and by introducing TEROL polyols, using polyester bottles again now to upcycle formulations for instrument panels and for steering wheels. Very exciting opportunities to grow our global automotive platform. Elastomers. Think of elastomers as two areas of growth here. One is high-performance footwear.
We supply the TPU sole and the energy-returning midsole layer to big customers like Nike and Adidas and Reebok. That's a lot of sustainability folks as well today. Direct bonding of the soles together, eliminating adhesives and VOC emissions, and allowing a truly recyclable sports shoe. That's a lot of focus. This is an area of our business that commands a lot of R&D. 50% vitality. 50% of the products we sell in 2025 will not exist today. Huge R&D focus, huge innovation capability. For elastomers, where we produce thermoplastic polyurethane grades for industrial applications, think of an EV charging cable we talked about this morning.
Halogen-free flame retardant chemistry that allows the growth in state-of-the-art performance, temperature resistance, fire performance. We talked about the infrastructure problem this morning, the electric charging stations, which will go up. This will be a big beneficiary from the infrastructure investment. Very excited about the growth in elastomers. We see this being a $160 million EBITDA business by 2025, with strong growth momentum and a lot of history in Huntsman. Upgrading our profitability and cash generation through three major phases over the next two years. Integrating HBS already delivered $25 million of synergies, footprint, commercial synergies, purchasing leverage, and optimizing our logistics. $25 million of synergies delivered today. $40 million through our Project Transcend program, where we've looked at our 34 downstream operations and thought there's a better way of doing that.
We can consolidate, we can streamline, we can get better back-office integration. Of the $40 million we identified there today, we've delivered 26. The 14 will be delivered by the middle of next year. The great thing about that program is it's also giving us a lot of insights into lean manufacturing, into expanding our headroom at very low levels of capital. We think there's a Transcend 2 program here whereby we can deliver a further $60 million by the end of 2023. Exit underperforming market segments and geographies. What do I mean by that? Refrigerators are a great example. Appliances, refrigerators. 100% of all refrigerators in the world now use polyurethane foam. No more fiberglass, no more polystyrene. It's all MDI. We're competing with ourselves. That has become a commodity business, which is driven by supply, demand, and cost.
That is a business we will exit, and we'll use those molecules to feed into Huntsman Building Solutions, where we can generate much higher margins, where the competition is not polyurethane, it's fiberglass, or it is polystyrene, or it's other materials, where we can win in the materials battlefield in urethanes. Realign our organizational structure consistent with that. Put the resources where we can generate the value. Execute variable cost improvement programs, and unlock extra capacity through our lean program. $60 million additional improvement in margin over the next two years from Project Transcend 2. Drive active portfolio management, align resources, and a rigorous focus on managing fixed and variable costs. In totality, polyurethanes will deliver $125 million of portfolio and cost optimization by the end of 2023. No polyurethane presentation would complete without a discussion on MDI utilization rates.
Here's a slide that kind of sets out over the next three years how we see MDI capacity developing. The announced capacity totals around about 1.3 million tons. The vast majority of that being in Asia. Think about the market growing at 5% or 6%. Think about a market now which requires a world-scale MDI plant almost every year to keep pace with growth. Think about the capacity that's been announced that represents 3% growth over the next three years. The market is gonna remain tight. Tight supply and demand, and very balanced. We get asked a lot about our China polymeric MDI position because that is the most commoditized, if you will, of the sales we have. It represents around $400 million of sales. That's less than 10% of our portfolio.
Less than 10% of what we sell is now dictated by the supply and demand conditions in China. Every thousand renminbi move in price that you see in ICIS every week represents around about $50 million of EBITDA impact. What we talked about in America, what we talked about with the Patriot splitter is exactly what we're gonna do in Europe and exactly what we're gonna do in China. We're gonna upgrade those molecules that we sell in the 400 million ton business—$400 million worth of business here, which is very volatile, into building solutions, into spray foam, into applications which are independent of that supply-demand curve that we show in the chart here.
We have a very, very important joint venture in China with Sinopec to make PO/MTBE, and that has had an extremely good year this year because POs remain tight. The dual control energy policy of China has helped us in that respect, and it's tightened up the PO market. This year, we'll earn about $120 million. Next year, in your models, think about that business doing between $80 million-$90 million as PO becomes somewhat longer. It's still a business which will generate a great deal of return for us. In summary, demand conditions for MDI are gonna remain balanced to tight over the next three years.
In conclusion, I believe that next year we will generate somewhere between $875 million and $950 million of EBITDA in polyurethanes at a margin between 18% and 20%. We'll do that three ways. We will upvalue the business through customer solutions, leveraging our splitter technology to increase product differentiation by shifting low-value margin business to high-value, lower volatility applications and upvaluing the earnings on long-term contracts, number one. Number two, boosting our differentiated platforms by growing and globalizing building solutions, by strengthening our global automotive franchise, and by scaling our global elastomers business. Thirdly, we're gonna remain fit and very focused on driving active portfolio management, resource alignment, deselecting of non-performing markets, executing synergies and cost optimization programs, and delivering on a lean low CapEx approach to productivity improvement, driving a rigorous focus on variable and fixed costs.
Ladies and gentlemen, I've had the privilege of working in this industry now for 30 years. This is an industry which is growing, which has got significant tailwinds to its advantage, and where Huntsman has a clear strategy, has the investments already in place to capitalize on that, and has a wonderful team around the world that will execute on our vision. I've never been more confident and more excited about the future of the PU division. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you, Tony. Any questions? Kevin?
