New Fortress Energy Inc. (NFE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the New Fortress Energy July 2021 Investor update call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Josh Kane, with Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. I would like to welcome you to the New Fortress Energy July 2021 Investor Update Call. Joining me here today are Wes Edens, our CEO and Chairman of the Board; Chris Guinta, our Chief Financial Officer; Andrew Dete, Managing Director, leading our Brazil efforts; Alap Shah, the Head of our Solutions Group, leading our Fast LNG Development; Kasciandro Senem, Managing Director for LNG; and Ken Nicholson, Managing Director of Fortress, leading our clean fuels effort at NFE. Throughout the call, we are going to reference the investor update supplement that was posted to the New Fortress Energy website. If you've not already done so, I'd suggest that you download it now. In addition, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures during the call today. The reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the earnings supplement. Before I turn the call over to Wes, I would like to point out that certain statements made today will be forward-looking statements including regarding future earnings. These statements, by their nature, are uncertain and may differ materially from actual results. We encourage you to review the disclaimers in our press release and investor presentation regarding non-GAAP financial measures and forward-looking statements and to review the risk factors contained in our quarterly report filed with the SEC. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Wes.

Great. Thanks, Josh, and thanks, everyone. So we're a couple of minutes late. But I think that the presentation has been uploaded. And so hopefully, all of you guys have access to it both in digital and printed out hard copies as well. My goal for the day is really pretty straightforward. What I want to do, we've had so much going on in our business, so much of it productive really in the last year that this is the first of what I expect to be an annual event to provide an update to investors, away from an earnings call and away from the machinations of how the numbers were for a quarter, to give an update on where the business is, what has been going well, what has been going less well and a little bit of a forecast about what's -- what we expect to happen in the year to come. I will spend a lot of time on this myself, but also I'm going to bring in a number of the different folks off of our teams around the world that are here in New York with me to give their insights and color into it. What we will do as an operating matter, is kind of go through the presentation and then pause, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have. So it's designed to be as open as it could be. And the perspective that I always take on disclosure is that I want to be treated -- when I'm on the other side of the phone, I want to be treated with as much transparency and clarity and simplicity as possible. And so that's our attempt to do the same with you all. So there's no bad questions. If we don't do a good job explaining something, please ask us to clarify, but we'll try to do it. So just to look at Page #2, it really has been an extraordinary year for us. Now that's not an exceptional thing to say. It's been extraordinary for everybody from the last year of the pandemic. But our own history of the pandemic, my own personal history is I never stopped coming to work. We -- March 11, ironically, was the last day that the NBA played. So obviously, we had a big NBA moment last night. But that was the moment for me that really marked the start of the pandemic. That was the night that they suspended the game in Utah. March 12, we had about half the people come to the office. March 13, we went from a couple of hundred people down than me, 8 other people and my dog. And we kind of stayed that way for the next 45 days, really worried about what was going to happen. But at the same time, we were -- greatly reduced our own staff here in the office. The people are working for us, were working for us. I mean, we actually were in the process of finishing the Puerto Rico terminal right in the middle of that. We had 265 people on site. I went down there a couple of times. They didn't shelter at home. They sheltered at work. And so we have real things going on in the development side as we're doing this. And so those couple of months were obviously very difficult months, but really starting the first of June last year, we brought everybody back. And basically said, look, it's not compulsory, but we operate when we're all together. These are projects that we need to work on together as a team. We're going to test everybody once or twice a week. I think we -- at the end of the day, we did north of 10,000 tests around here. We cleaned the place up as much as we could. We had all the scrubbing and all the biometrics and everything we could to try and make it as safe as an environment. And I told everyone, look, we think it's a very clean environment and probably cleaner than what you'll end up with people who deliver your food to your door, go to the service station or go buy groceries for you. So -- and so we've had really full staff here. We were very fortunate. We did not have, to our knowledge, any secondary transmissions. Obviously, people got COVID. I told everybody if you don't feel good or you're worried about being exposed, stay home. We'll send you guys test, and we'll deal with it. And things really did progress. It has not been easy for us. It's been harder for these different places around the world we do business, right? The emerging markets still, COVID is not in the rearview mirror, to say the least, right? And so there's been a lot of challenges that they've had. We have still managed to make a tremendous amount of progress over this time because I say the basic issues that we're trying to address, number one, the issue of energy poverty, and I'll give some numbers on it in a second, but it's extraordinary. But people need power, they need clean, affordable power. That hasn't changed. And number two, the sustainable issues, if anything, are more manifest as far as I'm concerned. When you look at kind of what has happened around the world and weather events and whatnot. So just a couple of the highlights when you look at the map. So we've greatly expanded our footprint. We've gone from 3 terminals a year ago to 11 import terminals and facilities today. We've completed or substantially completed construction in San Juan, Puerto Rico; La Paz, Mexico, where I was last week, opening it up. Puerto Sandino in Nicaragua, which is basically done, it will be operational here in the next 30 days or so. So that's all been completed. We launched our Fast