Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to our corporate plan update and upstream spotlight. We appreciate your interest in ExxonMobil. I'm excited to be with you here live from our corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas. And today, we have with us Darren Woods, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Kathy Michaels, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Neil Chapman, Senior Vice President, all presenting our plans to 2030 and beyond. Jack Williams, Senior Vice President and senior leaders from our Upstream business will be joining us for 2 Q&A sessions. You can find the slides we will be presenting today on the Investor Relations section of the ExxonMobil website, and I'm not going to read everything on this next screen. But during this presentation, will make forward-looking comments. We encourage you to read the cautionary statement on Slide 2. Additional information on risks and uncertainties Plano these comments are listed on our most recent 10-Ks and 10-Qs. And finally, please note that we also provided supplemental information in the appendix to today's slides. And now let's get started. [Presentation]

Please welcome Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Darren Woods.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome. Great to be with all of you, those here in the room and those who are joining us online via the webcast. I can tell you that we're really excited to have the opportunity to update you on our corporate plans. And I know that the upstream team is also looking forward to the opportunity to take you through some of the details that lie behind those plans and some of the advantages. As you all know, we introduced a new strategy several years ago. And I would tell you today that, that strategy remains unchanged. And frankly, underpins all of our plans. And the plan this morning or what I plan to do to begin with is to talk about the foundation of that strategy and frankly, the pillars that we've built our business on. I'm then going to cover the markets that our plans are focused on, which I think show tremendous opportunity ahead of us in both our traditional businesses and in the new businesses where we are developing new products. I'll cover what we've already delivered, which is the starting point for this year's plan and then obviously, what we will deliver with this update. And importantly, what we see as the upside for our investors. Kathy will then take you through some of the details. So let me start with the foundation. All of our successes began and end with our unique set of advantages, advantages that, frankly, we've invested in over the decades and advantages that we believe significantly distinguish us from our competitors. All of our advantages and the capabilities that we derive from those define us, not the products that we make. Our advantages position us to do what few others have done, create world-scale solutions to some of the society's biggest challenges, decades into the future. It all begins with technology. It's at the heart of what we do. Long before today's tech sector, ExxonMobil was discovering, developing and deploying innovative solutions. Solutions derived from the foundational elements of our physical world, hydrogen and carbon molecules. Our long-standing commitment to invest in transforming molecules has led to a history of innovation and success and provides a critical foundation for our future. To make a count though, to make a meaningful global contribution and tackle the world's greatest challenges, scale is vital. It differentiates us. It makes our technology investments affordable by leveraging the benefits across a very large base of operations. By taking a consistent approach across all of our businesses, scale accelerates experience. It improves effectiveness and it drives down our cost. Finally, scale supports investments across the commodity price cycle, particularly when you want to countercyclically invest. Our businesses span a number of end-to-end value chains. By integrating along those value chains and across those value chains, we capture unique value where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. As markets evolve and value moves up and down those value chains, we're there to capture them. The Permian Crude venture is a great example of that, where we manage the molecules from the wellhead through tankage, pipelines into our refineries and then our chemical plans on to our customers. And as the value of those molecules shift around the value chains, we're there to capture that value. The different sectors that we serve and the products that we produce add diversification, helping mitigate the commodity price cycle. And importantly, integration provides more scale with shared support services and infrastructure, and it allows us to capture synergies and capabilities and competency. Our long-term focus on culture -- our long-term focus has led to a culture of consistently trying to do the right things in the right way to a very high standard. This is an ambitious objective and one that continues to rise every year and requires constant effort. We refer to it as execution excellence. How we achieve our results are as important as the results themselves. Living this philosophy and learning from our collective experiences has resulted in a deep knowledge in the critical disciplines of our businesses, and it gives us industry-leading execution capability. This advantage manifests itself in all facets and functions of our businesses. All these advantages and the synergies that exist between them have taken this generations to build, but are only now being realized through the hard work and commitment of our people. And we start by hiring the best. And I know that everybody says that, but let me give you a proof point. Among U.S. energy companies, engineering students have ranked ExxonMobil #1, 11 years in a row. We develop our people with challenging jobs that span the globe across career 10 years that average 30 years. This gives us unmatched capabilities and knowledge. And finally, it's our people's mindset. Having been with this company for over 30 years, I can say with absolute certainty that our people are not content with being second best at anything. When you put all this together, it's clear. Nobody has what we have. And frankly, I don't think anybody can replicate it. We are uniquely positioned to meet a very broad array of human needs and to help solve some of the world's greatest challenges, and to do it profitably today and far into the future. We show this here with 2030 market opportunities for our traditional products in blue. Let me explain this chart for a minute. The size of the bubble represents the estimated TAM. The attractiveness of the market is shown by the unit margins on the X-axis, and then the growth rate of the market is shown on the Y-axis. In 2030, the world will need even more energy, especially in the global south, to [ defeat ] debit energy poverty and to raise living standards. You can see this with the large bubbles for natural gas, diesel, and gasoline at the bottom left. The world will also need more petrochemical products shown in the middle as more people enjoy modern living standards. And in green, you can see the high-growth, high-margin markets where we are developing new products to help reduce emissions and provide significant value and use over the existing alternatives. We're leveraging our advantages across all of these opportunities, lowering cost and improving performance for our traditional products, while investing in new businesses and developing new products. Our most recent example includes Proxxima, a thermoset resin, with performance advantages across a broad range of applications and advanced coke from our Carbon Materials venture that provides superior energy storage performance. We're also seeing opportunities to decarbonize power for data centers, not in some distant future, but today. By 2030, we see a potential addressable market for our new products of more than $400 billion, growing to $2.3 trillion by 2050. We believe this is a reasonable projection based on third-party estimates and our own global outlook. As you can see, the growth of our traditional fuels and lubes slows, but the market is still very large. Population growth and rising living standards will drive a 15% increase in overall global energy demand. Oil and natural gas hold steady at more than 50% of the world's energy supply. Meeting this need and offsetting the faster depletion of U.S. shale will require even more investment. With our advantages, this will generate attractive returns. At the same time, global emissions are projected to fall significantly by 2050, but only with the right policy, the right market support, in large industrial players, helping to decarbonize the hard-to-abate sectors. If companies like ExxonMobil are not helping the world decarbonize with biofuels, carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, -- it's hard to see how the world is going to decarbonize. What really stands out on this chart is the value growth in the markets of our new products, products developed through the transformation of hydrocarbon molecules. The value in use for approximate applications is strong. Our technology transforms low-value gasoline components into a revolutionary resin that is lighter, stronger, faster curing and more corrosion-resistant than available alternatives. The markets for Proxxima are vast, construction where can replace steel rebar; automotive work in lightweight multiple vehicle parts, including battery boxes for EVs; and energy where it can be used to code pipes and to make wind turbine blades. That's just a few examples. The same is true for Carbon Materials. We've told you about the battery anode application. We believe our next-generation graphite will reduce charging times and boost EV range by 30%. We also see opportunities in carbon nanotubes to improve cathode connectivity and anode durability. Kathy will go through these in greater detail shortly, but I want to emphasize as will she, that while we built these new business investments into our plans, they are contingent on a demonstrated demand in a realized value proposition. They have to deliver accretive returns competitive in our portfolio or we won't invest. For over 140 years as societies needs have evolved, we've met them every step of the way. That's what we're going to continue to do. We plan to remain an indispensable company helping to meet the world challenges and their critical needs, which gives us a very long runway of growth and increasing shareholder value. Now I know there's a lot of hype and hollow press releases out there. That's not us. We don't just put words on a paper. We don't just make pledges. We make plans, and then we deliver on them. Our track record over the last 8 years of allocating capital to outstanding opportunities is very strong. Define conventional wisdom, we drove exceptional performance. Since 2019, on average, we've invested 45% of our cash flow. Of that, we invested $51 billion in major projects that started up during the period. These investments have earned $31 billion to date with expected returns of 46% over their lives. Across all of our investments made in this time frame, we expect a 33% return. Now I recognize the industry's allocation of capital has not always been effective, primarily because it hasn't been focused on the fundamental or sources of structural advantage. I can't defend that but we can change it. And today, we'll show you that we have. Capital discipline for us is not about investing less. Discipline is investing in projects with low cost of supply and high returns driven by unique advantages, which in turn drives financial strength, outperformance versus competition and a higher shareholder value. And you've seen this in our results. Combining the right advantages with the most attractive opportunities and the best execution has delivered standout performance. Since 2019, on a constant price and margin basis, we're structurally generating $15 billion more in earnings and $20 billion more in cash flow, and we've distributed $140 billion to our shareholders. We've also taken $11 billion in structural cost out of our business. No one else can say that. In addition, we've improved workforce safety, reduced our impact on the environment, and we've lowered our GHG emissions. Compared to our competition, we are in a different league. We've grown cash flow at a far faster rate. We've achieved unmatched financial strength with the lowest net debt to capital, which you all know is critical for investing across the commodity cycle. And more important to all of you, we've led in total shareholder returns across the time horizons. To sustain this, we have to maintain a constancy of purpose, an intense focus on executing our strategy and further strengthening and leveraging our advantages. Our plans through 2030 do just that. It starts by growing our portfolio of advantaged 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 invest between $27 billion and $33 billion a year, roughly the same reinvestment rate as the last 5 years. Equaling on average, about 45% of cash flow from operations over the period. We plan to invest about $140 billion in major projects that start up through 2030. At constant price and margins, we expect these projects to generate $68 billion in cumulative earnings and returns of 33%. That's capital discipline. Kathy will provide additional details in a minute here, but let me jump to the bottom line of what we expect our investments to deliver. By 2030, we expect at least $20 billion in additional earnings and $30 billion in additional cash, generating surplus cash of $165 billion. We'll bank another $7 billion in cost savings, delivering total savings of $18 billion since 2019. We expect our return on capital employed to rise to about 17%, more than double our current cost of capital. And while doing all of this, we'll reduce our emissions intensity, 40% to 50% in the upstream, and 20% to 30% overall. As Kathy will show, our earnings cash flow and return on capital employed will far exceed the results our competitors can deliver and provide a strong foundation for growing shareholder value. Far beyond what industry or our company has historically delivered, which explains our theme, a league of our own with significant upside in shareholder value. To make this point and reflect our growing product and business diversification, we've compared ourselves to large diversified large-cap industrials. Over the last 5 years, we've grown our cash flow from operations nearly 4x as fast, and we have a far stronger balance sheet, which not only gives us strength to invest in the cycles, but provides a buffer against price volatility, which by the way, we expect will decline as our new businesses and products grow. As I said, ExxonMobil is not defined by the products, but by our capabilities. Evolving society needs and a potential energy transition do not represent threats. They are tremendous opportunities. In any future, ExxonMobil will have an important role, providing needed solutions and creating substantial shareholder value. Our chart we show on the right is an example of what the potential investor upside could be. I hope that you see that the work we've been doing for the last 8 years and are continuing is putting ExxonMobil in a league of our own. We have a unique set of advantages that we're strengthening to grow the gap with competition. We have an unrivaled set of opportunities that are derived from our advantages and reflected in our plans that provide benefits far into the future and that deliver an unequaled value opportunity with significant upside. By the end of the day, I hope you see it and believe it. Thank you.