Thank you. Kevin McCarthy, Vertical Research Partners. Two questions for you, Tony. First, as it relates to Huntsman Building Solutions, can you talk about the strategy to increase penetration overseas and whether that will be organic strictly, or perhaps you know relate to bolt-on acquisition opportunities or a combination? Then the second question was on automotive. You talked about increasing content per vehicle from 16 kilos, I believe it was, to 25. What is driving that, and what is being displaced? Obviously, the cars aren't getting any heavier. They're getting lighter. So what is the share gain that's occurring for polyurethanes?
Kevin, thank you very much. Let me begin with building solutions. The way that we're growing overseas, and there is a very significant opportunity here in Europe, is through engagement with governments, engagement with industry associations, with architects, with specifiers. Europe at the moment, with the new Green Deal, you know, is investing a significant amount in upgrading insulation across the continent. By working with industry experts and panels to set very high levels of insulation values, this favors spray foam. This favors MDI urethanes as an insulant. We see that as being a major driver. We have the infrastructure in place. You know, we have our downstream operations in Europe and Asia already investing in the technologies and the capabilities to build a spray foam.
I see that as the combination of the two, the push and the pull, being a great opportunity here to expand in Europe and Asia. I think the growth potential is significant, as is the upcyclability of PET bottles. That's always a great door opener with governments who are trying to improve waste efficiency and clean up the rivers and the beaches. To be able to go and talk about the fact that we can take plastic bottles and convert it into spray foam and kill two birds with one stone, if you will, is a very attractive proposition. Countries like U.K., France, Poland are particularly focused on these issues. We see very good inroads, Kevin, into growing this business in Europe and in Asia.
In automotive, the upgrading of the interior there are traditional materials we're displacing. It's metals, you know, metals in the case of of car seats and the frames that go into that, where we can use polyurethane composites and polyureas. Traditional fiber materials where PU foam is both lighter, less dense, and stronger in terms of how it performs. Many different ways of substituting existing materials to get the higher level of performance, light weighting, and safety now the OEMs are demanding. Sustainability is a much bigger issue that we're engaging in now with the OEMs in terms of making the products biorenewable, bio, you know, bio formulas, whether it be using recycled bottles or using bio polyols or even green benzene is something we're looking at. These areas of great interest to the OEMs.
John Roberts, UBS. When you finish the splitter project, how long do you think you can go before your next major capital investment in the business?
John, we've got significant headroom here, both in terms of splitting technology and in terms of crude MDI, because the whole plan here is to sell up, all right? We sold out, we're gonna sell up. We have a base business that's on the chart of polymeric components, which we need to up value and remix into the higher value part of the business. I think we have the headroom, both in terms of crude MDI and in terms of splitting capability in all three sites for at least the next three years.
Frank Mitsch with Fermium Research. The recycling of plastic bottles is obviously very interesting. Can you talk about the infrastructure that you have in place to do that today? You know, what's your growth rate or your trajectory on increasing that business and the confidence level there? Secondly, there is a cadre of investors that suspect that your PU profits will be down in 2022. That is not your expectation. What would have to go wrong in order for that to happen? How concerned are you about the potential that you might not get to flatten out in the PU business next year?
Frank, let me address the first question around PET bottles. We work very closely with waste management companies, where, you know, the challenge is the collection of the bottles. There's plenty of bottles out there. It's getting them collected and sorted, and then for us to process them through our chemical upcycling process. We're doing that in Taiwan now as well. We've opened a TEROL facility in Taipei where a lot of the waste that was going into China has been diverted, and Taiwan have a bigger problem to deal with. We're getting a lot of access to post-consumer recycle in Asia in that respect. We can also use chemical intermediates from polyester plants. That's the other key here.
As well as taking waste streams from the finished product, we can take waste streams from the production process that actually go into manufacturing the polyester polyol. Many different routes by which we're accessing the key raw materials that we need to grow the business. In terms of the second question on the profitability next year, we've been through a number of elements here where we see, you know, greater value creation through the splitter, through HBS, through our global platforms, where we're gonna generate, you know, a significant uplift in profitability. They will more than offset, we believe, you know, the margin compression that we may see in China and parts of Europe if the business, you know, if those economies go sideways over the next 12 months.
Overall, the pluses are gonna outweigh the minuses, and the new projects and the differentiation, the global platforms that we're bringing on stream are gonna be a significant tailwind for this business.
Great.
David?
You gave a 7% number on SPF globally. What do you think that can get to, and what's kind of the evolution of that number? Arun Viswanathan on RBC Capital Markets. Secondly, I guess I was just curious, you also gave a leverage number of $1,000 or RMB 1,000 is $15 million of EBITDA. Is there any similar math we could keep in mind for your other regions? Thanks.
Okay, let me answer the first question regarding the potential for the spray foam insulation. I remember being asked that question when I lived in China 25 years ago. At that time, the penetration, the appliances business was 0. Right? It was polystyrene, it was fiberglass, it was different materials. We estimated that we maybe penetrate that market by 30%-40%. Today, it's 100%. Right? The only insulation that goes into refrigerators today is polyurethane. It's MDI urethane. Why can't that be the same for spray foam? Think big, start small, scale fast. That's our strategy. I believe there's no reason why the vast majority of insulation in homes and commercial buildings can't be spray foam insulation. It's versatile, it's easy to apply, and it's significantly better and more cost-effective than many other insulants available.
I just see tremendous scalability and tailwinds in this business. I go back to those appliances days many years ago, where people questioned just how far can PU go, can MDI go. I'm sorry, the second question is, Yeah. Yeah, it's very, very different because the regional businesses are very different. It's the China is the last bastion of component sales, where a lot of that business goes through traders. It doesn't happen in Europe, it doesn't happen in America. In the U.S., 6% of our available polymeric business is now going through formula contracts, which are related to raw materials, where we have a guaranteed and steady margin, and the rest of the material is being upgraded into HBS. It's a moot point now. In America, we don't sell any spot sales of polymeric MDI, neither do we do in Europe.