LNG, FLNG project. We went FID back in March. We have a lot to talk about there, but we think that, that is a huge element of our business plan going forward. And then lastly, we're laser-like focus on the sustainability issues. Ken Nicholson will talk in a little bit about what our focus is in terms of the blue ammonia project. But I have become convinced more than ever that sustainability is going to be the biggest issue that we deal with in our investing lives here. One of the challenges, of course, is that while we're all very focused on sustainability, there's not a lot of investable product that is out there. And so I'm very, very focused on what we can do to create something that not only meet sustainability goals, but also is something that creates investment returns for people because I do feel like, at the end of the day, profitability comes before sustainability, and that's what we're focused on. So with that, let's get into it. I am one of those people where I've sat through a million investor presentations, as I'm sure you all have. And the ones that frustrate me the most are the ones where you wait until Page 122 of the deck before you talk about the earnings, right? And so this is just my attempt to kind of bring forward the numbers without a lot of context just to tell you what we think is going to happen, and that hope we'll give you then some kind of a view of the context we have that we're talking about the rest of this report. So we expect the Q4 of this year, to be our first clean quarter. In other words, one where we have kind of run rate on those terminals that are completed now. So Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Nicaragua. Our operating margin estimates are shown there. So these are run rate numbers as of the end of the year. So $500 million in 2021, $1.1 billion at the -- in 2022, $1.5 billion at the end of '23. So those are -- these are all our estimates of the terminals that are up and running or are in currently in construction. So it does not assume any growth incrementally in terminal count. We do make assumptions about what we think is going to happen. And really, when you look at our financials, you'll see really just 2 estimates, one which is committed with the capital C. So things that have actual contracts in place that are committed. And then number two, our estimate what's likely. And those are our guesses. They're not intended to be aggressive. They're not intended to be conservative. I tell everybody as we go through this with our customers. The goal is kind of closest to the 10, so not to be aggressive or conservative. I, of course, have aspirations that exceed all of these things. I heard this great quote of the day from Aristotle is like the danger is not aiming too high missing, but the real danger is in setting the bar too low and hitting. So we're not trying to create for ourselves unrealistic expectations about it, but this is just to provide context for what we think the productivity of the business actually is. So when you look at the next section. So on Page #5, and I'll turn this over to Chris, to make some comments here. This is our quarterly run through, and this is the detail that we provide. And so you can see it's anchored by volumes and those then are translated into margin, gross margin less SG&A. The SG&A number includes both cash and noncash. So our actual cash SG&A number is something less than $100 million. We show stock awards and whatnot that are also obviously contingent upon us hitting certain goals for our employees here. So that grosses it up to $150 million. And then you see the expected operating margin less SG&A, so an EBITDA equivalent on the bottom line. So this is -- these are our version of forecast and guidance for folks. And we show it quarterly. And I feel like these numbers are actually very, very good base numbers. So Chris?

Yes. Thanks, Wes. So as Wes said, Page 5 is our best approximation of the cash flows for the remainder of 2021 and into 2022 and beyond. A few quick comments. You can see that the cash flows normalized over $1.5 billion on an annualized basis once the volumes in Brazil fully ramp. And as Wes said, you can look at this on a quarter-by-quarter basis and see that once you really have your first clean quarter, which we're saying is Q4 of 2021, and if you normalize that, you're over $600 million of op margin less SG&A. We are anticipating an additional 200-or-so million of operating margin from Ireland and Sri Lanka, which takes us close to $1.7 billion, almost $1.8 billion of operating margin on a run rate basis. In these numbers, it's important to note that we've included both the contracted volumes through the existing 6 terminals also are expected and likely volumes at the terminals that are under construction, which obviously includes Santa Catarina, Barcarena and Suape, all of which will be online, we expect, within the next 3 quarters. The way we've chosen to display the volumes here is to take our expected normal operating volume and then adjust for things like maintenance and weather downtime, which vary your quarter-over-quarter depending on seasonality or scheduled and unscheduled maintenance events from our -- for our equipment and for our customers' equipment. Yes. Just to kind of continue what Wes said regarding SG&A, we're anticipating that total SG&A to be approximately $150 million on an annual basis. And then if you normalize that for nonrecurring, noncapitalizable development expenses or noncash expenses, we expect our kind of our cash SG&A portion to be around that $100 million. And that's consistent with what we said in the past, $80 million for the legacy NFE business, plus approximately $20 million for the acquired businesses. A final point I want to comment on here is the dramatic operating efficiencies we have at these terminals. You can see here that there's truly a hyperbolic curve to the cash flows because once you've covered the cost of fixed infrastructure like an FSU or an FSRU, the resulting margin is really just a function of revenue last year delivered cost of LNG. A very quick point on this, and we will talk more about the second quarter specifics on our call in the first week in August, but we will start to present 2 distinct segments and break that out in the MD&A of our financials. Each quarter, segment 1 will be the terminals or the integrated energy solutions, which include all of our legacy terminals plus the Sergipe cash flows. And our second segment will be our marine assets, which include all of the vessels that are on charter to third parties, plus the Hilli. And importantly, the Nanook. As vessels come off hire to third parties, they will migrate into our integrated energy solutions segment, which is obviously a key tenet of why we did the acquisitions. With that, Wes, I'll turn it back over to you for Page #6.

