Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Corporate Plan Update. Today's call is being recorded. We very much appreciate your interest in ExxonMobil. I'm Jim Chapman, Vice President, Treasurer and Investor Relations. Joining me today are Darren Woods, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kathryn Mikells, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Neil Chapman, Senior Vice President, and Jack Williams, Senior Vice President. Our full presentation and pre-recorded remarks are available on the Investors section of our website, along with the Corporate Plan News Release. In a moment, Darren will provide brief opening remarks, and then we'll move to our question-and-answer session. During today's presentation, we'll make forward-looking comments. We encourage you to read our cautionary statement on Slide 2. Additional information on the risks and uncertainties that apply to these comments is listed in our most recent SEC filings on our website.
We also provide supplemental information in the appendix of our slides. And now, I'll turn it over to Darren for opening remarks.
Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We're excited to share how the work we've done to transform ExxonMobil continues to deliver in execution, earnings, market leadership, and in value to our shareholders. All of our successes begin and end with our unique set of advantages. We've built them over decades, and they distinguish us from our competitors. Several years ago, when we began our work to transform this company, we did so with one objective: to fully unlock these competitive advantages. Today, our transformation is driving industry-leading results. We have the strongest portfolio in our history. We're delivering greater value as our mix improves and our production becomes increasingly advantaged. We are more profitable than we were five years ago, and we expect that to continue as the advantages we've unlocked position us for even greater opportunities in the years ahead.
Last year, we committed to delivering 2030 by 2030: $20 billion in additional earnings and $30 billion in additional cash flow. Just one year later, we see the opportunity to do even more. Compared to 2024, we now expect to deliver $25 billion in additional earnings and $35 billion in additional cash flow by 2030 on the same constant price and margin basis. We expect to do it with no increase in capital, while generating a return on capital employed of more than 17%. At the same time, we're increasing our 2030 upstream production guidance to 5.5 million oil-equivalent barrels per day, roughly 30% higher than the next closest IOC. Of course, our priority is value, not volume. About 65% of our production will come from advantaged assets, with lower lifting costs and a lower emissions profile.
In product solutions, we're continuing to strengthen our portfolio through advantaged project startups and high-value product growth. Advantaged projects are positioned to deliver $4 billion of additional earnings growth by 2030 at constant margins, with roughly 60% from projects we've already started up. We're also beating our 2030 emissions reduction plans across the portfolio. We've already achieved our plans for reducing GHG and flaring intensity and expect to reach our planned 2030 methane intensity reductions next year. Let's talk about how we've done all this. It began in 2018 with the first step to unlock ExxonMobil's unique set of competitive advantages by dismantling organizational silos. Every year after that, we've taken further steps to change how and where we work. We moved from 11 independent company silos to one globally integrated enterprise.
The corporation moved from a holding company to managing all the core capabilities that underpin success in our businesses. It's been a challenging journey, one that will continue in the years ahead, but it's unlocking the true potential of our people and our company's capabilities for the first time in our history. The transformation has fundamentally changed how our company works, how and where decisions get made, how expertise and capital are deployed, how scale is leveraged, and how we capture value across our integrated businesses. It's sharpened our focus on what matters and changed the speed at which we learn and act. Our centralized organizations support the entire enterprise, focused on delivering excellence in execution and setting the bar for performance standards across all relevant industries, not just ours.
As a result of this change, more than 95% of our above-field workforce have had their roles transformed, expanding their scope and impact. The benefits of these changes are reflected in our earnings and cost leadership. To the end of the third quarter, we delivered more than $14 billion in structural cost savings since 2019, more than all other IOCs combined. We expect to achieve $20 billion in structural cost savings by 2030, two billion more than we said in last year's plan. Underpinning our streamlined structure is the implementation of a new enterprise-wide process and data redesign that SAP calls the most holistic and transformative in industry. This single solution replaces more than 10 disparate functional ERP systems. It modernizes and simplifies how we operate at every level of the company, redesigning end-to-end processes and connecting data, transactions, and decision-making across every business geography and function.
It will become an integrated source of global intelligence. It will enable us to learn and act faster, and better leverage our scale, accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence, and integrate new solutions. Through this transformation, we're strengthening and, for the first time, fully leveraging our competitive advantages in ways that truly set us apart. It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to replicate. Let me briefly cover each of these, starting with scale, which underpins everything we do. Scale is vital. It supports investments across the commodity price cycle, particularly when you want to invest countercyclically. It makes the development of proprietary technology affordable by leveraging benefits across a large base of operations. But size alone doesn't create scale. Scale comes from having one way of working, which accelerates learning, improves effectiveness, and drives down cost.
Organizing, channeling, and learning from experiences aggregated across disciplines, businesses, geographies, and over time unlocks tremendous capability and value. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers made the point: mastery requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. We do that thousands of times over across a portfolio of operating environments, capital investments, technology developments, logistics, and back-office transactions that no one can match. That's the power of scale: compounding expertise, building an enduring advantage. Our global supply chain is a great example, managing an immense volume of product movements, with an ExxonMobil vessel docking somewhere in the world every 20 minutes, and rail movements involving a fleet of more than 40,000 rail cars, comparable to Union Pacific and BNSF. Our new centralized structure allows us to translate this high volume and the data associated with it into hundreds of thousands of hours of experience and learning that drives bottom-line improvement.