Please welcome, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Kathryn Mikells.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us here today. Darren laid out a really bold vision of what kind of company ExxonMobil is today and importantly, will be long into the future. I'm going to focus on how we translate our unique competitive advantages and the big opportunity set that we have in front of us into a detailed operating plan, one that's designed to deliver superior shareholder value. For us, that all begins with the opportunities that we invest in. We believe we have the best opportunity set that we have ever seen, certainly the best opportunity set in the business. You're going to see some of the highest volumes in the company's history. But even more importantly, you're going to see the highest value. Our unit profitability is going to continue to improve as we improve our mix and importantly, simultaneously continue to reduce our costs. All barrels and all products are not created equal, and ours are increasingly advantaged. Executional excellence manifests itself in many different ways across our business. Superior safety performance, reliability, executing those big global projects, right, on time and on budget. But it's also really, really apparent in the expense discipline that we have. We are committed to be a low-cost operator. Why? Because that drives resiliency and returns across the commodity cycle. Technology also plays a really key role across all of our businesses. It improves everything that we do today, and it paves the way for our success tomorrow. For ExxonMobil, that innovation will enhance our existing products, but it powers new products. It captures new markets and it creates new sources of value. At every step along this journey, we're going to continue to execute the capital allocation priorities with the discipline that you have come to expect from us. We're going to maintain our financial strength, and we're going to share the company's success with all of you, our shareholders. On a constant price basis, ExxonMobil is a far more profitable company than we were just 5 years ago. And we expect to continue that trajectory forward to 2030. There's 2 headline numbers that I want you to take away from today's presentation. Really simple. We expect to deliver another $20 billion in earnings between now and 2030, and drive an incremental $30 billion in cash flow. That's $20 billion and $30 billion by 2030. But before I dive into how we're going to deliver that growth, I want to just take a minute to step back and talk to you a little bit about the price margin basis that we built that plan upon. First of all, we try to keep things simple. For our product solutions business, that means we didn't change anything. We continue to use average margins from 2010 to 2019, which we think is a pretty good indication of a mid-cycle margin. In our Upstream business, we moved from 2022 real prices to 2024 dollars. Our gas prices are the same. So we're using $3 per MMBtu for Henry Hub and $6.50 for TTF, but we're skipping 2 years of inflation. We did change oil price assumptions. We're now using $65 a barrel, and that's in 2024. Last year, we were using $60 a barrel Brent and that was in 2022. So in 2024 terms, that was $63 a barrel. The bottom line is these changes don't really impact our earnings growth, but they give us about $1 billion in profit uplift, if you're looking at any given year and trying to compare last year's plan to the present plan today. We've also extended the plan. Last year, we were going out to 2027. Obviously, you see we're now going out to 2030. Importantly, we continue to be on track for all those 27 goals and objectives that we set for ourselves. We've already doubled our earnings from 2019 at constant price and margins. And we're on track to hit our goal to double our cash flow by 2027. Our earnings growth, as you can see here, is driven by improvements in both volume and mix and continuing to drive structural cost savings. The size of this improvement is pretty striking as is the pace that will deliver it. And as Darren said, while our corporate plan only goes out to 2030, we certainly don't expect our growth trajectory to end there. We are well positioned to profitably address the world's greatest challenges far, far into the future. I want to double-click now on the biggest driver of earnings growth, and that's volume and mix. We expect that to contribute an additional $20 billion to our bottom line by 2030. In the upstream, we're continuing to grow our portfolio of competitively advantaged assets. That drives a lower cost of supply and importantly, higher returns. With the acquisition of Pioneer, our advantaged assets. That's the Permian, that's Guyana. That's our LNG portfolio. They now represent more than 50% of our upstream production, a target that we've achieved 3 years early. By 2030, more than 60% of our upstream production will be generated from those high-return competitively advantaged assets. And yes, these assets are going to drive overall production growth for the company. But more importantly, it's going to drive growth in both earnings and cash flow per barrel. In our Product Solutions business, we're going to continue to execute our advantaged projects. And those increase are high-value, high-margin product sales. That's lower emission fuels, right? It's performance chemicals and performance lubricants. Beyond our traditional businesses, we should see meaningful earnings by 2030 from our lower emissions investments provided that we have the right policy and regulatory support. Of course, high-grading our portfolio means both planting and pruning. And we continue to look for opportunities to monetize nonstrategic assets. Since 2019, we divested assets worth about $19 billion, timing those to take advantage of what was a pretty supportive market, enabling us to get pretty attractive prices. Through 2030, including some transactions that we've announced but haven't yet closed, we plan to complete over $5 billion of incremental divestments and about half of that should be delivered near term. Executional excellence is also a really big driver of our earnings growth. And that clearly comes through in our relentless discipline on driving our costs down. You can see here that we're the only IOC that has a lower unit cash operating expense today than we had in 2019. What does that mean? Put another way, we're the only IOC that's reduced our cost enough to offset the significant inflation that we saw post-COVID and at the same time, fund our sizable growth. No other IOC can say that. As Darren mentioned, we've achieved $11 billion in cost savings to date versus 2019. We're on target to deliver $15 billion by 2027. And we've now added $3 billion incrementally to our target and are looking to deliver an $18 billion structural cost reduction by 2030. All of the people across ExxonMobil and every organization in this company has contributed to that success. How have we managed that? We've centralized organizations. We've eliminated redundancies. We've consolidated. We've simplified. We've automated. And importantly, we have really started to leverage the scale of this company to be more efficient and more effective. And we're far from finished. As I said, we now have a new target of $18 billion in cost reduction by the time we get to 2030. That's $7 billion more than when we're standing here today that we have yet to deliver. How are we going to do that? Big areas of opportunity include leveraging our newest global organizations, things like our global supply organization. We have a big, big opportunity in leveraging the data sets we now have from across the entire company to improve our operational analytics and drive further optimization in how we operate our assets. We're beginning to leverage enterprise-wide software, and that enables us to further simplify, standardize and importantly, automate some of the big business processes that we have across the company. Our track record has been to overdeliver, and that gives us great confidence that we're going to meet or beat that 2030 plan. Later this morning, Neil is going to take you through a real deep dive on the upstream business. So I'm just going to touch upon it lately here. It is a great story of how we continue to pull further ahead, expanding our leading position. By 2030, we expect an additional $9 billion in upstream earnings on a constant price basis. That $9 billion represents a 50% increase or a 7% compound annual growth rate over the period. You can see that improvement is driven by growing our competitively advantaged asset, which drives this huge improvement in volume and mix. We're essentially offsetting the cost of that growth, including noncash depreciation. We're doing that by selectively divesting incremental nonstrategic assets at the same time that we're reducing the cost of our existing operation. Our total upstream production is expected to be 5.4 million oil equivalent barrels a day by 2030. That's an increase of almost 1 million oil equivalent barrels a day from what we're expecting to deliver in 2024. It's also some of the highest production levels that the company will have seen since the 1970s. As I said earlier, all barrels are not created equal and ours are increasingly advantaged. Over the next 6 years, we expect to grow production from our advantaged assets, again, Guyana, Permian, our LNG portfolio, by 1.2 million oil equivalent barrels a day and they will represent over 60% of our total production by the time we get to 2030. That growth from these advantaged assets drives about $10 billion of improvement to our earnings. And it's pretty clear that, that is the growth engine of this part of the business. As a result, our profit per barrel is going to continue to increase. We expect to add another $2 to profit per barrel by the time we get to 2030. That's an 18% increase, and we're doing that at the same time that we're going to see an increase in noncash depreciation. I've mentioned that a couple of times, noncash depreciation. So let me give you a few more specifics about it. When we look at where we expect to be in 2024 versus 2025, we're expecting in the upstream business, about another $2 billion of noncash depreciation. And from 2025 out to 2030, we're going to add another $5 billion. Where does that come from? That comes from Pioneer, right? It comes from major start-ups, and it comes from other production growth. As we grow our depreciation grows. Our investment criteria continues to be incredibly, incredibly rigorous. Our investments through 2030 deliver a 40% return in our upstream business. We would not trade our upstream portfolio for anyone else's. It is the best in the industry, and it's a source of tremendous sustained shareholder value. Let's go ahead and take a look at our Product Solutions business. It's a business like no other. We have an industry-leading portfolio. We're the world's largest polyethylene producer. Our refining circuit is literally double the scale of any other IOCs. And our lubricants value chain is the market leader. We've transformed our business by making advantaged investments by growing performance products and by rationalizing our footprint. We have only 1/3 the number of refineries that we started with at the time that Exxon and Mobil came together. 70% of that capacity is integrated across all of our Product Solutions segments. That gives us a really unique opportunity to optimize across all of those businesses. And we've taken almost $5 billion of cost out of the business. I'd say we've been pretty darn busy. Obviously, we recognize that refining margins are down from the record highs that we saw in 2022 and 2023. We're also in bottom-of-cycle conditions in our chem business. But all our work to transform the business has really positioned us to be able to beat the competition across the commodity cycles. As everyone in this room remembers, it was a pretty tough margin environment back in 2019. But as you can see on this chart, we've more than doubled the earnings potential of our business since then at those same low margins. And there is more to come. So let's look forward at how our E&PS business is improving at mid-cycle margins. Over the next 6 years, our Product Solutions business will improve earnings by $8 billion versus where we forecast will be this year. And again, as you can see, the largest driver of that improvement is volume and mix. And we get that by improving the execution and doing the big global strategic projects that improve our high-value product capacity. Our advantaged projects that we're executing over the plan period is going to contribute about $4 billion to that improvement in earnings. And we don't have to wait until 2030 to be able to see that. In 2025, we have 6 big project start-ups. That's as many big project start-ups as we had combined over the last 5 years. On a constant margin basis, those will contribute about $0.5 billion to our 2025 earnings and over $1 billion to our 2026 earnings when we'll have a full year of contribution. The goal of those advantaged projects is clear. It's to increase margin capture by boosting the production of our high-value products across all of our businesses. We're going to get 80% growth in high-value products between now and 2030. In addition to growing those high-value products, we're going to see the contribution from new businesses from higher trading volumes and incremental capacity gains that also helped to improve our volume and mix. New businesses like Proxxima and Carbon Materials also create opportunities for us to just extend our growth beyond our traditional fuels and chemicals business into new higher growth higher-margin markets. All in all, we expect the earnings power of our Product Solutions business to increase by 75%. That's a compound annual growth rate of 10% through 2030. And we're also going to establish an advantaged platform for growth that extends far beyond this decade. Technology. Technology is a key enabler, creating these profitable new businesses. Proxxima's a thermostat resin that has unique properties, that will drive substitution in existing markets and expand into new applications. Things like structural composites and steel substitutes, areas where traditional resins have really struggled to compete. Our proprietary catalyst technology creates a material that's lighter, it's stronger, it's more durable than conventional alternatives. Initially, we're targeting transportation, construction materials and industrial coatings as the markets that we're looking to penetrate. We're going to be investing in facilities to produce more Proxxima feedstock and we plan to ramp that capacity up to nearly 200,000 metric tons per year by 2030. We also have big plans for Carbon Materials. We see an attractive growing opportunity in the market for lithium battery anode materials. As Darren talked about, applying our technology to very low bottom of the barrel molecules, we've developed an advanced coke product that can lead to 30% higher capacity, faster charging time and extended battery life. We're currently working with automobile manufacturers to test this new product, and our plan is to have our first commercial scale unit up and online by 2028 to meet the growing demand for lithium batteries. By 2030, we expect the total addressable market for these 2 businesses collectively together is going to be over $100 billion. When we look beyond this period to 2040, we see an annual earnings potential from Proxxima and Carbon Materials together at over $6 billion and investment returns of over 20%. And those earnings would be higher than our Energy products segment has averaged over the last 5 years. These new businesses are just 2 examples of how we're going to continue to transform molecules to drive profitable growth as we meet society's evolving needs. Our earnings growth translates into strong sustainable cash flow through the rest of the decade. If you look here according to Wood Mack, our Product Solutions business is going to deliver cash flow that's 40% higher than our next closest competitor by the end of the decade. I'd say we've come a long way since 2019 to put ourselves in a leading position. The bottom line is our strategy is continuing to pay off, and there is way more opportunity as we look ahead. Let's talk about our Low Carbon Solutions business. We're really looking to establish advantaged businesses so that we can deliver strong returns on a sustainable basis over the long term. We're focused on 3 primary verticals: carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and lithium. Those areas of focus are really aligned with our core competencies and unique competitive advantages that Darren talked about earlier. And we believe we've established an insurmountable lead in CCS. Here's why. We have the world's first large-scale CCS system, right? We've got a high-capacity CO2 pipeline network connected to a variety of permanent storage locations across the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast is of the largest markets for CO2 emissions. We have 6.7 million tons annually under contract for transportation and storage with third-party customers. And that is far more than any other company. And we're on our way to meeting our aim to having 30 MTA by 2030. Our first CCS project is on track to start up in the first half of next year and we'll be bringing other customers on board in 2026. That network underpins our hydrogen business across the Gulf Coast, where we plan to produce virtually carbon-free hydrogen using differentiated low carbon intensity natural gas from our Permian operation with 98% of the CO2 from the hydrogen production captured and stored. Our plant in Baytown will be the world's largest, producing up to 1 billion cubic feet of hydrogen a day. Half of that we're going to use for our own facilities with the other half used for third parties. The project will also bring 7.5 MTA of carbon into our carbon transportation and sequestration network. The strength of our project has attracted a number of interested global third parties, including ADNOC, who's purchased a 35% stake in the project. We're working to FID the project in 2025 and started up in 2029. That's subject to translation of the IRA 45 policy into actionable technology-agnostic regulation. These foundational projects are the main drivers of LCS' $2 billion increase in earnings potential by 2030. Our CCS network also opens up additional decarbonization opportunities. For example as you see here, low carbon power for data centers. Importantly, we're no stranger to power generation. We've developed 5.5 gigawatts of power projects since 2001, an 800 megawatts of fully islanded power. We're working with other large-cap industrials to rapidly deploy a solution that would provide both high reliability and low carbon intensity power to meet the growing demand for computing power for artificial intelligence. Importantly, projects like this are fully detached from the grid. That means they're independent of utility time lines so they can be installed at a pace that other alternatives, including U.S. nuclear just can't match. We're going to use a state-of-the-art carbon capture unit to track over 90% of the CO2 emissions from the power generation. And then we'll use our CO2 pipeline and our network of sequestration sites to transport and capture that CO2 permanently. We're going to be leveraging our industry-leading best project execution capabilities to stand this project up quickly. And we're well into front-end engineering and design, and the customer feedback has been incredibly encouraging. When I look at our new business opportunities, whether it's CCS, hydrogen, lithium in our Low Carbon Solutions business, or whether it's Proxxima, Carbon Materials, lower emission fuels, advanced recycling in our Product Solutions business, I see a company that has a long runway of profitable growth from these many new business opportunities. We think collectively, these new business opportunities can generate $3 billion of earnings in 2030. That's in the ballpark of what our Specialty Products segment is on pace to deliver at this year. By 2020, with the right policy and strong business development, we think that number could easily be $13 billion. That would be a 15% CAGR from 2030 out to 2040. We recognize that there is uncertainty, right, as we think about the pace that we're going to be able to develop these new businesses as well as thinking about policy and regulation and how that's going to evolve. What that means for us is that we're going to pace these investments to minimize the downside at the same time that we're establishing advantaged positions to maximize the upside potential. If there's one consistent theme that I hope you've heard today is that we have an abundance of long-term growth opportunities. Continuing to be disciplined in both our capital allocation and our investment decisions, right? That is essential to creating sustained shareholder value. We're always looking for new opportunities, but we're only going to fund those that are truly advantaged with high returns that are robust across cycles. In the chart here on the left, you can see that our base CapEx, which is the blue bar, has come down over the years. And you can see that our planned base CapEx is pretty flat despite the fact that we are growing significantly. We do see an opportunity for CapEx growth to fund these new businesses that we've been talking about. And you see that in the green bar. That includes our third-party lower emission businesses like CCS, like hydrogen, like lithium but those are going to be paced, consistent with policy and regulatory support. In the green bar, you also see new business growth coming from new products like Proxxima and Carbon Materials, those are still being proved out. These businesses only give us modest earnings in our plan period. But what's important is they have really high growth potential over the long term. Finally, we also see potential CapEx growth from really early stage traditional projects that ramp up later in the period. And you see these in the chart in gray. That includes big projects in LNG within our Upstream business and the next step Product Solutions, high-value product growth step. This year, our total cash CapEx is going to be about $26 billion. That's in line with the $28 billion guidance that we provided for total CapEx and exploration expense. In 2025, we expect cash CapEx is going to be $27 million to $29 billion. And that reflects an additional 4 months of Pioneer as well as some investment to start to fund these new businesses. And from 2026 to 2030, we're expecting our CapEx is going to be in the range of $28 billion to $33 billion with the potential increase driven by further investment in those new businesses and then beginning to progress those early-stage traditional projects. We're excited and confident about all of the opportunities that are in front of us, which is why they're in our plan. But we really recognize that we've got many that are still pretty early stage in their development. The exact pace and scale of those are going to be adjusted as we mature those opportunities, right? And importantly, we make sure that they meet our risk return requirements. If they don't meet our requirements, we won't proceed. The chart at the right here shows our cash CapEx as a percent of our cash flow in 2024 and '25. Again, we see that in 2030, and we're comparing that to a 2010 to 2019 period, which, again, we think is representative of a typical cycle. What you see is that our reinvestment rate is declining as our cash flow grows. Our current reinvestment rate is about 10 percentage points lower than what it's been historically in that 2010 to 2019 period. And when you look out to 2040, our reinvestment rate comes down by another 10 percentage points to about 40%. We have $30 billion of low emissions opportunities over the plan period. That includes investments to build our LCS third-party emission reduction solutions. It also includes all the work that we're doing across the company to reduce our own emissions. The strength of those opportunities are reflected in the financial returns we expect with our return on capital employed rising to 17% by 2030. And 80% of our base project spend pays back in less than 5 years. As Darren mentioned, we plan to spend $140 billion on the Permian and on major projects that start up through 2030. At constant prices and margins, that CapEx is expected to generate $68 billion in cumulative earnings over the period and a 33% return on investment. Investing in advantaged projects is what creates the virtuous cycle of profitable growth, which is what drives shareholder returns. Surplus cash, which is cash flow after funding all of our CapEx projects and dividends, that's enabled by that profitable growth. At $65 a barrel real Brent, our cumulative surplus cash flow over the plan period is about $165 billion. That includes $20 billion of surplus cash that's sitting on our balance sheet today. It also includes about $1 billion a year of contributions by equity company distributions. Our diversified portfolio is also really well positioned in a lower price environment. At $55 real rent, we generate about $110 billion of surplus cash flow with an additional $40 billion available from untapped debt capacity that we have on our balance sheet. And in an upside case, at $85 real Brent, we create surplus cash flow of about $280 billion. Our breakeven is further evidence of the strength and resiliency of our plan. The breakeven is the Brent price at which we can still fund all of our capital projects and the dividend. Our breakeven improves over the plan period to about $35 when we get to 2027, and it improves further to $30 a barrel when we get to 2030. Surplus cash flow is the engine that drives capital returns for our shareholders. In the fourth quarter, we increased our dividend by 4%. That marked the 42nd consecutive year where we've had higher annual dividends per share. Fewer than 4% of the S&P 500 companies can actually claim that. And it's a claim that we're proud of and absolutely intend to continue. On top of that, we have a really robust share repurchase program. We're on track this year to repurchase more than $19 billion worth of our shares and $20 billion in 2025. And we announced today that we expect to maintain that $20 billion pace through 2026, assuming that we have reasonable market conditions. We're saying we're in a league of our own because we're unique in our capabilities and approach, and also because we're delivering results that have far exceeded the competition. With this year's plan, we intend to extend that lead. Stronger earnings, stronger cash flow, stronger return on capital employed should lead to winning shareholder returns. By investing in advantaged opportunities by driving structural cost savings and by delivering execution excellence across all of our business, we'll continue to separate ourselves from our competitors and grow shareholder value far beyond what our industry and our company has done historically. We're setting a pretty high bar for ourselves, but it's one that we absolutely expect to clear, and we believe it will deliver significant upside for you, our shareholders. I'm going to close on a very simple formula for shareholder value. First, start by building a unique set of competitive advantages. Advantages that are difficult to replicate. Use those advantages to build a portfolio of resilient high-return projects, with products that address the evolving needs of society but importantly, offer higher value. Develop, deploy, operate them with excellence effectively and efficiently. And of course, share your success with shareholders. I hope that you have seen that in the overview that we've provided with you today. I also hope that you see that we're uniquely positioned in a league of our own to deliver value today to our shareholders and to deliver that same superior shareholder value, far, far, into the future. Okay. With that, we're actually going to take in transition to our Q&A session for our Corporate Plan Update. We have until about 10:15 Central Time to take your questions. I'd ask everyone here to do a couple of things. So first, if you could hold your detailed questions on the upstream until after Neil and his team kind of get beyond the upstream spotlight, we'd greatly appreciate that. And then second, just to ensure that everyone has as much opportunity as possible to ask their questions. I'd request that you limit your questions to a single question. Now I'm going to invite my management committee colleagues to come up here and join me on the stage. And once we get settled up here, I'm going to turn it over to Marina, and she is going to conduct our Q&A session.

