Good day, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this morning's call on KBR Technology, a perspective on hydrogen infrastructure investment. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Jerry Revich. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. I'm Jerry Revich from Goldman Sachs, and on behalf of Michele Della Vigna, Head of European Energy and Carbonomics Research, along with Ashok Mohan, we're thrilled to welcome the KBR executive team responsible for the company's hydrogen strategy. We have with us Doug Kelly, President of Technology Solutions; Ben Soffer, Vice President of Global Advisory; Mark Sopp, Executive Vice President and CFO; Alison Vasquez, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you so much for joining us.
On behalf of the company, Jerry, from KBR's perspective, thank you for hosting this, and we're really pleased to be with you. Thanks for making it happen today, Jerry.
Our pleasure, Mark. We are required to make certain disclosures in public appearances about Goldman Sachs' relationships with companies that we discuss. The disclosures relate to investment banking relationships, compensation received, or one percent or more ownership. We're prepared to read aloud disclosures for any issuer upon request. However, these disclosures are available in our most recent reports available to U.S. clients on our firm portals. Disclosures and updates to those disclosures are available by ticker on the firm's public website at gs.com/research/strategy.html. This conversation is not intended for the media and is off the record. Now, with the legal portion of our programming out of the way, we have 50 minutes of management introductory remarks to be followed by Q&A. If anyone has any questions they would like us to cover, please submit them via the webcast or email Michele or me. With that, Mark, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Jerry, thank you. Thanks to Goldman Sachs for hosting the event today. We're super pleased to be here. One more legal matter is, please pay appropriate attention to our forward-looking statement in the materials presented, and trust you'll do that. I'm really pleased to have two real world-leading experts with me today in the field that we're talking about, with Doug and Ben. So they are the stars of the show. I'm just going to say a couple things up front here on KBR holistically, then I'll turn the floor over to Doug. Just to give you an idea of KBR, onto slide three, please. I'll kind of move left to right here. Big picture, KBR delivers science, technology, and engineering solutions to governments and companies around the world. From a scale perspective, we're about $6 billion in annual revenue. We are a people company.
We have about 30,000 really smart people who inspire both us and our customers every day and make our customers successful, using very specialized skill set and time-tested domain expertise. That's a really big deal for us. We couple that with innovative technology, particularly in the area we're talking about today. The one way our people are very special, and I think this is a differentiator, is they are truly operationally focused. We have boots on the ground in all of our businesses. We truly understand the end user environment, their needs, and we cater our solutions to meet them, and consistently have done so for decades and decades. About two years ago, we narrowed our strategic focus to these four vectors that you see here.
While we do a lot of other things, these are our growth vectors, and sustainable technologies is indeed one of them, and we've been working on that for some time, as you'll hear today. I will add, there are quite a bit of synergies across our government and our technology business relative to all of these, but particularly in sustainable technology. Clearly, governments have the mandate for more sustainable solutions, as do commercial enterprises. We have great installed base and access to all of the above. Moving more toward the middle, we are positioned in attractive markets where we do offer innovative, digitally enabled solutions, and increasingly so. We serve customer-critical programs and projects. Many of those programs and projects span many years, and they therefore offer profit and cash flow streams for many years, and that offers the business quite a bit of predictability and stability.
One indicator of that is we have met our expectations from a budget and street perspective for just about four years now. That is a consequence of having this focus on attractive low-risk markets and the transformation and execution we have gone through over the years. We do have a proven track record, again, over many decades, of being able to consistently deliver for our clients. We use our know-how, we use our domain expertise, and we also use quite a bit of proprietary intellectual property, and we do so in some of the world's most challenging environments, like space. These clients are blue-chip clients across the board, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.K. Ministry of Defence, other governments, and of course, some of the most well-recognized industrial companies in the world. On the right there, our investment thesis is quite straightforward.
We do serve attractive growth markets with high-end professional solutions and also technologies that offer healthy and consistent margins and cash flow, and we've demonstrated that with our performance. Our business is low capital intensity across the board. As such, we have attractive deployable cash flow capacity. Our leverage is well in check, we do intend to deploy excess capital through a combination of M&A and returning capital to shareholders over time. On the bottom right there, we are balanced across these five main areas of our business on the pie chart. We are primarily government-focused. Those are the areas denoted in the dark blue.
