Let's get started with our next session. We're very pleased to welcome Jack Williams, Senior Vice President of ExxonMobil. Jack runs the product solutions business at ExxonMobil. Jack, welcome, and thanks for joining us this morning.
Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Good to be here. Yeah, we run the corporation with a four-person management committee, of which I sit on, and not only have product solutions, I also have supply chain and global projects reporting into me, and our global operations and sustainability organization. I'll get more into that a little bit later. I want to go through just a couple of slides real quick, a cautionary statement. I'll be making some forward statements. Just to introduce you a little bit to kind of what we are as a corporation, what we're about, what we're trying to do, and what our look is between now and 2030, and then John and I can talk a little bit about that and other things. The way we look at our purpose for our corporation is that we are really trying to solve this and equation.
We are producing the energy, affordable, reliable energy, and also the essential products that society needs and will continue to need for decades and decades, and also reduce emissions at the same time. We think both missions are very important, and we take both very seriously and have a lot of efforts in each. As you look at the corporation right now, we have an unmatched pipeline of opportunities, probably the best since the ExxonMobil merger back at the beginning of the century. When you think about the upstream, we have the big Permian opportunity. We're continuing to grow in the Permian for many years to come. That's, of course, accentuated by the Pioneer acquisition that has entered into our portfolio recently, which has opened up even more opportunities for us. We have the Guyana asset where we have three FPSOs producing.
We'll have eight by the end of 2030, so a lot more growth to go there. We have LNG projects, further opportunities in Papua New Guinea and Mozambique. In the product solutions business, we have this chemicals performance products franchise that continues to grow at 7%-8% a year. We just started up our China One steam cracker. We'll continue to grow with that demand. We have a really good lubricants value chain, the Mobil 1 finished lubricants business, as well as a good base stocks business. We have these integrated manufacturing facilities throughout the world that we're focused on high grading the yield. A good example of that is Singapore, where we're upgrading resid up to clean fuels and base stocks. We have these new products, specialty products, Proxima and carbon materials. I'll get into a little bit later.
We have the low carbon solutions business where we have CCS opportunities. We will be starting that up really soon. Blue hydrogen, lithium, further opportunities in the low carbon solutions business. All these are underpinned by these competitive advantages we have around scale integration, the technology that drives those products like Proxima and CMV, our capability or execution excellence, and our people. What that has resulted in is some pretty impressive results recently. If you look at the end of 2024, leading TSR for the group, one year, three years, and five years, and we have a very exciting opportunity into the future out to 2030. Let me kind of talk about that a second. This graph just kind of shows what would a share of ExxonMobil do over the next out to 2030.
You first start with dividends, and we have grown our dividends for 42 consecutive years, committed to continue to embark on that going forward. We show the share buybacks that we have had. This shows the 2025 and 2026 plans for those, which is $20 billion a year, and you can see the accretion with that. The next bar, this big 10% bar, is showing what our plan that we talked about back in December out to 2030, which generates $20 billion of incremental earnings by 2030. We put that on an annual basis, so it is 10% annual earnings growth between now and then. I just talked about a lot of the generators of that, but in the upstream, it is 25% volumes growth over that period, and it is Permian and Guyana that is really driving that.
In our product solutions business, it is 80% growth in high value products, and that's these chemical performance products, these high value lubricants I talked about. Our low carbon solutions business is starting to contribute in that timeframe as well. Wrap that up, 10% CAGR out to 2030, and you wind up with a high teens, 18% return we're looking for over the next five years, which is strong, I would say, not only versus the IOCs, but also versus the S&P Industrials, which we show up there, and we've outperformed over the past five years, and we have, I think, a good shot at outperforming over the next five as well. We think that ExxonMobil is that plays out a pretty strong case for ExxonMobil being a strong contender for most every portfolio out there.
With that, John, I'll maybe turn it over and have a little Q&A.
Great. Thanks for the intro, Jack. From there, why don't we start with maybe some of your high level views on the broader industry? ExxonMobil is obviously an enormous global player touching many different subsegments of energy, and you are uniquely positioned to speak to the broader energy market. What's your view on global energy supply and demand today?