It's only China, and that's why we highlighted it, where we're selling components into the open market. Everything else is being upvalued through our downstream network.
There-
Yes.
Josh Silverstein from Wolfe Research. You mentioned between spray foam, the elastomers, the auto platform, it's about $260 million of EBITDA, I guess, 2025 versus 2021. You talked about $125 million of cost improvements. It's $385 million, which is big compared to the $900 million next year. First, I just wanted to know if there are any offsets going against you over the next few years as well. Then as you're looking forward, how much visibility do you have on these three different growth platforms here versus what you're making some assumptions on?
Well, I think the offsets we've talked about, and there's gonna be an offset next year, we think on PO/MTBE in China. There's gonna be some offsets on, you know, on the components we do sell until we can upvalue those components. But I think in the rest of the business, it's now gonna be something Peter said earlier on, it's up to us now to execute this program. It's in our hands to execute on that. I think that, you know, I think the potential is clear in terms of where we have to go and how we execute that. A lot of those savings and uplifts, again, are in our control. They're fixed costs, they're margin improvement, they're available cost improvements on the formulations.
I'm, you know, feeling very confident in the projections we've made here and the programs we have in place to deliver that.
Tony, hi. Dave Begleiter, Deutsche Bank. In your higher value-added products, what's the pricing strategy in the non-contract portion of the business? Basically, how much pricing can you retain if and when raws do roll over in that portion of the business?
Yeah, I think the, you know, I think we've seen tremendous pricing power this year, particularly last quarter. Our average prices are up more quarter-over-quarter than they have been. What's been holding us back are the headwinds in raw materials and energy. At some point, we'll be through those. The true test of the stickability of those prices will come in those downstream businesses when raws come down, and we hold on to those margins, the price increases we've got through. I'm very confident we're gonna see that happen, I don't know, maybe from the middle of next year onwards. I believe that those price increases we put through will hold in the vast majority of the segments we operate in because we're selling solution. We're a solution provider rather than components.
You know, the ingredients and the technologies and the effects that those formulations provide are irreplaceable. In many cases, we're the only ones providing them. That gives me confidence that once we see the, you know, the benefit of raws and energy coming down, that we'll truly see the strength of this portfolio.
Any other questions? Oh, one more.
I'll just slide in with one last one, I guess. It's Matthew DeYoe from Bank of America. Tony, if I just think higher level about the transition at Huntsman, right? You're increasing your go-to-market strategy as a compounder and formulator, and less so as a seller of commodity products, right? We were talking about this for Performance Products. The transition there is pretty clear. Even Peter earlier referenced, you know, H.B. Fuller as a peer. But H.B. Fuller doesn't have a significant upstream fixed cost base, and the Performance Products business doesn't have this anymore. As we saw last year, that fixed cost base can drive some pretty significant volatility in your margins.
Now, 2Q is a bit of an anomaly, but how do you think about the need for the upstream MDI footprint for the business model, particularly if you're pushing for more dependability and ultimately maybe a better multiple?
That is a great question. It's one that we think an awful lot about in polyurethanes. Those upstream assets provide a guaranteed, reliable, high quality, low-cost route for crude MDI. All right? The technology and the uplift comes below that in terms of the splitting of the downstream operations. We looked at this very closely through things like the Building Solutions business and whether we integrate and how we integrate. We think that that upstream integration is worth between 500 and 700 basis points in terms of improved profitability. I think to have that reliable supply, that connection, you know, many of our competitors in Building Solutions have not been able to get the key raw materials they need to grow. Great thing about Building Solutions is guaranteed what it needs in terms of MDI and polyols.
That vertical integration we have in China, in Europe, and America has been very helpful to do that. You know, I believe we have we have some great assets upstream which are, you know, through our lean manufacturing and knowledge we're developing, we can operate those in a low CapEx environment. I think the Patriot splitter was the last big investment we make on those units over the next few years to maximize the upside, the profitability of our downstream strategy. You know, right now, I'm feeling pretty good about those upstream assets. I think they serve us well. I think we run them well. I think they're low cost. And we've got real expertise over the last 50 years on how to operate MDI upstream assets.
Great. Thanks a lot, Tony.
Thank you very much.
Well, I'm sorry to report that our Divisional President, Rohit Aggarwal, came down with COVID about two weeks ago, and he seemingly was doing better. He ended up in hospital in Singapore, and he hasn't been able to get clearance to leave Singapore. It came down to drawing straws between Ivan and me giving Textile Effects. Rather than losing and spending a weekend in Cleveland, his hometown, in January, here I am. This is gonna be a very short presentation on Textile Effects. To help give a more complete and comprehensive outline of it, I'd like to show you a very brief video.
It's the last video, by the way, that you'll be seeing from us and one that I think gives a good outline of the business here. We think about this business, we think about the apparel industry, roughly 70%, actually closer to probably about 75% if you take into account PPE and the protective clothing for law enforcement, military, and fire protection. This is a business that is, as you continue to see the recovery of the retail apparel industry, it's gonna continue to improve. 60+% of the business is in Asia. Want to just remind you this was a Swiss company, and we bought it shifting over to Asia. We believe that we're the most global and we're the most differentiated in the chemical textiles industry.
