Good morning, and welcome to Nucor's 2022 Investor Day. I'm Katherine Miller, Director of Corporate Communications. On behalf of our entire team, thank you for joining us today, both in person and on the webcast. You often hear us talk about our most important value, and that's safety. Safety doesn't just apply to our facilities. It extends to all of us in everything we do. I want to take a quick moment to just point out the exits to my right and in the back of the room. We will be taking a break at the conclusion of the presentations, and we'll then go into our Q&A portion of the program. We encourage you to follow along with the program that's provided before you. There you will also find the Wi-Fi password. We're excited to be here this morning.
We trust that this will be informative, transparent, and a robust dialogue. With that, I'm pleased to turn it over to Nucor's Chair, President, and CEO, Leon Topalian.
Can you hear me okay? Mic working? Yes. Perfect. Well, good morning. As Katherine said, we are very excited to have you here today. Our last Investor Day was in 2019, and I was not long in the time as the new EVP, just after we announced the Brandenburg plant that was going to be built in Kentucky. Katherine also used another word that I want to make sure we echo today, and that's transparency. If I think back to the 2019 opportunity and spending some time with you, compared to today, we really want to unpack where Nucor is going, what our mission is, our strategy behind that, and how we believe we are one of the strongest and most diversified industrial manufacturers in this country. As we do that today, again, transparency becomes really important.
Today we're going to share with you more segment reporting breakdown of our earnings through the cycle. Really loud. Wow, that's a hot mic. We'll break down our earnings by segment so that each of you can see how are we earning, where are we earning what do those margins look like, and what are the margins that we, as a company, predict as we move forward into the future. We're very excited about doing that, because at the end of the day, all of you are busy. All of you are covering many companies, many industries. We recognize that. Better transparency is going to enable you to build better models, and we want to partner with you. Today, we look forward to engaging with you. We look forward to your questions.
At the end of the day, we want to make sure you clearly understand Nucor's strategy. We can debate the strategy, but there's no reason any of you should not understand what it is and where we're going and why we're going into the future. I want to unpack our eight-word mission statement. It's grow the core, expand beyond, and live our culture. We're going to begin with growing the core. As we think about the core of Nucor's business over the last six decades, we have continued to revolutionize in providing solutions for our customers by adding capabilities, not just capacity. Our investment strategy as we move forward isn't just to build plants to make tons. It's to invest in the long-term capability set of Nucor to make products that no one else is making that provide that differentiated value proposition.
As you think about being a market leader in 10 of the 14 major product categories in this market, we think about how do we continue to expand that? What are the areas that Nucor continues to grow? Because we're, again, 10 out of 14 in market leadership today, and that will be 11 out of 14 when Brandenburg starts up and plate begins to generate out of that facility in here in a few weeks. The other piece of that for Nucor in the core side is continuing to move up the value chain in cold rolled and galvanized, providing a higher return for our shareholders.
As a result of that, you're seeing the announcements come, not just in West Virginia and the two galvanizing lines that we're going to build there, but also the two galvanizing lines that we announced just a few weeks ago, one that'll be built at Nucor Steel Berkeley, and then other out west, which we haven't announced the location just yet. We're excited about that because, again, it begins to take us out of the hot band waiting and more into the value-added products of cold rolled and galvanized. Now we look at expand beyond. What does that mean? Again, since 2020, when I took over the company, we issued a challenge coin with those eight words: to grow the core, expand beyond, and live our culture.
One of the premise of that strategy was simply this: that if you're the market leader in 10 of the 14 categories in steel, how do you grow? Where do you grow? I've been a part of our company now for almost three decades, and for the better part of most of that, we talked about CAGR. We talked about compound annual growth rate. We hadn't talked about that a lot in the last five to 10 years, and there's a reason for it. How do you grow at 10%-15% annually in North American steel when you're already the market leader in 10 of the 14 major categories? Answer is you can't. We did different things. We tried going overseas. We did our European joint venture. That didn't work out real well.
We lost a lot of money in that market, we exited that business when I took over the company. We tried different technologies, Nucor is going to continue to take risks, calculated risks, as we think about future growth. Make no mistake about it, this executive team and I, and all 31,000 team members of Nucor, are focused on growth. We are going to continue to grow this company, and we're going to do it while still maintaining 40% of our net earnings going back to our shareholders annually. That's not going to change. You'll hear more about that in a second from Steve Laxton, our CFO. As we think about growing the core and expanding beyond, the expand beyond gets filtered in a few different ways. We look through the lens first to find efficient manufacturers that model Nucor's efficiency.
Who are they and where are they? Second, we look for companies that operate outside of the traditional cyclicality of steel that can provide a better, long-term, through-cycle performance of earnings that's more sustainable and less cyclical. Last, we're looking for companies that provide margins that are much greater than our cost of capital. So again, CHI is a wonderful example of that. They're an incredibly efficient manufacturer. The synergies in locking up with Nucor to be able to grow that business, particularly on the commercial side, where they have the smallest market share today, provides an incredible backdrop for growth for the future. So we're excited about where the expand businesses are going. You're going to hear more from Chad Utermark, who is over that business as an Executive VP. Again, the growth projections and profiles as we move forward.
The last piece I want to touch on this morning is the live the culture. I would tell you I get more questions internally about putting words to that. What does it actually mean? For us, words to that are simply this: An unapologetic quest to deliver world-class results in every area of our business that begin with the safety, health, and well-being of the 31,000 team members who make up the Nucor family. You see, one of the things that when I get to New York or I meet with analysts or investors, being part of Nucor for 26 years, every result, every model that you build, every spreadsheet that's calculated on Nucor is delivered by the 31,000 men and women. Men and women like Kate Thompson in Illinois, like Cathy Waddell in Kentucky, like Dale Flowers in South Carolina. They have names. They have families.
They have career aspirations. All of those are equally aligned to the steadfast growth of our company. When you come to visit our plants, I welcome all of you. I just made a trip to Brandenburg and Gallatin a few weeks ago, actually last week. It's amazing. It's an amazing plant to see the breadth and the size of that equipment that's being commissioned there and hot commissioned today. It's incredible. We have so many opportunities. Every one of those team members, when you come, ask them what our mission statement is, because they know. When you can combine and connect 31,000 team members to a strategy and something bigger than themselves, amazing results happen. That really is the value proposition of Nucor. Anyone can buy our equipment, anyone.
Very few in the world can do what we do with that equipment and yield the returns and the results that Nucor's been able to return. It also goes into the ESG part of the story. As we think about the E, environmentally, Nucor has got a footprint that starts incredibly low. We have an opportunity to differentiate and create value for our shareholders for a very long time. Our team, and you'll hear later, got back from Europe a couple of weeks ago. Today, there are companies pledging tens of billions of dollars to invest their companies to become like Nucor, to be able to use EAFs in their chain to be able to supply the differentiated, sustainable steels that are needed for tomorrow. Make no mistake, that change is happening as we speak. It's not future. It's not pie in the sky. That change is now.
It is happening as we speak. The other part of that, the green and digital economies of this nation and beyond are going to be built on steel. The steel that they get built with matters. Nucor's got one of the lowest carbon footprints in the entire world. So when you think about that sustainability message, right now COP 27 is going on in Egypt, and we would have been there had it not been for our Investor Day. We look forward to being the first industrial manufacturer in the world that has joined the 24/7 Global Carbon-Free Initiative. We are leading the future today because while those companies across the world are investing to become like Nucor in 2030, 2040, and 2050, we won't be there when they get there. By the time they reach us, we won't be there anymore.
Just like safety, environmentally, we're pressing to zero, and we will figure out how to deliver the world's net zero steels that they need today and well into the future. I want to end on sharing just a few things with you on our West Virginia plant, but probably not the metrics and the analytics that you might expect. You see, when we look at talent, for example, across the spectrum, man, talent's in high demand. We're no longer competing against our competitors for team members in this industry. We're competing against Google and Tesla and Amazon and every other major Fortune 100 company for that same talent. So what do you do? How do you take care of them? Well, as I said at the beginning, living our culture means we take great care of the team members that are a part of the family.
In West Virginia, the war on coal has ravaged that state from a manufacturing base. A lot of team members or, excuse me, a lot of residents of West Virginia have left that state. There's a lot of single parents, single moms, and working women that are sitting home trying to figure out, do I go back to work or do I stay on government assistance? So for the first time ever in Nucor's history, we're going to have Nucor-led childcare in that facility so that we can engage those working women to come and join Nucor. We're going to train them. We're going to give them manufacturing education so that they understand how and what we're doing.
We'll have lactation rooms inside of the plant so that they don't have to make the difficult decision of going back to work or caring for their child because we're going to do both. When they need to see their child, they're going to have access to that. I can't tell you what that does in terms of fueling a culture that recognizes my job as CEO is to serve them, not the other way around. We take incredible care of those men and women that make up this Nucor family that deliver every result that you're going to see here today, and there are many. There are so many things that I couldn't be more proud of in our team. As we look at our team up front, and you'll get to meet them shortly, we are the deepest bench in the entire industry.
When you look at the collective group of the executive talent that resides in Nucor, from a succession standpoint, we have been focused on for decades. In this room today is 250 years of experience in Nucor. That is an incredible amount of experience, and each of them are solely committed to represent those team members out in the field and align all of us around a very intentional mission statement to grow the core, expand beyond, and live our culture. One of those team members that I'm going to call up to the stage now is Steve Laxton. Steve is our newly appointed CFO, but he's a team member I've known for 20 years. I know him well. I know his family well.
He is one of the brightest, most dedicated, committed leaders I've ever worked around, and he's doing an incredible job as he's taken over the reins, again, as just the fourth CFO in Nucor's history. With that, please welcome Steve Laxton to the stage.
You got it.
Steve?
Thanks, Leon. Thank you, Leon. Very humbled by the kind opening there. Hope I can live up to it.
Absolutely.
Thanks for being here today. Most of today, what we're going to spend time on is talking about the future and where Nucor's going. That is exceptionally loud, isn't it? Wow. Sorry about that. Before we start to talk about the future, I do want to take a quick look back at where we've been, because we've had a really exceptional time period. You live this every day, but we've had an economy that's had COVID, we've had the pending recession that resulted from that, supply chain disruptions from many of our customers and some other areas throughout the economy. We've had labor shortages, all sorts of challenges. Despite that, our team has delivered record performance in every single segment that we have. I want to start by thanking the 31,000 men and women that make up Nucor, because they've created these results.
We've also integrated acquisitions, we've delivered on CapEx projects, we've altered how we approach our commercial practices and improved what we are as a company, that's phenomenal. I want to take a little detour here. Sometimes I get a question, maybe even some of you in this room have asked the question about how we pay our team, last year our teammates made over $140,000 a year. That's a lot. We get the question sometimes, how do you do that in a manufacturing environment where every dollar is so critical and you're pressing for margins all the time? The answer is real simple. We don't pay the team, they earn it. You see, at Nucor, roughly two-thirds of every teammate's pay is variable. Our team makes money when they're creating results for you, the owners of the company.
That's a wonderful and beautiful and elegant alignment that we have that very few other companies have. I'm very proud of the team, the results they've delivered. While we're looking back, I do want to point out one thing about our financial performance as well, that's our cash from operations. Nucor is an incredibly resilient company. Leon cited us as an industrial manufacturing model. That's what we really are. We're a converter business model. You see that in the resilience of our P&L, here in our free cash flow statements. Our cash from operations, I want to point out two years, 2015 and 2020. The cash from operations in those years were much more stable, much more consistent with prior years and future years than the P&L might indicate.