We view the technology business that we're talking about today as a kicker, as an additive component to this portfolio, which offers really exciting and sticky growth, and is focused on the new economy and the circular economy focused on sustainability. With the same low capital intensity and low risk attributes as our government business, but with higher margins and really exciting growth prospects that we'll talk about here. With that, happy to turn it over to Doug to tell you more about these offerings and our exciting future here. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Mark. I'll just dive right in. We see energy transition as really driving towards a net zero carbon future. What does that mean for us? It really means that there's more and more of a focus on the hydrogen element of the zero-carbon future. We see that market being a tremendous growth opportunity and a market opportunity for us. Both our numbers and numbers we've received from the Hydrogen Council indicate 10% or greater CAGR over between now and 2050. This strong momentum is really part of all of the major companies around the world's strategies. We see Google, we see Microsoft, we see the global oil majors, BP, Shell, and ExxonMobil, all making commitments towards net zero. KBR ourselves, we have a commitment to net zero carbon by 2030, and we achieved carbon neutrality by 2019.
There's a strong commitment, strong momentum in that area. If you look at the right side of the slide on the KBR Technology Solutions, you see that the very top hexagon has energy transition. We see this as really a fundamental market change that's far-reaching and lasting. You see the other hexagons around that, it's not just energy transition, but how can some of the other capabilities within Technology Solutions support our energy transition move initiatives? One is digital solutions, being able to use those to decrease energy for existing units. We see new disruptive technologies, which I'll come back again, and we'll hear Ben talk about thought leadership and domain expertise in this area. Really around disruptive technologies, which is part of the business that I'm most focused on.
If you read our press release just last week, we announced a partnership with Mura to supply a mixed plastics recycling technology. We feel like this is a unique and differentiated technology that will make a significant impact on the plastic circular economy. We're also exploring and developing additional biofuels and carbon utilization technologies. Even in traditional markets like refining, we're looking at better bottom-of-the-barrel solutions and technologies and rolling those out, along with our catalytic olefins technologies, which are critical to producing the petrochemicals for the products we use every day. We just deployed a solid acid alkylation technology, which allows refiners to have a more efficient, environmentally friendly, and safer alternative to producing high-octane gasoline.
I think the key thing is we're focused on those new sustainable technologies, and we have a full-time dedicated team looking at the best technologies to help our clients meet their own sustainability projects through this time of energy transition. If we move to the next slide. I don't want to spend a lot of time on the next slide, but just to give you a flavor for the kinds of things that KBR's already been doing. We're already on this journey. I think that's the key message I really want to make. If you look at areas like blue green ammonia, I'm going to talk about that some more here in just a few minutes.
Carbon capture and storage with projects like Monolith, where we're helping them with their new zero carbon emissions project up in Nebraska in the U.S., and LanzaTech, where we've got a long-term engineering support agreement for their carbon capture project. If you look at hydrogen expertise, really in our government business, extensive hydrogen expertise associated with NASA and launch operations, and we've extended that to other areas of our business. We have a tremendous expertise, long-term expertise in cryogenics and LNG storage that directly relates to the hydrogen area. We're working with clients to decarbonize their existing assets, provide more energy-efficient solutions, using digital tools to get the most out of their processes in the most energy-efficient way. Then circular economy.
I think the best example is the Mura plastics recycling, where you can take mixed plastics, not just polyethylene and polypropylene, which are the most common, but a wide variety of mixed plastics, and produce feedstocks that go into olefins plants to produce additional plastic. Really closing the loop on the circle, which is extremely exciting to us at KBR, and we feel like it's going to really make a difference, not only for KBR but for our clients around the world. A focus on, we are in a transition and there are traditional fuels. What can we do to introduce and help our clients with developing and designing more innovative biofuel solutions, from startups all the way to full-scale solutions.
Again, I think the key message is energy transition has been going on for many, many years, and KBR has been a leader in this area. Go to the next slide, please. If I drill down a little bit and talk about ammonia, green ammonia, and what that means. Why is ammonia important to the hydrogen economy? Well, the first thing is really just fundamental chemistry. It's one part nitrogen to three part hydrogen. One part nitrogen, three parts hydrogen. KBR has an established leadership position in this area. More than 50% of the world's ammonia is produced with KBR's technology. We continue to improve the capacity and efficiency of our plants, with the single largest converter.
The world's most energy-efficient ammonia plant in India, the world's most reliable ammonia plant with almost 6 years of continuous operation before they shut down with companies like Yara. You might ask, so what? Well, I think the so what to this information is our clients around the world in this space look to KBR for innovation, for leadership as they make this energy transition. One of the things that we have is an offering called K-GreeN. It's a proprietary end-to-end solution to reach green ammonia. It's a fully integrated solution that takes water, through electrolysis and then uses the back end, the ammonia synthesis as our traditional, market-leading ammonia synthesis technology. We're integrating, and we have cooperation agreements with electrolysis companies. I liken electrolysis to some of the early days of the chip manufacturers, where there's great developments leapfrogging each other all the time.