Good morning, everybody. And our first question comes from Devin McDermott from Morgan Danley.

First, just a quick comment. Darren, having watched the progress here since you laid out this growth plan since 2018. It's really great to see the results and then the continuation of that attractive growth through decade end, so a lot of attractive opportunities ahead. Kathy, I wanted to start with you. Toward the end of your presentation, you talked about what this all drives and that's this falling breakeven over the next 5 years, $35 per barrel by 2027, $30 by 2030. It was very impressive and by a wide margin, peer-leading number. And I wanted to get into what this means for shareholder returns, your thoughts on dividend capacity specifically. You do have a lot of room to accelerate dividend growth that would seem as this breakeven falls and reinvestment rate falls over time. So how are you thinking about some of the moving pieces there?

Yes. And so I'll start. One of the comments I made is we've had 42 consecutive years of annual dividend growth and that, that puts us into a quite small group of companies within the S&P 500 and that's certainly a record that we are looking to extend far into the future. We recognize how important dividends are to our shareholders. And we have a very large shareholder base that's retail shareholders, where I would say we fully recognize how much they count on that dividend and on dividend growth. When we think about that dividend, right, and growing that dividend, we think about ensuring that, that dividend is going to be sustainable. That, that dividend is going to be competitive and that it continues to grow. And so I'd say that really underpins how we think about our dividend policy. We also look at the combination of both dividends and that strong shareholder repurchase program in terms of how we deliver and distribute capital to shareholders kind of over the course of the cycle. That dividend is a very permanent obligation, right, where share repurchases over a long period of time are tax efficient and they also give us flexibility. So I'd say we feel really good about our trajectory, right? Obviously, we're continuing to grow earnings and cash flow, and that puts us in a terrific place terms of continuing to grow the dividend over the long term.

Our next question comes from Neil Mehta of Goldman Sachs.

I think a release a couple of days ago saying it's been 25 years since the merger of Exxon and Mobil. And then you've done some terrific deals over the last couple of years, including in the Permian with Pioneer, which I know we're going to hear from Neil in a bit. So I'm just curious on your perspective on M&A. Is it -- continues to be a core competency for the organization given the organic growth opportunity set you outlined, you don't have to do M&A.? But do you see that as a growth value creation mechanism for the organization in the next couple of years?

Yes, I'll touch on that and then see if Kathy wants to add anything. What I'd start by saying is the advantages that we're growing in my mind, opens the door for M&A. In fact, if you look at the Pioneer transaction, the effort that we put into the unconventional space early on to deploy technology and find ways to differentiate what we were doing by bringing the best of ExxonMobil into the unconventional space really opened up the opportunity -- say, Neil and his team will talk about, and that gave us the 1 plus 1 equal 3 equation. Where we, together with Pioneer, can grow and develop something more than either of us could have done independently. That remains a very important part of the equation going forward. So Neil, we don't have to prioritize that. It's equal in its value. It's really around where can we take our advantages and apply that to grow the most significant value proposition. And as we've seen with Pioneer and as Neil and his team will talk you through, value opportunity with that. Huge value opportunity in our organic investments. And we're on the lookout. I would say we are more focused in that space today than we've ever been. But we've got the luxury of not having to choose between one or the other. We have the luxury of figuring out where the highest value is in pursuing that. And so we -- that remains, in my mind, a really important lever that the organization continues to stay focused on. Anything to add, Kathy?

Yes. I'd say we're always looking for opportunities now and we're picky, right? And we're picky because we need to find the right opportunity where those synergies are going to really add value. So anything we acquire really delivers strong returns but we're always looking.

Our next question comes from Doug Leggate from Wolf Research.

Still getting used to that. I think [ rescinding ] off my shoulder on the dividend question. So I'm going to try something else. And Darren, I apologize in advance. This is the first time the collective community has really had a chance to sit with all of you since the arbitration was announced with Hess. I wonder if I could ask you for everyone here to frame to the extent you can, the rationale is to why you launched that arbitration and your level of confidence in your position. And obviously, Guyana has been an extraordinary asset. But I think we're all a little confused still as to what the position of Exxon is.

Okay. Well, thanks, Doug. I'll a few things, and then Neil is obviously closer to that. I'll let him add any additional comments. First, what I would tell you is we're very confident in the position. I think we've mentioned many times publicly, that we were there at the beginning with Shell. We wrote these documents. We understood the intent of those documents. And so we're pretty familiar with the language and the requirements in that. So that gives us confidence in the position that we've taken. Obviously, the objective here is to defend, we believe, is a fundamental right in that operating agreement that says, as we have invested and built the value of that resource and delivered that, that if a partner wants to make a change in the construct that we have an opportunity as seen in the other partner to participate in that opportunity and have the right of first refusal. And so maintaining that, the integrity of that document and defending that we think is critical not only for this particular asset. But for the precedents for everything else that we're doing. That's the basis on which we're approaching this. I know that the discussion out there has been that Chevron has have arranged the deal so that the deal falls apart, if there's no -- that's their construct, not ours. Our view is that we have an opportunity. We've developed the value of that asset. We have a right to consider the value of that asset in this transaction and a right to then take an option on it. There is an option value here. We think it's in the best interest of all our shareholders to maintain that value option. Why would we give that away because one of the partners constructed a deal with another third party? We don't see why that would change the way we think about the option or the value of that options. We're trying to maintain the value of that. Do you have anything to add on that?

No, I think it's dead simple. I don't think it's complicated. We believe we have a ROFR. We believe we have preemption rights. We've gone to arbitration and we'll demonstrate that. We actually have a responsibility to all the shareholders. If you believe you have the right to preemption, you believe you have the right of first refusal to test what that value is. It would be incomprehensible in my mind to just say, we don't think we want to test it. We don't know what the value is. We're not going to look at it. What we're saying is we have the rights, we want to test the value, we'll look at the value and we'll see if that value is in the best interest of the company, the corporation and the shareholders.

Our next question is from John Royall of JPMorgan.

So you talked a lot about driving down reinvestment rates, but you had a lot of success back in 2020 at the lower part of the cycle, kind of weaning into the low part of the cycle. So I guess my question is, do you have a cap in mind on the reinvestment rate, should you find yourself in bottom cycle conditions again? Should we expect you to lean into the next down cycle the same way you have in the past? Or is this reinvestment rate somewhat of a constraint today?

Maybe just a little context with respect to the point you made about 2020 leaning in. We're actually leaned into the cycle in 2018 before the pandemic. And if you look at the portfolio of projects that we've been executing since 2018, it's been pretty static in terms of the things that we identified in 2018 as we rolled out this strategy, as we were looking at the fundamentals and what we're frankly at the time, an inadequate investment rate in the oil and gas business. And so we worked hard to find the right opportunities with the right advantages and invest in those. We were aggressively pursuing that, as many of you will remember. Wasn't a really popular approach at the time, but we understood the importance of it with respect to delivering what the industry and frankly, society was ultimately going to need. The pandemic, basically through a rent, into the works in terms of dropping out the revenue side. So we had to step back and reevaluate and resequence that process as is the rest of industry. What you may remember is rather than canceling those projects, we basically -- some of them we continue to progress, others that we deferred and worked out different terms with the contract companies. And we took an approach that basically says for the long term, we know we're going to make these investments. We've got a particular set of circumstances and challenges that we're facing today that we need to get through but we're coming back. And so let's work with the contract community to establish an approach that keeps both of us moving forward and then takes advantage when we come out of that. So the things that we've been prosecuting since then have all been part of that original 2018 vision. We just had to move some of it around given the challenges of the pandemic. If you look at where we're at today, I think we're in a very similar situation, where we've laid out a very long-term view as to where we want to go invest. And as I think Kathy and I have been trying to make the point, when you're building a plan 6 years into the future, there's a lot of variability in that plan, and we have to make some assumptions about what's going to transpire and to invest. My philosophy on this. If you don't plan to do something, you won't. And so while there's a lot of uncertainty here, it's absolutely critical that you build in the plans, the objective and it gives you optionality that as things move forward and evolve, if they don't materialize in the way that you had assumed that justify that spend and that investment, you have the option to stop and to pull back. That's really, really important. If you choose not to put it in your plan, you don't do it. You don't -- you can't start something up from scratch. It' better then to pull back than not. So the approach that we've taken here is on the base, the stuff that Kathy showed you in the blue, which is relatively flat, that's all the stuff we know how to do and what we've been doing. Neil's business, Jack's business, the things that have been moving forward. These new things that have a lot more uncertainty around them. We built them into the plans with this view that we see the real value proposition, but they are new and we are early in that, and we'll see how that plays out. But our best intention, our best guess is this is how it will manifest itself. That's what the organization is working towards and we'll see how that develops with time. And so my expectation is we'll be sitting here 5 years down the road, and we'll be talking about the plans that we laid out here today through 2030, and that we will have been executing all of those plans.

Darren, I'd just add that the -- speaking of the projects we started back in that time frame, the last 2 of those are starting up in 2025. The [indiscernible] project and the [indiscernible] project. We executed all of them. Very pleased with the projects that are already online and very pleased with the ones that are coming online in 2025.

Neil, you wanted to...

Yes. The other thing that's really important, and you'll see more of it later on is we've got much more flexibility in our portfolio going forward because of our exposure to the unconventional and the Permian business. So it's not just a question of what you do. It's what the optionality you do -- you have at the bottom of the cycle. We were extremely proud of the organization in 2020. And in the unconventional space, we carried on drilling. And we carried on drilling at really attractive drilling costs. What we elected not to do was frac and complete those wells, flow those barrels into a low price environment. What we did in '21 and '22 is when the price came back, then we flowed those barrels. So having that flexibility to cut back and spend where you can get attractive rates is really, really important. And we absolutely benefited from that in '21 and '22. And of course, we got more exposure going forward to that.

Next question comes from Betty Jiang at Barclays.

I want to focus on the low current investments. I think it's really a strong contrast against other majors that were seemingly pulling back from low carbon investment, and yet Exxon is leaning in. And I think the conversation should be focusing on the competitive advantage. I don't think energy transition can happen without Exxon being part of it. So when we're talking about these advantages, even with the policy environment, the broader low-carbon environment seeming to be more uncertain, do you think your advantages has expanded as you start evaluating the businesses, the markets, the customer demand? Maybe just elaborate on what you're seeing, how that has evolved over time and you're confident in those long-term growth earnings potential?

Yes. Sure, Betty. Thank you for the question. I think as you point out, our approach has been very different here. And it starts with 2 fundamentals. The first fundamental is the fact that the world will continue to need energy -- that oil and gas will continue to play an important role going forward and that people will continue to need affordable, reliable low-cost energy. The other fact, the world needs to find an economically viable way to reduce emissions. That is fundamental. And so we -- and you know we've all talked -- we've been talking about this, the end equation. And we are absolutely convinced the world can do both. We've got to break out of the existing narrative and start thinking about how do you achieve both of these things. They're not mutually exclusive but you need to open the aperture as to the approach. And as you say, we believe very strongly that there is a molecule aspect of the solution set and ExxonMobil has a capacity and capability to contribute in that space, and that's what we've been working on, leveraging the same capabilities that have applied to the rest of our businesses. Why that is so important is as we've talked about, there's a lot of uncertainty, and the path to transition is very unclear because it has to be made at a societal level. No one company can drive the transition. No one country can drive it. So everyone is working towards this path. There's a lot of uncertainty out there. You've got to maintain some level of optionality and flexibility. And so while we're committed to it, we recognize that we have to move with the demands and the needs of society. And so we're trying to strike that balance. And by relying on the same set of advantages and capabilities, we have the flexibility to move back and forth. And if you look at Dan's business, the Low Carbon Solutions business, he would tell you if he was here standing on the stage today, there is no way he could have progressed what we've progressed to date if it wasn't as part of -- being part of ExxonMobil and leveraging those same capabilities. The projects organization, the subsurface folks, the pipeline folks, the work that Dan is doing is being executed by the rest of our organization and drawing on the talents and capabilities of that organization. Nobody else is doing that today. That's a huge luxury. And I will also tell you by getting in there early. The devil is in the details. We are building brand-new value chains, brand-new business here that everyone's talked about it at a very high level. Nobody has rolled their sleeves up and gotten into the details of this other than ExxonMobil. Now I can also tell you that when you go to the Biden administration and other people who are interested in this space, they come to us to ask detailed questions because we're the ones that understand them, Dan's team in particular. So there's been huge advantage to that. How exactly all that plays out, given how early they are, it's difficult for us to say. And frankly, we're not trying to make a projection that we lock in stone. Everything that Dan has been doing is position ourselves for the upside, position ourselves recognizing there is a need to do this. But at the same time, recognize the timing of it is somewhat questionable. And so minimize the downside, position for the upside. And that's frankly what we've been doing in that low carbon business. And then building, strengthening the advantages in the Denbury acquisition, I think, from my perspective, strategically, recognizing the importance of reducing emissions and the important role that carbon capture storage is going to play in that. That was a strategic play to building foundation that frankly, we know is going to be relied on going into the future. What we didn't anticipate, what we think is going to be a huge value driver as Kathy touched on is the advent of AI and the aggressive pursuit of AI in the implication that has for power demand and data centers. There's nobody out there who can deliver decarbonized power to meet the needs of AI today and in the near future of the Exxon Mobil. If you're betting on nuclear and something coming down the road, you got a long road. There's a long road ahead of us in that space. And I don't think that's going to keep this country in our industry advantaged, if we're waiting for that.

Our next question is from Bob Brackett of Bernstein.

Let's follow-up on that topic around low carbon data centers. For a while, you've had a strategy around molecules and non electrons, data centers run off of electrons. You could have a model where you are feeding advantaged gas into a data center and then you're taking away the CO2, where you're just managing those molecules or you could do something more complicated. What's the business model that you're pursuing on this low carbon data center strategy?

You've hit on it, Bob. You understand it. This Is not a pivot from a molecule approach to an electron approach. As Kathy mentioned, we have over -- we've developed 5 gigawatts of power capacity in our existing businesses. We didn't do that to get into the power business, that we did that to enable our manufacturing sites to do the job, the molecule job. I would say in this space, it's the same approach. We don't bring a lot of value creation to the power generation step in and of itself. It's the ability to provide decarbonized natural gas to that power system and the ability to capture the CO2 and then to transport it and sequester it where we bring the value. So the value proposition for low carbon data centers is on the molecule side of the equation for us. Having said that, again, this is a brand-new area that people are trying to establish. We bring huge capability in this space. We know how to build these projects. We have a good project organization. We know how to do that at scale. These are very large investments by the way. These data centers are enormous. And so bringing our project capabilities, bringing our relationship with contractors to get the power gen equipment in, to get the people to build the things, we can be a convener. We can be a project organizer, get these things up and moving quickly. And then as we move, make progress, then we can evolve to what we think is, from our perspective, the more natural role for us to play, which is around the molecule side of the equation. But in the early stages, I think the world is going to need help getting started on this, and we're in a perfect position to do that. And so we'll play that role, but we're not looking at being power generators. That's not the game here. If we need to, to facilitate this, we're certainly capable of doing it, but it would be done in facilitation of the molecule value of the equation. That's how to think about it.