The word uncertainty certainly comes to mind. We've had perhaps the shortest oil spike in the history of the oil markets. It started on a Sunday evening and ended by Monday morning. You can see the results. I mean, I think it's really hard to predict near term where things are going to go. We have a lot of volatility out there. The market's pretty well supplied with OPEC+ continuing to unwind the voluntary cuts. We will be opportunistic should there be any downturn. We think we're well positioned and ready in that kind of environment. Obviously, if prices go the other way, we'll benefit pretty hugely with the production we have going on.
If you look longer term, you kind of look out to 2050, we put out a global outlook every year, and our look at 2050 shows that due to population growth and higher living standards across the world, we'll need 15% more energy by 2050, and we'll have 25% lower emissions. There'll be some that say 25% lower emissions is not enough. We need to do better, and we are advocating for good sound policy that would do just that. We do see a world where you have more energy that's needed and also lower emissions that will be emitted over that time period. That's what we're focused on.
We're focused on what do we need to do to participate in all of that, and that's why we have the upstream oil and gas business focused on Permian and Guyana, good growth opportunities, and a low carbon solutions business that is going to have world scale CCS up and running here very shortly. Then these new products, new technology driven products, Proxima and Graphite going into lithium ion batteries that we think is also going to play a big role in a lower carbon, but still high energy future.
Great. Maybe drilling more into ExxonMobil in particular. I think you addressed this a little bit in your opener, but how does Exxon differentiate versus your peers, both in energy and really just other large cap companies?
I think in terms of energy, I think we stand out in terms of the breadth of our portfolio and the depth of our capability. I mentioned these competitive advantages we had around technology. We're investing $1 billion a year in new technology. It's getting to the bottom line with these new products, and we're continuing to invest in that. I think that'll bode us well for not only the growth to 2030, but well beyond that. We have a lot of scale. Obviously, we're a large company, and just because you're large doesn't mean you're leveraging scale.
We think the way we've restructured the corporation over the last five years, where we have these businesses, you have upstream, product solutions, and low carbon solutions business, and then we have these large central organizations like our global projects organization, technology organization, supply chain organization, operations, trading that look at all these areas enterprise wide. They support all the businesses, and that really enables us to leverage that scale, and that has led to this $13 billion now of structural cost reductions in route to $18 billion by 2030. We think the scale and integration has really been unlocked with some of the organizational changes we've made over the last five years and provides a real advantage. I think the other areas where I'd like to emphasize is execution excellence. We really have executed well, and that has delivered some significant returns.
We solve the difficult problems. We're able to execute the difficult projects and have done so successfully. I think that bodes well also for future resource owners trusting us for the developments going forward. Finally, I just have to, I know everybody says their people are the best. I know you hear that all the time, but we dedicate a lot of time to developing our people, and ours really are the best. We spend a lot of time on making sure that we're developing people to their full potential, to looking at what skills and capabilities does the corporation need to succeed this decade, next decade, and the decade after that, and how are we developing those? What is our succession planning for making sure we have the experts in all those areas?
I think that we've built that up over decades, and I think we'll be working on it for decades more in a surge as well. I think that to me is really what differentiates us is these competitive advantages and then that large portfolio of opportunities that I mentioned earlier.
Great. Maybe moving on to your long-term strategy, you mentioned the uncertainty in the market, and there's a great deal of that now. How is that causing you to, or is it causing you to rethink your strategy or to revisit your 2030 plan? Has that changed anything in any way?
Yeah. You know, we built the 2030 plan, again, leveraging these competitive advantages, but we kind of generated the results and talked about this $20 billion of earnings growth and $30 billion of cash flow growth. We did that kind of on mid-cycle prices, so kind of average 2010 and 2019 margins, $65 Brent, kind of mid-cycle type margins. We are very resilient to lower than that. If you look at 2025 to 2030 at $55 Brent, we generate $110 billion of surplus cash after dividends and CapEx. We certainly can withstand lower pricing, and that would be for an extended period of time over that entire period. We have a 7% net debt to capital balance sheet, so sitting very, very good there. We have done a lot of portfolio improvement over the last several years.