Remind you that our industry, Huntsman Textile Effects, is both the color that you all are wearing and the treatment that you all are wearing as well. If you're wearing something that's wrinkle-resistant, stain-resistant, fire-resistant, whatever, that's it also goes with home furnishings and automobile and so forth. So it's both the color and the fabrics. Customers are gonna be looking for functionality. They're gonna be looking for feel. They're gonna be looking for color. We believe we lead in this area. In the area of sustainability, again, think of what's going through right now in the area of brands. You think of what Ralph Lauren or many of these customers back here along this line, virtually every one of them are hitting the retail, talking about what they're doing to have a more transparent supply chain and a more environmentally friendly.
Used to be a few years ago, you talk to any of these customers, and they say, "Yeah, we buy all of our materials out of a broker out of Hong Kong." Now they're taking accountability, they're taking responsibility for it, and they're specifying more often than not the use of Huntsman Textile Effects. We look at the overall growth. We've seen, again, about a GDP sort of growth with this as we see the growth that now is starting to take place with a number of the brands and so forth, better than 8, 9, 10% growth in this area, again, being driven by accountability, being driven by sustainability. We just remind you that this is a business that we purchased for less than working capital, quite a few years ago.
It was losing about $70 million of EBITDA at the time, shortly after the purchase of this business. We've continued to grow this business better than GDP. We've continued to grow the earnings of this business better than GDP. We've continued over the last decade to grow the specialty side of the business, the differentiated side of the business. It's almost twice the rate of GDP. We think that the business is gonna continue to be a very strong business, and it's gonna be a business that will require very little capital and will be generating about 55%+ cash to EBITDA.
As we think about longer term, the business over the course of the next year to 2 years, we believe this is going to be getting to a mid-teens sort of an EBITDA to sales sort of a number, making that $110 million. Again, that's pretty close to where the business was in its peak in 2017, 2018. Remind you that 2018, 2019, we saw the effects of trade wars and COVID starting to diminish on the earnings.
Seeing the effects of COVID since that time in 2020 on the retail end, and we've seen a nice bounce back with the business coming very close to operating at that $100 million EBITDA rate on an annualized basis as we start looking at some of the better quarters that we think we'll be repeating these quarters more often than not during 2022. With that, any questions? Recognize I said a lot there. David.
Peter, is this business core to Huntsman?
Is this business core? It is core so long as we have the business. I would be less than honest if I told you that we have not been in discussions more than once with the divestiture of this business. If we find somebody that will put a higher value on this than we do, I don't wanna comment on where we presently are with this business as far as that goes. Look, while we have it, we're gonna take care of it, we're gonna fund it, we're gonna make sure the business is capable of seeing that continued growth. This business will provide, I think in the future, a real opportunity for somebody to consolidate and really focus and perhaps focus on that entire supply chain.
That, David, is just frankly not in our focus right now. I'm as tactfully as I can saying that, we've had discussions. We may well continue to have discussions. If we look at our overall portfolio and the balancing of that portfolio, this will obviously be something that we'll continue to review. I would just want to note, and as Phil is making his way up here to stand beneath the two flightless Liver Birds of Liverpool, I wanna make sure that what I said about share buybacks in my earlier presentation. We're committed to at least $1 billion over the course of the next three years.
It's a combination of the $1 billion that is part of our overall program that's been approved by our board of directors, plus the additional revenues that we expect to be earning over the course of the next 18 months. I say 18 months because we said 12 months after the payments are made. Second payment tranche will be made 6 months from now. We see that as being additive to the $1 billion, but not within that 3-year time period. Again, I'm trying to set expectations. I hope that there's an opportunity for us to put it all into that 3-year period, but I suspect at the end of that 3-year period, what more we have, we'll be trying to buy that in, as it makes sense to do so. I just wanted to clarify that.
I hope I've done that sufficiently, Phil, for you. Okay. Very well. To conclude, our presentation today, Mr. Phil Lister.
Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon, everyone. Let's take 15 minutes now to cover the financial overview. As we've said today, I think we have a much more differentiated portfolio than we had if you go back 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, 10 years. That differentiated portfolio has changed through multiple divestments. From our perspective, the one major divestment, which occurred in quarter three of 2019, really transformed the overall portfolio. Selling that business to Indorama really focused the remainder of the portfolio from a differentiated standpoint. You can see on the chart here as we moved through COVID and dipped through from a margin perspective in quarter two of last year. Then we've seen a strong recovery from an EBITDA margin perspective and overall from a total EBITDA standpoint.
At the end of quarter three on an LTM perspective, we were at $1.2 billion of EBITDA, approximately 16% EBITDA margins. As we said today, we're guiding as we move through into 2022 to approximately $1.4 billion of EBITDA and an improvement in EBITDA margins to 17%. We're not satisfied with that. We're very focused on improving those margins as we go through 2023 and 2024 into that target range of 18%-20%, targeting at a minimum 100 basis points per annum to get to those levels. Other key metric that we talked about is obviously our free cash flow conversion. If you look back at the time period from 2017 through 2020, Huntsman had a free cash flow conversion of approximately 42%-43% per annum.
We talked on our Q3 earnings call about where we were in 2021. Approximately 20%, the headwinds from working capital that many chemical companies have gone through this year, which would be approximately $300 million-$350 million, and the targeted capital expenditure investments that we've made, particularly the Geismar splitter in polyurethanes, which have meant that our CapEx is at $350 million this year. We're extremely confident of returning in 2022 and beyond to 40%+ free cash flow conversions. There's some indication on the right for your modeling. The reduced movement in working capital in 2022, approximately $300 million-$350 million of headwinds in 2021. Reduced CapEx of approximately $50 million.