We want to have collaboration agreements with who we consider to be the market leaders in this area and looking for some additional technology breakthroughs going forward. Air separation has been around for many, many years, so there's nothing unique about that. Then we can take the hydrogen and the nitrogen through our traditional ammonia process and produce a product to be able to meet needs. The key thing is electrolysis. The electricity that goes into that is from renewable electricity. What we're looking at is as the cost of renewable electricity comes down, these solutions become more and more competitive with traditional gray ammonia and blue ammonia solutions. I might also mention that blue ammonia, we're delivering projects like that today. Blue ammonia is just where you capture the carbon through carbon sequestration, with traditional ammonia plant projects.
Where do we see the growth? We see a continued growth around 2%-3% in the historic fertilizer and feedstock chemical processes. Where we really see high growth is in transportation fuel, power, and Ben is going to talk about that more here in a few minutes. Hydrogen, either hydrogen fuel cells or hydrogen vehicles. We see that is really where you see those 10% growth numbers that I was referring to earlier in the presentation. The key thing that I would like to deliver today or to mention today is we can deliver this solution today. The question is really the economics around it. I will pass it on to Ben next.
Doug, thank you, sir. Very kind of you. Conscious of time, I have got a couple of slides, really talking to where we are from an advisory perspective. The advisory team being, some describe as the pointy end of the spear, in terms of getting into new markets that KBR are working within. What we have seen really is that COVID has accelerated significantly the fall in fossil fuel demand. It has precipitated policy making and the hydrogen economy is, as we all know, widely reported to be a market that is in growth phase. That is why it is interesting to us. Hydrogen Council, as you saw earlier in the first or second slide, $130 to $2.5 trillion market by 2050. Interestingly, the majority of hydrogen present day is retained in the industrial market, not traded, and really is not seen as an energy vector.
To really get hold of that $2.5 trillion market, we really are looking at how do you develop the supply chains? How do you get involved with stable governments and drive project development? We are seeing that in many, many countries, and we recognize that probably the reality is that despite best efforts to get to the pure Green future, capital costs right now of a Green future are probably a long way away, five, 10 years. We have got to go through a transition, and that is really where we are working with governments, investors, and B2B, G2B and G2G. That is really what we are doing. What have we done in this space? Well, we have secured a number of strategic consulting opportunities. We are working in Singapore, we work in Japan, Australia, and the U.K. These are all really proactive hydrogen proponents.
You can see this from the map on this slide. They are interesting markets. They are different markets from maybe what you might have considered to be KBR heritage business, certainly energy business. We are working with government, we are working with defense, both with a C and an S. We are working with industrial markets. Interestingly, we are working in financial and obviously energy customers. We have put a pragmatic plan together as kind of number 2 in terms of how the transition works from Blue to Turquoise to Green. That we have published, we are working with a number of governments around the world in terms of what their net zero 2050 looks like. As you have just heard from Doug, we have launched K-GreeN, and that is probably the most exciting thing that we have got in terms of where, from an advisory perspective and KBR perspective, our clients are really embracing.
I guess the last thing on this point is to say that we're attracting really top talent from major strategy consulting firms such as McKinsey, Bain, and Boston, PwC, to name but a few. That really supports our vision and our strategy in respect of what we're seeing here. What I've got on the next slide, if you just move forward, is really food for thought for our Q&A. This is Singapore. This is our master planning advisory consulting work. We've been engaged with the Prime Minister of Singapore through the PMO office for about 12 months on a master plan for energy transition and net zero 2050. It's a focus, a piece of work on hydrogen as an energy carrier and other energy carriers as well.
The scope of work that I'm sure the Q&A will probably bring up has really been focused on net zero 2050, but really looking at the low carbon supply chain to identify suitable imports into Singapore. We've also looked at indigenous, low carbon hydrogen production facilities to decarbonize domestic use. Really, all on this call will know that Singapore is a natural resource disadvantaged country, so limited capability to supply renewable energy and energy. It's also a trading hub. All of this plays to a post-COVID stimulus package aspect of development. We, through this work, have developed hydrogen deployment pathways. We've looked at hydrogen adoption in many sectors, including downstream, effectively putting together a financial model that allows the government to assess different scenarios for their development as they go to 2050, including CapEx, given different levels of hydrogen adoption and also cost of abatement.
This is a dynamic model. The work is largely complete. I guess we probably look to position our advisory position into the next phases of their roadmap, that's ongoing work that we can't really speak to in too much depth right now. We're also strongly embedded in the industrial heartland of the likes of Jurong Island as a result of this work and other work as well. We're doing deep dives into energy efficiencies across some of the largest industrial facilities operating on Jurong Island.
The last point here really that I want to make is that as we outlined on the previous slide, we are engaged with many other governments and government agencies around the world at different levels of maturity, we're working on that kind of engagement across many different advisory-based engagements to secure a net zero 50 for those countries, for those business to businesses, and for those supply chains. Can you just go to the next slide, please? Bringing this short overview to a close and before we open things up, we would like to really reiterate that for us, this is a significant part of our strategy globally.