We divested $24 billion of non-core assets, and it got us really down to our fighting weight. We are in really good shape, and we would see any potential downturn opportunistically. If we varied from our plan, it would be because we see a really, really good attractive opportunity in front of us, not because we need to, because of market conditions kind of forcing, kind of tying our hands. We are continuing forward with the plan. We think it is the right plan. We are, of course, keeping our head up and looking around for opportunities, and we will take advantage of those as they present themselves.
Great. Maybe we can dig in a little bit more on the 2030 plan. Can you just talk through some of the various drivers of earnings and cash flow growth that's embedded in the plan?
Yeah. I think it's been relatively well understood in the upstream that we have 25% volume growth, a lot of that from the Permian and Guyana. I think people understand what that is, and can do the math on that fairly easily, and it's pretty straightforward. On product solutions, it's not quite as easy because we're not really talking about increased throughput in a lot of our kind of fuels products. We're really talking about high grading the yield. On chemicals, on our high value chemical products, we are talking about volumes growth. For instance, the Corpus Christi steam cracker we built, the China steam cracker we built, we'll continue to grow that franchise, and that is kind of very similar to upstream in terms of just keeping up with demand and growing those volumes.
On the fuels products, on these integrated manufacturing platforms, we're upgrading the yield like Singapore. In Singapore, our throughput is not really going to go up. Matter of fact, we're producing 80,000 barrels of fuel oil. We'll convert that to 70,000 barrels a day of clean fuels, 50 of clean fuels and 20 of lube-based stocks. The way to think about that is that 70,000 barrels a day, that is going to get a $20 a barrel uplift, a clean dirty uplift. The clean dirty spread, again, over time has been about $20 a barrel. That is 70,000 barrels a day that's going to get that uplift, and that's kind of the way to think about a project like that.
Another one is Fawley, where we're putting in some hydrotreating where we'll be able to sell clean fuels into the U.K. market versus exporting higher sulfur fuels. That's maybe like a $10 a barrel difference on 35,000 barrels a day. It's harder to model that. We understand that, but that's the right thing for that business. We don't need more throughput. We need higher value products, and we have a great opportunity to add value there with our technology programs, proprietary catalyst programs. The Singapore project is 12 different catalysts to high grade all the way from resid all the way up to lube base stocks, 17 reactors. Of course, that's going to be starting up here in the next month or two. That's really where the value is in product solutions.
In CCS, again, it's more of leveraging a dollars per ton that we'll be achieving there. That, again, we're looking forward to getting that business up and running and started momentarily.
Great. Maybe just thinking even longer term beyond the 2030 plan, considering society's long-term energy transition ambition, do you see still the ability to continue to grow earnings and cash flows in your conventional business beyond 2030, or do you start to use more of the low carbon, start to grow its share of the pie?
I think this is probably the biggest issue that is out there in terms of modeling our company, valuing our corporation, because a lot of models from some of the sell-side analysts have a terminal value around 2030 in that time period that's negative for us. To the extent that we've talked about our earnings growth out to 2030, there's models to get to our current valuation. You have to, if you accept that 2030 growth, you have to start saying we're immediately going to start declining from there. We'll immediately start reducing earnings, losing cash flow from there, and nothing could be further from the truth. We are very focused. We have our plans locked and loaded out to 2030. Like I said, we'll be flexible. We'll be opportunistic, but we have really good solid plans out to 2030. It's not a target. It's a plan.
Beyond that, we're focused on what comes next. We have these really good LNG projects in Mozambique and Papua that would be post 2030. Proxima and the Advanced Graphite that we talk about are really, they'll be making some earnings before 2030, but most of that is post 2030. When you look at just those two products by the late 2030s, they could have the same earnings power today as our entire energy products business. They are basically taking refinery feed and converting those into much, much higher value products. Lower volumes, but much, much higher value products. We are continuing, of course, our CCS project, CCS, big Gulf Coast CCS development will be really up and running by then. We think we can get up to 100 MTA through that system, and throughout the 2030s, we'll be growing that volume.