On the left-hand side of this page is a different story that I want to point out, and that's a company that's becoming much more cash generative over time. This is subtle, and there's a couple things that drive this. Partly, the markets drive this, of course. We've benefited from higher margins, great economy, or great demand for our products, at least. That's part of the driving factor. The other part of that is what we are doing as an organization. We're putting the company in a spot with higher margins, stronger free cash flow characteristics over time. We'll unpack that more as we go throughout the day. Okay, enough about the past. Let's talk about the future a little bit. This is Nucor's capital allocation framework. It's pretty simple. There's three elements to it. The first, we're committed to maintaining a strong investment-grade balance sheet.
The second is we're committed to making annual returns directly to our shareholders. The third element is that our highest and best use of capital is to reinvest in the business over time. This creates a little bit of a virtuous cycle, if you will. By investing in projects that create value, we're able to make commitments about our balance sheet and grow the returns to shareholders over time. They all kind of fit together and work together. Very quickly, on our balance sheet, we sit in a great position today. We've got over $3.5 billion of cash, wonderful liquidity position. We don't have any maturities until 2025. We have the highest-rated credit offerings in the metals and mining industry.
Our leverage has actually been declining over the last several years, we sit in a spot where regardless of the economic conditions in the short run, we have an ability to implement a strategy and drive value over time. This is a fantastic position to be in as a company. The second part of our capital allocation framework is about returns. Over the last decade, Nucor has returned about $9 billion back to shareholders. That's roughly split between dividends and share buybacks about equally. On this page, we highlight something I'm very proud of, and that's Nucor's dividend history. For 49 years, Nucor has not only paid a dividend, but grown a dividend. There's very few companies that can match that.
Only 64 companies in the S&P 500 have paid a dividend and increased it for 25 years, only 20 companies have increased their dividend longer than Nucor. That's not manufacturing companies, that's all companies. We're really proud of this commitment that we've made on returns. The other half of the returns come from share repurchases. Since 2017, Nucor's bought back about one out of every five shares of the company. This creates a wonderful way, a wonderful mechanism for us to allow the shareholder to participate in good periods of outsized performance. Now I want to shift gears and talk about where Nucor's going with its capital a little bit. We have a lot of projects underway, and some of those are in our core. The first words of our mission statement are to grow our core.
Nucor has a wonderful, fantastic leadership position with the most diverse product offerings and a great efficient cost model. That's a great spot to start from. We're able to leverage all of those into creating additional value over time. Here, we've highlighted 17 of our largest projects and two acquisitions that we've done recently. That's a lot of capital. It's about $9 billion worth of capital. By the end of this year, we'll be about halfway through that capital spend. These also, you can see, have a meaningful impact on the EBITDA. I just want to pause here and highlight something. The EBITDAs we project on this page are not peak performance. These are midpoints of cycle based on history. They don't include 2021 or 2022 results.
Just to give you a sense for that, we had five projects that were completed more than 18 months ago, so they've been operating for 18 months. Those five projects were a little over $1 billion in CapEx. They generated a little bit more than $1 billion in the last 18 months in EBITDA. So these numbers that we're showing you here are midpoints of cycle numbers. The second part of our mission statement is to expand beyond. Leon highlighted what that means and some of the definitional framework for that. Here, what I want to show is that we've acquired four companies and created four new platforms in expand beyond. Those platforms collectively are going to generate about $700 million of EBITDA moving forward. This is significantly more than the value of the businesses we bought. We didn't buy fixer-uppers.
These are fantastic companies in their own right. We're able to drive incremental value in what we do. The value comes in four different key areas. Chad Utermark will highlight these a bit more, I just want to briefly touch on them. These are classic synergies that we get when we look at a new business. We never want to deploy capital unless we can drive incremental value in that business. We get revenue synergies, we improve operating efficiencies, and we have supply chain efficiencies. Those are classic that we get in almost every acquisition that we look at. A fourth element there is that some of these businesses provide an opportunity to grow on their own right, either geographically or through product expansion. There's a lot of upside in these businesses for us.
In addition to spending capital and the major projects that we have, there are a few fundamental drivers that affect profits going forward. These three factors will be unpacked a little bit more by subsequent speakers, I'll just touch on these quickly. There are fundamental demand drivers that skew where demand will be for steel. They skew it positively. Those have to do with everything from the latent demand for automotive, the changing landscape for energy, the demand cycle for that, infrastructure needs. Nucor is uniquely positioned to meet the demands of all of these markets. There's no other producer that can do that. The second element is trends in our own industry. We'll describe this a little bit more detail in a bit.
Quickly, consolidation effects, the transition to cleaner EAF production, and trade case effectiveness have combined to create a more stable platform moving forward. The last element are things that Nucor is specifically doing. We, of course, have all the projects that we've talked about, but there's also some other things that are going on. Nucor's taken a look at its own portfolio and how it improves positions. Leon referenced one business that we've exited. There's others that we've restructured or exited recently. Those combined with the system benefits that we get every time we start a new business or acquire something. The numbers you saw earlier, the billion and a half dollars in the core, that includes only returns to those projects, not the system-wide benefits and the scale efficiencies that we tend to gain.
If you roll all this together, you're going to have a powerful earnings catalyst for Nucor as we move ahead. Namely, I want to just pause just a little bit here and slow down because the baseline that we're starting with of $3.2 billion is the 2017 through 2019 average EBITDA. We're not counting the last couple of years. We're not trying to cherry-pick things. We're trying to pick a baseline that's representative of where we feel like the steel industry is and where our margins would be from that point in history. We've talked about the billion and a half dollars that'll get added from our core and the $700 million that'll be added from our expand beyond. The other three elements are related to the content that was on that prior page.
We'll have expanded margins in our downstream products, in our long steel making and in our flat steel making. Those things are all going to be driven by the demand drivers that we talked about and the fundamental portfolio improvements that Nucor has had to create greater efficiencies over time. You roll it all together, we've got somewhere around $6.7 billion of EBITDA as we move forward. That's a tremendous lift for a company that's already the market leader at what we do. Lastly, I just want to highlight that most of what you see today, what you're going to hear from the team today, is about positioning Nucor for higher margins, more resilient cash flows, and more stable performance as we move ahead. Having said that, I'm going to turn it over to Doug Jellison. Doug is a 32-year veteran of Nucor.
He's worked in almost every kind of business we have. He's run businesses in our downstream products area, in our steel making business, and today is our Executive Vice President of our Raw Materials group. Doug.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you for your interest in Nucor. I guess if most of you are like me, that delay in the Powerball ticket last night kind of messed up your celebration plans for this morning, we'll focus on Nucor a little bit more. One of the things I want to do here in the next few minutes is to share how some of our recent results have been driven by our culture and our differentiated business model in that. I want to start first with Leon's statement that everyone in Nucor understands we're on an unapologetic quest for world-class performance in everything we do. That starts with safety. Our goal is to be the safest steel and steel products company in the world.
If you look at the last 10 years, if you know anything about industry rates, you'll know that we've been a good, safe company. Had a little bit of a plateau there, mid-decade, we've had three consecutive record years. This year about to be the fourth consecutive year. The significance of this is that you don't get this without everyone in the company performing at a high level every day. It takes development and training and skills to have that level of performance. Let's shift and look at how we apply that performance to managing our portfolio. When we think about the portfolio of businesses, we talk about where we should play and where we need to stay away from. We talk about challenging ourselves to that world-class excellence. We also talk about how we add new businesses to our portfolio.
A little detail in each of these. When we go into a business, it's not just a quick look at it. We have to spend a fair amount of time. Some people might say we spend too much time. We will look at the performance, we'll look at our strategy, we'll look at market segmentation, we'll look at processes, and we'll look at our leadership teams. If we can't, through all of those changes, get the performance we expect, then we have to have the courage to make those difficult decisions. As you can see, we've made those decisions with closing our Castrip business and exiting our joint venture in Duferdofin-Nucor. We also find time for small business, U-Pull-&-Pay. It's a self-service, retail parts business for automotive.
Good business, always been profitable, but not a business that we could drive outstanding performance in. We were fortunate enough this year to find a new home for those teammates where they can thrive and reach world-class, and we can keep focused on where we can drive a greater improvement. We also hold ourselves accountable to continuing to stay at world-class results. Several years ago, our COO, Dave Sumoski, was over our bar mill group and started to look at the bar mills. What he realized is there were opportunities for us to perform better than we had. We started to invest in new capabilities with SBQ, MBQ, and wire rod. We added new geographies in our rebar mills with Lexington, most recent Lexington, Frostproof, and Sedalia.
We've also updated our processes to make sure we have the best cost structures with an upgrade of the roll mill in Marion and the addition of a melt shop in Kingman. All of these have paid back tremendous benefits, especially over the last few years, as Steve has mentioned. I touch on the metal buildings in just a second, but I want to move over to our acquisitions. We've been doing acquisitions and integrating businesses for over 2 decades. We have a really strong record of being able to bring businesses in and drive better performance. Chad's going to touch on C.H.I. in a few minutes. I want to walk through real results with our tube group. If we look at our metal buildings business, that's a business we started in the late '80s. We've grown it over the years through both greenfield expansions and through acquisitions.
The business has been profitable, but as we look at it's not as profitable as our other businesses. Our team focused on: How can we change this business? What are we doing right? What can we do better? We started to study the market segments and identify those segments that valued the values we brought to the business. As we looked at those value-appreciative customers, we started to reorganize our business to support those customers' needs. That led us to optimizing our operations, which allowed us to go from 11 leadership teams to 6, from 5 product designs to 1, and a whole host of other changes. The result is we've gone from a 4% EBITDA margin business to nearly a 16% EBITDA margin business. We expect to keep that in the mid-low teens as we go through the business cycle.
Another one is our tube group. We acquired three solid, well-performing businesses over a 90-day period in late 2016 and 2017. We spent in acquisition and capital investment since then just over $1 billion. We were able to take our operating knowhow and change the operations and drive greater efficiencies. The headline for that would be the production bonus. The real work is all the details that go behind that and all of the efficiencies that we can drive in consolidating businesses, consolidating operations, and standardizing it. We also were able to leverage our channels to market. These businesses overlap with our steel mill businesses by about 80%-90% of the same customer base. We were able to leverage that to pull more business through on a more steady basis. Last, we were able to optimize our supply lines and channels for the tube group.
The result of this is, if you looked at these businesses for the 3 years prior to our ownership, they averaged a 12.2% EBITDA margin. Our actual average since our ownership is 19.2% EBITDA margin, with a peak last year of 24.6% margin. That's what all this stuff we're talking about looks like in numbers. The last area I want to touch on is another very unique capability that Nucor has, and I think unique not only in the U.S. but unique in the world, and that's our raw material assets and capabilities. Our brokerage group is the only brokerage group in North America that talks to every dealer and visits every scrap yard coast to coast. That boots-on-the-ground approach allows us to build relationships and see what's happening day by day, week by week.