We're working with some of the most successful countries in the world, leading edge of investment decision making, energy transition, and master planning with a great, I mean, really great installed client base, mature governmental, industrial, commercial clients that we're working with in their drive to future net zero. Our technology portfolio is sustainability focused. We're the world leader in ammonia technology and green ammonia as well. We're also attracting top talent globally from major strategy and management consulting houses attracted to us to deliver this, really filling the blank space that exists between heritage engineering consultancy and the likes of McKinsey. The outlook's excellent. We've seen growing demand across sustainability-based markets that supports double digits top line growth, clear margin expansion, opportunities across our Technology Solutions business and indeed KBR, and of course, our installed client base.
With that, I'm going to hand back to Jerry and Michele for Q&A, and thank you very much for your time.
Okay, great. Thank you so much, team. To kick off the Q&A session, let me have Michele start here. Michele, please go ahead.
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much for the presentation. You clearly are very involved in providing consulting services across the hydrogen transition. You've done it in Japan, you've done it in Singapore. I'm wondering, from your experience, what are the best ways for government to kick start a successful clean hydrogen economy, which will become so important to their aim to become net zero by 2050?
Alison, shall I take that?
Yes, Ben.
Yeah, go ahead, Ben.
Thank you. For me, this is really learning from the Singapore, the Japanese, and the Australian examples, it is about policy and it's understanding how policy can apply the necessary pressures to the free market, and the free market and the supply chain economies. Without understanding the full scope of the supply chain, you will not, in our opinion anyway, you will not become successful in meeting your net zero 50 and being part of that journey. Again, looking at the likes of Singapore, where we've been engaged is really looking at how that really very integrated supply chain speaks to one another, works with one another. I'm sure Doug will have some comments around the likes of electrolyzers and air separation units. They are one part of the energy transition, which is so important.
Without a project and a mega project, you do not really have the wherewithal and the ability to really accelerate your supply chain and therefore meet your ambitions. You need the offtake. As Doug said, you also need the cheap electrons to convert to something within that supply chain. From our point of view, if you do not have a complete project, and that is certainly where we sit on an integration point of view, integrating the upstream all the way through to the offtake, you do not really have the ambition to bring the overall project together. I do not know, Doug, what do you think? The electrolysis and the air separation units are clearly a key component to some of the work we are involved with.
They absolutely are, that is why we have got what I would call cooperation agreements currently with two different electrolyzer providers. There is some opportunities, some studies that we have already been doing this year or this past year, we see a tremendous focus on this market. We expect to do numerous studies for the upcoming year to really look at the viability of projects from a cost standpoint. I see one of the questions is really the competitiveness of green ammonia versus gray ammonia and blue ammonia in the questions that have been typed in. Really, the renewable electricity is coming down. The electrolyzers are becoming more efficient. Today it is still a lot more expensive to do a full commercial scale project. Even though we can deliver K-GreeN today, it is not economically viable in most situations. It still requires government subsidy.
It still requires and/or some investments. What we see and the way we are helping companies like Yara and others, is they have traditional ammonia plants, they also want to be seen as being green. We are putting smaller scale plants and studying putting smaller scale plants alongside major ammonia facilities so that it is partially green. Again, it is a transition. We are helping people work through the technology, become comfortable with it in order for them to, as prices become better on electricity, renewable electricity, as electrolyzers develop and become more viable, these side plants become more and more mainstream.
Can I ask just a quick follow up? Go ahead, Ben.
I'm going to put literally a sentence in there. What I would add is with the work with Yara, and they have publicized it, they are really looking at becoming an energy company in the future. Their viewpoint is really that ammonia is an energy vector, and they are embracing that so that they have both the fertilizer world and the energy world. That's certainly something that we find very, very exciting.
I just wanted to ask you a follow-up to Michele's question on the engagements that you have with Singapore, Japan, Australia, U.K. Can you talk about what the revenue opportunity from those consulting engagements is to KBR, what it could be over the life of the opportunity, and what parts of KBR are you folks pulling into the range of consulting services that you're providing?
I think it's hard on this forum to talk about exact numbers, and I'm sure Mark would probably confirm that. What I would say is that from a KBR perspective, we are drawing on one KBR. It's a mantra that we absolutely embrace. The Singaporean opportunity there really was, as I alluded to in the presentation, it's filling the blank space between engineering and the likes of McKinsey or Bain or Boston or what have you. It's really applying that technology expertise. For example, with Singapore, we drew on our government solutions expertise from the NASA perspective, where we were, I believe, the first to flow liquid hydrogen in the U.S.A. in 1969 or 1970, in terms of heavy lift rockets. The objective from a kind of hydrogen containment and refrigeration, cryogenics, and handling perspective was second to none.