Our supply chain organization is on track to generate more than $5 billion of cost savings per year by 2030. Another good example is project development using modular construction. We took an upstream offshore project design and development approach and have applied it to our entire portfolio of investment opportunities. It's resulting in unique-to-the-world designs, faster construction times, and significant cost savings. By integrating along and across those value chains, we increase our scale and capture unique value where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The Permian Crude Venture is a great example of that integration, where we manage the molecules from the wellhead through tanks, pipelines, into our refineries and then our chemical plants, and onto our customers. We expect it to generate roughly $9 billion in business value through the end of the decade.
Turning to technology, this advantage is at the heart of what we do. Long before today's tech sector, ExxonMobil was discovering, developing, and deploying game-changing solutions derived from the foundational elements of our world: carbon and hydrogen molecules. Today, our global technology organization unifies those capabilities and applies them to our biggest challenges to deliver differentiated performance. This is creating entirely new products and processes, and lowering costs, raising yields, improving efficiency and productivity across all of our businesses. Our Singapore Resid upgrade project deployed breakthrough proprietary technologies that convert low-value, bottom-of-the-barrel molecules into some of the highest-value lubricant-based stocks we offer. In the Permian Basin, we're applying patented lightweight proppant developed through downstream research and a deep understanding of petroleum coke properties as a proppant to increase recovery from hydraulic fractures. To date, this new technology is demonstrating up to 20% higher recovery while improving capital efficiency.
That's just one of more than 40 stackable technologies we're developing and testing with the objective of doubling resource recovery in the Permian. We're also developing entirely new opportunities with new high-growth, high-margin products in large established markets. Proxima transforms low-value gasoline components into a revolutionary resin solution: lighter, stronger, faster curing, and more corrosion-resistant than alternatives. In construction, Proxima-based rebar has demonstrated up to 40% faster installation than steel. In coatings, our Proxima technology enables a one-step marine cargo tank coating solution that cuts application time in half, creating significant savings for our customers. In automotive, tier-one OEMs are showing strong interest in our lightweight battery enclosures made with Proxima. And in the oil and gas sector, we're showcasing Proxima's superior subsea pipe coating attributes in our Hammerhead development.
In carbon materials, our next-generation battery anode graphite is demonstrating 30% faster charging, up to 30% greater available capacity, and up to four times longer battery life. And with our recent acquisition of Superior Graphite Assets, we're establishing a differentiated graphitization process with higher throughput, 50% greater energy efficiency, and much shorter processing time than industry alternatives. This is a game changer in energy storage solutions, with significant benefits in EV and on-grid battery storage applications. These are just a few examples from a robust pipeline of breakthrough technology developments. I expect much more to come in the years ahead. The advantage that translates our efforts into bottom-line results is execution excellence. How we achieve our results is as important as the results themselves. Living this philosophy and learning from our collective experiences has resulted in a deep knowledge of critical disciplines.
This advantage manifests itself in all facets of our business, particularly in our execution. This is evident in the most important area and the one most difficult to consistently manage: safety. This year, we expect to deliver our fifth consecutive year of industry-leading personnel safety performance and the fifth year of no significant process safety events. It's also evident in another critical area of our business: project design and execution and the performance of our global projects organization. From its inception in 2019, global projects have set the standard, improving costs, schedules, and delivering best-ever safety performance on an increasingly complex portfolio of projects. Through 2030, global projects is on track to deliver $10 billion in capital savings and set the benchmark for industry-leading cost and schedule performance.
This year, we completed more strategic projects than ever before, including some of the largest and most complex projects in the industry's history. These include our fourth deep-water development in Guyana, where our design-one-build-many approach has enabled us to deliver large-scale projects at an industry-leading cost and schedule, a wholly-owned grassroots world-scale cracker complex in China, a large and complex project delivered at industry-leading pace and nearly 40% cost advantage versus an equivalent U.S. Gulf Coast project, and the Singapore Resid upgrade project, introducing proprietary new-to-the-world process technologies, delivering new-to-market products. On average, we execute about three times as many mega projects as our nearest competitor, with up to 20% lower cost and 20% faster delivery schedules than the industry average. For sustained leadership in a capital-intensive business, our project design and execution advantage is critical. And once a project is built, it needs to operate at industry-leading utilization.
That's why we recently announced the formation of a global operations organization, combining all of our operating organizations with our centralized operations group. Since establishing a central group focused on operations, we've deployed new approaches to managing safety and conducting maintenance. These efforts have resulted in sustained industry-leading safety performance, a 2% increase in asset utilization, lower cost, and roughly $3 billion of incremental value. With a single organization directly responsible for all our operations, like global projects, we'll learn and improve even more quickly. I look forward to sharing the successes of this new organization far into the future. Behind all of this, our advantages and ongoing transformation is the incredible effort and commitment of our people making it work, embracing the change in the one-team, one-goal mindset. Our people and our culture are core strengths.
We develop our people through a diverse set of experiences and related assignments that span organizational boundaries and country borders, providing a variety of challenging opportunities. Working with seasoned leaders and deep technical experts from around the world over careers that span decades provides rich development experiences and leads to a depth and breadth of capabilities others can't match, and importantly, builds a unique culture based on shared values. Our people are proud of what they accomplish but are not prideful. They celebrate our successes while challenging themselves to achieve even more. They fight hard against failure but recognize it's a price that is sometimes paid to achieve great things, and our people are never satisfied with being second best at anything. All of these advantages are critical to delivering our plans to substantially grow both our traditional and new businesses.