Darren, can I just add one point on that? You'll recall, Bob, a couple of years ago, we said we were taking our Permian operations to net zero. So we've got net zero gas. And we also said we would advance the Pioneer operations from 2050 to 2035 net zero. So to supply with low carbon gas, net zero gas, you have to decarbonize those facilities. And that takes reducing emissions. It takes [ stops ] flaring. It takes electrification, it takes putting renewable electricity behind your needs in the Permian. That's a long-time approach. As far as I can tell, we're the only one on that journey and anyone committed to do it. So with any ones who are going to have the gas in the short term to supply net zero gas to these facilities.

Next question comes from Ryan Todd at Piper Sandler.

Maybe since we'll cover that Upstream later, a question on the energy product side. You've got a growth outlook there from 2024 to 2030 of roughly doubling your earnings power from $4 billion to $8 billion in the -- a lot of that's driven by volume and mix. The primary drivers there, it looks like on the project side is mostly a couple of projects that shift from gasoline to diesel, and a couple of renewable diesel projects. Can you maybe talk about the -- what else is going on? It's a big growth number for a relatively not dramatic projects. Are there other things that are involved in the number there? And maybe on a step back, as you think about your view on refining in general, the shift out of gasoline and the diesel. Can you maybe talk about how you view the macro side of the refining environment over the course of the plan?

Jack?

Yes, I'll try not to take offense by our project's not being dramatic. But no, we -- look, we've got energy products specifically, I think what your question on is we do have some low emission fuels projects, Strathcona Project in Canada is one. You mentioned the Gulf Coast projects where we'll be switching from gasoline to diesel, more diesel production. But I'll step back on the refining market of the last part of your question first though. What we see right now is that after a couple of really good years in '22 and '23, we have much lower margins because we have a lot of capacity adds. Some of the capacity adds were projects that got delayed during COVID. But right now, even though we have demand continuing to grow, we have -- what's met with more than that in supply. So it's going to require some rationalization of some of the smaller older sites and we think the most likely location that is probably going to be Europe, the medium and low complexity sites there. But during that time period of '22 and '23, we took advantage of those -- of that really high-margin environment. We brought on Beaumont, that Beaumont expansion, very advantaged new supply on the market. And we divested 4 refineries that were some of the weaker refineries in our circuit. If you look at the balance of those, our throughput went down 250,000 barrels a day and our earnings went up. So it was a really, really nice portfolio move during that time period. As we look forward, what I'd ask you to think about in terms of our refining circuit and the way to think about our refinery business is it's a feed platform for high-value products. So all our sites, Kathy mentioned this earlier, 70% of our capacity is producing products for all 3 of our businesses. And a myriad of businesses, the kind of the sub business underneath those 3 main, energy, specialty and chemical. So you think about our Lubricants business, Low Emission Fuels business, some of the chemicals business, Vistamaxx, performance polyethylene, hydrocarbon and fluids, all those are coming out of that refinery platform. And then you think about Proxima and carbon materials, that's coming out of that refinery platform, too. So those refinery products, we're converting into very high-value products. So since I'll go ahead and continue on and talk about Proxima and [ C&V ] a little bit. If you think about Proxima, Kathy mentioned this, but think about this. It's a composite from Proxima is 75% lighter and twice as strong as steel -- 75% lighter and twice as strong as steel. So when you think about infrastructure and auto, it's just 2 large industries, the lightweighting opportunities are tremendous. Now the product itself is a proven product. It's been out there since 2017, but it's been relegated to niche applications because we haven't had the volume. It's a -- basically, the feed volume for Proxima has traditionally been a byproduct distinct cracking and a low volume byproduct to that. So it hasn't been -- it's always been kind of a niche type product. Our technology innovation that we're bringing is a new on-purpose process to generate Proxima that really takes the lid off on volumes. So it opens up the whole volume play. It opens up auto where you need large volumes. And it's fed by gasoline components. So it's the ultimate and it's taking gasoline out of the market into these noncombustion -- very, very high-value noncombustion products. So we think that's a real game changer. It opens up a whole new demand set. The big TAM that Darren showed earlier that's available to us. We're -- it's going to take a little bit of time as we qualify this material into other products. But we're very optimistic, very excited about the prospects of Proxima. And then on carbon materials real quick, this advanced coke product that Kathy and Darren mentioned, it's going to replace what is currently served by needle coke. And this is a new process to create this advanced coke, that gives performance properties that there's no way needle coke can generate. You can't do it with that product. And that generates this 30% greater capacity, 30% faster charging. Again, a big TAM. You all know the EV market, how fast it's growing, the opportunity is very, very significant. So again, refining platform is a high-value product feed platform for these products. The other thing I'd mentioned back to your earlier comment about how energy products was in earnings? We do have trading and optimization in there as well, and we are continuing to grow those businesses along with that.

Well, I think to come back to the fundamental point, and we're working. This is a big change within our organization is I don't think about refinery and chemical facilities. We have manufacturing facilities that make products that supply different markets and different needs. And so when you step back and think about the conversion complexes that we have available to us today, which is what Jack's talking about, these complexes are supplying all of our different businesses. And as they evolve with time, we will bring in technologies that adjust the product mix coming out of those manufacturing platforms. And so the idea that somehow having a refiner -- refinery limit yourself to making petroleum products that are combusted, I think is a false concept. And what we've challenged ourselves to do is as these molecules go along, so as we saw gasoline going along, what can we do with those molecules to meet the needs of society? Same with carbon. In any scenario you want to paint, carbon's going along, people, there's going to be a lot of carbon out there. What are we going to do with it? There's a really cheap feedstock that we have available to us, what can we make with it? And that's what we set our technology organization on, go find something to do with this carbon. And this is the first step of it. And I would tell you, we're early in that journey, but I'm absolutely convinced these molecule technologies, looking at what we can go do, finding out what society needs and evolving it. We're going to be using these refinery facilities for a long, long time. We will just be making a whole different set of products.

Our next question is from Jason Gabelman of TD Cowen.

I wanted to go back to the surplus cash, and I appreciate the ranges at lower and higher oil prices? And I guess I'm wondering to some extent, given $110 billion excess cash at a lower oil price, are you trying to signal that $20 billion of buybacks is kind of the floor moving forward given the outlook for earnings growth and the fact that you're going to generate $110 billion over 6 years. And then on the other side, as that earnings growth comes in, how do you expect buybacks to trend over time?

Sure. So we're absolutely trying to signal the resiliency of the business across a wide set of price sets, right? And that's why we gave you both kind of an upside and a lower side case. You have seen us shift towards looking to be more consistent and how we're giving cash back to shareholders. And we've also shifted in trying to give guidance a bit further out, again, very consistent with trying to give you a bit more visibility to what it is we're trying to execute within the business. So absolutely, we look at our business and say it is getting more and more resilient. As we talked about, we're very focused across all of our business including in the low carbon solutions business and making sure we're on the left side of that cost curve, right, which enables us to continue to throw off very robust earnings and cash flows even in a lower price environment. That enables us to sustain dividend growth, right, as well as a more consistent, very strong returns to shareholders through that share repurchase program.

Our next question comes from Paul Cheng from Scotiabank.

Darren, everyone talked about AI. And I think within the energy sector, probably Exxon is more capable and equipped to do that. Can you tell us that how much money that you are investing in this area? And realistically how this AI perceived today is different than what you have been doing in machine language, [indiscernible] data before? Are we really seeing the result going to be different or it's just become more efficient and better maybe that lower cost. And Kathryn on the $7 billion on the efficiency gain. How much is that it relates to the AI or AI-related?

Yes. Thanks, Paul. I'm going to let Neil talk maybe a little bit more about the technology side and AI given his responsibilities in that space. But let me just maybe provide some initial context, which I think you touched on in your question, which is a really important change that from the past, is by -- with the changes that we've made in the organization and moving out of this siloed approach with these different businesses and delegating the responsibility for running those businesses to each of them and now instead centralizing and looking at things from a central standpoint, we're moving to a single ERP for the entire corporation. That's never existed before in our company's history. Part of that transition is we have been aligning all the data that we have across the company to a single structure, and so it's all compatible. So we are entering into a stage now where for the first time in the corporation's history, we can mine process, whatever you want to -- however you want to think about it, all the data coming across all of our businesses. This is why when I talk about our competitive advantages in scale and integration, we haven't been taking full advantage of that historically. We're now trying to do that and data is going to be a huge piece of that today. In fact, if you look at the savings that we've made in maintenance, tremendous amounts of savings, shortening our turnarounds, lowering their cost, making -- becoming more reliable. That is driven by collective assessment of the data that we've collected across our entire corporation, Upstream, Downstream and Chemical, which historically, we didn't have access to. And historically, we weren't processing or assessing consistently as a single unit. So that's making a huge difference. And so I'd tell you that as context is that the platform that we have to now start applying some of these tools is radically different than we've historically had. And we're already seeing the benefits of that today without some of the benefits associated with what I would call is the advancement in AI because in my view AI has been around for a while, but we're getting more and more advanced. And the good news is we now have a platform to take advantage of that advancement. And the second piece before I hand it to Neil to make -- point to make is that when we do have those discoveries and learnings, we can now replicate it across the entire platform of our corporation, where in the past, those findings and any discoveries were limited to the organization that had them. Today, we're doing that centrally and then applying the learnings across the entire platform. So again, another huge advantage of scale and integration. And then to the specifics of AI, Neil I'll let you take that.

No specifics, but I think just to add on to what Darren was saying, it's not just about leveraging. It's about organizing. IT's -- evolution of IT has gone on forever. I mean, AI is just the latest theme here. What we did in the last few years, we centralized our technology organization as a corporation. We used to have technology in the Chemical business, in the Upstream business, et cetera. Now we have one central organization. What that means is you can leverage the capability more easily and you can deploy the resources to the places where you think it has the highest value rather than get dispersed in every business and being dispersed geographically. We also brought our IT organization into our technology organization, think technology is subsurface, catalyst development and all those. IT is an integral part of that technology organization. That wasn't the case before. It's only 18 months since we've done that. So now what we're doing is we're integrating the IT component, including AI into our base technology. You're going to hear me talk a little bit about this in the way we're approaching the unconventional business this afternoon. You're going to hear me talk about it in how we're deploying this IT technology in the seismic area in Guyana. So as technologies involved, it's really important with the corporation of this size that you organize that you focus and concentrate your resources and you don't disperse it across the whole organization. Right now, just to finish, Darren, we're seeing application in many areas, but we're selective. Obviously, like I think, everybody in the upstream we're looking to deploy that capability searching for more molecules in the exploration space. I think everyone is going there. But we're also using it in the supply chain, and we're piloting it in other areas like maintenance as well.

All right. I think we have one more -- time for one more question in this session.

Our last question is from Jean Ann Salisbury of Bank of America.

Just one more on the new businesses. Thank you for the projections for the $3 billion and the $13 billion in earnings by 2030 and 2040. Can you speak a little bit more about what you would need to see to ramp the CapEx to achieve these opportunities and earnings and kind of positioning for the upside, as Darren said earlier, is it basically long-term customer contracting that's driving the cadence? Or are there other major things that we should be looking for?

Well, I think it's going to be a mix of things because if you look at that portfolio, we have a mix of opportunity sets there. And so maybe I'll just walk through a few of them and then see if any of the other members here have a comment to make. But -- so for Proxima and carbon material, Proxima has got a huge opportunity space across a number of different applications. And so the work to penetrate those markets, demonstrate the value and use to get the qualification and bring those in the market. That's going to set kind of the pace of how we invest in that. Carbon materials as well has a big opportunity in that space. But again, you've got to get qualified and how quickly does that happen and you move through. So those are going to be things that will dictate the pace of how quickly we can move on some of the low carbon solutions portfolios, on the carbon capture and storage, it will be a function of customer demand. I think the incentives are in place, the incentives are consistent with where we've been historically with credit for carbon capture. So the IRA enhanced those a bit. And the question is, what's the customer take-up and how aggressive do harder decarbonize sectors want to invest in carbon capture and storage to abate their emissions. That will be a customer-by-customer decision that we'll have to work our way through. The data center piece will be a question of how aggressively do the tech sector want to actually grow that beyond the, I'd say the discussion in the press releases and all the talking when it comes down to what do we really want to try to do in the time frame that we have here and what technology do you want to pursue? And how committed are you to decarbonizing that power and those investments, those all have to play themselves out. So we're very early in that process. Lithium, we've got a challenge to make sure that it's on the left-hand side of the cost of supply curve. So brand-new technology, brand-new approach. We see huge potential here. We see a growth market not only for EVs, but in batteries in general. A lot of other advantages with that business in terms of developing a brand-new source of lithium supply here in the U.S. So think of it as energy security opportunities in that space. But we've got to demonstrate that, that technology, applied with some of our capabilities, positions us where we need to, and we're early in that process and we're working our way through there. So we've got some challenges in that space. So I think as you look across the portfolio, different things are driving different aspects of it. The final one I'll make is the blue hydrogen, which as we referenced here several times, being driven by the IRA and more specifically, 45V. We've yet to see the regulations that translate that legislation. So we're waiting to see what that looks like and whether or not that is aligned with the intent of the legislation and that will inform our decision. So just there's a lot of moving parts. Hence, the reason why you say at the end of the day, we don't know exactly how all those will play out. But we see the real potential there. We want to make sure we're focused on those and have got a line of sight to how we would progress those based on a set of assumptions, but then we're constantly monitoring to see, are those assumptions playing themselves out. Where do we need to potentially pull back? Where do we need to potentially lean in further? And that's what we're trying to do. And I think we've always done that. But now with the additional disclosure to the community here is making sure that you understand the context of how we think about our plans and what we actually include there. Anything to add anybody?

Maybe the only other data -- additional data I'd give you is, we talked about $30 billion of opportunities over this planned period. About 2/3 of that are really positioned towards those external opportunities. And that would include Proxima and carbon materials. The other portion is really for us, decarbonizing our own footprint.

Okay. Management Committee, thank you. Very good discussion, more to come. Before we take a quick break, we have one additional announcement. This morning, we launched a really exciting new set of tools on our investor website, our modeling tool kit, which is intended to provide you and your teams with the tools to better understand to roughly replicate and to even analyze through meaningful sensitivities, the earnings and the cash flow plans that Darren and Kathy walked through this morning. Within this toolkit, you'll find sensitivities and key assumptions document, key disclosures, expanded rules of thumb earnings sensitivities across both our Upstream and our Product Solutions businesses, an interactive analyst center containing a wide array of data pulled from our 10-Qs, 10-Ks, press releases, et cetera, in one centralized location, that's easy to download in Excel and utilize. And finally, a modeling basics document, which outlines a simplified approach to modeling our complex company. So you can find more information on all this and links to these documents on Page 40 of our deck today, and the Investor Relations team looks forward to connecting with you and your teams to walk through these, what we view as very user-friendly improvements to our financial disclosures. So with that, we're going to take a 15-minute break, both virtually and in the room, and we'll begin again just around 10:30 Central Time. [Break]

Please welcome Senior Vice President, Neil Chapman.