We are continuing our technology program. We are continuing focusing now on what is next after, what is the next carbon material after Advanced Graphite. We are continuing to work on that today. We have a very optimistic view beyond 2030. We focused on our plan to 2030, and we felt like that was kind of as much further out than most companies go, but we wanted to provide that kind of transparency. Beyond 2030, we are going to continue to grow this business. We are absolutely committed to it, and the underpinnings of that growth are there today.
Maybe drilling into your very significant slate of projects that is starting up this year, you have 10 major 2025 startups. Can you talk about how some of those are tracking? You do not have to talk about all 10, but maybe the major ones and kind of any updates there.
Yeah. I mean, I think when you think about that, John, I mean, 10 projects this year, that's a big year. That's a big year, and they're all on track. We started up our China steam cracker complex. We started up our first of our advanced recycling units. We'll have another one in the fourth quarter. When you think about the big Singapore ZID upgrade project that I mentioned, the Fawley hydrotreater project that I mentioned, and then also a renewable diesel project in Strathcona in Canada, all those just start up in the next month. Those are kind of July, maybe early August, that kind of timeframe startups. They're all in commissioning stages right now. We have some upstream projects. We have the Yellowtail project at Guyana.
We have the Bacalhau project that is in Brazil, and then we have a Golden Pass LNG project that should start up at the end of the year, Bacalhau and Yellowtail both in the third quarter. We will have an expansion of our Proxima business out to another 25,000 tons per annum capacity addition for Proxima to meet the growing demand there. That is kind of a third quarter as well. We have got a large slate of projects starting up this year. We have talked about these in 2026. When you get a full year of all these projects, that is $3 billion of earnings, additional earnings from those projects slated. Again, that kind of mid-term, mid-cycle pricing. A big, big addition for our portfolio and a big leg up.
When you think about that growth to 2030, a good chunk of that is coming with these projects in 2025. Again, all of them doing quite well.
Great. My next question is on your medium-term CapEx guide that you laid out in your corporate plan. As you look at 2025 through 2030, base CapEx looks like it is expected to remain relatively flattish, and there is a pretty sizable incremental wedge from new businesses or policy-dependent businesses. Out of the new or policy-dependent businesses, how do you think of the priorities if you do not get all the policy support you are hoping for?
Yeah. If we do not get the policy support, we will not do the projects. That was the idea we talked about. We showed a graphic in our December plan that showed that, as you said, John, it is relatively flat CapEx for these kind of decisions that had yet to be made. Some of those are policy-dependent. Baytown Blue Hydrogen Project is one of those, and it is dependent on 45V. We will watch and see how that comes through, and hopefully we have a good solid policy that yields to that investment, but that is what we are looking for. In addition to that, we counted in there future chemicals growth that we knew we needed to do to keep up with that 7-8% demand, but did not have any firm project that we could put in the plan, but we knew we were going to do that.
We have yet to make the decision on whether that's going to be an organic step or an inorganic step. That's iffy in terms of what the timing is going to be on that step. What I can tell you is we're committed to keep up with this 7-8% of demand growth for our high-value chemical products. These are products that are 10-25% higher margin than commodity chemicals. We bring a lot of technology to these products. They perform a lot better, and they have higher value in use. We're committed to that growth. How we meet that growth, we're still looking at what opportunities we have. You have on top of that, excuse me, you have other opportunities that we're looking at that are like Proxima and carbon materials that we know we want to grow.
What we put in the plan was enough CapEx to make sure that we could prove out the business case for these products. Then we have additional CapEx that we would expand those end products. I would say that's looking very good right now. How we go about that, we're still looking at opportunities that could be more capital efficient in the early days to bridge to higher CapEx and higher supply steps, but those are still looking pretty good. I would say there was some uncertainty in that wedge that we showed. I would say there's still a little bit of uncertainty there, and we'll continue to watch those areas.
Great. My next question is on the Pioneer acquisition. Can you just provide an update on the progress you've made thus far on synergies? I know you have kind of traditional synergies that you've talked about and kind of reverse synergies, but maybe in particular how you're feeling about the enhanced recovery synergies that you've guided to.