We've got some lower interest costs from the refinancing and retirement of debt that we talked about earlier this year. Obviously, there'll be an increase in tax, cash taxes, given the improved performance in 2021. Think about that of approximately $75 million. You'll all recall in quarter two of 2021 when we had a significant turnaround program at our Rotterdam facility in the Netherlands, which is approximately $40 million of maintenance T&I spend, which will not occur in 2022. If you add that all up, combine that with the guidance we gave for free cash flow 2021, we're confident of achieving in 2022 that 40% free cash flow conversion. In terms of other details, consider pension and restructuring at similar levels in 2022 versus 2021, talked about our synergy and cost optimization program.
talked about it in quarter three, and we talked about it a number of times during the course of today. Bottom left is our in-progress initiatives. We talked in quarter three about the fact that our target was originally $120 million. We increased that to $140 million on our Q3 earnings call. That combined with site optimization in polyurethanes, we also initiated for the first time a global business service model with a hub in Kuala Lumpur, which reduced our cost base overall. We've had a number of strategic purchasing as well as divisional cost out programs. That targeted program, originally $120 million, now $140 million. Today, in addition, we've announced another $100 million. Tony has talked about the $60 million in polyurethanes.
Beyond that, we will expand our global business services program, and that will add another $25 million of savings by the end of 2023. In addition to that, we also have a supply chain optimization program looking at improving gross profits and also, crucially, and not up here, improving our net working capital by approximately $40 million in 2022. All in, we're now looking at an entire program of $240 million, hitting that full run rate as we go into 2024, improving our margins, improving the overall profitability of the company. Just wanna address cost. We talked about this on our last earnings call. We're looking at SG&A and the focus that we have there. This chart shows the number of competitor peers, capital market peers, and where Huntsman stands.
We fully recognize that SG&A is a key component of ensuring that we improve our overall profitability and those margins towards 18%-20% overall. Last twelve months, we're at 11%. Full year, 2021, we'll be at 10%. We're not satisfied with that. If you take the SG&A improvements from the previous cost programs, we have another $50 million of savings on SG&A, where we will focus on driving that percentage down more, improving our overall EBITDA to sales. Talked about the balance sheet, so let's turn to that. Peter showed this slide earlier. On the left-hand side, just very clearly, we spent from 2006 through 2017 focused on debt reduction, $3.6 billion. Our focus was getting the balance sheet in shape such that we hit investment grade. That's what we did.
Between 2018 and 2021, we've now had a much more balanced approach to returning cash to shareholders and also putting cash into M&A. If you look on the very right-hand side, $1.3 billion of cash returned to shareholders, $1.4 billion of cash into M&A. You've heard a lot about those different acquisitions that we've made over the last three to four years, bolt-on acquisitions, enhancing our portfolios in Polyurethanes and in Advanced Materials. Talk about M&A and our acquisition criteria that we have and the disciplined approach that we've been taking over the last three to four years. Talked about the focus we have from a divisional standpoint on the right-hand side. Polyurethanes, it's about expanding where it makes sense, where it is affordable, our Huntsman Building Solutions portfolio.
In advanced materials, Scott talked about the acquisitions we made in CVC and in Gabriel, enhancing our overall portfolio in composites, coatings, and adhesives. That focus and those assessments will continue. What must acquisitions have? Cost synergies, obviously. HBS, when we acquired those businesses, we consolidated sites. We drove the cost down. Technology synergies. When we acquired Gabriel and CVC, we acquired new technologies which were additive, curing agents, toughness, which allowed us to go to market with a more holistic package and generate more value. Tony's talked about scalability and commercial expansion. The previous private equity owners of those bolt-on acquisitions were not able to, because they didn't have the network, to expand beyond North America. We've been able to take those technologies and that business, expand beyond North America, as Tony indicated on spray foam, grow geographically.
What acquisitions must have when we look at them? Financial profile, high EBITDA margins. CVC and Gabriel, both above 20% EBITDA margins. High free cash flow with low capital intensity. HBS does not require lots of new reactors. To expand HBS, you might just need to add one shift of workers. It's low capital intensity, high free cash flow conversion. How do we look at IRRs? On a risk-adjusted basis, we look at making sure there's a clear premium above our weighted average cost of capital. You can look at that and think about that from a 14%-15% IRR basis. We get that multiples are high right now. They have a very disciplined approach. Preserving our investment-grade balance sheet is key, making sure that we remain less than 2x levered net debt to EBITDA.
As Peter said earlier, what does that mean in terms of the size of bolt-ons? You can think about those bolt-on acquisitions being of similar size, less than $500 million, and similar size to the acquisitions that we've done over the last 3 to 4 years. We think we've been doing it. We think we've been disciplined in our approach. This slide here shows those acquisitions up at the top. Five acquisitions ranging from $100 million to $350 million. At Sasol, Huntsman, Maleic JV doesn't get a lot of attention. Today, that's a 4x multiple. The other acquisitions up to $350 million, building on spray and building on our advanced materials business. In total, $1.4 billion of acquisitions since 2018.
By 2023, we'll have delivered over $200 million of adjusted EBITDA related to those acquisitions at greater than an average of 20% margins. Crucially for us, that implies a less than 7x multiple on those acquisitions. We look at that, and we understand that shareholders look at that given where trading multiples lie. We've never stopped still in deciding whether we are the best owner of assets, whether that be Venator, the deal that we did with Indorama, or if you look at the divestment that we made just last year to Pidilite in India. That was a business-to-consumer business which ultimately Huntsman was not going to grow substantially more compared to a company like Pidilite. We sold it, and we sold it for 15x and made significant value from that.