Our global outlook sees strong demand across our core businesses, with oil and natural gas continuing to supply more than half the world's energy in 2050. The new IEA World Energy Outlook, published last month, offers an even higher projection of future energy demand. This pragmatic shift is encouraging. Hopefully, it will help guide governments toward policies that better balance the world's need to reduce carbon emissions while meeting the critical growing need for reliable and affordable energy. Meeting these needs and offsetting a growing rate of depletion will require sustained investment. With our advantages, this represents a significant opportunity for even more attractive returns. What continues to stand out on this chart that I first shared last year is the value growth in the markets for our new products.
Each is built on our core technical capabilities and operational strengths, leveraging the same advantages that have underpinned more than a century of success in our traditional products and markets. By 2030, we see potential addressable markets for our existing and new businesses totaling $4 trillion. By 2050, that number could more than double to about $8 trillion, based on third-party estimates and our own global outlook. Our plan continues to reflect investments to capture the value represented by these markets. However, the mix and pace are changing in line with the evolving market conditions. As we recently shared, this year's plan reflects the suspension of spending on our Baytown low-carbon hydrogen project. While we're convinced that low-carbon hydrogen will be required for the world to achieve net zero and that our project is advantage versus today's alternatives, the markets and customer base are developing slowly.
As a result, we're inventorying our work on this project until the market catches up. Conversely, we expect to reach a final investment decision by the end of next year for our first low-carbon data center. This reflects the progress our carbon capture business has made in negotiations with a number of hyperscalers and power providers. Going forward, we expect the new market part of our investment portfolio to be dynamic. This is consistent with how we've characterized these investments from the beginning. While in our plan, they are contingent on a demonstrated demand and a realized value proposition. They must deliver accretive returns, competitive in our portfolio, or we won't invest. The changes in this year's plan reflect this, as will future plans. In summary, we remain excited by the huge value opportunities that are developing and that we are uniquely positioned to capture.
This is reflected in our portfolio of advantage investments: projects with low cost of supply, high returns, and resilience to bottom-of-cycle conditions. To sustain growth in our traditional businesses, while significantly growing our new businesses, we plan to reinvest about 40% of our total cash flow from operations through 2030 as cash CapEx. We plan to invest $100 billion in major projects that are expected to start up between now and 2030. At constant prices and margins, we expect these projects to generate about $50 billion in cumulative earnings over that timeframe. Over the full life of these projects, we expect returns in excess of 40%. That's capital discipline. Not investing less, but investing in the right things, where our unique advantages generate superior returns.
Through 2030, we expect our earnings, cash flow, and return on capital employed will far exceed the results of our competitors and provide a strong foundation for growing shareholder value far beyond what our industry has historically delivered. Which is why we introduced this chart last year. Compared to other IOCs and diversified large-cap industrials, we're delivering leading cash flow growth and doing so with lower relative volatility. That reflects the strength of our integrated model, our disciplined capital allocation, and our focus on execution excellence. Our balance sheet remains one of the strongest in the S&P 500, as reflected by our credit rating and exceptionally low net debt-to-capital ratio. This financial flexibility gives us strength to invest through price cycles and provides a buffer against price volatility. As I've said many times, ExxonMobil is not defined by our products, but by our capabilities.
Evolving society needs and a potential energy transition are not threats. They are tremendous opportunities. In any future, ExxonMobil will have an important role, providing needed solutions and creating substantial shareholder value, which today is not yet reflected in our valuation. This provides a compelling opportunity for long-term investors. I'll close with this: our formula for value creation is straightforward. Leverage a unique set of competitive advantages that others can't replicate. Build a uniquely advantaged portfolio of high-return investments. Operate with excellence and share success with shareholders. We've always focused on this. Since the pandemic, we've done more of it faster. We set the bar high and cleared it. With this year's plan, we're raising the bar again, and we will clear it again. The transformational journey we've been on is delivering, with much more to come.
We have a unique set of competitive advantages and a capable, committed workforce that others simply can't match. And we have a plan that delivers strong returns through 2030 and far into the future. We look forward to answering your questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Darren. We'll now begin our Q&A session. Please note that we ask each participant to limit themselves to one question as a courtesy to others. And with that, we'll take our first question. It's coming from Bob Brackett with Bernstein.
Good morning. I would argue that the simple message to take away from today's update is $5 billion is additional 2030 earnings and cash flow. The lion's share of that looks like it's coming from the Permian, say, $3 billion. The uplift in Permian volumes, which you've guided to, is another 200,000 BOE a day. That's around 75 million barrels BOE a year.
And at a $40 sort of cash flow margin, which is reasonable given your guides, that's about $3 billion. So it seems like you can get most of the Permian uplift just from volumes, yet you've also highlighted in the written materials the technology pipeline that you have, plus a goal of increasing per barrel earnings. Are those the right buckets to think about? And can you sort of break down that Permian cash flow uplift into those buckets?
Yeah. Thanks, Bob, and good morning. Let me just maybe provide a little context and then hand it over to Neil to take you through a little bit more detail. But your math is pretty solid. The Permian is a big part of the value uplift that we're seeing plan on plan.