Yes. One of the questions that I think people have, and I would have is what are the margins by country, right? That's a good question to ask. And we have deliberately not shown that, not because I'm not trying to be transparent, but because we think that there is a lot of sensitivity from our customers' standpoint about the release of that information. And so I apologize for that, but I think it's the right judgment to not break out the specific margins for it. And the margins do vary a fair bit. The way I think of our businesses is that the countries that we operate in fall into one of two very, very clear and distinct categories. They're either smaller markets where there's a big energy poverty issue. There's a big replacement of diesel and heavy fuel oil into natural gas. We're in smaller markets. And as a result, our margins are higher, but the volumes are much, much lower on the one hand. And then the market, Brazil is a big one. Ireland is another big one, which have highly developed gas markets. There's pipelines and efficient ways to deliver gas. The volumes are going to be considerably higher. The margins are going to be lower because, of course, it's still -- it's a very, very competitive market. But at the end of the day, these look more like energy [ syncs ] in terms of ways to sell LNG and bring LNG to market, much like you'd find in Europe and other more developed markets, than they are in some of the developing things. So there may be a way for us to classify these into these 2 groups. It's something we have talked about ourselves and our Board and our auditors and whatnot because I want to provide people the clarity of that. The margins are good. They're -- as I said, there's higher volumes, lower margins; lower volumes, higher margins, it's all very productive and very good. But -- and it's just not something I think is the right thing for us to provide specific disclosure around each one of them. But I know that's something you guys will be focused on. So turning to Page 6. And really for the next few minutes, what we'll do is walk through each one of the countries. And I'll do some of that, and I'll have Andrew and others go through different ones, Danny, et cetera. But I thought that it would be useful just to start with providing a little bit of color and context to what each one of these markets are because they actually are quite unique, and the opportunities within them are actually considerably different. So we listed them on Page #6. So Brazil, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Nicaragua, Ireland and Sri Lanka. The first place that I look at is the energy that is produced, the energy is consumed there. And so if you look at the column that says energy consumed per capita, and I put the United States at the bottom of the page and there for reference, it's staggering what the differentials really are in terms of energy. Even for me when I look at these, the numbers really jump off the page. So the United States, 11,515 per capita kilowatt hours. When you look up and down, the one that is closest to us, obviously, is Ireland, Mexico and Puerto Rico at roughly half of where we are. But then on the opposite end of it, Jamaica is roughly 10% of what we consume in the United States. Nicaragua is half of that. So I have the guys pull the numbers from some of the African countries as well, and they're roughly 3% of what you have in the United States. So there's a huge disparity in terms of people's access to power. When you look at the next line -- the next column over, installed capacity. So Brazil is a very large market. We made big, big bet when we invested in the Hygo transaction back in January. And it's a bet that I feel better about every single day. But it's a huge market, gives us access to a large and growing market. Brazil is roughly 2/3 of the size of the United States, consumes about 5% as much gas, and we'll talk about each one of the markets and what the characteristics are that we think are interesting, but there's a lot that's going on there. Mexico installed capacity, this is just in the BCS. So what we've looked at is rather than looking at Mexico broadly, we just looked in the markets in which we're in. So Baja peninsula is about 750. So each one of these markets have got different characteristics. We've got our volumes that kind of fall out of this. You can see what percentage of the markets that we think that we're going to get. But again, I think it's a useful paradigm to look at each one of these markets, understand how big the market is, how much of the electricity is generated thermally because that gives you some kind of a guide as to what actually could be -- can be transferred over into gas versus diesel or heavy fuel oil. And then lastly, of course, the growth rates, which that tells you a lot about what the market is for new power generation. So with that, let's start with Brazil. I'm going to turn it over to Andrew Dete. Andrew?