I'm not so sure about that music. I tried to blend in with all these Texans around here, and you put London calling on there, it doesn't help my cause at all. Welcome back, and welcome back to everybody streaming online. I appreciate you staying with us. So as Darren said earlier on and Kathy said, the rest of the day is going to be on the Upstream. You will recall at the time of the acquisition of Pioneer, I said to everybody that we would come back before the year-end and give you an update on the status of the integration and transition. Well, we're going to do that, of course, but we've elected to send it to a more broader look at the transformation of the whole Upstream portfolio. So the next 40-odd minutes. I'm going to give some key messages with some prepared slides, and then I'm going to be joined by Liam Mallon. Liam is the current President of the Upstream organization. You're probably aware Liam's announced his intention to retire earlier in the new year. I'll talk about Liam a little bit later on. And Bart Cahir, Bart is the Senior Vice President responsible for all of the unconventional business. So obviously, a big part of this portfolio is the Permian and a big part of the Permian is the integration or the transition with Pioneer. For those on the campus, at lunch, you're going to get the opportunity to meet the extended upstream leadership team. You're also going to get the opportunity to visit 4 exhibits, which I know our organization is really excited to share with you. For the folks online, we're actually going to video-take those exhibits, so you'll have an opportunity to see those as well. So what am I going to cover? I'm going to look back briefly on the last 5 years in the Upstream as Kathy and Darren did. I'm then going to look forward through 2030 in the Upstream, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the Permian and Pioneer. We'll touch, of course, on Guyana and then briefly, we'll look at the LNG business and the rest of the portfolio. You're going to hear about a business that's been totally transformed. There's lots of highlights, I believe, both in what we've done, but more importantly, what we're going to be doing in the next 6 years. 3 of them, I cover on this slide right here. First of all, by 2030, this Upstream business is going to be generating over $55 billion of operating cash flow. At the time of the merger, we announced that we would have $2 billion of synergies average over the next 10 years through the Pioneer and Exxon combined organization. Today, we're saying that it's over $3 billion a year, more than 50% increase over that same time period. We're also adding 2 new FPSOs, 2 new boats to our outlook capacity in Guyana. And of course, I will touch on all of these as we go through the presentation. I want to start with this. This is not our view. This is WoodMac's view of operating cash flow for the upstream companies. The gray is all the IOCs. The blue line is Exxon Mobil. It's all on the same basis. It's all at flat real prices. So obviously, I'm going to focus on the blue line. And you can see the difference and the progress we've made in the last 5 years. In 2019, we were in the upper half, but not leading 2024, you can see we're the clear leader. And our plans are going to add, according to WoodMac, $18 billion of cash flow growth over the next 5 years. When I share our information, you'll see it's very close to WoodMac's view. In other words, we're going to grow the gap versus competition. WoodMac, say, in 2030 will be $20 billion or 40% higher than the next best IOC competitor in the Upstream. Before discussing our forward plans, let me just do what I said and reflect on the last 5 years. I believe we've come a long way. I vividly recall our conversations in New York in 2018 and 2019. There was a lot of questions about our ability to achieve what was described as an aggressive set of plans. And I think fairly in light of the previous 5 to 10 years contributional performance, but since that time, including going through COVID, we've transformed this Upstream portfolio, and we've transformed it to be clearly the strongest in the industry. We've built our highest return, most capital-efficient project portfolio Exxon Mobil have had in the Upstream. We go back -- it's at least 25 years -- it's probably 30 or 35 years at least in all of our experience. It's the strongest portfolio that we've had. We divested $15 billion worth of nonstrategic, lower value, lower return, end-of-life assets from our portfolio over this period. I was really proud of our organization. We sold the vast majority of them at the high prices on the rebound from COVID. We didn't go quickly into them but we met that $15 billion, but we sold most of them at the high side of the market. We've added 1.2 million barrels of advantage production, of course, primarily in Permian and Guyana, and we removed $6 billion of structural costs out of the business. As far as we can tell, no other Upstream organization, IOC or anywhere else in the world, has taken that amount of cost out over the period. We believe our investment in technology that we talked about in 2018 and [ 2019 ] is really manifesting in a true advantage. In the Permian, at that time, you will recall, we laid out the case why Cube development captures the highest value. There was skepticism about that at the time, you'll recall. Most people are drilling cubes now. And you do that because you get the highest value. We're successfully drilling the longest laterals in the Permian. We're drilling 4 milers now. I recall at the time, many folks were saying, you can't drill 2 milers, you'll lose productivity, you'll lose resource recovery at the toe of the well. Well, obviously, that's been demonstrated. It's not the case. We're getting very, very comparable performance with the 3 and 4 milers. And our first 3 FPSOs in Guyana, they're producing at more than 100,000 barrels a day above the investment basis. In addition, we didn't just focus on Guyana and Permian. In our heavy oil business, we've literally transformed our Kearl mining operation. We've lowered the unit cost by more than 30%. That includes deploying a wide range of technologies, one of which is, we are the only company to have 100% autonomous heavy haul vehicles in the mining operation in Canada. And we did that while growing the average production to 280,000 barrels a day at Kearl. And as Imperial have talked about many times, we're frequently getting daily rates into the 300s and even weekly rates into the 300 kbd. In addition to that, the organization is executing at a level that's unrivaled. The first 3 boats in Guyana were delivered at industry-leading costs and industry-leading schedule. We're drilling faster and lower cost than anybody else in the Permian, and we closed the Pioneer transaction in record time, capturing way more value than our initial estimates. The result of all that transformation in the last 5 years, you can see illustrated on these charts. At flat real prices, we've more than doubled earnings. Importantly, we've more than doubled the unit earnings at a flat real price or constant price. And you can see the average earnings growth is 18% per year. How do we achieve that? By high-grading the portfolio and growing the portfolio, by improving the mix with higher returns and, of course, taking out the $6 billion of structural costs. On the right-hand side, you can see in terms of cash flow, we added $13 billion of cash flow at constant prices, close to 10% per year growth rate. Looking ahead now, the next 6 years. The strategy is not going to change. We like the -- basis of the strategy. What we're going to do is we're going to lean in even harder and we're going to lean in even harder to a set of assets that we believe is unrivaled in the industry. We're going to take the strongest portfolio in the industry, and we're going to make it even better. We're going to add another 1.2 million oil equivalent barrels per day of advantaged production. We're going to take another $3 billion of structural costs out of the business. And the resulting portfolio is going to be more than 80% liquids or LNG. And I put LNG in with liquids because, as you know, 80% plus of our LNG is indexed to Brent. Also, we'll have a much more flexible portfolio because about 50% will be short cycle production. The key to this success, as we talked about 5 years ago, is this deployment and investment and in technology. We're going to continue to grow that advantage. I've got 3 examples on the chart here. I'm going to come back to them all a little bit later. First, we're advancing the Cube configurations that we talked about 3 or 4 years ago in the Permian. This new technology we're using to get a different spacing in our cubes will raise the value of the Permian resource by 15%. Second, we're introducing a new to the world, low-cost, lightweight proppant. The proppant used in the industry, as you're all aware, is sand. We're going to describe how we're supplementing that with a lightweight, low-cost proppant already in early stages of deployment. It's increasing recovery up to 15%. And third, in Guyana, we're leveraging the accelerated 4D seismic interpretation to recover more oil. We already see that adding another $1 billion of value to the first 6 boats, net for Exxon Mobil in Guyana. This organization remains on execution excellence. It's a trademark our organization has earned. It's a trademark, our projects organization has earned. We do not plan to lose it. I don't believe there's any organization that's having or had the same success. It's often underestimated, but we believe it's critical. This is a capital-intensive business and it's going to be key to delivering the highest synergies from the Pioneer acquisition, it's going to be key to maintaining the outstanding performance we've had in Guyana as we go from 3 boats today, to 8 boats by the end of the decade. And in fact, it's going to be critical. It's going to be key to all of the project execution we have and the capital we're deploying. We're going to start up more than 10 large projects before the end of the decade. Similar to looking back, looking forward, Kathy talked about these numbers this morning. We're going to grow earnings 15% or $9 billion versus '24. The basis of the improvement, you can see on the chart, it's the same strategy. It's more advantaged, high-value production. It's driving more efficiencies and driving more costs out of the business. We're going to add $16 billion of cash flow to over $55 billion of cash flow in the Upstream business by 2030. Darren and Kathy both discussed cost reductions earlier. I think Liam, Bart and myself, we would say, in the Upstream, it's been transformational. It has not been easy on the organization. We have streamlined leadership. We simplified, standardized business processes globally. We've revolutionized the way we're approaching maintenance. We've taken costs out of all parts of the business. I would tell you today, we're leaner, we're faster, we're more flexible. By 2030, we're going to have taken $9 billion of structural costs out of this business. Now to put that in perspective, that's 45% of our total cash operating expenses. On the right-hand side, you can see comparisons to our key competitors. Remember, we have 10% of our portfolio is in heavy oil. And heavy oil has the higher cost. Despite having the heavy oil, you can see we have the lowest unit costs in the industry. I think if you compare on an apples-to-apples basis and you take heavy oil out and you look at the chart, which are the dashed line, we have a considerable gap on lower unit costs. We could not have said that, of course, in 2018. I want to share the CapEx profile for the Upstream. Typically, we don't share that historically by segment. The important point here, as you can see, it's essentially flat when we look at ourselves plus Pioneer in 2019, and we go out to 2030. That, in my opinion, is pretty incredible. If you look below the chart, and you see the volume growth, we're going to be at 5.4 million barrels a day by 2030. And everybody in the room here knows this is a depletion business. So at higher volumes, you have to offset more depletion or more decline. And that's just to maintain the volumes being flat. You've got even higher decline when you got a higher percent of unconventional business in your portfolio, but we're offsetting that high decline without increasing CapEx and we're growing the volumes. And the reason for that is higher capital efficiency. The synergies we're getting out of the acquisition of Pioneer. The additional capital efficiency improvements that Bart and Rich Davi are driving out of the businesses in the Permian. We estimate that the capital efficiency improvement, primarily in the Permian, is reducing our CapEx by $2 billion per year. Offsetting these savings, we're adding 2 boats in Guyana. We're adding a whole bunch of other high-return 30-plus percent DCF projects that weren't in the previous plan. We're doing all of that while holding capital expenditure flat from 2019 all the way to 2030. That's because of the quality of the investments, 70% of all our capital expenditure between now and the end of the decade will be in Guyana, Permian and our LNG business. If you look at it in terms of CapEx as a percent of cash flow, or call it reinvestment rate, if you like, of course, it's demonstrated by the line on the chart. It's a 30% reduction across the period. The average returns of our investment of all the CapEx that we're spending in the Upstream between now and 2030 is over 40% return, over 40% DCF. I would tell you, we have been ruthless in our organization, limiting CapEx to high-return projects. Kathy mentioned, we have a rich portfolio of opportunities, but we are not giving up on maintaining the high returns. One of the tools we use is to set this cost of supply, a minimum threshold on cost of supply. I've previously shared this type of chart before. It looks at the cumulative capital expenditure spend that's on the x-axis between now and 2030. The left is liquids and the right and the red is LNG. For each investment in crude or gas, what we're plotting here is to generate a 10% return -- the price to generate a 10% return for the full life of the project, and that's what's plotted on the x-axis. So what it tells you is that 90% of all the spend that when deploying between now and 2030 will generate a double-digit return at less than $35 a barrel, if the price is less than $35 a barrel for the life of the project. And obviously, we know that is not going to happen. But it illustrates the resilience of these investments. There is some at the right-hand side, you can see some investments that are above the $35 a barrel hurdle. I mean we include those for transparency. We haven't FID-ed those projects yet. They're in our plan. Obviously, the organization is going to work them to drive them down to our target. The result of that investment program, we're going to increase our volumes by over 1 million barrels a day. Highlighted on the chart is where the growth comes from. In the dark blue, it's these advantaged assets, the Permian, Guyana and LNG, where all our plans are well matured and I'm going to discuss them in a few slides. You can see our advantage production is close to or higher than the Upstream production of all the other IOCs. I like this way of describing what we have done and what we're doing. It's a simple waterfall chart. And in this case, I've used 2025 as the intermediate year. And the reason we've done that is the first full year of having Pioneer in the company. You can see between 2019 and 2025, Exxon Mobil added 600,000 barrels a day of production, and we divested 600,000 barrels a day of production. The earnings per barrel of what we added was 5x what we divested. That's why the quality has improved. We then added through 2025, 800,000 barrels a day through the Pioneer acquisition. The next 5 years, you can see we're going to add another 700,000 barrels a day. Interestingly, that growth rate of 900 is the same or very similar to the growth rate that Exxon Mobil had based on the initial production in 2019 in the previous 5 years. Divestments, you can see, are much lower. We cleaned up a lot of the portfolio. You're always looking to clean up a lot. But in 2018 and 2019, I showed you that tail of assets at the Investor Days. We had a long tail. We've taken most of that out. So we anticipate divestments will be lower going forward. I want to close this section with a summary of how the organization has transformed and continues to transform this portfolio. The top charts, the financial measures, unit earnings, unit cash flow, costs, the numbers speak for themselves and illustrate the turnaround. On the lower left chart, you can see the dramatic reduction in the percent of dry gas since the acquisition of XTO. We've been heavily weighted, too much, frankly, dry gas in our portfolio. Now dry gas or gas in this country offers lots of opportunity. It's just about getting the balance right. In 2030, we'll have just 18% of our portfolio is flowing gas. And of the 18% -- 13% of the 18% will be gas produced through liquids production in the Permian. On the bottom right, you can see the higher percent of short cycle in the Permian -- in the portfolio going forward. Obviously, that's driven by the Permian. But as I mentioned in the Q&A earlier, it dramatically improves our flexibility. Let's turn to the Permian. The acquisition of Pioneer has created really a industry position that's leading and it's frankly unmatched. Our investment in technology, combined with what's so important to us, is the excellence in execution is paying off specifically in higher capital efficiency and higher resource recovery. On this cover slide, I provide some key headlines and key metrics. As I mentioned, we've increased the synergies by over 50%, and we've only been 6 months into this transition. We're introducing this patented lightweight, low-cost proppant that's giving us a significant step-up in resource recovery. We're adding 2 billion oil equivalent barrels to the size of the resource. You will recall at the time of the merger when we put Exxon and Pioneer together, we said we had 16 billion barrels in the Permian. We've now raised that and it's still early in the game to 18 billion barrels, that's a direct result of the improvements in capital efficiency and resource recovery. By 2030, in the Permian, we'll be reducing 2.3 million barrels a day. This slide illustrates the strength of our resource position. Contiguous acreage is key to capital efficiency and resource recovery. And just by illustration, just by observation and looking at the maps there, you can see the advantage we've got. I was talking in 2018 and 2019 about the advantage we had in the Delaware Basin after the Bass acquisition, the Pioneer acquisition, as you can see, multiplies that many times over. And there's just simple examples of why contiguous acreage gives you such an advantage. If you don't have a large acreage, you can't drill 4-mile laterals. The capital efficiency saving of drilling one 4-mile lateral versus four 1-mile laterals is enormous. But you have to have the resource and the acreage to do that. On the right is the external view, that's not our view. That's the external view of total resource and the competitiveness of resource in the Permian. I mean, it just illustrates the scale of our advantage, and it doesn't account for some of the technology improvements that we're going to discuss today, both on the stage here and in the exhibits. When they are deployed, I'm confident the third parties will exaggerate that advantage that we have. The value of the acquisition, though, it's not just in the size and the scale of the resource, it comes from combining the capabilities of these 2 companies. Even in the early days, it's proving to be really exceptional. Exxon is a leader in drilling. Our focus has been in the Delaware Basin. We drilled the longest laterals. We drilled the longest laterals at the lowest cost. Pioneer's focus, of course, was 100% in the Midland Basin, where they were leaders in fracking and completions. Today, you can go and look at the data. We are the lowest drilling and completion cost per lateral foot in both basins. You can see it from public data. We see it in the public data. We can see it from the data where we're in joint ventures with other players in the basin. At the exhibits this afternoon, you're going to visit our operations room. There is nothing like this in the industry. We have these engineers and geoscientists watching every single well that's being drilled what's every single frac job that's going on, all controlled from the site. It's 24 hours a day, it's micromanaging. But when you're deploying that much capital, you better make sure that you're deploying it effectively. That's what's important, and that's what I want you to see. It's pretty amazing. Already, we've moved all the Pioneer operations into that control room. They're all being controlled on the site. These Permian operations are massive in scale. They're large, you're deploying a lot of capital. But the basis of our development plan is simple. First, it's to leverage the scale that we have. It's not just drilling in completion costs. It includes leveraging the scale on all the -- all other costs, logistics, water, procurement. When you're large, you get a sale and a cost advantage. We're gaining much more from reverse