We've also got improvements in the base business, and we've also got structural cost improvements that are adding to the bottom line, which is a collective effort across the organization. So those are the key components. I think the volume piece of the equation in the Permian is very much tied to the technology work that we've been doing and something that Neil, I know, is excited to talk about. So I'll hand it over to Neil to kind of take us through some of that.
Good morning, Bob. Yeah. I mean, the growth really comes from execution and improvement, continuous improvement in the plan that we've been talking about for a long time. And that plan is unique in our industry. It's about deploying this capability set that's differentiated from everyone else to the largest contiguous tier-one resource base in the industry, both in the Midland and the Delaware.
That resource base allows us to deploy capital way more efficiently than others. We can drill longer laterals. You know we drill four-mile laterals continuously. We're deploying our global projects organization to build the facilities cheaper. We're building one, designing one, and building many for the surface equipment, and of course, Darren talked about the technology programs that we're deploying: 40 stackable technologies. We talk a lot about lightweight proppant, and you've seen the improvement. Last year, I described to the investment community what lightweight proppant does and how it was going to improve resource recovery by 15%. Now we're very confident it's going to be 20%. And we're still very, very early in the deployment. We only put lightweight proppant in 20% of the lateral length that we drilled last year, which is really, really small, so we're on a path to improve recovery.
We expect to improve recovery by about 50% by the end of this decade. And while there's always uncertainty and there's always risk with new technology programs, because we have this pipeline of 40 stackable technologies, we're increasingly confident that we'll be able to double the resource recovery in the early 2030s.
That's very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Bob.
Thank you.
Bob, thank you. The next question comes from Doug Leggett with Wolfe Research. Morning, Doug.
Thank you. Thanks, Jim. I was having trouble getting my mute button to turn off. Sorry about that. Okay. So figure out the technology. Darren, it's kind of amazing that it was a year ago that you laid out a $30 billion cash flow growth story. And one year into a six-year plan, you're up 17%. I have to imagine that there is obviously some risking to the target.
So my question is, what else can change over the next five years? The Permian obviously continues to do great. Guyana, for example, you still have your 1.3 versus 1.7 capacity. And I could go on and on, but now there's news wires suggesting you might be re-entering Iraq. So I guess my question is, how would you characterize the risking of the $35 billion target? I think you characterized that as you'll beat that hurdle as well. How should we think about that?
Yeah. Thanks, Doug, and good morning. Appreciate the question.
I think the way to think about this, and there are unknowns in this space, but I take you back to the comments that I made in the introductory remarks, which is we set out on a journey to unlock the potential of this corporation without fully understanding the limits of the value that we can create in doing that. And what we've been delivering here in the last several years continues to demonstrate that the transformation the corporation is going through is indeed working, and there is trapped value that we are now unlocking. And we've seen the beginning of that. The plan year on year just is another cut at realizing the opportunities that we're beginning to unlock.
So we recently introduced a single technology organization that brought together all the capability across the corporation, and we're seeing great benefits from that, just like we saw when we brought the projects organization together. As I said in the introductory remarks, we've just brought the operations organization together. We will see a lot of benefits from that. We've got the supply chain organization. So we've built these very large common centralized organizations to support all the business. And I would tell you, Doug, we're very early in the journey around capturing the value from those large organizations. If you think about the size of the change and how early we're into it, we've got a long ways to go, and I think a lot more value that we haven't actually recognized.
On top of that, and as we mentioned in the comments, we're building this single enterprise system across the corporation. That is unique in our industry, and when you combine that unique single instance ERP system with the scale and the diversity of our business and all the work that we're doing, there's potential value unlocked there that, frankly, is hard for us today to even estimate, but we know that it's there. We see great opportunities there. The stuff we can see more than justifies that investment, but there's going to be a lot more to come from that, so I think, maybe to your point, we do think there's a lot more upside here, and the additional benefit that comes from that is, as we get better and demonstrate performance, more people want to work with us.
And so the opportunities that we're unlocking in the upstream and working with resource owners, because we can deliver faster and at a lower cost, that's a huge benefit to resource owners. They want ExxonMobil involved in that. So it's kind of a self-propelling, self-supporting effort in that as we get better, we get more opportunities. As we get more opportunities, we get better, and we just keep moving through that. So I think we've got a really good formula here. We're on a really good path and feel really positive about the approach. I don't know if you guys have anything to add to that.
Well, let me just say this, Doug, that I think in terms we have this really, really strong portfolio already. And I think as the organization is so focused on executing that portfolio, we're seeing continuous upside.
You've seen that in the Permian results this year. I mean, just one comment, because you've raised it many times about the 1.3 million barrels a day and the 1.7 million barrels a day of capacity. I will remind you of this. In our plan, the eighth boat, the eighth FPSO, starts up at the end of 2030. We don't get any production from that vessel or very limited in that year. So you'll see the production in the following year.
I would just say that in the product solutions camp, that the Proxima and carbon materials that Darren mentioned, very little of that is included between now and 2030, about $400 million by 2030. But there's a lot of earnings potential there. We're putting a lot of emphasis on trying to accelerate those opportunities. So I do think there's potential upside there as well, Doug.
Thanks for your question.
Thanks very much. Our next question comes from Devin McDermott at Morgan Stanley.
Hey. Can you hear me all right?
Yeah.
Good morning.