We are the only brokerage group in North America that has a complete picture of how the market's moving and operating, and we leverage that to our benefit every month. We also have the unique position of having 4.5 million tons of DRI capacity. No one else has that type of capacity and that flexibility to use that. What does that look like in practical terms? The graph here is a limited set of weeks for the 6 mills that primarily use pig iron. It's looking at this year. You can see the line on there where the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened, which is when we stopped buying pig iron from Russia. Basically, you couldn't get pig iron from the Ukraine. The pig iron from Russia and Ukraine was anywhere from 60%-80% of our pig iron supply.
We went from about a 16% mix of pig iron in these locations, almost immediately down to 4%, without affecting quality, without affecting delivery. As the market settled out and we were able to tap into our other relationships with other suppliers, we were able to move pig iron back to about 10% of our mix. Recently, with drop in prices of scrap, we've seen prime scrap drop to shred prices or below, which makes that a much more economical option, and you can see our shift heavier into prime scraps. Integrates don't have that capability. They have a very limited range of raw material mix, probably at most 20% scrap, and that's about it.
We have not only the flexibility in our EAFs, but we have the resources and capabilities to change that mix dramatically from week to week to give us the lowest cost scrap mix in the industry. In summary, may I mention, anybody can buy equipment. Our team knows anybody can buy equipment. Our team also knows that their high performance is what makes the difference. We have the willingness to look at businesses and make tough decisions about where we should play and where we shouldn't. We hold ourselves accountable for world-class results. We have the ability to bring in new businesses and integrate them quickly and effectively. All of that sits on a unique raw material capability that no one else in the industry can match. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Al Behr, our EVP for Plate and Structural.
Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it. Thanks to all of you for joining us this morning and giving us the opportunity to tell our story. This is fun for us. I'm going to cover some comments about the evolving industry landscape, I'm going to break this up into three sections. I'm first going to give you just a quick overview of our position within that landscape. Then I'll have some comments on our outlook on demand, then we'll cover supply. First, I thought I'd start with just a map of our divisions across North America. You can see the products and the company names listed there, you can see the geographic spread. Really the point here is that when we talk about Nucor as a diversified and efficient industrial manufacturer, this gives you a visual sense just what that diversification means.
It's an unmatched product breadth that Nucor carries to the market. A quick overview of the markets we serve. Half of our volume flows through construction, it's our key end market. Many of my comments about demand will be centered around construction. Certainly, we have other key market segments listed across the bottom that we serve, several of those also represent exciting opportunities for growth for us in the coming years. As we start to think about demand, there's really three key drivers or three trends that we see happening right now that are very positive for demand. The first one is infrastructure, this has got some news recently. We've had some spending bills passed. We're excited about that. We think it's the right thing for America, it's also a huge tailwind for steel demand.
We'll have more spending on infrastructure as a company in the next 10 years than we've had in the last seven decades. That's a huge win. It's something like 3 million-5 million tons per year annual steel demand incremental from prior years. As we think in the middle there about the reshoring and the onshoring story in America, this is also great for our country. It's also a tailwind for steel demand. I'll share some thoughts more about that because some of the things we're seeing within that reshoring story are also particularly steel-intensive. Lastly, there's the power grid modernization. As we start to transition from a fossil fuel-based energy system to renewables, that transition is steel intensive. This is also some exciting things happening here that you'll hear about from Chad Utermark in this area.
If we stay there for just a minute and think about the steel intensity, again, of that transition to renewables, this lists the steel required per ton per megawatt of generating capacity. You can see there, it's automatically steel intensive. Certainly, offshore wind jumps off the page. We're excited about that, not only because of the tonnage, which by the way, if you think about the Biden administration's plan for 30 gigawatts by 2030, that math is seven and a half million tons of steel just for the transition into offshore wind. We're particularly excited about that because of our Brandenburg plate mill that's going to come online at the end of this year. It's going to start serving customers as we move into next year, and it's ideally suited to take care of these customers in that business.
Today, most of the offshore wind that's built in the world is serviced out of a blast furnace, and that's got a carbon footprint of about five times what ours will be out of Brandenburg. We think it makes a lot of sense as we're building green energy, that's renewable energy, we ought to do it with green steel, that's sustainable steel, and we've got a great story to tell there we're excited about. As we start to think more about demand and about construction, this is the Dodge forecast. Dodge are the leading, what we would consider the leading construction economists, certainly in the country. This is their forecast. It's for 10% annual growth. This is non-building. This is from 2021, the last full year of data, out through 2026.
When we talk about infrastructure spending, you're going to see that impacted here because this is non-buildings. As we think about the building side, it's also strong growth for 8% CAGR from 2021 through 2026. You'll see there 2022 has been a particularly strong year, and we've talked about that on earnings calls and with you all, the resiliency and the strength of non-res construction for us this year. It makes sense there's some moderation into 2023, but still stronger than 2021, much stronger than 2021, and renewed growth out through the end of 2026. Back just for a moment about the steel intensity of what we're seeing today. These are just an example of three key areas where we're seeing a lot of building.
First of all, I'd say all three of these projects are project types where steel is inherently competitively advantaged as a building material choice. We're seeing a lot of these built, and they're almost always built with steel. Nucor's position is unmatched to take care of these, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. Just in terms of steel intensity, if you think about a pharmaceutical plant, that's got an average build size of $170 million, and it's got a per square foot cost of about $500 per square foot. An EV plant is $2 billion average spend. They're about $300 a square foot. It's a little less because they're geometrically huge. They're huge footprints, and they're very steel intensive. Lastly, the big guys on this page are the semiconductor plants.
They're an average build of $11 billion. The per square foot cost is nearing $5,000 per square foot. Obviously, there's a lot of things that go into a semiconductor plant other than steel. We're certainly aware of that, make no mistake about it, these plants are very heavy. They're very steel intensive. They're a strong demand driver for steel as we see this onshoring and reshoring. Let's think about another type of project, warehouses and data centers, and you've heard us talk about the strength in this sector as well. This is an example building, frankly, it could be any manufacturing plant. When you look at all the various components that go into completing the construction of one of these buildings, Nucor is a direct supplier to or a direct manufacturer of every single component you see on this page.
As a matter of fact, in no fewer than 10 of those sectors, we are the leader in the market segment as a direct manufacturer. Again, a diversified, efficient industrial manufacturer. This is one part of how that looks. One last comment about that. When you have a product breadth like we have, and you have all of these customer types and different types of channels that we work through, it's important to not do that in a series of silos with disparate strategies. We do that through our construction solutions team that, number one, seeks to influence the decision-makers at the highest level possible on a project. Second, they bring to bear a solution that is all-encompassing and is better suited to take care and drive value for that owner.
Those better solutions end up with better project outcomes, and it is a competitive advantage for Nucor. As we start to think about supply, this is a picture of either U.S. or North American supply as a very broad brush. You'll notice it looks almost the same, it's important to note two different things. One is it's EAF-centric. Over 70% of capacity now in the U.S. or North America is made in the EAF. Secondly is imports. That imports have been, are, and will continue to be part of the supply chain for steel in North America. Let's look at imports in a little more detail. This is the market share of imports as the blue line, the total volume of imports as the green bars across the bottom.
You'll notice that from 2015 through 2020, you see a steady downward trend in the level of imports. This is in part due to the success that our industry has had in bringing forward trade cases and prosecuting those trade cases. In 2015, we had 55 of those trade cases on the books. Sitting here today, we have 187. As an industry, we recently just defended the hot-rolled, cold-rolled, and galvanized trade cases successfully. We'll do that next week. We'll provide testimony in the plate sunset reviews. This is a key part of the story and part of what the rehabilitation of this market has looked like. You also notice here an increase in imports in the last couple of years, there's really a pretty simple reason for that. It's a huge spread at the time between import prices and domestic.
This shows you by month, just the last couple of years, that spread, and it peaked out about a year ago today at $1,000 a ton. You can see what that did. It brought in a significant quantity of imports. What you'll also see is that as that spread narrowed and that spread moderated, so did imports. The point is not that trade cases prevent imports or block imports. The trade cases are able to allow the market to operate efficiently. They bring rational behavior to the market, and you see as spreads widen, imports widen. As spreads moderate, so do imports. Lastly is just a little bit more about the landscape and how it's shaped. This is the move to EAFs shown over the last couple of decades. It's been going on for some time. Today, we sit at about 70% EAF.
What we saw over that time period was that shift happening because of the inherent efficiency of EAFs and the inherent flexibility that an EAF is allowed in terms of flexing for the demand of the market. What we're seeing today is this increasing as we add sustainability as part of the story for EAFs. They are competitively advantaged when it comes to sustainability, and you'll hear more about that from Greg Murphy in just a few minutes. If we look more closely at sheet capacity, this also shows the consolidation and the move towards EAFs over time. On the left is in 2000, you had about 20% of the market was EAF based, and you had the top four producers with 43% share. You fast-forward to today, those top four producers have 83% share.
There's the consolidation, the market share of EAFs has more than doubled to 43%. Sticking again with sheet and looking at North America, if you look at the capacity and you look at how that's transformed over time, you start in 2019 with a total capacity of 103 million tons. You add some closures through 2020, you add some startups that are either happening now or expected, including our own mill in Gallatin and our own mill to come in West Virginia, along with some anticipated closures. This is all from First River. You end up with a total capacity in North America of about 105 million tons. When you put this against the demand outlook that we just walked through, you see a supply-demand dynamic that's really pretty well-balanced.
In summary, I'll end with this, that's that the demand picture as we see it has got significant multi-year tailwinds that we see as key drivers for demand. There's a supply picture that is balanced and it inherently favors the efficiency and the sustainability of EAFs. Lastly, you have our position in that market as a diversified, efficient industrial manufacturer, ready to bring solutions to our customers that are unparalleled by any of our competitors and ready to take advantage of the opportunities we'll encounter. At this point, I'd like to turn it over to my teammate, Rex Query. Rex is a 32-year Nucor teammate. All of us have worked in a lot of businesses. I think Rex probably owns the unofficial crown for having worked in the most in our company. It's a pretty awesome history he's got.
He's our next speaker, and please welcome Rex.
Thanks. We keep adding new businesses, so if I don't relocate again, I'm not going to be able to keep up with the record of most groups that I've worked with. It is great to be here, and I actually have the privilege of speaking with you about our investments and our growth in our core. Just as a lead in, a reminder, Nucor began, the Nucor of today began in the 1960s as an efficient industrial manufacturer. Now, we were a single location industrial manufacturer, so we were not very diverse. What we've done is we've invested in that core, but we also changed the definition of core for us. Yesterday's expand beyond, decades ago, expand beyond has become the core that we speak about today. I want to walk through that just for a few moments.
Looking at this first slide, 60 years later, we highlight just a few of the investments. What we see, what we'll note, we'll see micro mills being invested in by Nucor. This is a geographic look, a regional focus for us to focus in markets to better serve our customers regionally as we build these micro mills, right? Sedalia, Frostproof, Lexington, North Carolina is coming on. You also see the investments in our sheet capabilities. We've got a few on here where we've expanded the capabilities. We've expanded our footprint as well, but it's also a look at the capability expansion. You'll see Nucor-JFE, joint venture in Mexico, exposed automotive galvanizing line. You hear a lot about our focus in going higher end, higher value added. You'll see our invest recycling. I'll also note Precoat Metals, acquisition of a coating company, predominantly in construction.