synergies than we've ever thought about. That's probably a little unfair. We always knew that Pioneer were a quality organization, but we quickly, what we call reverse synergies, leverage the great tools and processes that Pioneer had into the Exxon operations, integrated supply chain, integrated planning tools. I mean, we shouldn't be surprised, Pioneer were always and always have been a quality organization. But we brought some, I think, really outstanding talents into this organization. Pioneer has a deep knowledge of this business and a deep knowledge of the Permian Basin. Rich Daily, who, of course, you all know, is a critical leader of this new team. You're going to have the opportunity to chat with Rich this afternoon and get his views. And Rich and Bart, between them, rapidly built a highly aligned, highly motivated quality team to exploit this Permian opportunity. The second part of our development plan is to leverage this deep inventory of technologies that I've been describing. I'm going to touch on 2 today. First, the enhancements to the cube design that leverages a broad range of technologies. And the second is this new proppant, which is derived from petroleum coke. The Head of Upstream technology and 1 of the exhibits this afternoon, he'll describe the pipeline of technologies, but he will describe in far more detail than I'm going to do how this proppant works and what value we're seeing from it. Let me start with this cube. I said many times, our unwavering objective in developing the unconventional space and developing the Permian is to get the maximum value, the maximum NPV after the resource. We are not chasing volumes. We're not chasing short-term cash flow. We're focused on maximizing the value of the complete resource, and that requires this balance between capital efficiency, resource recovery and production. You've got to get that balance correct to get their highest NPV. And that balance is the key, because we've said and people have said, and you all know, not all benches are the same, not all acreage is the same and it's why direct comparisons are so challenging. But it's why we've invested so much in the fundamental science understanding of the reservoir and of the rock because if you're going to get the maximum NPV that's what's required a deep understanding of the reservoir. That allows you to set the optimal spacing and size of these fracs. It's what previously led us to deploy this cube development. At that time, we demonstrated in excess of 20% higher NPV versus a best bench development. Now we know everyone is drilling cubes now, but the cube design should not be static. It should not be the same for all benches and it shouldn't be the same for all geographies. You have to tailor it to the geography and the bench. So the cube design continues to evolve. I would say we're way more sophisticated when we talked about cubes 3 or 4 years ago. And the latest design further tailors the spacing. It's got unique patents, longer laterals, leverages the new proppant. This is, frankly, a pretty clumsy illustration of what we're doing. But what it means is you're not going to have the same fracs in exactly the same position everywhere in the basin. If you do, you don't understand the resource and you don't get the maximum value out of the resource. This latest cube design that we have is reducing the number of wells by 20% for the same resource recovery. I mean that's a pretty good number, 20% reduction in the number of wells to get the same resource recovery we estimate it's adding a further 15% to the NPV. So let me say a few words about this new patented proppant. There's 2 key components here. First, it's lightweight. And second, it's lower cost. The advantage of lightweight is that it travels deeper into the frac as you can see here. In this schematic, we're using a blend of sand and the lightweight proppant. You can see the sand is the yellow and the proppant is the blue. The sand is perfectly acceptable and meets the functional need close to the wellbore. It's when you go further down the wellbore, the sand is too heavy and doesn't get down. But if you put a proppant down there, a lightweight proppant, if the proppant doesn't have the strength that's required, the reservoir is just going to close, the frac is just going to close. You have to have it lightweight to get further down the frac. It has to have the strength to keep the frac open. That's what enables the more flow. That's what increases recovery. The unique part of this technology is we have formulated this petroleum coke that has the strength that's required. The advantage of being petroleum coke, it's low cost. People have tried lightweight proppants in the unconventional space before, but they are very, very expensive, and you lose value. What we have done is we're taking petroleum coke. We're manufacturing this specific type of coke in our own refineries. That's what makes it different and that's what lowers the cost. So we've been developing this technology in our labs. Some of you have asked me about it over the years for several years now. We're still in the early stages of deployment. But as I said earlier, we're seeing up to a 15% increase in recovery so far. That's way better than we'd anticipated at this early stage of deployment. More recovery, small increase in costs. It's pretty exciting. We're going to have 200 of our wells next year, we'll be deploying this technology. We estimated a full deployment when we have this in all of our wells, we'll be using up to 2 million tonnes per year of petroleum coke. So it's a big scale operation. Integration of Pioneer, I mentioned it's going exceptionally well, frankly, above expectations. The best illustration of that is the fact that Bart and Rich and the whole Permian team are committing to a high level of synergies that we announced at the merger. And we're still very early in the integration. As I said, we see now more than $3 billion per year of synergies over the first 10 years. You can see on the chart, large increases, see that time, we see more from capital efficiency from these enhanced cube designs from longer laterals, from more leveraging of the scale. We see higher capital efficiency from additional benches becoming more economic. So as you get capital efficiency up and you get resource recovery up some of those lower Wolfcamp pensions, the Mississippi and the Jo Mill become highly economic. If you've got the capital efficiency and resource recovery up. And that's in large a large part why we're increasing the total resource recovery to 18 billion barrels. We'll get a higher cost savings from combining the best of both companies. Now, as I said, we're rapidly leveraging the best practices and scale. We're just 8 months in. And having the organization to commit to this level of synergies really reflects the quality of the acreage, the quality of the people, combined with these rapid advances in technology. So let me close with a few key metrics on the Permian for 2030. Our D&C costs, our drilling and completion costs are going to be 30% lower versus 2019. That's presuming that all the material costs and service costs are the same. So you normalize back to 2019 levels. It's pretty similar to what we see today. So we're giving a 30%. What that means as 50% of our D&C costs are in materials and services, the execution improvement over that period has doubled. We've baked into the plans that resource recovery will be at least 30% higher versus 2019. Of course, our target remains, we've been explicit about this to double the resource recovery. But we're confident we'll get to 30% by 2030. Obviously, our objective is to do better. The average returns of our Permian capital that we're deploying over the period is over 40% DCF. The cost of supply significantly lower than $35 per barrel. We'll be producing 2.3 million barrels a day with $25 billion of operating cash flow. I'm confident we're going to increase the gap versus our next best competitor, leveraging the scale, deploying these technologies combined with this rigorous execution on the highest quality contiguous acreage. You will see this advantaged performance in the type curves in the coming years. You're going to see a significant differentiation as the quality differences, the technology differences and the execution differences become more exaggerated. We're going to provide regular updates on the key metrics. Let me go south now and turn to Guyana. Our success in Guyana continues. We're delivering, in fact, actually, we're exceeding on the plans that we've laid out. We're adding 2 new FPSO developments to recover more of the $100 billion -- 11 billion barrels of announced discovered resource. That means we'll have 8 FPSOs in production by the end of this decade. Result of that, 1.7 million barrels oil equivalent of capacity with an estimated production at that time of 1.3 million oil equivalent barrels. Everybody asks me what's the production versus the capacity. It is difficult to predict production in the future, always in the upstream because of the uncertainty of the reservoir. So far, we've been producing way above capacity, 100,000 barrels a day in the first 3 boats above the capacity. There's just no guarantee that's going to be the case in the future. We'll see. We're going to generate $8 billion net ExxonMobil operating cash flow at the end of the decade. This slide gives you the update on the production and outlook profile through 2030, 3 FPSOs in production. The next 3 FPSOs, Yellowtail, Uaru and Whiptail, will start up in '25, '26 and '27. We're continuing to optimize the developments, the size and the timing based on the greatest clarity of the resource. Remember, we're doing something unique here. We're exploring, appraising and developing all in parallel in this basin. We've added the seventh development on Hammerhead. Hammerhead is actually a heavier oil development. In an order of magnitude, it's in the range of 15 to 24 API. So to balance contrast that lease is probably 32 or 33. This FPSO, our current plans is going to be 150,000 barrel a day boat. Long tail is going to be the eighth. That's the reverse. It's a lighter crude than Lisa. It's about 40 API range, something like that. So that's the outlook profile. Obviously, all of these are subject to government endorsements. The Senior Vice President of our Deepwater business is responsible for Guyana, Hunter Farris, he will be with us at lunch today and on the tour this afternoon. So you can quiz him on all those developments. It's a great resource. 11 billion oil equivalent barrels is a lot of oil, but what's key, not just for us and the co-venturers work for the countries to get the most value, most value out of the resource is how you develop the resource. We're really proud that our first 3 boats were delivered on schedule and on budget. But what's just as important is that these budgets and these schedules are the most aggressive in the industry. This left-hand chart plots the investment cost versus the time from discovery to production. Our first 3 boats are all in the first quartile of the deepwater industry. The right-hand chart looks at drilling and benchmarks drilling data in the industry in deepwater. Here, we're plotting the days to drill versus the length of the wells. I'll remind you, we always talk about the FPSO. Order of magnitude, 1/3 of the cost is in the FPSO, 1/3 in the SURF and 1/3 in drilling. So drilling is really, really critical. You can see we're industry-leading. And every year, we're drilling at a faster pace. We're now drilling at twice the speed in Guyana, in deepwater that we were doing in 2019. Like the Permian, we're applying more of our advanced technologies set into Guyana. The scale of Guyana allows economic deployment of more intense seismic programs, in this case, to recover more resource. Here, we're illustrating the use of 4D seismic. It's always difficult to simplify seismic interpretations. But what we're looking at here is the real-time movement of oil, gas and liquid in the reservoir. It probably doesn't look that clear to you, it doesn't really to me, but for our geoscientists, it's a little bit like -- it's like me not wearing my reading glasses and holding the paper right out as long as my arms will go. This is a much better interpretation and recognize we're trying to interpret the subsurface. This is more than 3 miles below the ocean floor, but it provides an accelerated understanding of the flows. That's what's important. What that does, it allows you to more accurately place both the injector and producing wells. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to push with gas and water, the oil towards the producing wells, better visualization of that gives you better placement, better placement gives you better recovery. We estimate this technology is going to add $1 billion net to our first 6 boats. More opportunity will come with more computing power. Right now, that's what's limiting us. So we're making a significant investment in high-performance computing capacity on this campus. That expansion will be online in '26. It has a potential to reduce a typical time line from data acquisition to action from 24 months to just 3 months. If you can get that kind of time line, you get much better recovery out of the reservoir. I'd like to remind you, and I always like to remind everybody, we're still very early in the development of the Stabroek block, 3 boats online, 5 to come. These 8 boats are going to be deployed across hundreds of square miles. What that means is when you've got 8 foundational boats, you've got lots of opportunities for tiebacks. You've got lots of opportunities for infield drilling. Those are the highest return investment you'll ever make in the upstream because you've got most of the capital already deployed. We're not even close to doing that. There's lots of running room. We're continuing to explore. We did not have a significant or material discovery this year. That contrasts obviously, with the previous few years. But we are not finished yet. Every well we drill in this space and provides new learnings, it further informs the future exploration programs. And of course, we're obviously, as we've talked about and the government has talked about many times, we're working with the government on future gas developments, which has got more work to do in that space. As I said at the start of this Guyana section, our responsibility to the co-venturers and to the government is to get the maximum value out of the resource, and that's front and center of our planning. And it's manifesting in the Guyanese economy. It's already very visible. Guyana has the highest GDP growth of any country in the world. We're supporting many in-country elements. We've got more than 6,000 Guyanese citizens supporting our onshore and offshore activities. We've just completed the pipeline to take gas from offshore to the first gas-fired power station in the country and the government estimates that will reduce electricity prices in Georgetown by about 50%. We briefly touch on liquefied natural gas. LNG has been the foundation of this corporation's upstream portfolio for many years. Obviously, with our major investments in Qatar, Papua New Guinea and Australia. It's a growing part of our portfolio, too. We're going to have sales of more than 40 million tonnes a year by 2030. We've got 4 world-class projects under deployment. By 2030, we anticipate a cash flow out of the LNG business were around about $8 billion per year. This slide provides a status of the 4 major LNG developments that we have ongoing. We anticipate first gas from Golden Pass, first gas from NFE in Qatar in 2025. With the support of both our partners and the government, we elected to pause Papua development. Simply put, neither us nor the government nor our co-ventures, we're happy with the investment costs. We're working now with all stakeholders on a different concept and a different design to lower the investment costs and lower the cost of supply. I mean recall my comment on the earlier slide. We will not deploy capital in this company that doesn't meet those cost-to-supply investment hurdles. The redesign is going really well. We anticipate we'll FID this project next year. Mozambique, 18 million tonne Rovuma development. We're deploying that with a higher return modular train concept, we anticipate we'll FID that project in 2026. But in addition to growing capacity, we're continuing that strategy that we talked about before to extract the maximum amount of what we've got more value from this global footprint. And that goes by optimizing the assets, but it also goes by optimizing how you serve the markets where we operate, we push to get more value. In Papua, we're getting more than 20% volume above the investment basis of our current operation. We're expanding the sales, but we're bringing more sales under our own control. We're adding more than 5 million tonnes from third-party facilities on the Gulf Coast and the U.S. and in Mexico. That's to further optimize the supply points and the logistics to serve our target markets at lower cost, plus I tell you it adds significant additional opportunity in trading. Peter, Peter Clark, who is the Senior Vice President of our LNG business. Again, Peter will join us this afternoon, you'll get an opportunity to ask him about the business. So let me close by briefly some comments on the rest of our portfolio. I -- we talked so much about Guyana and Permian and the LNG business, but we have a large portfolio outside of it. That's also been totally transformed. And the folks working on those assets are just as focused on extracting the maximum value. This slide illustrates just a few of the breadth of plans that we have for these assets in the next few years. In 2025, we'll start up our first offshore Brazilian production in Bacalhau in Brazil. We're also, of course, a 25% player in Tengiz in Kazakhstan. Those 2 developments will start up next year, extra 140,000 barrels a day for ExxonMobil net. As earlier -- as I mentioned earlier, our divestment program is going to be lower going forward, but we do anticipate closing 2 important divestments in the very near term. The joint venture, our position in the joint venture, nearshore in Nigeria and our unconventional business in Argentina. We estimate the proceeds of those net will be over $2 billion. Our new technologies are not just getting deployed in the Permian and in Guyana. But across the rest of the portfolio, as I mentioned, Kearl has reduced the production costs as we deployed these heavy-haul autonomous vehicles. In the Canadians in situ business, Imperial and Brad Corson have talked a lot about this potential breakthrough technology called enhanced bitumen recovery or EBRT. We estimate that could potentially add 4 billion oil equivalent barrels of resource at a cost of supply, again, less than $35 per barrel. We're doing all of this while we're lowering emissions. The methane intensity of this business is going to be 70% to 80% lower by the end of this decade versus 2016, 70% to 80% lower. The flaring intensity is going to be 60% to 70% lower. The greenhouse gas intensity is going to be 40% to 50% lower, all versus 2016. We will meet our commitments to take the heritage ExxonMobil Permian position to net 0 by the end of this decade. And we will also get the new facilities from Pioneer to net 0 by 2035, at the latest. John Whelan, who is the Senior Vice President for our conventional businesses, a lot of the rest of this portfolio. John will also be with us this afternoon in the lunch. So I encourage you to take the time to meet with all of the extended leadership team of this business. Let me close this part of this discussion. We're extremely proud of this organization. They've already transformed this business. We've added Pioneer to a portfolio that was already industry leading, and we've taken a massive amount of costs out of the business. We have an aggressive outlook again, but the confidence that we can deliver is extremely high because it's replicating what we did in the previous 5 years. And these projects and these plans, as I've articulated, are well understood by the organization. So with that, I'm going to close. I'm going to invite Liam and Bart to join me on the stage here for your questions. Let me just make a comment on Liam, because -- before he comes up here. Liam has been President of the Upstream organization. While he's been in mobile and ExxonMobil for more than 35 years, and he's been in the upstream industry for over 40 years. Liam has been President or a President in Global Projects and the upstream organization for -- during this whole transformation. So we're indebted to Liam's leadership during this period. But if Liam was making these comments, he would also add what I'm going to add. It's not a one-man show. It's the combined competency. It's the combined capabilities of all of the folks in the upstream that's delivering these results. So Dan Ammann is going to join, and he's going to take over as President, but he's got a really, really strong leadership team behind him. So, okay, for folks who will bring the chairs out, I'm going to invite Liam and Bart up on to the stage. We'll take your questions on the upstream spotlight until I'm told about 12:15 central time. And again, to ensure that as many people can ask a question as possible. We request that you ask just 1 question. Take a seat gentlemen, so Marina, I'll leave it up to you.