We are drawing on every possible facet of KBR really to deliver something that is differentiated and world-class. Very, very different from others. Again, filling that space. We are not copy-pasting. We are repeating, and we have the capability from the work that we've undertaken in Singapore and on those other countries that we've discussed, really to go around a number of developed nations in the world which are embracing hydrogen as a roadmap and cook and repeat. I do see this as a major part, certainly of advisory and being a pathfinder for the rest of KBR. Doug, I don't know if you've got anything to add to that? Sorry, Mark, if I didn't answer the financial question, I wasn't really prepared to answer that.
I will add to that, Jerry and team. Ben's right, the consulting revenues will depend on the size of the project undertaken. I can at least say this, which I imagine will come up in any event. We have some really exciting growth areas across KBR. When you talk about military space, you talk about trusted microelectronics, you talk about defense modernization. We clearly believe that this specific area, within sustainable technology and overall sustainability technology and the business that Doug runs, is definitely among our top growth prospects for KBR in the foreseeable future. To give you a sense of that, we did guide the street that the Technology Solutions business will do circa $1 billion in revenue in 2021 at double-digit EBITDA margin.
We see prospects of revenue growth and margin expansion over the following years to deliver the potential to double the EBITDA in the Tech Solutions business over the next five years. We certainly would point to energy transition, both consulting and projects in sustainable technologies, as leading the way in driving that growth of double-digit top line and margin improvement in the Tech Solutions business. We're really excited about it. The overall energy transition slice of Tech Solutions today is between $150 million and $200 million for 2021. That's the starting point that the team has built over the past two years coming into this discussion. Again, great growth prospects that are driving, hopefully, to double this business in terms of EBITDA over the next several years.
Okay. That's very clear. Thank you. Michele, please go ahead.
Please. If I could go back to your comments in terms of the cost competitiveness of clean hydrogen. In our Carbonomics study, we believe that clean hydrogen needs to become between effectively 10% and 20% of the global energy industry to reach net zero. To get there in an affordable way, costs do need to come down substantially. From your experience, where do you see the biggest opportunities for cost deflation in the hydrogen value chain? Do you think we can reiterate a success story like solar and wind, of bringing costs down 70%, 80%? Within that context, do you think blue or green hydrogen have the best opportunity of continuing to move lower on that cost curve?
I'll.
Yeah. Go ahead.
I'll start this. Is that all right, Doug?
Yeah, go ahead. You start and I'll finish.
Okay. Fine. Look, it's a journey, and we're going blue, turquoise, green. There's no way that we're going to go green tomorrow. We believe that the journey is about CCS to start with, CCUS, and then probably a drip feed of green into that process to ensure that the mega projects and the supply chain start to look a little bit more relevant economically. Not dissimilar to the LNG story from so many years ago. The supply chain has changed, and we absolutely do see the cost of things like electrolyzers. That's probably a good place to mention and either start or finish on and hand over to Doug. Electrolyzers, when I started looking at this for a very large project in Western Australia, it was 20-odd gigawatt project, looking at green ammonia and green hydrogen.
The electrolyzer cost then, and it was only two years ago, was over $1 million a megawatt. It's now, depending who you talk to and what type of technology, it's anything between $150,000 and $300,000 or $400,000. Yes, a huge variation, but a massive drop. Those drops have really driven by the scale. I think we are, if your question was really, is this following a similar trajectory as solar and wind? I think we're there, and I think we're probably in a steeper curve, personally, than we thought we might be. Maybe COVID has accelerated that. I do absolutely believe that the speed of supply chain maturity is upon us. Once we can develop that, and we've seen projects around the world, there's plenty of them, green hydrogen, green ammonia projects.
Once we start to get those into a position where they start to become a reality and get past concept into feasibility and FEED stages, that market will only increase. It's choosing the horse, though, and it is choosing the right type of electrolyzer or the right type of technology to ensure that works. Doug, yours.
Yeah, I'll take a little bit different angle on it. Good points. The other thing that I would add to that, though, Ben, is that when I'm talking to clients about green ammonia, they really break it down into capital costs and operating costs. What we see is the capital cost, because of the reduction in prices that for electrolyzers that Ben mentioned, the capital cost for a green ammonia plant is not that different than a traditional ammonia plant. The challenge has been operating costs. There have to be breakthroughs in the renewable electricity supply for the electrolyzer and electrolyzer efficiencies. You mentioned solar and wind and the decreases that have happened there, decreases in cost. These are all interrelated.
As renewable energy from electricity, excuse me, from solar and wind and other sources decreases, and it is on a decreasing cost curve, the operating cost for green ammonia becomes increasingly better. It really is a transition. How quickly that happens is anybody's guess, but it's heading in the right direction to be able to make hydrogen, excuse me, green hydrogen, excuse me, green ammonia more cost-effective.