The painting on the construction side, we've got announced expansion there. You'll likely see more of that to come as well in the coating side for us. Also, California Steel Industries. As you look, you'll see our expansion into the West with California Steel and the joint venture we have there with JFE. We are expanding our capabilities and our capacities as well in our already environmentally sustainable processes. Here we see just a subset of some recent capital investments. The total here is a little over $2 billion. You'll see a look really at the sheet and the bar side. Just wanted to highlight a few of these. For me, most recently involved in the sheet side of our business. It's a focus for us on growing our end-use opportunities that we have. Hickman, we have a new galvanizing line in Hickman, Arkansas.
Generation 3 galv line, cold mill there as well, just prior to that. That's not on the list here. Our Gallatin expansion recently, really a full remake of the capabilities of that plant. We added a pickle galv line here not long ago, focused on heavier gauge galvanize that we can reach into frame applications in the automotive side. You also see the recent bar investments that we've had. I wanted to revisit this slide just for a moment. You saw this earlier with Steve as he walked through the waterfall slide. Really what I want to do is just focus for the next few minutes on the last couple of items there, and it's the improved margins in the long products and on the sheet side. I want to just unpack that just for a few minutes and walk through some of the changing.
What we'll see is the changing landscape in the market, changing competitive landscape, also the changes inside of Nucor and what we're doing to facilitate the expanded margins. All right. A little history look back. If you go back to the early 2000s, we had a period of acquisitions, long products. Prior to that, it was greenfield for Nucor, then we kick into this acquisition phase. We got long products. You saw some sheet acquisitions. I happened to be at Decatur, Alabama. It was a sheet mill that had gone into bankruptcy, and we start that back up in late 2002, 2003. What you've seen is an expansion of our metal margins over this time. We've got consolidation that's occurred in the industry. Al mentioned the trade cases. Fair trade accountability. We saw that going on as well.
You also have seen in here recently, the sustainability focus, I'll talk about that here a little bit more. The trend for an increased metal margin, that's our sales price less the scrap, and that's what we have to work with for our costs and our profit. Interesting, if you take this back and go into the 1990s with this same look. Even at a time when you saw this tremendous shift in EAF from blast furnace to EAF and a more common cost structure, you still saw the same trend. Even as you saw companies come together in a more comparable cost structure, you still saw this expansion of metal margins. I'm going to take this a little bit more specific, let's just look at the long products and sheet products, EBITDA margins trend, and the stability.
Long products you'll see there in the darker green, the consolidation, fair trade accountability that we've seen. You see a more stable and higher EBITDA margins in the long products. You'll see the 20% versus the 14% average we've seen on the sheet side. We absolutely believe we're in the first few years of some significant change going on in the sheet side of our business in the market with our competitors. Al mentioned the consolidation from what the top four producers have market share previously and now what we have. You see the increase in the accountability on the trade. We absolutely believe you're going to see this, also you're seeing that investment in additional capabilities by Nucor into our sheet business. Last thing I'll mention on this is the sustainability trend. All right? Greg will walk through some detail.
In every area of our business, we started initially getting requests, now they're really demands for lower carbon footprint, greener steelmaking, and a focus on environmental stewardship. We already offer that today as an advantage versus most of our competitors, in particular, our integrated competitors. Strategically, within the Sheet Group, we really divide our process pretty simply as we think about the business into three areas. We look at products, geography, and end markets. On the product side, we've talked about the coated and galvanized, higher margin, higher value-added. That's really the focus. Advanced high-strength steels and other advanced grades. That was part of the Hickman, Arkansas expansion that we've seen there. Aluminized zinc, you'll see predominantly in the construction side of our business with the painted product, and I mentioned the pre-paint earlier. Geographically, I want to focus just a moment on Midwest and Northeast.
40% of the sheet still consumed in the United States is in the Midwest. Still in the Midwest. Even with the automotive transition in the Southeast, you still have that much of the steel consumed. Add another 10% when you talk about the Northeast. There's 50% of the sheet steel consumed is consumed in the Midwest and Northeast. That's been an area that's been dominated by the integrated steel companies. You see our announcement with West Virginia. We want to take advantage of the trend and the requests and the requirements of our customers for a greener solution. We are in the heart of the Midwest with this West Virginia mill. We can reach that area with Decatur, Alabama, Hickman, Arkansas, Gallatin, Kentucky, and supply that area with greener, more sustainable steel, lower carbon footprint. West Coast, I mentioned CSI.
You had the recent announcement with UPI exiting that market. We see an opportunity there for further expansion and growth for us in that area, that region. In the Southeast, we have a very strong footprint already in the Southeast. Great reputation in the automotive market with our Berkeley sheet mill. You saw the announcement of us expanding that. We'll double our ability on the automotive side for galvanizing. Finally, on the end markets, we've mentioned these various markets. These are really the key drivers for us from a business standpoint. Back to the sustainability. We're getting the demand in automotive construction, consumer durables, energy for cleaner, more sustainable steel. Really just want to show you with the recent announcements, just a quick footprint of our Sheet Group. We've got Nucor-JFE on there as well. That's an integral part. We supply substrate.
Currently, we have the flexibility there for various supply. We're able to do that, supplying the automotive market. Qualifications are already well underway. We've been qualified in a number of the automotive companies, and more on the way. As you know, that's a little bit of a lengthy process to get done. We're seeing great success there. Great partners with JFE. We work well with them. California Steel, which we spoke about, but you see West Virginia, the announcements of the Berkeley galv line and a new galv line that'll go out west as well. Last thing I will mention is the Nucor Steel Indiana, Crawfordsville, started up in the late 1980s. You have a significant investment going on there for us. Narrower mill, more construction-focused, and that is the role they will play on the team.
West Virginia coming in, some of the others fulfilling some of the higher-end, wider product. For there, they can remain narrow, focused, look at painted, and also with the aluminized zinc product as well out of there. Finally, I'm going to wrap this up. This gives you, in a five-year period, a snapshot of Nucor and what we're doing with our recent announcements. You'll see top half of that, you'll notice projects listed. If you look at 2020, we had about a 10.5 million ton capacity. That'll be 17 million tons. Market share. Going from 17% to 27%. The gray bars that you see on that top half are galvanized, coated, higher value-added. Roughly about 2.5 million tons. In a five-year period, we'll add about 4 million tons to that. We're going at about 2.5 times.
You'll see a market share from 14% to 36%. We are making the investments to truly grow capacity, but also to expand our capabilities. We are green, and we're getting greener. As Leon mentioned, when we got others making the investments, we get to make investments in the things that we're going to grow our company further. We got other companies making investments just to try and get where we're already at. I want to wrap up and just I'll comment just a moment as I hand off to Chad. At this point, we already have 20% of our sheet consumed internally by Nucor. That's downstream. This is that what yesterday was the Expand Beyond is now our core today. That's growing. I think a total steel consumption pushing 6 million tons, just shy of that internal consumption inside of Nucor overall.
We are going downstream. We have been for decades, connecting closer with the end user and the OEMs, and we're expanding that even further. I'm going to hand off. Chad Utermark, Executive Vice President, New Markets and Innovation, and he's going to talk with you a little bit about today's Expand Beyond, but like it'll be tomorrow's core for us. Thank you
Good morning. Thank you, Rex. As your largest customer, I appreciate that. Inside of Nucor, I've been on both sides of the house, steel making and now downstream, we have a really healthy, vibrant, discussions, and we work so well together, and I really appreciate our upstream steel making and the products that we now have at the steel making level to bring to our downstream businesses. As we talk about Expand Beyond, it's one of the things we quickly look at is the steel needs in that Expand Beyond business, do we make it? With Nucor being the most diversified, having the broadest portfolio of carbon steel, it's just a natural fit. Grow the core, Expand Beyond, live the culture. You've heard that. I want to take a few moments this morning to unpack Expand Beyond. Why are we expanding beyond?
How do we think about finding the opportunities out there? What excites us about expand beyond? Although with the backdrop of seeing Nucor as a diversified, highly efficient industrial manufacturing company, these three areas are where Nucor not only excels but allows us to create value as we apply these to these expand beyond opportunities. Let's break these down a little bit. Core competencies, kind of a fancy word, but inside of Nucor, that's just what we do. It's just who we are. It's our culture. From safety and quality ownership down at the plant level to these efficiency bonus systems that we have in place, it's that quality and culture that makes Nucor what it is. What's exciting is, as we get these expand beyond opportunities, how do we transport that into these businesses? Supply chain.
I mentioned earlier, we have the broadest portfolio of carbon steel products in North America. We want to bring those steels into these expand beyond opportunities. Rex mentioned how we started the expand beyond of yesterday with some of these downstream businesses. I can tell you today, the relationship between the steel mills and our downstream businesses create synergies and differentiating customer service. We work well together, from inventories to can you jump in and roll this steel, to, "Hey, steel mills, come over. Let's develop a product here to meet a customer need in downstream." As we expand beyond, we are going to leverage those same supply chain. Commercial channels. With Nucor's existing commercial channels and customer relationships, we will accelerate growth in these businesses, and that's a big part of what we are doing in expand beyond, is accelerating growth.
I'm excited to share that we are already seeing new revenue coming in to expand beyond businesses due to relationships that we already had with our customers inside of Nucor. Just something in the last month that popped out in our warehouse group, and I will show you a slide, is them bringing business to other Nucor products. In fact, let's unpack that. This is a picture of a big warehouse with steel racking. However, our racking company, NWS, Nucor Warehouse Systems, doesn't just offer racking. They offer a solutions package to the warehouse customer. They provide products, their scope of bid is things like lighting, stairwells, decking, and safety systems, as well as installation services. Our NWS will come in and coordinate all of that. I'm excited to share just in the last probably month, guess what we are offering now to these warehouse customers?
Overhead doors, conduit, other Nucor products. We are finding expand beyond opportunities in growing and sizable markets, as you can see. I think Steve had a similar slide. These are the four most recent expand beyond businesses that we have entered. I can share with you that we have exciting growth plans for all of these businesses. While I won't break down every business, I do want to talk about towers and structures for a minute. We entered the electrical utility tower space this late summer with the acquisition of Summit Utility Structures in Pennsylvania. While we only have 2% market share, the growth in this space, in particular, driven by grid hardening, renewables, natural disasters, replacements, as well as population growth, that growth profile is really, really exciting for us.
You should expect us to pour rocket fuel on this segment here, whether that's through acquisitions or whether that's through greenfields. Steve mentioned this as far as the financial impact. Over the coming years, we should expect this group, this group of four new expand beyond businesses, to be generating in the $700 million EBITDA level. Once we get a business, how do we drive these efficiencies? How do we make it Nucor? What we found is each expand beyond business has its own unique opportunities to bring and grow and enhance these businesses. What we do is we look at them, then we filter them through these three areas. I'll talk about towers and structures for just a minute, then we'll talk about overhead doors and what's going on with CHI.
What came out immediately with towers and structures as we walked through those facilities, those manufacturing plants where they make these steel poles, it looked just like our joists and deck plants. As you know, we know how to make joist. Guess what we've done since this small acquisition we have in Pennsylvania? We've got a team of probably about 10 of our joist and deck teammates working with us in this business to drive efficiencies, synergies, bring automation, so that we're the world-class producer of towers and structures. CHI. We've talked about this. It's got a lot of attention when we entered this space, saw a great opportunity, in late June, we acquired what I believe is best in class in the overhead door space with CHI.