Hey. Good morning. So I wanted to shift over to Product Solutions growth. And if I just kind of step back, I think the ability for Exxon to develop proprietary technology and scale it into commercial businesses is one of the key differentiators to your value proposition. There's a lot of focus on the Permian and advanced profit opportunity, but there's a lot of potential growth in Product Solutions as well, I think, is underappreciated. You've highlighted some of the new business opportunities. And think about over the next five-plus years, there are growing wedge of the Product Solutions growth. Jack, based on the comment just now, it sounds like there's $400 million embedded in the 2030 guide.
You've highlighted a billion of total potential, though, by 2030, and then 13 billion from these new businesses by 2040. So I guess my question is, can you just talk about some of the progress in these new business areas, the milestones you're focused on to de-risk growth and maybe solidify some of the upside to growth across the key verticals like Proxima, carbon materials, lithium, or anything else you all want to flag?
Yeah. I'll hand it to Jack in just a minute. I just want to, again, set some context for that, Devin, because I think it's a very good question. And your point about the potential in EMPS is not fully recognized. I would agree with that.
But I would also, we're moving away from talking about chemical facilities and refining facilities and getting much more focused on the fundamental conversion technologies that we have in our facilities and thinking about how we use the facilities themselves, the kit, and more importantly, the technology and the technology capability behind that to transform these molecules into solutions that society is going to need and not limit ourselves to the products we're currently making, but think instead what products could we make to tap into needs and high value, high growth in large markets?
That's fundamentally the philosophy and why we moved from a chemical organization to a product solutions organization to reflect the fact that we've got a lot more to offer through these facilities in that work than what we're currently making today, and hence why I say we're not defined by our products. And the carbon materials ventures is a great example, as is Proxima, of looking at where some low-value feedstock is to make high-value products. And so that is just the beginning of the journey that we're on there. And I'll let Jack take you through some more of the specifics.
Yeah. If I could just talk about those two in particular. First of all, as Darren said, I mean, this is upgrading yield. This is taking low-value products, low-value streams, and upgrading those into very valuable products. These are advantage projects.
If you look at Proxima, it has differentiated performance properties versus its incumbents. The other thing is these are technology-driven, and they both have both Proxima and carbon materials. The battery anode material has big moats, IP moats, around them. The other thing is there's no real ceiling on demand. These had really high TAMs. So a lot of opportunity there. In terms of what we're looking for, Devin, right now in Proxima, the big thing is we're disrupting supply chains. So we're going in there, and that's taking some time as we change out formulations and so forth. And then in carbon materials, we really have two different technologies. We have this advanced synthetic petroleum coke technology. We have this advanced graphite technology.
And so we're working on getting both of those, scaling those both up to where we can get those up into something that can really move the needle.
And then the one other thing I would add is you mentioned some of our low-carbon materials that we're moving forward with. And so we have seen CCS really start to pick up in terms of customer interest. We now have nine MTA under contract with six customers. We're already flowing CO2 for our first customer. We have three more customers that we'll be bringing online next year. You mentioned lithium, which is a technology, again, where we think our core competitive advantages really will come to play.
We're going to be introducing, I'll call it, our first small unit in 2028 to make sure that we take what is great acreage that we have in the Smackover area and ensure that we can actually deliver it at a good cost of supply. The hydrogen market, I would say, is one area that has been more slowly developing than we originally expected. On the reverse side of that, the CCS market seems to be accelerating. When we look across our low-carbon solutions business, again, that's an area that we really see as great opportunity going forward, not just through 2030, but through 2040 and beyond.
Thanks, Devin.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right. The next question comes from Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs.
Yeah.
Hey, Neil. We're having a sound issue there. Want to try one more time? We can see you, but.
Jim's working.
Perfect.
Sorry about that. Hey. I just want to spend some time on the share repurchase program, and as part of the guidance team, you talked about $20 billion in reasonable conditions in 2026, so flat versus 2025. And just on slide 19, you show there's a lot of surplus cash after the dividend, so Darren and Kathy, we love your perspective on the sustainability of the $20 billion of the share repurchase, and if we go lower on oil prices, what's the willingness of taking on a little bit of leverage, given how strong the balance sheet is, to countercyclically buy stock?
Yeah. I'll let Kathy, this is right up her alley, so I'm sure she'll want to talk about this, but just, again, a little bit of context.
What I would tell you with respect to this plan, as we do every year, we have a sensitivity where we really test hard what happens in some pretty severe scenarios, more severe than what we saw with COVID, to make sure that the plans that we have and, importantly, the projects that we're trying to execute and the growth steps that we're trying to take are resilient to some very extreme price environments. And so I think the foundational element of the plan is, we think, robust to just about any reasonable price scenario that somebody could throw out there across all of our businesses. And so a lot of confidence in the value levers and executing on those levers through this time horizon. And I'll let Kathy talk to the specifics of share repurchases.
Yeah.
So let me start with, I actually think we go out of our way to give a little bit more guidance in this area than most of the other companies and our peers provide so that shareholders have an understanding of what our intention is, right? And we always do a little bit of a caveat saying, "Hey, at the end of the day, it is going to depend on reasonable market conditions." But I think you've seen us see execution very consistent with the guidance that we have provided. You mentioned in our base case scenario at $65 real Brent 2024 pricing, we throw off $145 billion in surplus cash flow. We also showed you a test at $55 a barrel, right? And in that scenario, we throw off, I'm going to call it, about $100 million in surplus cash flow.