Very clear. Thank you. Sorry, Jerry. One quick follow-up. You clearly have talked a lot about ammonia, which is a very interesting market because it's already a major hydrogen market today. For a net zero scenario, we will need to also create new markets for hydrogen in decarbonizing steel, in decarbonizing heating, potentially for heavy transport. Do you see any of these markets starting to become material in the coming years, or you think that's perhaps for later in the decade?
I'll-
You want to start with that one?
If you don't mind, I'll kick off. Yeah, no, it depends, obviously, your viewpoint of how many years and which year, but we are advisory consulting. We're involved in those discussions. We're involved in those discussions in Europe, certainly in the U.K. as well. Not wishing to separate Europe from the U.K., but it has been done. Certainly through the work that we've done in Singapore. That was part and parcel of our PMO study there. Yes, decarbonizing steel, decarbonizing the scope 3 emissions that go part and parcel with all CO2 abatement processes is absolutely what we can see. I can see the carbon capture sequestration, CCUS, as well, in terms of a modularized approach, being something that will start to realize itself. What's going to drive that? Well, it's public sentiment, it's also carbon pricing as well.
If you start to look at the carbon pricing that's being discussed in Southeast Asia, in terms of what sort of carbon pricing is required to really stimulate this new market, you can start to financially analyze them. I'm quite sure that everybody on this call has got to grips with those changes, really as to quite how quickly things like CCS and CCUS on smaller facilities could come about.
Thank you. I might add to that, if you look at the different uses that I mentioned in one of the slides, with marine transportation, with power, with hydrogen for vehicles, I think probably the earliest to make an impact will be the marine fuels. The others are coming, I think, fairly quickly. There's lots of projects being announced in this area. For example, if you noticed this morning, SK E&S, the announcement where KBR is providing technical support for SK's plan to build a 30,000 metric ton per year liquefied hydrogen facility, really to supply different areas in South Korea. I think the initial phase of that project is really looking at different licensure technologies. So we're clearly participating in this space.
The approach that we're using is there's multiple avenues, so we want to have an iron in the fire for all of the different potential high-growth areas.
And-
Thank you
On that note, we actually have a related question from the webcast. What's the unit economics for you folks on projects like SK Hydrogen, Mura, LanzaTech? What share of total CapEx on those projects is addressable for KBR?
Ben, you want to take that?
I was going to hand it back to you, Doug. Really, sorry.
Yeah. Because we take our confidentiality with our clients very seriously.
Yeah
We don't really want to disclose specific project economics. If you link back to what Mark mentioned before, we factored in not only our work under contract but our future projects and our forecast and our expected work into the growth numbers that Mark mentioned before. It's a very significant and growing part of our business. Relatively small now, but that will become increasingly more relevant as we go forward.
Certainly the SK project is not the first of those. It was obviously announced this morning, we've got very similar projects with the likes of JX Nippon, which is underway, which is one of the CO2 richest gas fields in the world. Could potentially be the largest hydrogen production facility. This is not one, this is one of many.
Okay. We have a question on the webcast regarding the green ammonia production, asking you to comment on the barriers to entry. With all the consortium announcements in green hydrogen ammonia production, do industrial gas companies like Air Products have an edge to serve the transport market, or fertilizer companies like Yara and Energy Majors could come in as well?
I think from a barrier to entry standpoint, the barriers are not that high from a technology standpoint, other than to say there are incredible efficiencies to having an integrator that understands all of the areas involved. You're basically combining electrolyzers, you're combining air separation units. In order to be successful from the operating costs that I was talking about before, you have to have an optimal way of integrating that with existing synthesizers to be able to create the ammonia. I think that while there aren't barriers to entry, if you want to do a green ammonia project, the pieces exist. I think that's why on that one slide that I talked about, why are people coming to KBR? Why are we differentiated in this space? It's because of our history of innovation and optimization.
Our clients have seen how we've optimized existing facilities, and they trust us to, by reputation and by experience, to be able to put together a very efficient and market-leading solution, an integrated solution for them to be able to move forward. Ben, you want to add something to that?
Yeah, no, really just to emphasize what you just said, it's about integrating. It's about being the integrator. No single technology in its own right owns a project. Yes, air separation is very important. Electrolysis is very important. The overall control system is incredibly important. Understanding the integrated nature of these projects, as we do with LNG projects and as we now do with energy transition projects, is critical to the survival and really the success of those projects. What's the off-take, what's the supply, and how do you create everything in between, particularly when the wind and the sun does not blow and shine all the time. It's making sure that all component parts work together.