Although it's only been three months, we're extremely excited about this team, what they are accomplishing, and their growth plans. Just a few highlights. We've got a dedicated integration team on the ground in full swing and bringing Nucor core competencies to bear in CHI. I'm also excited to share that the leadership team at CHI stayed with Nucor, and alongside Nucor leaders, we're driving efficiencies and improvements already at our CHI manufacturing facilities. What's most exciting, though, about CHI is the growth opportunities, the growth initiatives. We're already seeing accelerated growth of new dealers when compared to prior years, and we will continue to grow in the residential space. We have a little less than 20% market share in the residential space, we're still going to grow in that space.
You should expect us to look at finding bolt-on opportunities, small acquisitions to round out our portfolio. There's so many different types of overhead doors, especially as you get into the commercial space. Speaking of the commercial space, that is the big opportunity. I think Leon mentioned it. Don't forget, Nucor manufactures thousands of buildings a year. We touch that construction space that Al talked about, and these buildings have multiple overhead doors. We'll use and leverage the relationship at Nucor Buildings Group, where they make thousands of buildings. Our joist and deck and our beam businesses, where they build large complexes and have great relationships with big customers, we'll bring that to bear to bring opportunity for CHI to put commercial doors into those buildings. As you are aware, we've had a solid group of downstream businesses through the years.
You can see that on the left. With our recent growth and Expand Beyond, Nucor now has a much broader portfolio of downstream value-added businesses. As you can see on that chart on the right, and I mentioned it earlier, these new businesses have great growth opportunity, and that's what's exciting as we will push that and as we grow these companies. Also, in addition, we expect these Expand Beyond businesses to have much higher EBITDA margins and help Nucor. Expand Beyond businesses will help create a much more sustainable business in the future. In closing, we're excited about the Expand Beyond space and what's going on there. I want you to know that our team is bringing Nucor's core competencies to bear in these new businesses. In addition, within Nucor supply chain, we will mine the opportunities and bring benefits as well to these businesses.
Finally, when we connect these new businesses with our commercial touchpoints inside of Nucor and those relationships, you should expect, and we expect to see growth accelerate and strong financial results over the coming years from Expand Beyond. Thank you for your time, and I want to bring up at this time and introduce Greg Murphy, Executive Vice President over Business Services and General Counsel. Greg.
Thank you very much, Chad, and thank you all for being here today. It's my privilege to wrap up our prepared remarks today with a discussion about sustainability. Sustainability is something that pretty much all of our speakers have touched on, but I want to get into a little bit more detail about why we think sustainability really is a differentiated value proposition for Nucor in particular. I also want to compare and contrast where we sit today in the industry in comparison to some of our competitors. I use the term and got a little bit of ribbing for this, sustainability really is ubiquitous. It's everywhere you turn.
If you talk to any investor, if you talk to any customer, when we go out to recruit and add to our 31,000 team members, everybody's interested in knowing how is it that the steel industry is green, and how is it that steel can be sustainable. I want to touch a little bit on some of the advantages that we have that really separate us and allow us to really meet the demands of our customers where they are today. As we sit here today, Nucor has a Scope 1, Scope 2 greenhouse gas intensity level of 0.43 tons of CO2 for every ton of steel that we produce. If you compare that to the global average for integrated producers, we're about a fifth of the carbon intensity of the global average for blast furnaces and integrated steel production.
In other words, all of the steel we make today is green steel, as we sit at that really industry-leading level of 0.43 tons. In fact, as you can see from the line on the left-hand side, the Paris Agreement set forth goals and objectives by industry for where industries needed to be in order to reach that below 1.5 degree scenario into the future. If Nucor did absolutely nothing else but did just what we're doing today and remained at that 0.43 tons, we would be below the 1.5 degree scenario out in 2040. Think about that. 20 years out, we're still below the most ambitious standard set in the Paris Agreement. If you consider our Scope 3 emissions and you add those in as well, we're still at below 0.8 tons of CO2 per ton of steel produced, which is world-class, industry-leading.
Of course, we're not content to rest on our laurels. We're not going to stay at 0.43. In fact, we're continuing our inexorable march toward net zero in everything we do. I want to talk a little bit about some of the ambitious but realistic goals that we set to further reduce our greenhouse gas intensity. We announced that by 2030, we would reduce our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 35%. That 35% reduction based on a baseline year of 2015, which is the year that the Paris Agreement was adopted, would put us at a level of about 0.38 tons of CO2 per ton of steel produced. I can assure you that when we blow through that goal, we will set another goal on our march to zero.
Another thing we talked a lot about is really the importance of transparency, because there is a tremendous amount of what we call greenwashing. You hear that term used all the time. We thought that even though really the Paris Agreement standards and the way that a lot of people are defining greenhouse gases today focuses on Scope 1 and Scope 2, we think that it's just as important to talk about our Scope 3 emissions. Nucor was the first company in North America to publish our most significant Scope 3 emissions. They really fall into 2 categories. They're the emissions that result from the raw materials we use to make our steel. That would be any carbon-laden raw materials, including things like pig iron and direct reduced iron. The other big category for us as an EAF producer is inbound and outbound transportation.
Whether it be by barge, by ship, by rail, by truck, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with transporting raw materials into our steel-making facilities, and then the delivery of our steel and steel products to our customers. We believe that by publishing our Scope 3 emissions, we will hopefully encourage other steel makers to do the same, and you will see that that differential only gets greater. What are the advantages we have? Well, the first advantage is that for more than five decades, we've been producing steel using the electric arc furnace. If you think about that, we have today more than 30, I think the last count is 32 electric arc furnaces that we own and operate in North America. That number's growing, as you heard from Rex and from Al and from others. We own exactly zero blast furnaces.
Today, when we make steel, on average, more than 75% of our raw material mix is made up of recycled material. In our long products businesses, that number is close to 100%. Scrap has an embedded carbon value of zero from a greenhouse gas perspective. Huge advantage. The second advantage we have on the raw material side, as Doug mentioned earlier, that we own and operate two direct reduced iron facilities, one in Trinidad and a second one in Louisiana. By making DRI, we can produce a high-quality metallic that is about 50% of the embedded carbon value of pig iron. Doug talked about how we were able to pivot when Russia invaded the Ukraine.
We were able to quickly shift our product mix, he mentioned what a tremendous advantage that was to satisfy the needs of our customers, to not have supply chain disruptions. Of course, it has another incredible advantage, that is from a sustainability advantage. By using DRI, we produce 4.3 million tons of DRI every year. We can reduce the embedded carbon that we would otherwise have used in pig iron by 50%. The next advantage, you've heard a lot about this, but I think it really resonates in the sustainability area too, is Nucor's incredible product breadth. There are a number of other steel companies in North America that are coming out with their own offerings of green steel. If you pay careful attention, some of them can offer green steel in one or maybe two product areas.
Nucor has the ability to supply sustainable, low greenhouse gas, low carbon embodied and intensive steel across the full breadth of our product offerings. That's one of the reasons why we were so excited about a year ago to launch Econiq, which is Nucor's branded net zero steel family of products. This is a way in which Nucor can meet any customer who is trying to reduce the embedded carbon throughout their supply chain and can supply the lowest greenhouse gas steel across any category. We've had customers ask us, "Well, can we buy a metal building from Nucor that's Econiq?" Can we buy sheet steel for our automobiles that's Econiq? Can we build structural steel that will go into the greenest buildings that we want to develop as a developer? The answer to that is yes, and yes, in every category.
It started out with really great interest in the automotive OEM space, we were very excited to ship our first coil of Econiq in January of this year to General Motors. When we launched Econiq, we did it jointly with GM. What I've been really impressed with is the way in which Econiq is now really developing interest across all product levels, whether it be construction, whether it be appliances, whether it be automotive or other areas. While we are still in the beginning of that journey, I absolutely expect that that will grow and grow significantly over the coming years. Leon mentioned that I just got back from a trip to Europe, the reason that we went there is we wanted to meet with the four leading steel makers in the EU, we wanted to talk with them about sustainability.
As all of you know, in Europe, they have the reputation for being, quote, "ahead of the U.S. in sustainability." If you really think about and look carefully at how they produce steel in the EU today, almost all of the production, or at least a strong preponderance of it, is made in blast furnaces. We met with these companies, and we asked them to talk about the challenges that they're experiencing, and we shared our experiences. I came away with a couple of really fairly profound conclusions. One is that they face an existential threat to their industry, because as integrated producers that are facing $140 per ton of greenhouse gas tax, they will not be able to compete on a global stage.
Remember I showed you earlier that integrated producers are making steel today that's two tons of CO2 or more for every ton of steel produced. Which means that you add $280-$300 in carbon tax for every ton of steel they produce. In Nucor's world, sitting at 0.43 on our march toward zero, it's a very, very different competitive equation. The second conclusion I drew was that if you talk to them about what are their plans and how are they going to deal with that, they're literally spending tens of billions of dollars in new investments to remake their entire capital structure. They're taking the blast furnaces that they've operated, and frankly operated fairly efficiently for many, many decades, and they're having to get rid of those and replace them with electric arc furnaces and direct reduced iron facilities.
In other words, their plan for the future is to look more like Nucor is today. As Leon pointed out, by the time they get there, and by the time they spend those tens of billions of dollars to get there, we're going to be much, much closer to zero. Well, what are we doing to try to get better? A lot of the levers we pull are not particularly capital-intensive or OpEx-intensive. I'm going to touch on three of those today. One is, one of the main sources of our Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions is charge or injection carbon, because we know that we still need carbon in order to make the products that we need to make.
What we're doing is we're working with companies to develop a biocarbon substitute, which is really a charcoal-based carbon that you can inject into the furnace, and you can operate without the need for coal. When we're successful in implementing that technology, it will reduce our Scope 1 emissions by anywhere between 25%-30%. The second thing we're doing is we look hard at pig iron, because pig iron today is the most carbon-laden raw material that we need in order to make some of the advanced high-strength sheet products that we need to satisfy our customers. If we could take pig iron and instead of using coal to make pig iron, but we could use charcoal from a sustainable forestry product instead, then we have a embedded carbon value that's much closer to zero.
We're working with companies today on sourcing that biochar product. The last thing I want to touch on is carbon capture and sequestration. That's not a solution that's available everywhere. You have to have the right geology. You have to have the right situation in order to be able to do that. One of our direct reduced iron facilities has the ability to capture a fairly clean stream of greenhouse gases as part of our production process. Through carbon capture and sequestration, we believe we'll be able to inject between 600,000 and 700,000 tons of CO2 every year into the Earth's surface, into shale layers, where it solidifies and becomes rock over time.
By doing that, we take a high-quality raw material that's already 50% the carbon intensity of pig iron, and now we remove a significant portion of that embedded carbon in the DRI and have a product that's much closer to zero. Leon started today with saying something that I'm very fond of, which is the green economy is really going to be built on steel, whether it's wind towers, solar arrays, infrastructure to build out the grid. The steel that it's built with does matter. What we're finding is that people are now recognizing that it makes no sense to build a solar array in North America while importing some of the dirtiest steel on the planet from China. They're coming to Nucor, and they're coming for solutions.
We'll deliver those solutions, whether it be the green steel at 0.43 or whether it be our Econiq steel at net zero. We're very excited about our future in this area. I think at this point, we're going to take a short break. I know you've all been very patient, and then we're going to come back for a live Q&A. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks. You too. You too.
I appreciate you all being here. Appreciate your patience through the presentations. This is your chance to ask questions you have. If you feel like there's content you wanted to hear and didn't, ask away. Fire away. There's going to be two microphones. Sarah has one over on this side, and then there's also one over here from Katherine. Just let them know or raise your hand, and they will hunt you down with a microphone.