We mentioned, right, we have the strongest balance sheet of all of the IOCs, so we could always tap into our balance sheet. That would give us, call it incrementally, a bit less than $40 billion, so I'd say in a wide range of market environments, we will be able to generate surplus cash flow, which is really what helps to support not just rewarding our shareholders, but as you know, our capital allocation philosophy is, first and foremost, we are going to fund advantaged projects, right? Because that is actually what creates the virtuous circle that ends up enabling us to reward our shareholders. We clearly really benefit from having a rock-solid balance sheet, and that's something we're going to continue to protect. I mean, we ended the third quarter with 9.5% net debt-to-capital, right, better than all of the IOCs.
We look at that and then say, "We've got to reward our shareholders." You would have seen that we increased our dividend in the third quarter by 4%. We are in a pretty unique category. We're better than 95% of companies in the S&P in terms of having an annual dividend that has increased for now 43 years running, right? We've got 40% retail shareholders who we know are counting and very focused on that dividend. I'd say we have a very clear approach in terms of capital allocation. I think that approach is working, and we make sure that we test our plans against a wide variety of market environments, and that we have a lot of surplus cash flow that we can dedicate, first and foremost, to the business, but also to rewarding our shareholders.
Yeah. And, Neil, let me just add. I think one of the things different from the past is we've got this long-term plan out through 2030. Frankly, internally, we look a little even beyond that. And we've got a lot of confidence in terms of what's coming. And so the key variable here is price. And I think one of the philosophies you see playing out, excuse me, in buybacks is consistency. And so when you know what's coming down the pike, and it's a little bit like our capital investment, we know the cycles. We know when things drop. We know they're going to come back up. And so we can take a little longer view around how do we maintain some consistency in this space. And I would tell you that is a theme that we spend time talking about and focused on.
You'll recall that when we acquired Pioneer, we bumped that up to bring back in some more shares that we issued as part of the Pioneer transaction. I'm still very focused on recovering those shares and offsetting any of the dilution that we might have seen with that. And then the question is, what is a good solid base to move forward with? Again, condition on market environments. But that's the philosophy now we're thinking about it. Thanks for the question.
Thank you.
Neil. Neil, thanks for joining. Our next question comes from Arun Jayaram with J.P. Morgan. Arun, you might need to unmute there also.
Oh, apologies.
There you go.
Yeah. I was wondering if you could elaborate on some of the investment opportunities you're seeing in the data center arena. You highlighted that you have some firm turbine awards, and you've highlighted a couple of potential sites.
I'd love to hear your thoughts as a potential FID decision later next year, by late next year.
I'll hand that to Neil. That's a business under his portfolio, but I want to reconnect to the approach that we've taken here, and I think it sets us apart somewhat uniquely from others in this space. Recall that we're, excuse me, we're tapping into our core capability set and core organizations, and so it allows us to build on the capability that we've been developing in our traditional businesses and just extend it into new markets, utilizing the same capabilities, the same people, the same talent, the same technologies, and so it gives us a lot of flexibility and a lot of optionality, which is what you see happening in our portfolio. We were first to come with a very discrete, well-developed project concept around decarbonized data center.
And we went out—and when that noise first started happening, people first started talking about it, we went out very quickly to start talking about that opportunity, how we could bring it to life. And we've made great progress there. And I'll let Neil kind of talk more about that business.
Yeah. We're focused on partnering with a power producer where we can add CCS. We can add decarbonized power. We can decarbonize the power, and that's what the hyperscalers are interested in. Now, the way we're doing it is we're leveraging the CO2 infrastructure that we have on the Gulf Coast. That's the largest CO2 infrastructure in the world, actually. And the principle or the philosophy here is we'll provide decarbonized gas, net zero gas from the Permian, to a power plant to provide decarbonized power. We'll take the emissions and we'll sequester those.
It's all about integrating all of those together. So we're working with several hyperscalers who are interested in decarbonized power. We're working with a couple of power producers. We're well (as Darren said) well down the road of developing a project. And that's why we're confident that we can FID a project by the end of next year.
Arun. Thanks, Arun.
Thanks for joining, Arun. Our next question comes from Betty Jiang with Barclays.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. So I wanted to ask about the major capital projects. But Proxima as a product is something that is getting increasingly intriguing because you're seeing application in construction and automotive, and now you're in your own boat, FPSO. I'm just wondering, where do you see the bottleneck around acceleration of that product? How quickly could that scale?
And do you find this as one of the more high-impact businesses among the various emerging businesses that you have in the portfolio?
Jack, you want to take that?
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Betty. Yeah. I'm really excited about Proxima. I agree with you. I think it has tremendous potential. A lot of applications. Infrastructure, as you mentioned, in a rebar, where it displaces steel, 75% lighter, twice as strong. The coating is a really interesting application where you can save significant time and number of coats for industrial coatings. And then, as you mentioned, subsea with the subsea insulation that we're going to use at our Hammerhead, but we also had a lot of industry interest there. So the big question is, why can't you go faster? And we're going to be up to 35 KTA of capacity this year.
We'll ramp that up to 200 KTA of capacity by 2030. And we're looking at ways to accelerate that. But the big issue is into something like auto. It takes some time. And think about going into rebar. We have to set up new manufacturing plants for these facilities. So it's just taking a little bit of time. This is very disruptive. It's way higher value in use than current incumbents. But changing formulations is very disruptive. It takes several years. When you get into the 2030s, I think this can ramp up relatively quickly. It'll be more kind of exponential, and you'll be on that curve kind of in the 2029, 2030, 2031 time period. And I think we can ramp pretty fast. And as I said, it doesn't really have any ceiling here. It's a really high TAM.