In terms of the opportunity for green ammonia, can you just talk about how you're seeing the competitive landscape developing? We have a webcast question from competitors like Haldor Topsoe with the project from Saudi Arabia. How do you see the competitive landscape shaking out for green ammonia specifically, compared to what's obviously been a really dominant position for KBR in the traditional ammonia market?
Yeah. It's clear for the reasons that we mentioned early in the presentation that the market is huge, the growth potential is huge, and everyone wants to have a play in the space right now. All the traditional ammonia synthesizer companies, obviously the air separation companies, everyone wants to have a part. There's lots of projects, there's lots of publicity right now. I don't know all of the details and specifics around all those projects. I make some assumptions based on the people that I know at those companies and what I read in the news. I do know from a KBR standpoint that we're talking about real projects that are viable projects that are maybe small in scale now, but increasing in size with vision, that we're helping companies really lay out this transition. It is an energy transition.
We are where we are today, but we want to be better in the future. I say that KBR is allowing us, or we're working with our clients to establish real tangible steps towards achieving that energy transition.
Michele alluded to this in his question earlier. It seems like ammonia use in transportation applications, there's a really good case to be made that's shorter duration than some of the heating in other areas that we spoke about on this call. I'm wondering if you could talk about how big of a ramp do you see in the use of ammonia for transportation applications over the next three to five years based on what you see coming down the pipe globally.
Ben, do you want to take that one first? I can add to it.
Yeah. Sorry, I was on mute. Absolutely. Ammonia as a transportation fuel and as an energy vector, as I alluded to, is pretty key to how you move hydrogen around the world. We do see that as a huge growth market. In fact, I was on a MOD, a U.K. defense session this morning, where we were specifically talking about ammonia as a marine fuel. I do see that as a growth market. I can't really see it going away. It's transportable globally at near ambient temperature, a bit of pressure, and you can move it around. Whereas hydrogen, as we all know, I think we should probably all know that it's a very slippery molecule, and it escapes. If you can turn it into ammonia, it makes a bit of sense. There are other hydrogen vectors as well.
I see it as a growth market. The Ammonia Energy Association absolutely see it in that format as to the Hydrogen Council, as to many players we've just discussed, with the likes of Yara looking at it as an energy vector as well.
Yeah. I might add to that, Ben. What I see from marine transportation is, especially with the increased regulations on fuel oil, marine fuel oil, the shift towards ammonia as an alternative fuel, at least co-produced fuel, is already taking place in the shipping industry. I see more of that taking place going forward.
Yeah. I guess the other aspect here is, okay, growth in ammonia in terms of transportation fuel, you can definitely see it in marine. We can definitely see it in military applications, heavy goods vehicles. The area that's really quite interesting that is taking off, it is really what was driving some of the conversations in Western Australia, is with the Japanese and their offtake potential. The Japanese are really looking as part of their Paris Agreement to decarbonize their energy production facilities across the country. Obviously, nuclear facilities are not on at the moment. What's really driving that is, how do you co-fire something that's clean and green with coal? The answer is ammonia.
You can put about 20, 25, maybe even 30% ammonia into your co-firing facilities. If the ammonia is produced from green sources, i.e., green hydrogen or blue hydrogen, and you've sequestered the carbon, you then have the ability to meet your Paris Agreement numbers, which is exactly what they're doing. Why is that interesting? In terms of volume, the volume that you're talking about with Japan in terms of just that 20-odd percent into coal power stations is the equivalent, in fact, slightly more than the equivalent of the globally traded ammonia on the global market. The demand that they would have, just for 20-odd percent into their power plants is the same as the amount that's traded on the global market. It's a massive market for us. If we can make it green, all the better.
If we can make it blue, that's a step in the right direction.
Hydrogen storage, we spoke about, Doug, a slippery molecule, as you framed it. Can you talk about the opportunity that you folks have from applying what you've done with NASA and elsewhere, LNG cryogenic capability? What's KBR's opportunity set as a result from hydrogen storage outside of ammonia?
Ben, you want that one first?
Yeah, I'll start. I touched on it earlier. I think we're fairly deeply involved with NASA. There was an engine firing over the weekend for the latest rocket lift and rocket test for next trip to the moon. We have been involved with, as I said earlier, the whole hydrogen piece of NASA. You don't really get much better in terms of safety record credibility of hydrogen storage and hydrogen management than that. That certainly, and I'm speaking very much from an advisory consulting perspective here, that's certainly something that has really added to the credibility, unique, differentiated credibility of KBR when we've been discussing with our clients, whether they be industrialists, energy companies or financiers, or governments, on quite what liquid hydrogen looks like.
The JX Nippon project, again, is testament to our capability to understand how to store the product, how to manage it, how to manage the off-gas, how to manage the safety record as well. I don't know if that specifically answers the question. I'd be more than happy to take another question, but that's really where we're driving it, and that's really what conversations we're having with our customers.