Oh, thank you, Simon. Andreas Bokkenheuser from UBS. Thank you very much for today's presentation.
Just two quick questions from me. One on your raw materials strategy going forward. You're obviously investing a lot in sheet and downstream. Is that going to change your raw material strategy going forward? Are we going to see more vertical integration, more maybe scrapyard procurement, anything of that in expanding the DRI facilities to accommodate for that? That's the first question. The second question is actually on ESG. I don't know if Greg is the right person to ask, but on the net-zero carbon target, I know you didn't give a year, but is there any way to talk around how quickly you could do it? I mean, what is technically feasible in terms of becoming net-zero carbon zero and neutral, if you will, in terms of timing?
Yeah. Let me start with the latter question on environmental. Some of you had asked this really over the last year about what are we seeing in terms of demand. We've never quantified how much steel we've run in net-zero. We've not shared how much we've run of Econiq. I want to share that today because we're approaching roughly, we're thinking in the range of about 700,000 tons will be sold at net-zero this year. In 2023, we believe that'll approach 1 million tons. We're not talking a few thousand tons here. I would tell you that every ton that's been sold has been sold at a premium. Period. The value capture is already happening. It's happening throughout the industry. That is only growing significantly.
As Doug gets ready to think about the raw materials questions, I'll make a couple of comments. Greg, anything you'd like to add on Andreas' question regarding kind of that timing and conversion?
One of the things that we think is really important is that we're very credible in what we say about sustainability. To answer your question, we know that it's possible today, with the levers that we're already pulling, that we can get down to a greenhouse gas intensity level without the application of things like RECs and offsets. Assuming things like the natural greening of the grid, more renewables, we can get down to a number that's in that neighborhood of 0.2, probably, maybe even a little lower. As Leon pointed out, if the world adopts sustainable steel making the way we think they will, if all of the steel we sold today was Econiq, and we have the capability of doing that across every single product, we would be at zero today.
We didn't want to say that we would be at absolute zero by 2050 like a lot of companies have. Because if you ask those companies how they're going to get there, they have no earthly idea. We believe we can get really close in an industry that needs carbon in order to make the quality products that our customers demand, and we're confident that we can be the lowest.
Thanks, Greg. Doug, do you want to touch on the raw materials?
Yes. I'll pick up one thing with Greg and then touch on the raw materials. The other thing that's really critical and an advantage of the EAF is we can melt basically anything in it. We don't have to change our process to be able to take advantage of new technologies. We're at a low starting point, we don't have to be in a rush to do something that's not a good business move. We're in a pretty good position to look at the market and look at the different iron-making technologies and the technologies that'll affect our business to take choices that don't increase costs but reduce carbon emissions. It's a pretty good place to be. In terms of our raw material strategy, don't see the need for adding more DRI in the future. That could change longer term.
I think we see how other iron-making technologies evolve, we save for those opportunities. In terms of scrapyards, it's not something that we have to own. There are times when we have very specific criteria that we look at that may make sense for us to own those. We do a great job with our brokerage group of buying from the market. It has to really make sense from a capital efficiency standpoint for us to make that investment because it's not something we absolutely have to do.
Thanks, Doug. Timna.
Yeah. Hey, good morning. Timna Tanners with Wolfe Research. I have two kind of involved questions if you'll indulge me. One is really to expand on the market share gain slide where you talked about taking sheet share to 27% from 17% in 2020. Year-to-date, you've actually taken volumes, I think, overall down 10%, despite all the expansions. Kind of want to reconcile those two diverging strategies, right? The near term, less volume and a strong market, yet, the vision to expand more. How are you going to achieve that? The second question is on your investments going forward. I know you've talked about expanding existing capacity, there's a couple areas where we're seeing a lot of strength, and I just wondered your philosophy on energy pipe, electrical steel and tin, and maybe other niche products relative to expanding existing capacity. Thanks.
Timna, I want to make sure I understand the second half or the second question. In the investments downstream, are you asking if we're going to go into other niche products like tin and other things? Is that really where?
Yeah. How do you think about some of those other niche products, specifically those very hot markets right now where there don't seem to be a lot of players?
Yep. Well, let me start with, again, the second half, and maybe Steve, you want to jump in on the first, or Rex, on the market share. The team and Chad's group, and really, Dan Needham is Head of Commercial. You think about one of the other changes that's happened in the last 24 months, we've, for the first time ever, had an EVP of Commercial. His job and his team's job is really tying together the strategies throughout the entire enterprise to capture value. We've had a lot of products for a lot of years. I'm not sure we've married them up to solutions very well to our customers in the past. Again, the team is doing a phenomenal job. As we look at alternative metallics, we look at aluminum, we look at other products, we've evaluated all of those. We've looked at tin.
We're looking at electrical steels really hard. We've not made any decision on that yet, I would tell you the analysis is ongoing and our team is doing that diligence as we speak. As we think about the other capability set, obviously we've hammered home the environmental footprint and what we believe will be value capture there. We're going to continue to work up the value chain in automotive and as we think about the offerings. Some of you may not realize that inside of our corporate office is the hood of a Infiniti QX56 sitting there signed by all of our team members. Nucor's ability to make exposed panels has already been there. It's been there for years. It's how do we do that profitably and how do we partner in a different way for the future?
Again, that's something Dan and his team is working on a lot today. I would tell you there's a lot of irons in that fire to really evaluate the markets that we want to penetrate further. Today, that coated pre-paint, paint, and galvanized markets hold the most attraction for our short-term investments.
Yeah. Tim, if I could just add one thing to what Leon said there. Every time we look at spending capital, it's always through the lens of how we get the most value out of it. Markets, and whether one's hot or not, is certainly part of it, but the longer-term trend is what we're more concerned with and our relative competitive position. If we've got a spot where we know we can extract more value over time, that's where we tend to lean more on the capital side. Rex, I'll defer to you on the sheet question that she had.
Yeah. Specifically on capacity and us pulling back. This year's been an interesting year, right? Interesting couple of years, but the rollercoaster this year of things softening early in the year, we made a very deliberate decision. Bless you.
Bless you.
Made a very deliberate decision in the spot market not to go chase some spot tons. We just chose not to do that, and it was from our standpoint, that fit what we felt was the best to do in that market. Other people may do different things. That's fine. We're thinking long term, we're looking at maximizing our bottom line over the long term, not in a particular quarter per se. You saw the invasion, by Russia into Ukraine, you saw things really start to ramp up. That was a lot of the uncertainty going on in the marketplace in supply and disruption and those things. You saw pricing run back up. Well, at that point, we're producing more, demand goes up, starts to soften again. We pulled back. We made the decision on the spot not to participate.
We had a couple other things going on also, and that would be outages. When we see markets getting softer at times, we'll extend outages and take the opportunity to perform maintenance that we need and want to. We'll go ahead and do that. You also had the Nucor Steel Gallatin, I'm going to say transition from taking a couple of outages as we were commissioning equipment. We pulled that out of the marketplace as it was softening and didn't go chase some tons. You'll see that going on in any short period of time, quarter by quarter. Over the long time, when you look at that graph, what we see, our capability from a market share standpoint, will be growing from that 10.5 million tons you saw there to that 17. I hope that answers some of what you were asking.
Thanks.
The other point I would add is as we think about the Brandenburg team and what they're doing in starting up today, again, probably the safest construction project to start up we've ever seen. The team there has done a phenomenal job. Whether we're talking Brandenburg or West Virginia's sheet mill, both of those projects are going to come up and ramp up and come online and we're going to introduce those tons. Some of Rex's comments are incredibly deliberate with their current capacity, and we're not going to flood the market, but we're going to take the share that Nucor is expected to grow, and it is expected to continue to proliferate in this market. Again, we're 10 market leaders in 10 of the 14 major categories today, 11 when sheet starts or the Brandenburg plate mill starts up. That will continue with the West Virginia start-up.
Other questions?
Good morning, Carlos de Alba with Morgan Stanley. Thank you for the presentation. A couple of questions that are related to some extent. On the expand beyond strategy, you definitely provided much more detail than that I remember hearing. If we define Nucor, I understand you define Nucor as an efficient industrial manufacturer, there is definitely a lot of opportunities for the company to expand beyond. What sets the boundaries where you are willing to go, one? Two, what sort of discipline in terms of the multiples, evaluation that you will pay for those businesses, where does it lie?
The risk is as you expand more and more outside what you have been doing, the multiples start to increase, the company gets penalized, and maybe on sum of the parts approach, which by the way, would be very difficult to do in Nucor's case, but theoretically, you might start to trade at a discount to the businesses that you acquire. Related to this is that the steel products profitability has been phenomenal in the last several quarters. How do you see that going forward? What sort of normalization do you expect to see in that business?
Okay. I'm going to try to answer the first three or four, and then if I forget the last one or two, you let me know, or Steve.
Yeah.
I want to touch on your question around expand beyond. We have a lot of internal filtering and mechanism we're probably not sharing into the minutia today, but there's going to be a steel centricity to the acquisitions and the adjacencies we're looking for. There's got to be a competitive advantage and a value creation by owning it. Again, C.H.I. is a wonderful opportunity for Nucor because Chad said the word, our Nucor Buildings Group makes thousands of buildings. Over the years, that averages about 10,000 buildings annually just for Nucor. That doesn't include the gigafactories and chip plants and thousands of the warehouse and cold storage plants being built today. Every one of the Nucor buildings has anywhere from two or three, four to 30 or 40 doors on that building in structure.
The capability to help that market grow with the dealer networks that the Nucor Buildings Group has is an incredible synergy for Nucor to partner with C.H.I. It's probably more easy to think about, well, how far afoot will we go? We're not going to go into making shoelaces or toothbrushes. There's going to be a steel centricity to it. The other piece of it is we're not looking for $30 million and $40 million acquisitions, right? There's just about as much work in the 30 or 40 as there is in the five, six, $800 billion. We're looking for the opportunities to be market leaders. Again, C.H.I. provides that, or Nucor Warehouse Systems provides that. Some of the investments that we've made enable us to continue to grow in those spaces, and that's really what we're looking for.
At the end of the day, we want to grow the expand beyond businesses to the point that we're generating about 20% of Nucor's overall revenues through expand beyond businesses. Over the next five or six years, you're going to see that's where the predominance of our money in returns are going to move into that business. Steve, anything to add?
Yeah. Carlos, I'd just add one element to what Leon said there. Chad Utermark had a slide on the four different platforms that we have today, and I think the second or third row on there was the rates of growth for the market, not those companies, but the market overall. One of the key drivers when we look at the areas we want to focus on, of course, in addition to what Leon cited, the fit, our ability to drive value, those are by far the biggest things. The other is the growth rate inherent in that business or what it can bring Nucor into. It's always about the synergy effect. You talked about some of the parts valuations.
One of the things that is critical to any company we look at adding to Nucor's portfolio is how much incremental value can we get from it? That integration value is tremendous inside of Nucor. It's always been there from the days of Vulcraft and when we built our first steel mill in 1968, and it's there today. Rex cited that 20% of the steel made from our sheet group goes into our own downstream businesses. It's beyond simply supply chain efficiencies, although that's certainly part of it. It is a business model fit that allows us to integrate, coordinate, and extract more value.