We also ensure that we generate shareholder cash by looking at our operations around the world. We've talked about areas where we've closed down facilities. We've also taken a number of choices to gain cash from businesses and sites where we can sell land and also do sale and lease backs of office space. You can see there in Basel, in Switzerland, where we generated over $120 million of cash for the company over the last two years. As we said, we're continuing to evaluate the portfolio on a regular basis to improve shareholder return and keep ourselves extremely disciplined in this approach. Discipline doesn't stop there from a perspective of managing our organic fixed capital as well as our working capital. Left-hand side, talked about $350 million of capital expenditure spend in 2021.
We'll be down to $300 million in 2022. Think about that from a modeling perspective. 60% of that $300 million will be on growth projects. Chuck talked about a number of those in his presentation on Performance Products. We'll complete the splitter. We'll invest in MIRALON. 60% always looking at a risk-adjusted IRR in excess of 20%. 20% of our capital is mandatory. It's licensed to operate. We have to do it from an environmental perspective and a safety perspective, ensuring that our plants operate reliably and safely. Then think about reliability in terms of renewals and renewal maintenance. It's about 20% of that remainder of that portfolio. Just to be clear, whenever we look at maintenance, we're not looking just to replace in kind.
We look very carefully from a risk assessment perspective as to whether when we replace parts, whether we can up value the overall business quality. Right-hand side, working capital. A lot of focus there. Headwinds in an absolute manner for most chemical companies, certainly for Huntsman in 2021. We focus on days and the percentage of working capital that we hold in inventory. That has come down significantly from 2017. We're at 19% in 2017. Our estimate for 2021, net working capital for sales is 15%. We intend to target approximately 15% on a go-forward basis. I mentioned earlier a supply chain optimization program. You can assume that we deliver on that, take out $40 million of net working capital next year, which has the impact of approximately 50 basis points on our net working capital to sales.
The capital allocation priorities. Top left, we've talked about the $300 million of capital expenditures. Top right, we talked extensively about our bolt-on acquisitions and our acquisition criteria. Bottom left on dividends, we raised our dividend this year by 15%. Since 2016, we raised our dividend overall by 50%. We will continue to look and ensure that we are paying an attractive, competitive dividend. Today, the yield is approximately 2.2%-2.3% at our current market capitalizations. In the bottom right, we've said at a minimum, we'll be doing approximately $160 million of share buybacks every single year. I wanna be clear about that. In 2022, here's what you can assume.
From a shareholder return of capital perspective, $160 million minimum of share buybacks. Add to that what Peter talked about from an Albemarle litigation perspective. In 2022, you can assume net of taxes will be an additional approximately $160 million from the Albemarle case devoted to share buybacks. Add in your dividends of another $160 million, you have close to half a billion dollars of shareholder return at a minimum in 2022. That equates to approximately 7% return of capital to shareholders. That's from a minimum perspective. As we've said, if we generate, assuming the economy continues to recover, assuming Huntsman delivers effectively on its free cash flow targets, you can assume that we get through that share buyback program within three years.
All of this is assuming we maintain an investment grade balance sheet, and we will not go over 2x debt to EBITDA, net debt to EBITDA. We think today we presented a compelling investment opportunity for our shareholders. We do believe that we are significantly undervalued as a corporation. We recognize that it's a combination of portfolio transformation as well as demonstrating EBITDA performance, improvement in EBITDA margin, and delivery on our free cash flow targets to get that recognition in the marketplace. We're up-valuing the portfolio with a very balanced and disciplined approach to our financial discipline, and we're also paying a competitive dividend and doing a number of share buybacks over the next three years.
Strong cash flow generation, we've guided you today to approximately $1.4 billion in 2022, improved EBITDA margins and delivery of free cash flow back to above 40%. Again, not satisfied with that as we move forward, we're very focused on targeting that 18%-20% EBITDA margin range. Thank you for your time, and I believe we're now gonna head to Q&A to wrap up. Ivan?
Do general Q&A.
Hey, Phil, Mike Sison, Wells Fargo. I know Liverpool's colors are red, and I appreciate the orange and the Cleveland pictures there. I'm wondering if Ivan converted you to be more of a Browns fan than a Liverpool fan. The real question is, a lot of companies, Phil, will talk about in order for them to do acquisitions, they want the deals to be more accretive than buying back their stock. When I think about your 15%, if you just simply buy back your stock, is that return higher than that? How much more difficult is it for you to do acquisitions if you think about that as the criteria?
Yeah. I'll comment. First of all, Ivan has not converted me to a Cleveland Browns fan, and that is a good thing. Thank you for the question, Mike. Look, we think our stock is a compelling buy right now. We're obviously coming out in terms of our share buyback and the focus that we have there. We also think that M&A right now is at lofty multiples. Over the next three years, Mike, we would still expect that over that three-year period, we can do both share buybacks and also find the right bolt-on acquisitions at the right level to enhance the business overall. Right now, we think we're undervalued, we think there's headroom there from a buyback perspective, and we think it's an attractive proposition. Peter?
Well said. Well said.
Peter, Edlain Rodriguez from Jefferies. Peter, over the past several investor days, the underlying theme has been very similar. Portfolio transformation, differentiated products, but yet the multiple doesn't reflect those positives. One, like how frustrated are you, or are you frustrated about that? And two, like why do you think the message is not resonating?
I think the message is I would—I guess I'd look at a different perspective of that. I think if you look at our multiple versus some of the peers that we've put up here, you know, we said in 2018 that we eventually wanted to get to a Dow multiple. We listed a couple of other companies up there as well. I think that we've exceeded those multiples today. In years past, I think that we were highly dependent on highly cyclical commodity-oriented businesses. We no longer have those. I think you've heard a general theme today around what is in our control and what we have the ability to do. I think that those are all changes and very compelling. We have sold off 40% of our business.