Yeah. Look, I mean, we feel very, we're very pleased with the Pioneer acquisition. We think it's gone extraordinarily well. We're seeing a tremendous amount of value. When you look at an acquisition like that, you know you're going to get some efficiencies, and so we kind of built that in. We knew we brought some tools that would allow us to get more recovery from some of the Pioneer resource, and so we kind of had that built in. We knew we had some technology programs that were under development, and we kind of risked that a little bit and put that in there as well. Now we're some time on past that acquisition. What we didn't factor in enough is the quality of the Pioneer workforce, work processes, what they were doing, and the reverse synergies we're going to get from that.
We certainly had a pleasant surprise there with the quality of what Pioneer brought to the corporation. The technology has continued to improve. We're getting more and more confident on our lightweight proppant program that was significantly risked in the early day when we did the acquisition economics for Pioneer. That's going to be a big benefit for the legacy ExxonMobil acreage and the Pioneer acreage. That's continuing to look well. There are other technology aspects we're looking at as well. I would say we've increased our estimate from $2 billion to $3 billion per year. In terms of the increased recovery, I would say that's looking really good, really positive.
Great. Maybe switching gears, the next question is on return of capital. You have a $20 billion share buyback that's meant to be maintained, I think, through 2026 in your slides, assuming reasonable market conditions. How do you think about the flexibility within that program? Is there a certain crude price that kind of breaks that that would lead to either a raise or a lower of the buyback?
Yeah. I mean, we talked about reasonable conditions, and of course, that extends beyond just Brent price because we have a big business go across a lot of different markets. I did share with you that statistic that at $55 Brent, we would have $110 billion of surplus cash after dividends and after CapEx between 2025 and 2030. That does give you some room for a significant buyback program. We will continue to look at it. There is not a magic price in there that we are looking for. We are monitoring the conditions, but we feel good about our cash flow generation that would allow us to not only keep a dividend that we certainly intend and hope that will continue to grow, but also looking at buybacks as a way to share the benefits of the corporation with shareholders.
I think we have time for one more. My final question is on M&A. You've done more recently the Denbury and the Pioneer acquisitions. Following these acquisitions, how do you expect ExxonMobil to position itself in the M&A market from here? Independent of market conditions, do you see a focus of growing the low carbon business via acquisition, or are you favoring further opportunities to grow the traditional business?
Yeah. I'm glad you asked that, John. I think the way I'd say it is we're pretty wide open in terms of the ability to do more acquisitions. I would not say that the Pioneer acquisition has boxed us in at all in terms of having too much of the organizational firepower working on that. I think we have the capability to take on additional acquisitions. We've continued to say what we're looking for really is one plus one equals three. We're looking for value. We have to be able to add significant value to where what the current owner is adding for the resources, the assets that they're developing. We can bring a lot in that area.
We talked about some of the unconventional kind of tools in the toolbox, if you will, that we bring to bear with these technology programs we're working on that's going to bring increased resource recovery. Of course, with the Pioneer acreage and our legacy acreage, we have a lot of areas where we can do some trades around the edges so we can do real win-wins or some bolt-on acquisitions around the edges of our acreage that we bring a lot of value. There's a lot in the upstream and the unconventional in particular where we can bring some real value to an asset or to a company. When you think about chemicals, I mentioned the ability to take similar hardware, similar reactors, and manufacture products that are much higher value in the market, much higher value in use, and much higher margin.
In the low carbon space, as you mentioned, we have a CCS capability and a business started that is far beyond what anybody else has done. We can leverage that too in terms of additional acquisitions. In the technology space, this whole Proxima business was part of the origin of that, which was an acquisition, a small acquisition, a company called Materia in the technology space that combined technologies, and we came up with this Proxima. We have M&A opportunities across kind of the whole span of the corporation, and we are continuing to look. We are continuing to look, and we are looking for those opportunities where we think we can really bring significant value and again, one plus one equals three. With that, we will be looking pretty hard.
Great. Unfortunately, we're out of time, so we have to wrap up there. Jack, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time today.
Thank you.