Thanks, Carlos. Other questions? Sir.
Thanks. David Gagliano from BMO. I just have a couple of very basic questions. First of all, the normalized $6.7 billion EBITDA versus the, I think it's $3.2 billion from 2017 to 2019. How much of that is already flowing through the numbers? If you could break down that $6.7 billion, I think to speak a little bit to Carlos's question a minute ago, how much of that $6.7 billion do you expect to come from the downstream steel products business?
Yeah. Great question. Last year, our sheet group alone made $6.6 billion in EBITDA. A lot of that is flowing through. Leon, we're having numbers significantly above that $6.7 billion today. If you ask how much is flowing through, it's more than 100%. That's just because of the market we have right now. What we've identified on that chart are things we've already announced or concluded with acquisitions. It's not future pipeline pie in the sky stuff. These are things we have in front of us to execute on between now and 2025. I think during the core part of my slide section, we identified that about half of our CapEx will be completed by the time we get to the end of this year. I hope that gives you a sense for where we are along that journey.
It also outlines a little bit of a breakdown of where that $6.7 billion comes from. A lot of that comes from the base and then improvements we're making in our portfolio, demand drivers in the industry, and also specific things that we're doing at Nucor as well.
David, the other piece of that. We got the couple slides on there. All of you will have access, if you don't already, to the deck that we've gone through today, is some accountability, right? Us showing you individual by project, where they sit in the core or expand beyond what you could expect our three-cycle EBITAs to be. Again, that's part of the return metrics. Obviously, internally, we're held accountable to our board and obviously mostly to our shareholders. Part of that and part of sharing what we did in the breakout of each of those buckets is to inform you, to show you what we expect.
I'm sure we can have some other conversations to take any deeper dives you want to take, but that framework is there to provide that access for you guys to see what we expect and where we're holding ourselves to.
If I could just ask a couple follows. Just to try and ask it differently. I realize obviously EBITDA is through the roof now. Just when you compare the 3.2 to the 6.7, just the incremental left to go from the projects versus what's already flowing through the results. Is there a way to give us a sense as to I think you might've said about half the CapEx is done by the end of this year.
Yeah.
Is it fair to assume that about half of the incremental is to come on the EBITDA plan?
Well, there's still growth in some of the expand areas, too. We have those going to $700 million. We showed you on the chart what they were at the time we acquired them, which most of those are fairly new. We did about $80 million out of CHI in the quarter, for example. We have some growth in that area that will take place as well. The other factors, those last three bars that were on that chart, those are already there to a large degree, and that's a function of those three drivers that we highlighted in Al's area.
Okay, just last question from me. On CapEx annual between now and 2026 each year, please.
Yeah, we're not going to share that, but it is going to be at an elevated level relative to history. Of course, we've announced the amount of large projects in front of us, and one other data point that might help you is our maintenance CapEx. Maintenance being a broad definition of that word, is probably in the neighborhood of $600 million a year at this point.
Thanks.
Thanks, David. Other questions?
Hi, morning. Alexander Hacking from Citi. If you look at the steel products business for the past decade or so, it seems like most of the capital that's been deployed into that has been more on the M&A side, right? In contrast to the steel mills business, where it's been more focused on organic opportunities. Now, as you look forward, now you have this much larger steel products platform. Are there going to be substantial organic investment opportunities in that business to gain the kind of market share you were talking about earlier? Thank you.
Yeah. Alex, I want to make sure. Are we going to see an increase in the products investments and strategy as we move forward like we are in the steel?
Yeah, increase in reinvesting in the existing steel products businesses versus buying new ones.
Yeah. Look, one of the things, and the team shared today, I think Doug Jellison walked through us showing you our historical EBITDA performance in the Buildings Group that went from around 4% EBITDA margin to almost 16% today. That was through the rationalization of that group and making some very difficult decisions in a culture like Nucor's to have very hard conversations internally. Those are always difficult. For the long-term growth of Nucor, and again, you can see the return performance. Equally, within the products group, particularly the joist and deck. That's a group and a team that's known their market, known their territory, and that value creation has been captured incredibly well over the last couple of years. That team is generating hundreds of millions of dollars of returns for Nucor in just the quarter.
Its return profile against our geographic map has been incredibly well-balanced for what we expect. The other side, though, to keep in mind, Alex, while there's not been massive investment in terms of new greenfield, we've done some obviously in Canada. We've not invested in all of our downstream businesses from a safety, environmental, modernization, automation standpoint. Those groups have also benefited from that $600 million-$700 million of maintenance CapEx as part of this as we've grown. I think for the most part, as we see products today, it's a pretty balanced portfolio. Chad, anything you'd like to add? Chad's not only over new markets and innovation, but his EVP before that was responsible for products as well. Chad?
Just I guess maybe to try to answer your question. I would think in general, as we expand beyond and we have more downstream business, in general, the CapEx spend is a lot lighter than steel mills. Okay. Now, we will spend the CapEx we need to make sure we're automated, we're highly efficient, those type things. Just in general, when you look at that, I wanted to share that. I would just point out, one of the things we're really excited about is spending, and it's light CapEx compared to some of the numbers in the steel mills. The chance to automate in our downstream businesses. That's the next wave in my mind of game-changing technology that's going to come because a lot of them are very labor-intensive business.
The equipment's out there, and we've got some exciting things going on right now in our joist and deck business that over the next coming months and years, it's going to pay big dividends.
Thanks, Chad.
Thanks. Just, I guess following up on the steel product side. It is a little bit of a different business than steel making. Do you need to manage it by a separate set of KPIs? Or is there some kind of uniform Nucor set of KPIs by which you manage all of these businesses? Thanks.
Yeah. We love the net margin KPI a lot, and what they've been generating for us has been incredible over the last couple of years.
Yeah. Alex, all of our businesses, and if you visit one of our facilities, you'll hear our team talk about return on assets, which coincides with return on invested capital that we focus more on at our level of the enterprise. Those same metrics exist. Of course, commonality around driving for safety. The manufacturing model driving toward increased efficiency over time means some of the metrics will be a little different between one location versus another. The common theme is to get more efficient, move into higher value-added activities and increase margins and cash flow. All that drives into return.
Thank you.
Thanks. Other questions?
Good morning. It's Emily Chang from Goldman Sachs. My first is just around your margin expansion outlook there. Perhaps could you share with us what you think the stickiest components or maybe the structural changes in both the steel products markets and steel mill businesses that you think will allow for these high margins to be realized over time?
Yeah, Emily, I'll start that and somebody else can jump in. In the product side, Doug Jellison highlighted some of the things that are increasing the margins there. Those are things we're doing inside of our own business to make better margin on what we do and make ourselves more efficient. Some of it's an internal focus to what we do. Other parts of it have to do with the industry effects of consolidation, trade effectiveness, and the transition to EAF. That truly affects all the steel-making segments, but more pronounced in sheet than it is anywhere else. On the bar side, we're extremely well-positioned for some of the demand drivers. We're well-positioned across the board, but you'll see more effect from that in the bar side.
Hopefully that gives you a little more color around how those different factors might impact different parts of our business a little more pronounced or less.
Great. Just to follow up on M&A, thoughts about how you're balancing the M&A pace versus organic growth with some of the recent M&A transactions that you've done going forward.
I didn't-
Yeah. The question's about M&A and how we're going to balance that against other capital spending. Got you.
Emily, I would say that the heart of what we try to do is drive our enterprise strategy. M&A is one tool, one means that we might be able to do that. It's one that we've used a lot as we've added new businesses and expand beyond, and it ties a little bit to Alex's question about, are you going to see a pivot more toward a little bit more organic spending in some of those platforms or not? Those are somewhat intertwined questions. You'll see us typically use M&A to get into new businesses. That's where most of the money has been spent the last few years or strengthen position of the core, and we've done that with a couple of the deals as well. It all starts with the heart of the strategy to begin with.
Just a couple points to add to that as well, Emily. As we think about our mission to grow the core and expand beyond, it's not based on a pivot that Nucor has been in the doldrums and we're not earning. Over the last 21 months, Nucor has generated nearly $20 billion of EBITDA at $45 earnings per share. It's not as though the money's burning a hole in our pocket. We have the incredible opportunity coming off the greatest years in the history of our company to be incredibly well-disciplined. While we want to grow, how we're going to grow, we feel like we're in the driver's seat. We get to make the acquisitions and target the companies we believe are going to fit the models through the lens of bringing them into the Nucor family with a very disciplined approach.
Again, it's not this desperation and Hail Mary for our growth. It is a very targeted long-term focus to ensure that we maximize shareholder return and bring in businesses that are going to continue to decrease the volatility of those earnings through cycle. Timna.
Yeah, thanks. For a follow-up, I wanted to talk a little bit more on the demand side. I know you've got a whole team of people that look like they've been through some cycles like I have, and just would like to hear your perspective on how you're looking at the higher interest rate cycles, given that a big chunk of your end markets are construction. Then along those lines, I'm assuming we're going to talk about IIJA and some of the government initiatives with IRA, IGM, missing some acronyms probably. Have you quantified the benefit there? I know another rebar maker has talked about one and a half million annualized tons, but you obviously have structurals and plate. Have you done any quantification, maybe on an annual benefit that you can break out a little better?
Sorry, Al.
Yeah. You want me.
Yeah.
A little bit of that? Yeah. Are you talking about the infrastructure spend, Tim? I want to make sure.
Talking about broad government initiatives.
Yeah.
Infrastructure spend, IRA spend.
Plate
Any others that.
Right
you want to bring up.
On the infrastructure side, we would estimate closer to three to five million tons annually through the spending of that bill.
Across all products.
Across all products.
Products.
Yeah. IRA, I don't know that we've got a number in mind for that, we walk through some of those initiatives that we just see as the big drivers of demand. That's probably the easiest one to quantify, though, is on the infrastructure side.
Yeah, the other thing Al touched on, Timna, is we saw the CHIPS Act pass $55 billion that will be helped to reshore American manufacturing with the CHIPS Act. How that flows through over the next several years will probably ebb and flow, and I don't know it'll be a consistent build-out. That for us, Al showed you, when you look at the spend on that on a per capita, it's incredible, and it is the highest intensity of steel consumption, and that's coming. That's again, here now, that bill is passed, that's a wonderful opportunity for Nucor, but also for the U.S. as we grow.
Numbers keep popping in my head now. Maybe I'll offer a couple others. If you look at a semiconductor plant, I walked through the broad numbers. A semiconductor plant can very easily be 100,000 tons in one project. One World Trade Center, which is mostly Nucor Steel, we're very proud about that, was about 100,000 tons.
Rebar.
What's that?
Is that mostly rebar?
No, plate and beam.
Plate and beam.
Yeah. Are you talking about in the semiconductor plant? Both. Yeah, there's rebar, but plate and beam. Yeah. Joist and deck, a lot of times in the roof. They can be even more than that, but that just gives you a sense of the size of those projects. You start thinking about Taiwan Semiconductor. You think about Micron and all these announcements. It adds up to a very meaningful demand impact.
I think so.
On the construction outlook with higher interest rates?
I'm sorry, Tim.
Yeah. The start of your question was against the backdrop of higher interest rates.
How do you think about-
What's going to go on there? Al's highlighting a few points that they skew the demand. It doesn't determine it. We are not immune to the overall moves of the market. We're just like everyone else. If construction spending pulls way back, we'll be affected by that. We do sit in a spot where we're going to be able to take advantage in a unique way, more so than other people are from those major trends that are happening. We'll have to see what the economy does overall.