And our first question comes from Neal Dingmann from Truist.

A quick question on something you started with today, Neil just -- could you talk about maybe a little bit on the profit, I'm just curious now to hear more about that, maybe on that lightweight profit, how much -- looking at that, how much would you consider the cost to bring that new proppant to location? And what -- how do you think you all can scale that?

Yes, I'll start and then Bart it's right in your wheelhouse. So -- because when you bring something at the scale, you've got to have the supply chain in place. It's not just about producing this coke, you've got to get the whole integrated supply chain. That's contemplated in the number I gave you, which is low cost. We see this as some 10x lower cost than other -- the lowest other lightweight proppant that is out there. But you can't deploy it in every well right now because it's going to take us time to build up that supply chain. Frankly, one of the reasons we're talking about it now is it's going to become very obvious in the Permian Basin. There's going to be a lot of coke going around there. So you're going to start asking questions. The other interesting thing about this is we patented it. We've patent in this. That's pretty unusual. There are no many secrets in the Permian Basin. Everybody knows that we patent petroleum coke application in the unconventional fracking. I don't know, you got anything to add?

Yes. Look, Neil, I'll join you. The concept of pumping lightweight proppants and fracking is not a new one, it's always just been a cost-prohibitive thing. And so Neil alluded to the fact the great work our research and technology teams have done a collaboration with our downstream and our product solutions teams, now our supply chain to work the logistics. So I'll just give you a little fact to kind of give you a sense. We're focused on value when we're looking at our developments, we need about 2% uplift to actually get the breakeven on the incremental cost that's associated.

2% in resource recovery.

Yes, 2% on resource recovery. Thanks, Neil. Appreciate that. So that gives you a sense of the cost one.

Our next question is from Paul Sankey of Sankey Research.

Thanks very much, and thanks for inviting me here. Neil, we've asked this question a couple of times already today, but the market is worried about oil oversupply and would really like to see less CapEx. Can you talk about the sensitivity of what you're doing in this league of your own concept as to whether you'll recognizing that you're quite possibly going to drive the oil price down and whether you would be better, perhaps pursuing more natural gas and at what price you would be cutting CapEx, given what you've already told me about your base and your incremental? And could you talk a little bit about what those numbers are, your base upstream CapEx and how much growth and how much you can reduce it if you need to? And at what oil price?

Yes. Paul, I think you've got to put the perspective is, oil and gas combined with 3% of the global oil and gas supply. Here's what's really important in the commodity business. You're going to have the lowest cost. The price is set by the incremental barrel, let's just put OPEC to one side. It's -- you've got to look at the fundamentals. Have you got the lowest cost barrels. If you've got the lowest cost barrels, you've got the most resilient in the portfolio. Also recall, we are growing pool. But part of that growth is through Pioneer. Pioneer is already producing what, 700,000 barrels a day at the time of the acquisition. So yes, we are absolutely growing. We've grown by acquisition and then by growing back. So if you look at the total net that we're growing, it's not really a big impact on the world market. So for us, the most important thing is drive the cost down. We can develop that unconventional resource at a pace that we elect to resource. If the price goes down, we can pull back if we want to. What we're doing as an organization is we want to optimize the NPV of that resource because you could argue, get all your technologies fine-tuned, don't produce all that oil too early, get your technologies fine-tuned, you'll get a higher resource recovery down the road. Well, if you leave the oil in the ground for too long, you're losing value. So I think Liam and Bart, you can add, it's getting that balance right, Paul. But I think for us, the key is to get the lowest-cost barrels to be able to compete with the lowest cost in the world, and we'll just incrementally grow to get value.

I think, Paul, perspective I would add is the flexibility piece we talked about is materially higher. If you look at the forward set of opportunities, I mean, it's materially higher, almost 60% of the production, 40% of the spend at least. So we have much more flexibility because we've changed the nature of the distribution of the portfolio. So we have that ability to respond, and we have the playbook to do that. The second thing I would say is I think it is important to remember that the capital efficiency gains can come only when you're actually doing something. And this whole concept of investing through the cycle, and from my years of experience, the way you prove it is to have as much of a program and a manufacturing mindset as you can possibly achieve. And if you look at Guyana or you look at the Permian, that's what we've got. We've got the ability to repeat, repeat, repeat, learn, learn, learn and apply those technologies as we go. So I would say really what distinguishes us is having that portfolio with such a low cost of supply, being able to stay through the cycle, but have the flexibility to the extent that we need to make adjustments to manage corporate cash or other things, we can do that very easily. We've got the playbook. We've proven it. And we're in a very different position than we were in the past when we were halfway through mega projects that really were difficult to stop. So I would say it's fundamentally different.

Yes. Paul, 1 of the 1. I mean, you are right about this, so you know it. But oil consumption goes up every year. I mean it's 2024 is going to be the highest, and we expect 2025 is going to be higher. Of course, there's always been a lot of discussion about oil glut. Key is to get the lowest cost barrels. That's our philosophy.

Next question comes from Nitin Kumar from Mizuho.

Neil, you reiterated the outlook for doubling your resource recovery in the Permian. You achieved 15% to date. What's the time line of getting to that 100% -- the doubling, because you're 8 months into this, in 10 years, you need $30 billion synergies, it's a big chunk of that. So I'd love to understand how quickly can you double that resource recovery?

Well, just to sort of -- we said we -- by 2030, we'll have a 30% improvement. It's a combination of these technologies. It's not just the lightweight proppant, that gives us up to 15. We got others like the cube design, et cetera, along the lateral is just giving us 30. The doubling is the target we've set our technology and operations organization. Why is it double and not triple? Well yes, there's not a lot of science in that. But everybody knows that in the unconventional space, and Bart and Liam can get the numbers correct here, but the resource recovery is what 6%, 7% or something that is 6% to 8% in the basin. I mean there's a lot of hydrocarbons left in the resource. So we've got 18 billion barrels of resource far and away, the highest quality, largest inventory. But just think about that, if you can get that up by 30%, it's just the cheapest barrels you'll ever find. I mean, that's the way we think of. So there's no magic in the thing. I can't tell you when we'll get to double. But what I can tell you is these guys are putting enormous pressure on the technology organization to get up there.

I think Darren talked about it earlier. It's really setting that ambition level and challenging ourselves. And we also have to remember, we've got experience in resource recovery in many types of resource around the world. A good example is up in Cold Lake where, for years, we've been increasing the recovery with continuous evolution of technology. So the ambition is the important, to set that out there as a goal that today we're not sure how to achieve. But we're confident we will achieve it and we've made tremendous progress actually in a very short period of time. But we've got proof points elsewhere that with the determination and with the innovation, it can be done. And I think that's what we're going to try and replicate without putting a specific time horizon on it.

And if I could take you just one click deeper on the technology side. A lot of what we're working on are things that are aimed at improving the fracture technology and accessing the resource. Lightweight proppant is a great example of that. That's all about getting a better fracture fill, and therefore, better performance or inflow from the reservoir. We have a whole suite of technologies that are more consistent with enhanced oil recovery and things like that, which really can be deployed at any point in the life of the reservoir. And I think that's much more in keeping with the history of our industry. Wherever we've had a resource and begun to exploit it, as an industry and as a company, we've been able to go out and find more ways to just extract more and more through time. And so there's a time element to a little bit of the technology that we often think about a bit.

We like many things about this technology deployment in the unconventional space. I mean, in the lightweight proppants, this is coming from our refining organization. If you look at all the players in the Permian, there is not a lot of them in the refining business as well. But it's not just from having refineries, it's the technologists who can design that petroleum coke and Bart and Liam and Rich, they set the criteria. We need a proppant that's lightweight, that's got this kind of strength. Go find it at low cost. And that's leveraging the scale of the corporation.

Our next question is from Doug Leggate of Wolfe Research.

I appreciate the question. I'm not going to ask you a Guyana another question, Neil. I...

You can always ask about the arbitration again.

Yes, I already did. I'd like to ask a question, it's kind of got a Part A and a Part B, if I may. And it's really the Permian capacity of 2.3 in 2030. Is that -- I'm trying to understand what the flexibility is beyond that, what the longevity is beyond that. And the Part B is really about contract explorations because although you've given guidance out to 2030, there's a decent amount of stuff happening around that time line. Tengiz goes away currently in April 2033. Qatargas, RasGas have explorations. And arguably, the Permian gives you a lot of flexibility. So I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of a look as to how you manage that part of the business looking beyond the current plan.

Yes. I mean, Doug, the first thing I'd say is this is a plan to 2030. We haven't given you a plan to 2035. Even when you're trying to plan in this business out to 2030, I mean, your confidence level obviously is much, much higher for the immediate years versus the outer years. And you've got to set a criteria in some way. What we've done with Pioneer is we've given us an inventory which can maintain the cash flow growth well and deep into the 2030s. That's what we look at. If what Bart and Liam talked about, getting more resource recovery, it goes way, way beyond that. But in this business, you can never stop looking. I mean, we're committed to exploration. We're still exploring, others have cut back. We're committed to technology to get more resource out. And as Darren mentioned this morning and the question was asked, we're always on the lookout for value-added opportunities. If we create this competitive advantage, lower cost, higher resource recovery, it gives us the deal space so that the 1 plus 1 equals 3. I mean, that's the way we look at the portfolio. And so Doug, always it's depletion. You've always got things coming off on the back end. Our role, we're responsible for the upstream, is to fill that gap, but not to keep it flat. Our ambition is to maintain the growth rate in cash flow that we've seen over the last 5 years that we're going to maintain through the end of the decade. You guys...

I think that's right, Neil. I mean, Doug, it -- fundamentally, too, what sets the pace and rate, we are trying to maximize that value and create that optimum. Obviously, that's an absolute number that we can change depending on do we want to spend more or less, but what we believe we're at the optimum. I mean, I think the key is if you think about the perspective on the Upstream business back to the depletion point, we know and we have high confidence that we will continue that growth beyond this disclosure period. And we know the kind of things we need to do to do that. In simple terms, it's a few. You mentioned a couple, but successful exploration. Replicating what we've done in Ghana and staying focused on that. Technology breakthroughs, you think about the industry production over the last 20, 30 years, why is it still grown despite significant industry exploration success. It's mainly technology breakthroughs, as you know. The importance of M&A, we talked a little bit earlier on. And then fundamentally, just maximizing this great base of assets that we've got and improving the recovery from them. But extensions and changes and lease times, I would say we are intensely focused on all of that. And picking the best of the best, recognizing that quality threshold for our investments is very, very high. So I think all of those things you've talked about are up for discussion, and we're engaged on all of those things just as we would be, frankly, in any depletion business.

And Doug, though, it's absolutely a luxury in this business. We have a portfolio now where we can set the pace. I mean, it's not often you can say that. Most people have a resource base that they're executing as much as they can, as quick as they can. But we've got a deep, deep inventory right now. So we feel like we're in a really strong position, but you always keep looking. I would tell you, you know this, I mean, we had the conversation with everybody in this room 3 years ago, 2 years ago, we were telling you what a great portfolio we had, and we did. But we wanted to look ahead, and that's what resulted in the acquisition of Pioneer.

Our next question is from Biraj Borkhataria of RBC.

Just a follow-up on the setting the pace comment and the question is on LNG. So in your slides, you showed the onshore development of Mozambique, but not the second floating development with some of your partners seem to be actively pushing for. So I just wanted your perspective on that. Do you expect that to move to FID? And is that embedded in the plans you present today?

You want to take that?

Yes. Again, I think, perspective of Mozambique, an incredible resource. As you know, one of the largest in the world, and I think will give us access to one of the lowest cost of supply, good proximity to market. So right in line with our LNG strategy to double our -- the size of our equity portfolio in the near term. So the development includes -- we do tend to talk a lot about the offshore. That's the bit that we are operating. The development includes the offshore. The second, if you like, FPSO, Coral North, has not reached an FID decision at this point. It's anticipated sometime in '25. And ultimately, we believe both those resources will get developed. At the end of the day, the scale of the onshore development is much larger. That 18 MTA that Neil talked about, gives you a significant advantage relative to higher cost of supply offshore development. So bringing our technology, bringing our capabilities, bringing our expertise to that is what we're seeking to do strategically. And I think that's what enabled us to go into FID, recognizing the uncertainty that still exists.

And I think that onshore concept has changed a lot over the period, of course. And our modularization is key. And it's always challenging. This is greenfield. But we feel very confident we'll be to FID in '26.

Small modules, E-drives, leveraging its material improvement in the number of people you need at site, the speed at which you can do things. So again, it will be a pretty unique concept, but one that I think will give us a huge advantage.

This modularization concept because we built this whole big chemical plant down in Corpus Christi, we basically built it in Asia and shipped it to the Gulf Coast. But that modularization concept has been deployed in the Upstream for a long time.

Our next question is from Phil Jungwirth of BMO.

Can you talk about Longtail in Guyana a bit, which is now going to be the eighth boat there? You also characterize it as a light oil, gas-condensate development. When do you need to start thinking about additional gas solutions in Guyana as you bring this on towards the end of the decade? And what does the remainder of that $11 billion of resource in Guyana look like as far as resource type, oil, gas, light, heavy?

You want to take that?

Yes. I mean, I think we kind of think about the chart Neil showed with the map, Phil. I think, first of all, again, perspective, Stabroek is a huge, huge area. I think Neil has showed you all before at different investment sessions, but it overlays Texas state. It is a massive area. And I tend to think about it in terms of -- so our ultimate objective is to deliver the maximum value from the block for our partners, our shareholders, and of course, for the government of Guyana. So we are doing that at industry-leading pace, literally 1 development a year. It's never been replicated. Bringing the most complex offshore projects on and typically discovery to start up in 4 to 5 years. So I think we're focused on that. I would think about the block in 3 distinct areas. It was alluded to by Neil. That Northwest wedge, the so-called inaccessible wedge that is the subject of the dispute, that is untouched, untouched in terms of exploration. And we're hopeful at some point that, that has significant potential. There's the central area, which is where we've been recently exploring and have discovered some indications of hydrocarbon potential, but not yet significant discoveries, but that's also largely early. And then there's the so-called Southeast corner, which contains the 6 boats that Neil alluded to. And as you go right down to the Southeast is where it gets gassier, contains this Longtail development. So Longtail is the first development that we're comfortable with declaring potential, recognize we've got to pull those costs down a little bit to go ahead and develop. And it benefits by the fact that it has gas and a lot of liquids. It's a gas-condensate basically. The remaining area is not as liquids-rich, and that's the area that we're working on the government on defining exactly how much there is there. And then you heard President Ali talk about potentially trying to get some alignment next year on what the development options might be. So I would tell you that we're still appraising that area. We're still understanding the recoveries, the monetization options and working very closely with the government on that. But our objective is to fully develop all the resources, including gas. That remains our objective.

And Liam, it's -- I mean, as we said before, this is unique in many, many aspects. But the fact that we're exploring drilling, appraising and developing all at the same time, every time we get a resource where we're confident that we can get the returns we want, like Longtail, like Hammerhead, we'll bring those projects forward to the co-ventures and to the government, but there's a lot of understanding still to go.

Next question is from Devin McDermott of Morgan Stanley.

Great. I actually wanted to stick on Guyana. You just laid out a lot of longer-term opportunity. If we look out over this next 5-year window, you do have the current exploration license that expires in 2027. I believe there's a 2-year appraisal window that goes beyond that and then still longer-term development optionality within the overall area. What's your strategy to make sure that you can capture all of this opportunity within the existing licenses? Does it change how you think about exploring, appraising and developing that tail beyond 2030 and planning over these next 5 years?