We bought back roughly 15% the size of our business in recent acquisitions, and we're gonna continue to do that, going into the future. I think that this industry rewards you for accomplishment, for getting things done. I think that a good plan and a good presentation like this maybe lay some of the groundwork, but until you accomplish it, I don't think that you see a great deal in the stock. I think that we have started to see that turnaround. I think that we trade at a better multiple than some of our more commoditized peers. We'd like to continue to move aggressively forward, not backwards in that area. Am I frustrated? Nah. I've always Look, if a CEO I think ever got up and said, "They can't do any more.
Happy is where we are. No place to go," obviously it's time to retire. I see a great deal of improvement here, a great deal of places that we need to be going, and I see that we're going there. I'm less frustrated today merely because of the fact that we're in better control of our portfolio, and we're in better control as to controlling our destiny. That's not to say that we're not going to be impacted by overcapacities. It's not to say that we're not gonna be impacted by economic vicissitudes and downturns. Like any other company, we'll be subject to those, but I think far less so than we would've been, even just two years ago.
Peter, John Roberts from UBS. Does the PO/MTBE JV with Sinopec have any strategic value, or is it just hard to get value trying to exit a JV with Sinopec?
I think, John, we continue to get a lot of value. We account for that off-balance sheet accounting on that like any other company, Celanese or other companies do. We think that that's a very compelling joint venture for us. We utilize that propylene oxide further downstream in growing our businesses in China. We see that as a compelling joint venture. Now, is it as important as, you know, the future of MIRALON or some of the other things that we've put out there? I'm not. Again, as long as we have it, I'd say that it's a very compelling joint venture to us. I think that it is a key to our growth, and it's an asset that we're glad that we have.
Hi, Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners. Peter, you talked a little bit about your M&A approach, and it really sounds like there is a discipline around that. Looking at the hurdle rates around capital investments that you're requiring for risk-adjusted IRR, it sounds like there's a real discipline that's been put in place there as well. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about how your approach to capital discipline or capital investments has evolved over the past few years. Then a second question around the repurchases. Obviously, you've laid out a lot of opportunities, and at least directionally, things should be getting a lot better over the course of the coming few years. Why are we doing the share repurchases so gradually?
Given kind of where interest rates are right now, why not accelerate those share repurchases to do that now rather than doing it over the course of three years? Thank you.
Very, very good question. I think that the rate that we're purchasing our shares today, that deployment of capital, again, we've set some minimal standards as to where we want to be, that $40 million per quarter. As we look at what we did this past quarter, at $100 million, $102 million of share buybacks, I don't want people to think that we have no intention of going over that $40 million per quarter. I don't wanna stand up here and say we're gonna do something that we don't feel confident in being able to deliver. I do, though, think that there's this you saw in my presentation kind of four areas of dividends, internal expansion, M&A, and share buybacks.
Right now, the industry certainly has us the advantage on a share buyback basis. I would remind you that previous to COVID, we bought back roughly $600 million worth of shares, and we've reinitiated that this past quarter. I think it's pretty consistent. I think the size of deals that we're doing, you know, I think that it's been since 2017, yeah, 4 or 5 years that we've had a deal that was much over $300-$400 million. I'm not up here saying that this is anything new. I'm up here more saying that we're gonna continue doing what we're doing and having that disciplined capital.
Our priority up until 2018, 2019 was to pay down debt, to have a stronger balance sheet, was to get that investment-grade rating. We've got it from two of the three rating agencies, and I hope that we'll be getting it from the third in the not too distant future. It's more up to them than up to us. I'm not sure how we can improve much on our balance sheet. As we look at these opportunities, I think that what we're saying up here more than anything else is that we're going to continue to look at that adjustment in those four areas. Right now, for the foreseeable quarters ahead of us, we feel that share buyback is going to be the best deployment of capital.
We're going to be aggressive in this area.
Arun Viswanathan, RBC. I mean, I had a very similar question, but I guess I'll ask about, you know, textiles. You mentioned that, you know, it could potentially not be core through your discussions. Would you consider something like a JV there or anything to monetize that a little bit quicker? And then secondly, would you also consider potentially a leverage recap? You know, you're well under your 2x target. You could potentially take on a turn of leverage and accelerate the share purchase that way. Just curious if those creative solutions would be something you'd consider.
Yes and no. I mean, yeah, so I mean, look, we've had discussions, and I don't want something to come out about TE that would contradict anything we've said. We've looked at an outright sale. We've looked at joint venture arrangements. Frankly, they either had too much risk in going forward or the values just weren't there. Or we had a rosier view of the future than a prospective buyer had. I think that our results in this business speak for themselves. Somebody took a thing back in a discussion we had a couple years back, they, the business has exceeded both their expectations and our expectations.
I think that will continue to do that, so I don't believe in undervaluing or underselling an asset. But again, I wanna be clear, there's not an open process there, but I think I have been very open in the past just saying that, at the right values, you know, we'll look at any number of value propositions.
Frank Mitsch from Fermium Research. One of the early slides had a comment about hydrogen being turquoise. I was aware of gray, green and blue. Is that a Huntsman invention or do I now need to, you know, look at the whole color gamut to figure out what hydrogens are? But more specifically, what percent of the times would your business unit presidents, Scott, Tony and Chuck say they spend on M&A today versus what they may have spent on M&A pre-pandemic? Has the time devoted to looking at potential targets gone up, stayed the same? How would you rank that?