Thank you, Ben.
Yeah.
A little bit to that, is that there's also experience that we have in LNG in the cryogenics around LNG storage, market leaders in that area. That also applies to the cryogenics required for hydrogen storage. NASA is relatively small scale, but as you get more broad scale as the numbers we're talking about in this presentation, hydrogen being more forefront, there's going to have to be larger scale facilities, larger scale storage, and we have the people and the expertise and the experience to really be able to address that problem as well.
As I said earlier, Jerry and team, this is Mark. Some people criticize us for the duality of a government business and an industrial commercial business under one roof, but here's a great example of the synergy opportunity that we not only have in the future, but we're already tapping today on this and other dimensions, and that's a big part of the KBR story that could be better understood. I do want to take a moment to just clarify something I said earlier, if you don't mind, Jerry. It was correct, but it could be clearer, which is the Technology Solutions business is expected to have double-digit EBITDA margins, but more specifically in the mid-teens. Someone pinged us on a clarifying question there. That's still the expectation of mid-teens for the Tech Solutions business, of which energy transition is certainly contributing.
Furthermore, we also have guided, we expect those margins to increase 1 to 2 percentage points per year into the upper teens in the years ahead as a result of scale improvement and the success that we expect out of the business we're talking about today. Thanks.
Appreciate the color and clarification. The reason for the hydrogen storage question is because in LNG, obviously really expensive to store, so you folks had a really large addressable market in LNG with the storage capability relative to overall project CapEx. I'm just wondering, as we think about longer-term storing hydrogen, is the addressable market project in storage as significant relative to overall project CapEx as what we've seen in the analogy that I drew?
I would say it's about variability. I'm not entirely sure that it's all about liquid hydrogen, hence our interest in things like ammonia. I'm not altogether convinced that liquid hydrogen is purely the way forward. There are many different vectors. Sorry, Doug, go ahead.
No, you said exactly what I was about to say. The cost of storage and transportation of hydrogen versus the cost of storage and transportation of ammonia is significantly in favor of ammonia. That's why we think that is the way hydrogen will be moved in the future.
We're not discounting that liquid hydrogen will be one of the vectors that are moved around the world. We're attaching ourselves to both and other vectors.
Mark, earlier in the conversation, you mentioned their targets for Technology Solutions to double in EBITDA over the next five years. I'm wondering if you can comment directionally out of that improvement in earnings power, what proportion of that do you expect to be generated from these hydrogen and ammonia-related businesses that we're covering today? It sounds like you expect one of the strongest growth profiles across the business, but I'm wondering if you might be willing to put a finer point on that. What's the top-line potential of this business if we're thinking five years out relative to that doubling that you mentioned for the segment as a whole?
I would tell you that I would expect this business to perform at or better than the overall Technology Solutions result because of everything we've talked about today. I think it will contribute or more than contribute to the overall growth we expect in the target of doubling EBITDA for Technology Solutions over the next 5 years. Granted from a smaller base, but the growth rate here is quite exciting.
Okay. In terms of, we do have a few outstanding questions from the webcast here. We have a clarification. You folks are looking for ammonia to be used straight with power and shipping without cracking it first as the primary green hydrogen use, was a clarifying question we got on the webcast. Can you just confirm that?
The answer is yes, we see that today. It's not to say there wouldn't be in the future direct hydrogen for shipping, but right now we're seeing ammonia being used in marine shipping.
That cracking technology is and will be a specific part of our advisory review work going forward, so part of the Singapore work as well.
Yes.
Okay. Then in terms of the ammonia synloop process and facility you're building for Monolith, there's a question of can you describe that process, where the nitrogen comes from, and how are the existing assets leveraged in a project like that, if you don't want to comment on the project specifically?
Yeah, the project is a new process. I know mainly the scope. This is one I might have to take the name and get back with you on the specifics of the details of the project. I know we're supplying basically that ammonia synloop piece to a new process that Monolith is deploying around carbon black. I see that there's a question on the grades of carbon black produced. I'm sorry, I don't have the details on the overall project. I'd have to get back to, I guess it's Avi's asking that question. Please allow me to investigate details, and I'll get back with you.
Okay. Terrific. Well, we're at the top of the hour. Thank you so much to the KBR executive team. Thank you everyone for joining us. We did have a few outstanding questions from the webcast in the queue. We will do our best to follow up on those offline. Thank you so much, everyone, for joining our call, on behalf of Michele, Ashok, and the Goldman Sachs team, KBR management team, all our attendees, thank you.
On behalf of our 30,000 folks across KBR, we're delighted you're interested in us and our exciting story. Thank you, stay safe, and we'll talk soon.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.