I'll let Liam...

Yes, again, you can think about the size and what we've achieved because you're going to keep it in perspective. It is absolutely extraordinary. My smile, my beam always starts when I talk about this. But it is extraordinary to think about 2015 was the discovery. And here we are today producing 660,000 barrels a day gross at an incredible pace on an incredible resource with incredible people. I mean, it is stunning, the scale and pace at which we've been able to do it. And fundamentally, our people and what they do and our partnerships with our key suppliers, enabling that. We feel very confident that the area that is subject to relinquishment, which, as a reminder, excludes all the areas we've declared commercial and excludes the inaccessible, 30%, is relatively small and very manageable. We have been focused. We've been running a 6-rig program roughly for the last few years, at least a couple of which varies a bit, 2 or 3, have been focused on ensuring we can make that decision with all of the data available to us. And we're comfortable with that decision. So I think we've managed that risk, Devin, very well. And we don't see that as a significant issue. And we're engaged with the government on that and really, I would say it's on track.

Yes.

Our next question is from Josh Silverstein of UBS.

Just sticking with Guyana. Can you talk a little bit more about the gap in your production outlook versus the capacity 1.7 versus the 1.3? Is this timing related? Is this because you start to see declines in the first Liza projects in 2030? And what can you do to close that gap?

Well, let me answer and then Liam can add anything to it. I mean, we just set an estimate for the production. I mean, we don't know. We had an estimate for the production of the first 3 boats, we exceeded it. Everybody knows in the deepwater, ultimately, the reservoir will decline. You'll get a water cut comes in and all of those things. That happens, but we don't know until we start producing. So everybody always asks, why aren't you at capacity? Well, we don't know. The first 3 have been. Down the road, maybe we'll do better than that, but you really don't know. I mean, there's a degree of uncertainty.

Yes. There is a degree of uncertainty. I do want to come back to the achievements, though. I mean 100,000 barrels a day on the first 3 boats above nameplate capacity investment basis. Some of that we had to do some work, to do some debottlenecking as the technical term on the facilities. The well deliverability is generally at or above expectations. That's important. We keep telling that if it's the boat. The wells have to be able to deliver this. And the Guyana resource, as you heard me describe to Devin, is just phenomenal. So I think what goes into this difference between capacity and production: scheduled maintenance on the boats, tie-in of other facilities, your predictions of decline and gas and water and when they will start to impact the energy in the system. So it is a best-case modeled outlook based on replicating the reliability that we see today, but not assuming that every next development we will get that same uplift. And that's why on Neil's slide, you saw a range on those whiskers. There's upside to the number, there's also downside to that number if that uncertainty doesn't play out the way we think. But it is our best estimate based on demonstrated performance and a modeled outcome of future performance. And that's where the uncertainty is. But there is a range of outcomes here. And if we can replicate what we did early on, there's upside. So that's the way I would look at it.

Next question comes from Bob Brackett of Bernstein.

I have a bunch of questions, but I'll ask an annoying one that's a follow-up, which is to say on that capacity versus deliverability, you've got 8 independent FPSOs that play off of each other. You've got 40 seismic watching the reservoir. You have the ability to go out and drill more wells if you're going to under-deliver. You've built -- build one, deliver many concepts so you understand the top sides. So against all of that, is that 1.4 versus -- 1.3 versus the 1.7, is that a P90 and 90% of your models, you beat that? Is it a P99? Is it a P50?

I think, Bob, I really think you're trying to get too specific. It's a ways out there.

It's 300,000 -- 400,000 barrels gross material.

Gross. Yes, it absolutely is. But I mean, we don't know. I mean, we're giving you our best estimate and it's a range. And so if you were to say, what is our best estimate? The P50 will be in the middle of that range today. We will update that range next year, for sure. Based on when we bring Yellowtail online, we'll learn something more. But I mean, that's all we can do is put what we say on that whisker -- what did you call it, whisker?

Whisker.

Right, Bob?

Your whisker.

I haven't heard a whisker before. But anyway, middle of that range is P50.

Again, I think you're right, Neil, we shouldn't be too specific. It's a plan. It's a disclosure basis of what we believe. But we can just give you a data point, though, back to perspective on what's all happening so quick and how this is evolving and there will be uncertainty. Back to this 4D, it's not just judging where the fluids are moving that's allowing us to optimize every day, it's planning those future infill program. And we've doubled the number of infill opportunities in the last year and we can drill them in the decade. That's because of our ability to not just shoot the 4D, use our technology on full wave inverse and to interpret it and turn that around in like weeks as opposed to years. So I think that's all in play and will help us narrow this range as we go forward. But I don't think you can be too specific.

Yes. Here's what I would offer to you. We've got 8 foundational boats covering these hundreds of square miles. The opportunity to keep those boats full with infill drilling and tiebacks and all of that is probably something that we haven't seen maybe ever, but for a long, long time. That potential is not even built into our plans yet.

Our next question is from Jason Gabelman of TD Cowen.

I wanted to ask on broader -- on the advantage production growth. It looks like in the plan, advantage production has grown by about 1.1 million, 1.2 million barrels of oil equivalent a day. That's the same as the Permian growth, but you do have other advantaged growth in Guyana, as we talked about, in LNG portfolio as well. So I'm wondering if there's an offset to that advantage growth because the overall bucket equals that Permian growth.

I'm not sure I follow your math there, but we can come back to you on that. The advantage growth comprehends the Permian, Guyana and the LNG that we're going to be bringing online. So you may be just misinterpreting one of the charts I showed was versus '25 and one was versus '24. We'll come back to you and we'll tie that down for you.

All right.

Next question comes from Paul Cheng of Scotiabank.

Neil and the team, I want to go back into Permian, on the low-cost proponent. You're saying that the full program you expect to deploy about 2 million tons of the core? But can you give us some idea how that translates into a number of wells? And what kind of impact were you talking about? And how quickly you will be able to ramp up? I assume that you get -- you need a 2% recovery improvement that will represent that some longer lateral. You said 2-mile plus or 3-mile plus? I mean, any kind of rule of thumb that you can give us? And in your combined program today, if we assume that's the case, what percent of your prospect inventory or a number, whatever you want to share, that will be considered more than 2 miles today?

Do you want to take it both?

Yes, sure. Look, Paul, I appreciate the question. I know your first question was around the 2 million tons of lightweight proppant. And if you sort of think about that, we're deploying that sort of blend, it's a bespoke in terms of the design, but stage by stage. And so I think you were sort of querying, does that apply to certain wells, certain lengths and that sort of thing and I would think about that more as it sort of deployed equally when we sort of deploy it on a well-by-well basis. In the near term, Neil alluded to the fact that we're going to be deploying about 200 wells. Think of that as around 20% to 25% of a well in a typical year for us. Then I think you also were asking about longer laterals. We're in the early stages of a lot of our -- the 4-milers. I think we've got 12 now that we've drilled. We're real pleased with how those wells are performing. They are performing as expected. And so we're excited about the possibility that's there. We're not seeing any form of degradation. Their performance is, again, per our expectations. So we're just going to continue to extend and leverage the contiguous acreage that we have. You saw on the maps, that is something that is truly unique about our acreage position, the ability to really extend and have more 3.5- and 4-mile wells in the inventory through time. So over the next few years, you're just going to see that complement continue to grow and grow.

The average -- our average well length, as was shown on the chart, is quite a bit beyond industry average.

Yes, Paul, we haven't got an exact number for you in terms of how many 3 or 4 miles. But I can tell you, it's more than anybody else just because of the contiguous acreage. And just going back to the proppant, we're supply limited today. And actually, I don't mind being supply limited today, we don't mind, because we're still evolving this technology. We're trying different blends. We're trying different -- and the blend is probably going to change depending on the bench, depending on the geography. As I said, it's not one size fits all. Oh, you can do that, but you're losing value. It's understanding. And so today, we're supply limited. So obviously, we have got detailed plans on how we can ramp up that supply quickly as, but it's at 200 wells next year, it will be more the following year. I just don't know what that number is.

Yes. We give the full complement within a couple of years. So we're on track to have that supply fully loaded in a couple of years.

Couple of years, yes. How many wells are we drilling per year?

Yes. A typical year is going to be somewhere between 700 and 1,000 wells, depending on rate and pace.

Our next question is from Neil Mehta of Goldman Sachs.

I just wanted to spend some time on Qatar and LNG. You had indicated on the slide, Neil, that you expect the first LNG by the end of 2025. And just your perspective of the gating items to get that project to completion, what do you think the world looks like in the -- for LNG post Qatar coming into service? Does it flip into structural oversupply? And then just tying into, I think, Doug's question around contract exploration, how do you think about the business? It's a broad question on Qatar and LNG, but any color there would be...

Yes. Here's what's interesting on LNG demand. I mean there's a lot of third-parties out there predicting LNG demand. You'll talk to Peter Clarke, who runs the business later on this afternoon. I encourage you to quiz him. There's no end of customers wanting to supply long-term contracts for LNG. We are out there negotiating, as is QE, no doubt, as are the other players. There is a thirst for LNG in this world, and we see it continuing. So we don't see any issue with that. We can secure long-term contracts. We can secure them that have slopes, which are competitive in our portfolio. I mean, that's the way I would look at that. Have you got anything else?

Well, other than, Neil, I think, in addition to we see it as a business that has significant growth potential and it's very flexible from energy transition. But the whole relationship in Qatar for us is a long-term strategic relationship, as you know. And we continue to bring our global projects and other technical capabilities on NFE in [ second ] roles and other things. And I would just say we're engaging deeply with Qatar Energy. We have an international partnership on that future and continuing to look for opportunities to maintain that participation beyond any potential expiries, recognizing that they're confidential in nature and the terms are confidential in nature. But our intention would be to continue to keep that strategic relationship, both in Qatar and internationally as we're doing today and participate where it makes sense and where it's economic for us in any new growth opportunity.

And Neil, just to add to Liam's point, I mean, people talk about these license extensions, the contract coming to an end. This is all confidential with partners. Otherwise, we'd lay it out, but it's confidential with the government, that's why we don't talk explicitly about it.

Our next question comes from John Royall at JPMorgan.

So I just had a question on portfolio mix. So you mentioned oil sands being higher cost and kind of mixing up your overall production costs. Can you talk about how oil sands fits into your portfolio more broadly? And then maybe just a broader question around kind of short cycle versus long cycle. And do you think about kind of an optimal mix between short cycle and long cycle? Or is that not really how you think about your business?

Well, I think the mix, in general, you've got to have the balance by asset type, you've got to have the balance by geography. This is a capital-intensive business, and you've got to balance that risk all around the world. You could argue that it's probably as low risk as anywhere to have a higher percentage of your portfolio in Texas. So we still feel pretty good about that. In terms of the heavy oil specifically, we spent a lot of money in Kearl. The organization has to deliver value from that, and they're doing that. John Whelan will be with you this afternoon, and John is responsible of that. We've driven the cost down. John's organization has driven the unit cost down by more than 30%. We have -- we will be very close to the lowest cost in the industry. We're probably about there. But if we're not there, we're right there and we have 1 mine. We're with -- so John's organization has to get the maximum value out of Kearl. And as you know, it's an enormous inventory. And we see ways to continue to ramp down the costs. In the in situ business, we see a lot of potential in the in situ. And I briefly touched on the technology programs that we have in there, highly competitive. We have a deep inventory and we're working them now. You've got anything else to add on that?

No. I mean, look, again, portfolio, it's great to have a large asset that you're continuously operating better and better and better as you go because you're continuing to develop it. And I think that's what we're proving. So I think we've dramatically improved the profitability of the heavy oil business. And today, it's resilient in our portfolio and generating a significant amount of cash and that's thanks to the innovation, the people, the commitment. And we keep that going. You have to think about a mine and in situ, as Neil said, but it remains a strong business.

The Kearl, Liam, Kearl's an enormous resource.

Kearl is like billions of barrels.

Billions of barrels.

And it is pretty well defined from a subsurface so that risk is relatively low. So if you can get your manufacturing process really good and apply technology and your operation is really good, you're going to be just fine and that's what I think we've demonstrated. So I think it's in a much better place, Neil, than it was 4 years ago, 5 years ago. A much better place.

Yes. And then specific to the question around shorter cycle, Neil has touched on this, we're trying to maximize the value within the short-cycle portfolio and maintain relentless focus on capital efficiency. And so we challenge ourselves to try and go fast as we can, obviously, because that can bring some value forward when the macro is right, but we're not going to give up that commitment to deliver leading capital efficiency. And we -- Neil hit on the fact and has talked about how we're confident we're leading, that is core to helping us sort of set the rate and pace. So I think that applies across the upstream portfolio. That commitment to make sure what you have is competitively advantaged and leading from a capital efficiency standpoint is always going to be a little bit of a guidepost on how we're investing.

I mean we just -- candidly, we're very fortunate to have, so we have a deep inventory of opportunities. And we're limiting the capital to make sure we get the highest value. Very unusual in this business. So you have that depth of high-quality opportunities, and you can elect to deploy the capital at a time that you think meets the most -- gets the most value.

All right. Neil, I think we've got time for one more.

One more question.

Our last question is from Betty Jiang of Barclays.

Well, I guess, I'll try to make it good. Actually, I want to ask about the Permian -- back to the Permian about the free cash flow profile from that asset because we heard resources going up, cost is going down. So CapEx is $2 billion less than what you thought before. So how should we think about this free cash flow on an asset basis? If we're getting to $25 billion of cash flow by 2030, do we think the CapEx is flattish? or at some point it starts to plateau? And like basically how big is that free cash flow wedge over time?

Betty, thanks for the question. I mean, we don't give CapEx by segment. I mean, I gave you an indication of a total for the Upstream. And that's not something that we share. And quite frankly, it's a competitive issue. We want to make sure that we create a competitive gap versus competition. So there aren't many secrets in the Permian, unfortunately. But we try and keep as much as we can to ourselves. And that's why we talk about operating cash flow and that's why we talk about driving capital efficiency. So I don't have a free cash flow number for you. You can calculate the free cash flow, Kathy gave it to you for the corporation, but we don't do it for any segment. Having said that, I gave you enough specific pieces of data, which you can get a really strong indication of how much the capital efficiency is improving and how much the D&C cost per lateral foot, where we're clearly the leader today in both basins is being driven down.

Yes. And look, Neil, I'll join. We maintain a small strategic nonoperated position. So you heard Neil make mention of joint ventures. So we actually have coverage across all of the sweet spots of both the Midland and Delaware Basin. And we have coverage across all of the major operators in the basin. And so there's third-party data, but then we also get...

Real data.

Real data -- real-time data, and we have a small but very focused team that is looking at that data and helping us understand where we really stay competitively. So we can say with confidence that we know we're in a leading position. And you know what some of the statements are from other folks as well. So I think you can map those...

And Betty, it's a key hurdle. What we say to the organization, if you're going to -- we're going to allocate capital to the Permian, you've got to demonstrate to us not just in the first quartile, but we're leading or have a route to any part of the basin to be the most capital efficient, the lowest cost D&C per lateral foot. That's a criteria. And that's part of what sets our pace in terms of capital deployment.

Yes. And then the last comment I'll make is we're certainly aware some have talked about moderating their pace. With the depth and the quality of the inventory, you saw Neil's -- the third-party look at the inventory that was -- you heard the number of wells. Well, you can kind of figure out that's almost 20 years' worth of inventory sitting up there that's super high quality. So we're going to be able to continue to grow this business with the flexibility, the optionality to respond to the macro conditions well into the next decade.

I think there are players out there who are talking about slowing down the pace. It gives you an indication of how much inventory have gone.

Neil, thank you. Bart, thank you. Liam, in particular, thank you.

Thank you.

And thanks to the very good audience in person and to those watching virtually from around the world. I'll say again, we very much appreciate your continued interest in ExxonMobil, and we wish you and your families a happy holiday season.