I think that the time of those individuals would be low single digit. Typically, if somebody would approach them, some of these are going to be offensive in areas of polyurethanes. We'll typically be looking and speaking with our own customers, family-run, privately held businesses and enterprises. As you all know, Frank, it's usually the second generation that comes in and screws up a business. We're looking for those sort of opportunities there. You know, that may be a reference that we hear something, and we'll take it corporate, if you will. One of the hats that Phil wears is also around corporate development. Ivan works with this area, and we'll cannibalize other areas in finance and work with that.
Personally, I don't want Scott and Tony and Rohit and Chuck to be spending their time going out and trying to negotiate a deal. Working in the due diligence part of that, fine. Working in where we can have synergies, fine. That's not it. It's really I'd much rather them be focused on delivering the results up here around uplifting prices and so forth. You all well know, we get plenty of opportunities that come to us through third parties and everything else. Again, we'll also look internally with our own customers, where we have found some of our better acquisitions. Smaller, very small acquisitions, usually the better acquisitions. The color on the horizon.
You know, I'm a huge believer in sustainability and all that stuff, but it's just so much just doesn't make any sense to me. As you look around it, you know, I read recently a Bloomberg report saying now categorizing rare earth mining as a green investment. Imagine that, rare earth mining in places where they have zero environmental controls, where they have child labor, forced labor. This is now considered to be green investments. It's just. I look at if we really wanna try to get the cleanest gas in the world, we'd be making it here in the United States where it's regulated. You go to jail if you break the laws.
It's just a lot of what we're doing is just fast backwards. I won't get into that because we haven't the time. Kevin.
Kevin McCarthy, Vertical Research Partners. You know, Peter, if I look at the last 18 months, we've seen tremendous destruction of supply across the chemicals industry, whether it's the pandemic itself or multiple hurricane seasons or Winter Storm Uri. In that context, I think some investors are concerned that as supply normalizes, so too will prices and margins. In listening to your presentation today, it doesn't seem as though you feel like you're overearning in very many businesses. I think Tony called out some premium earnings in China in the polyurethanes business. I guess my question would be, as you look at the portfolio holistically, is that fair to say that you believe you're at a normalized level here that will grow reliably over the next three years?
Are there other examples where you feel you're overearning today, but it's simply the case that we're going to overcome it, based on all the initiatives that you've outlined resulting in the net growth? How would you frame that out?
It's a very, very good question, Kevin. There are three issues in this industry that typically destroy profitability and margins, and one of those is going to be a slower economy. The other one's gonna be overcapacity of new capacity coming in. Third is just stupid management decisions, where managements will ofttimes decide we're gonna go after volume instead of value, and they'll do whatever they have to. We've seen that in some of the recent businesses that we've gotten out of. That's one of the reasons why I felt compelled to get out of it. No matter what you do, you feel like you're just always in quicksand.
I think that as you look at this industry, by and large, especially the products that we're in, I don't ever want to discount the vicissitudes of the broader economy. As I look at the weather events, freezing events and so forth, this industry is getting, in many ways, more consolidated. There are fewer and fewer mega sites. You look at these new MDI plants that are being built, 400,000-600,000 metric ton lines that are being built. When one of those lines go down, it literally has an impact on the entire industry. We're seeing that in more and more products, more and more sites.
If a Freeport, Texas or a Geismar, Louisiana or one of these mega sites go down, it not just puts that down, but it reverberates through the industry. Look at the oil and gas industry. We're reliant today on fewer refineries than at any time in our history, North America and in Europe. It's not just a question of if the weather's getting worse. It's just that when you do have a weather impact, it not just affects that certain area, but it'll have a tendency to impact everything from Pascagoula down to Texas City along that entire supply corridor. I think the industry itself structurally is changing. I'm sorry for getting into too much detail here, but I think the industry itself is structurally changing.
You look at the time, you look at the expense, you look at the permitting processes, and so forth. Why hasn't there been a grassroots MDI facility built in North America now for 20-some-odd years, 30-some-odd years? Are we ever going to see another one built in North America? INEOS tried it, and they spent $ millions and years. Covestro's talked about it and got near, and they back off. I'm not saying that'll never happen. Just saying we're kind of moving into a different environment, where one of the biggest curses of this industry was overcapacity. I've always used to say as well, the time to start worrying in this industry is when you say the industry's learned a lesson, and we're never gonna overbuild. That's not what I'm saying.
I am saying that there are some, you know, the time it used to take to permit and build a line was 1-2, 2.5 years. You're looking to build now, to be competitive, a much larger line, much larger capital outlay. Barriers to entry certainly are going up, and it takes much, much longer. It takes us as much time today in the state of Texas to permit that $30 million expansion in our carbonates business. It takes as much time to get the permits to break the ground as it does to build the entire facility. I mean, when you look at your investment opportunity, and you weigh the risk-adjusted basis and so forth.
Sorry, we're getting drastic here, but as you look at some of these, it's gonna put a higher value on those competitive assets that you have. I think as we look across the business, barring a hard downward economic cycle, we look at the capacities in amines, maleic anhydride, MDI. You look at what's being added or not added in advanced materials, epoxies and formulations, so forth. I just don't see a lot of capacity that's being added. You have more so than you did in past years. Instead of a 12- to 18-month kind of runway, you now have multiple years, 2- to 3-, 4 years. In the case of MDI, according to Covestro, and I don't have any reason to doubt them, 5- to 7 years, sort of a runway.
I think that they're just some of those dynamics that are changing. They're going to give the industry a little bit greater clarity. That was a long answer, I'm sorry. We'll just-
Any other questions? All right, great.
Very well. Thank you all very much for taking the time to join us today. Thank you.