So right now, our plans are very methodically going one plant after another. But we can accelerate that if the market demands are there.
Great. Thanks. Thanks, Betty.
Thank you.
Betty, thanks for joining. Our next question comes from Steve Richardson of Evercore.
Thanks. Good morning. I was wondering, this is probably for Neil, but I'd love to go back just to the Permian quickly. Considering how much you've learned since Pioneer and the beefed-up update here, I was wondering if you could talk about the tension between recoveries on a per well basis versus on a section or a DSU basis that operators all seem to be taking a bit of a different tack on. And how is your thinking on that changing, if at all?
How much of how you're developing the plays changed over the last year, acknowledging that the lightweight proppant is just one of the many technologies that you're looking to bring to bear here? Just curious if you could kind of help us on how the thinking around that's changed, if you could.
All right. Neil.
Yeah. It's a simple approach. I've talked about this many, many times. The Permian is different. The benches are different. The geographies are different. So you have to deploy different technologies, different techniques, different well spacing, different frac intensities depending on what the geology is. And that's what's unique about what we're doing. We're looking very, very closely about what is the geology, what for any bench that you are developing or any cube that you're developing. The key here is to improve the recovery.
I mean, I think at the core of everything that we're doing is how do we get more oil hydrocarbons out of the well? And the philosophy is very, very simple. You've got to fracture the rock more. And when you fracture the rock more, you create more flow for hydrocarbons. When you fracture it, you have to keep those fractures open for longer. That's why the lightweight proppant that you talked about comes in. You have to improve how the molecules flow. These are very, very small fractures, very, very small channels, maybe the diameter of a grain of sand. Oil is very sticky. So you have to increase the fluidity of the molecules. And that's why in our technology program, we do things like inject surfactants to improve that. But it all depends. The Wolfcamp A is different from the Wolfcamp B.
Midland County is different from Martin County. It's about understanding where you can bring the different capabilities and optimizing it for each development that you have. That is the key on all of this. When you have a deep portfolio of different technologies, you can deploy them in different ways. Now, when you improve recovery, you can elect to recover more, or you can elect to space the wells out and lower your capital efficiency, get the same recovery at lower capital. The plan that we laid out today, what's really unique about it is we're going for up to 200,000 barrels a day versus what we talked about last year. But that's with no increase in capital. That's 200,000 barrels a day with no increased CapEx.
And that all comes from deploying this technology portfolio, this technology pipeline that we have, which is still very new, but tailoring it to the different geologies and the different geographies. That's what we're doing differently. Everyone else seems to be using the same philosophy wherever they're doing the development. Yeah.
I'd add to that, Steve, the objective function here is maximizing NPV. And so with these differences and as Neil's organization and the technology organization is working with the field, figuring out what is the maximum value proposition and the mix between the capital efficiency and the additional recovery, that's being done and tailored for each one of the developments. So that decision evolves and changes as we move around this differentiated set of assets.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
Steve, thank you. Our next question comes from Jean Ann Salisbury from Bank of America.
Hi. Can you hear me okay?
Yep. Good morning.
Great. Okay. Good morning. You've been very clear that you believe that you have patent protection on the Petcoke lightweight proppant. Can you give more color on the proprietary barriers to entry that you see on the many other contributors to increased Permian recovery that you reference and why you don't expect other operators to replicate a lot of that uplift?
Yeah. Well, I'd say it's quite, quite simple. We're developing a unique proprietary set of technologies. Petcoke is one of them. And so before deploying it, we created a large intellectual property portfolio to patent protect. That's not typical in this industry, as you know. But on all the technologies we're doing, we're very, very clear that we're using the deep capabilities of this corporation, and we're going to patent protect it. We're not going to share it.
We talk about petcoke and lightweight proppant a lot, but I'll just give you another example. I just briefly mentioned in the last question around surfactants and fluids to improve the flowability of molecules. Well, industry will use that. They'll use surfactants. That's not unusual. Those surfactants are readily available from service providers. But we have one of the largest chemical companies, chemical organizations in the world. We're one of the largest solvents intermediates organizations in the world. So we're tailoring those solvents depending on the development that we are moving into. How we're using those solvents in that application, it's proprietary. So we have created, we are creating a broad intellectual property portfolio. We're patenting it, and we're determined to defend those patents.
And Jean Ann, I would just add, that's been one of the challenges we gave. I gave Neil and the technology organization is we don't want to innovate and develop technologies for the industry. We want to do it to the advantage of ExxonMobil and our shareholders. And that has been an underlying principle from the very beginning that when we have these advantages, we need to make sure those advantages accrue to our bottom line uniquely as we develop that. So it's been an underlying focus as we develop these technologies from day one, frankly.
And Darren had just said, Jean Ann, most of my career was in the chemical business, developing and deploying new technologies, which we broadly patented. And we're just deploying that same capability into the upstream now.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
Thank you.
Jean Ann, thanks for joining.
We, unfortunately, have time for just one more. And that last question is coming from Alastair Syme with Citi.
Thanks, Jim. Can I just ask about the opportunity set in Canada? I think since the last corporate update, there's been a bit of a change in the political narrative. So I wonder what opportunities that might open up for the heavy oil assets and how they would compete for capital versus the other opportunities you've highlighted.