One of the things that the administration is currently debating is some of the buy clean provisions that are going to be embedded in things like the Inflation Reduction Act, we're very much
Working with a seat at the table to have those discussions. One of the big debates right now is how do you define green steel? There's a pretty dangerous move, in my opinion, afoot, where people are looking at this sliding scale of scrap, they're saying the more scrap you need, then the lower the greenhouse gas intensity you need in order to be able to define your steel as green. That's simply wrong. If the goal is to make energy projects with the lowest embedded carbon, why would you allow somebody who produces steel that has nine times the carbon intensity be able to do that and still call it green? We're in the beginning of that very earnest dialogue.
If we're successful in convincing people who really do care about these issues to implement policy that will really reward companies that have a much lower greenhouse gas impact, that could also fuel a lot of this demand that's embedded in some of that legislation.
That's right. Other questions?
We have one from the Internet, let me just give you that one if you can.
From the Internet. That's a big audience.
From Tristan Gresser at BNP Paribas Exane. European steelmakers are receiving large sums of public funding to transition away from blast furnace technology. In the context of a global competitive steel environment with increased focus on sustainability, how do you think about that? Do you think this could lead to potential trade actions? Have you applied to any public funding in the U.S.?
Yeah, look, I think it's a great question. As we look at the world as a backdrop for what steel's doing, we touched on our number one defense, which is having effective trade remediation, anti-dumping margins or countervailing duties. That requires a presence in Washington. We have some of the members of our team and Ben Pickett, who heads up our government affairs, with us today. He and his team in Washington do an amazing job as advocates for the industry, not just for Nucor. I think Al mentioned, in 2015, there were about 50 trade cases, carbon trade cases, not just Nucor, of carbon steel in the U.S. Today, it's over 130-ish.
180.
It's a significant remediation to prevent the millions of tons that are trying to make it on to the shores of the U.S. That's not the only thing we've got to do. More specifically, as Greg mentioned, a seat at the table. We have a great relationship with Gina Raimondo, our USTR, Katherine Tai, both who are incredibly competent leaders in Washington that understand our industry well, understand the impact and, quite frankly, the critical national importance of steelmaking in this nation. If, and it's a big if, we ever saw our nation move to a carbon tax, we have already set the stage that there has got to be swift and immediate border adjustment so that we can levelize that playing field. There has to be a penalty for steel that's imported in the United States that are three, four, six, nine times dirtier than the steels that can be made in the United States, because without that, you've now crushed fair trade, and that is a market that we operate incredibly well with. We will compete with anyone in the world on a level playing field. Again, the border adjustment tax is a critical piece of that legislation that, if our nation ever went to a carbon tax, that would need to be enacted immediately. Thank you, Internet. Other questions? One in the back of the room.
There has to be a penalty for steel that's imported in the U.S. that are three, four, six, nine times dirtier than the steels that can be made in the U.S., because without that, you've now crushed fair trade. That is a market that we operate incredibly well with. We will compete with anyone in the world on a level playing field. Again, the border adjustment tax is a critical piece of that legislation that, and if our nation ever went to a carbon tax, that would need to be enacted immediately. Thank you, Operator. Other questions? One in the back of the room.
Thank you very much. Lucas Pipes with B. Riley Securities. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the margins and the downstream opportunities and what are some of the competitive moats. Some of these markets seem maybe a little bit more fragmented, so would appreciate your perspective on that. Thank you.
Are you specifically referring to the Expand Beyond type businesses?
That's correct, yes.
Okay. Chad, I don't know if you want to touch on the competitive landscape. As we look at CHI, for example, they are not the number one market leader in overhead doors today. Two other competitors occupy a much larger %. As we think about, again, the value creation capture and opportunity that exists, their model is very differentiated. Today, their competitive landscape, if you ordered a new garage door for your home, which, by the way, is the single largest ROI on your home investment, more than a kitchen or a bathroom remodel, you're going to call the competitors to CHI, and you're going to wait anywhere between 24 and 30 weeks for that delivery. If you call CHI today, you'll have that door delivered and installed by professional installation folks within two weeks.
Again, it's a huge opportunity for us as we think about that growth and that growth opportunity. In the towers business, same thing. We looked really hard at the entire landscape. We looked at who was number 1 or number 2 or 3 in that space, and hey, did that provide a good backdrop for us to move into that almost like we did in the Tubular Group, as we acquired 3 companies in 90 days to give us a significant footprint. Our move now is to create that towers and structures business internally and grow that. It began with the Summit acquisition, and you're going to see as, I don't know if it was Al or Doug, mentioned the build-out of that moving forward.
There are competitors in that space, but there's also market opportunities for the most diverse industrial company to be able to supply that chain, continue to build those relationships with that. In every segment that you saw up there, man, there are absolutely competitive forces out there. They're ones we believe we have a unique advantage to offer to partner differently and to create long-term value.
Other questions? Yes, sir.
Morning. Timothy Parker, Hudson Capital Management. Just can you talk a little bit more about Econiq? You said there's premium pricing, but are there premium margins? What costs go into making that green or Econiq in your brand?
Yeah, absolutely. Greg, I don't know if you want to-
Yeah
kick it off and-
The whole concept of Econiq is that we start with that industry-leading 0.43 Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. Nucor's been very active in the marketplace for virtual power purchase agreements because we recognize that over time, as coal-fired plants are retired and as more renewables come online, our Scope 2 emissions will go down even if Nucor does nothing. What we don't wanna do is we don't wanna wait for that to happen. What we do is we lend our investment-grade credit rating to new development projects, whether they be solar projects or wind projects. By doing that and by guaranteeing the price at which future power will be bought from those solar or wind projects, they get financed, and they get built.
The quid pro quo for that is not only does Nucor take the risk of the future price of energy, but we get the renewable energy credits associated with the projects that we have facilitated getting built. We take those renewable energy credits from our VPPAs, and we apply them to offset any residual Scope 2 emissions. The second thing we do is we have an amount of Scope 1 emissions, and I explained how we're working aggressively to drive down those Scope 1 emissions by doing things like using biochar instead of injection carbon. Right now, we do have an element of Scope 1 emissions, we go out onto the marketplace and we find the highest quality offsets, and we offset those small residual Scope 1 emissions that are left to get to net zero.
Our ambition is that through the projects that we're doing ourselves, like carbon capture and sequestration or some of these green pig projects, biochar projects, eventually we'll have our own portfolio of offsets that we can use, which will create additionality, and we'll be able to get to that net zero number. That's basically how we do it. Yes, there's some cost associated with that, but the way we really interact with our customers is we're selling value that far transcends that incremental cost of the VPPAs and the offsets. What we're doing is we're offering them a solution to partner with the leader in the industry who is changing the way that we think about making green steel. We find that that really resonates with customers who are well along on their journey for sustainability.
I mean, we recognize other companies can go out there, and they can buy RECs and offsets too, but one, if you start from a much higher baseline, you're going to need a lot more of them. Secondly, what are you really doing to change your business model? What are you really doing to make the steel that is truly sustainable? That's kind of our model with Econiq. The customers that are on board and are getting on board every day are the ones that really, I think, take a more sophisticated and discerning view of what we're trying to do here, which is we're trying to get to zero.
Are the margins better?
Absolutely.
Yes.
Because we don't have a large amount of incremental cost, and we're selling them at a premium, our margins are bigger.
The other piece, Greg answered it well, I mean, short answer is very little to return what we're seeing today. The landscape environmentally is changing as we speak. Greg and his team are focused on a very multipronged strategy as we look to branding and the brand of Nucor and the cleanest steels in the world, how we think about the tie-in with the current administration and future administrations, how we tie in and help our customers solve solutions that some of which they don't know they are gonna have in the years to come, that they're gonna have, and those that are so far ahead of the curve that it's not just OEMs in automotive. We're seeing this across the landscape in construction, HVAC, agriculture, and many other industries quickly transition.
This approach and Nucor's move into this space is gonna create a unique opportunity for us as we move forward. I'm excited the work they're doing. It is a massive undertaking in the sense that many people can tell you Nucor is the largest recycler, and maybe it doesn't go much beyond that. We've got to continue to educate and equip a industrial manufacturing segment of the United States that recognizes if you want to build anything with the cleanest steels and the safest steel in the world, it's gonna be done with Nucor. Thank you. Question, sir? One more? No. Other questions?
Thank you for taking my follow-up question. Can you speak a little to the elasticity on the raw material side, be it scrap, pig iron, DR grade pellets? As you look out and there's continued growth on the EAF side, what are your expectations? How do you try to manage those risks? Thank you.
Sure. When we think about the raw materials, we start breaking it into two large groups. There's an abundant supply of obsolete scrap. Probably the biggest challenge there is a great deal of that scrap is on the coast
It's very easy to move it to the export market. You're going to have some logistics as you redirect that inland. The high-quality metallics could be your prime scrap, your industrial scrap, DRI, pig iron, HBI, and those. The prime scrap itself is a more finite amount of scrap, and if you're in that battle of chasing that, and that's what you're after, that's a bad place to be because it's not very elastic. That price is going to go up as the demand goes up exponentially. DRI, pig, HBI are more a function of the ore cost. HBI and DRI, you have a pellet process and there's a pellet premium. That's probably a bit more challenging. Although we're seeing a significant amount of capacity come online that will probably break that over time. We're also seeing new iron-making technologies that skip that step of the pellet.
As you look at all those, you need to have a substitute material for prime scrap or you're in trouble, and within those substitutes, long term, you need to find a way that either increases the capacity of pellet production or sidesteps the need for that pellet production.
If I may add one thing too, on our raw material strategy. Technology has existed for a very long time to remove some of the tramp elements from obsolete scrap like copper. I think the reality is that as a result of that, there really wasn't a huge demand in the market for low copper shred because there was an abundant supply of other raw materials, and from a cost standpoint, it didn't make sense. What we're seeing today is a transition as we all focus on sustainability, and we focus on how are we going to have the most flexible raw material strategy.
We're piloting and actually operating modules at some of our sheet mills today that let us take obsolete scrap, the raw material that Doug said is absolutely the most abundant and available and cheapest form of scrap today, and by removing some of those tramp elements from that, we're actually finding that we can substitute that low copper shred for things like pig iron. Think about that. Now you're taking something that has an extremely high embedded carbon level. You're taking the cheapest and most available raw material, and by removing those tramp elements through the metallurgical process, you're able to not only get a cheaper raw material supply, but you're also able to drive your Scope 3 emissions down. Those are just a couple of the things.
As you can tell, we're working on an awful lot of things. That gives you a sense of some of that flexibility in our raw material strategy.
Thank you.
Any other questions? Okay. If not, I want to thank each of you for coming today. I want to thank our virtual audience for dialing in, many of which are Nucor team members. Thank you for what you do each and every day. Thank you to our customers who make our work possible. Our investment strategy is very simple: for us to grow long-term profitable growth in this company and continue to maximize the returns. Over the last 21 months, as I stated earlier, Nucor has generated nearly $20 billion of EBITDA through that same time. It's an incredible achievement and a team that's poised and ready to capitalize on the future. We thank you for your interest in Nucor. Thank you for your participation today. We look forward to continuing the partnership, as you represent our valuable shareholders across the industry. Thank you. Have a great day.