I'll let Neil kind of talk to specifics of Canada. What I would tell you, I mean, one of the good things about our markets, Alastair, is they're global. And so it's really a function of can you get your products competitively at a low cost of supply into the global marketplace.
I think we're somewhat agnostic as to where they come from, much more focused on can we develop those with an advantage that brings them on the market that frankly beats the other resources from a cost of supply standpoint. Neil, you want to talk specifically about Canada?
Yeah. Well, I'd say in heavy oil, Alastair, I mean, we've got really two big assets, of course. Kearl, when you looked at how we've improved upstream earnings and cash flow, this $5 billion over the period, one of it comes from improving our base business. And a large part of that is from Kearl. We've made tremendous strides in Kearl, reducing the cost and increasing the volumes for very little extra capital. Today, we're running close to 300,000 barrels a day in Kearl. So we see opportunity to continuously improve to lower the costs.
Right now, I would say we're right up there with the leaders, if not the leader in the lowest cost mining operation in Canada today. That's a long way removed from where we were 10 years ago. We're getting up to 300,000 barrels a day consistently. In the in-situ business, we're deploying some new technologies. I think we've talked about that before. This is around solvent-enhanced recovery. We're relatively early in that development, but we have a tremendous resource base. And we think if that technology proves out to be viable and correct and deliver what we anticipate it will, it will be able to compete for additional capital in our portfolio. And remember, we're not doing anything in the upstream unless it has a cost of supply less than $35 a barrel.
So what we're talking about is heavy oil less than $35 a barrel, which means it will generate a 10% return over the complete life of the project, even if the price doesn't go above $35 for the period. So we feel really good about it. It's part of the portfolio. It's about part of improving the base. I think this in-situ is likely to see towards the back end of this new technologies, the back end of this decade and into the 2030s.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alastair. Thank you, Neil. There's one more thing that I'd like to discuss before we end this call. Today, we're announcing that Kathy, our Chief Financial Officer, intends to retire from the company effective February 1st of next year.
Some of you may know, but in recent months, Kathy has undergone a series of procedures and surgeries, excuse me, to address a debilitating, but thankfully non-life-threatening health issue. While her condition has improved, it has become clear to her and I think the rest of us that she needs to focus fully on her recovery. Her decision to retire has obviously been a tough one for Kathy and for many of us across the company who care about her, and I will tell you that I will definitely miss having her by my side. During her nearly five-year tenure, Kathy has strengthened the finance organization and really helped in the development of our talent pipeline and succession plans. Neil Hansen, the current president of Global Business Solutions, will be elevated to the CFO role, reporting to me and joining the management committee.
Neil's been with the company for 25 years and has proven his capabilities in running large businesses and in most of the critical areas of finance. He's a well-regarded leader who's assembled and run highly successful teams throughout his career. Many of you will, of course, remember Neil when he was head of investor relations several years ago. The board, management committee, and the entire corporate leadership team wish Kathy a fast and full recovery. We also, of course, congratulate Neil on his new role. The two of them will work together over the next several weeks to ensure a smooth transition within the company and for all of our external stakeholders. Kathy's last earnings call will be when we report our fourth quarter results early next year. And Kathy, I just want to thank you for everything you've done for the company, for all our employees.
You will be very missed.
Thanks very much, Darren. It's certainly been a pretty challenging year for me. Things are absolutely getting better, but it has been slow going. I still have a lot of work to do with my doctors to one day kind of get back to my usual self. I absolutely love ExxonMobil and my colleagues. I know my colleagues on the call today will recognize the sincerity of my disappointment in needing to leave this great company. I care deeply about our role in society and the people that we serve across the globe. Sadly, it became clear to me in recent weeks that my love for this company meant I had to step aside and let someone who could focus full-time on the CFO role take over. I'm absolutely delighted that that person is Neil Hansen.
It didn't take me long after joining ExxonMobil to realize how talented and how capable he is. He's been groomed for this role for many years, and he's really set himself apart as the right person to succeed me. I am very certain that he's going to continue the good work of the finance leadership team that has begun to really build a world-class organization. Likewise, I'm very confident that he's going to further strengthen our relationships with our investors and analysts. I'm deeply grateful to you, Darren, to the rest of the management committee, to my leadership team for their support during my illness, and I'm equally thankful for the way that everyone has supported my decision to retire. ExxonMobil is a company that really has a heart and a soul.
And I have to tell you that there's been countless moments and encouragement that I've received over the last several months that really prove that to me over and over again. I'll be here, obviously, through the fourth quarter earnings call, and I will then be proudly rooting from the sidelines for ExxonMobil for years and years to come. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it back over to Jim to close things out for today.
Okay. Thank you, Kathy, very much. And thank you, Darren. And thank you all for joining today and for your questions. We'll post the transcript of this webcast on the investors section of our website by the end of the week. Also, you'll recall last year we introduced our modeling toolkit, which includes what we view as very helpful information for those creating or updating financial models of our company.
We appreciate all the very positive feedback we received on that in this last year. Note that we've updated the toolkit this morning to reflect our latest price sensitivities and other key assumptions. And this is all available, as usual, on the investors section of our website. Finally, on behalf of all of us at ExxonMobil, we wish everyone a happy holiday season. And that concludes our webcast.