Yes. Thanks, Wes. So it's a great moment to give some more context on Brazil, closed on the acquisition of Hygo in April. And since then, we've been able to have great dialogue kind of with customers, potential supply across all of the main sectors in Brazil, so industrial, power, transportation, et cetera. And while I think we'll eventually kind of talk about the regional differences of a country of over 200 million people, as Wes pointed out, about 20% of the energies to the United States, what seems to be clear is there's kind of 3 things that we're seeing for everyone. So one is a very undersupplied market in energy. So both in terms of fuel and in terms of power. People are really, really hungry for more abundant energy and for cleaner energy. They face high prices. So whether that be in the existing gas network or outside the existing gas network, prices on both a molecule basis and a sort of transportation and distribution basis remain very high. And then third is we have a market that reflects a lot of characteristics of a legacy monopoly, where you have underinvestment and underbuild-out in infrastructure that is really causing some of these higher prices. So this remains just a tremendous opportunity for us. And we're really excited about the strategy that we have to attack it. So on Page 7, we kind of laid out the 2 main sort of categories out. So we see declining gas supply and we see critical power shortages today in Brazil. And so going kind of left to right on this page, we show our terminal footprint on the very left side. So 3 terminals in development today, one operational. And we note that the new gas law that was passed in the same month that we closed really ends Petrobras monopoly and creates the environment for a new competitive private gas market in Brazil. One of the things to point out about Brazil is today is there's a critical power shortage. So about 65% of the energy market in Brazil is hydro. And today, those -- the hydrological conditions are at all-time lows. And so we're seeing 50% below averages from the largest reservoirs, and you're seeing a consistent year-over-year decline in hydrological conditions. And the fact is that they don't have sort of the dispatchable thermal capacity to match the drop that we're seeing on the hydro side. And so today, you're seeing all the hydro plants in Brazil dispatching -- or sorry, all the thermal plants in Brazil dispatching, including our plans for GP. And we see 2 main sort of categories of opportunities. So the first is the large sort of connected by pipeline segment, which you can see in the map here, is facing supply shortages. So typically, you've had offshore gas coming into Brazil, and you've had gas coming in from Bolivia. Those sources have been either stable or in decline. And we're seeing a tremendous opportunity to supply customers who exist on the pipeline network today, who are facing supply shortages, high prices and high transport and distribution costs. And then secondly, we're seeing a real tremendous opportunity for power. So decline in hydro conditions is resulting in intermittent power and critical shortages today. And so whether that be how we configure the current power assets we have, how we supply fuel to power assets and conversions of power assets, and then how we think about new build power in the country as well. So moving to Page 8. We really kind of lay out our 2 main opportunities. So on the left side, we're really talking about our Barcarena terminal when we're talking about decarbonizing the Amazon. And so the Barcarena terminal is the sole kind of supply point for gas in the north of the country in Brazil. What that means is sort of a cross-sector. So industrial demand, power demand, transportation demand, this is going to be a key hub for really everything in the region. And so that starts with really some of the co-located industrial demand that we have at the terminal and spreads out throughout the region, whether that be sort of the 3 gigawatts of power that's in what they call the isolated system in Brazil that we think will eventually switch from HFO and diesel to running on gas. Or whether that's other distribution to industrial customers kind of in the states in the north. And so this is a really, really exciting opportunity for us in a very environmentally sensitive area to provide more abundant energy to drive cleaner energy. And we've been able to, obviously, take over that terminal from Hygo and to continue the development of that and to sign an EPC contract and to really have that development on track today. And then secondly is our 2 other terminals, Suape and Santa Catarina, where those terminals are really strategically located on the pipeline network to replace declining supply and to really compete against high-priced gas. And so Suape in the northeast of the country really kind of at the northern end of the TAG pipeline network where we can take advantage of our location to basically supply customers today who can't get enough energy and who are facing really high transport costs, bringing gas from the southeast of Brazil. And then our Santa Catarina terminal in the south of Brazil, where really strategic for supply into the southern end of the TBG pipeline, which historically has taken gas from Bolivia. Those gas supplies have been declining based on the decline in the Bolivian gas wells as well as underinvestment. And so that terminal really allows to replace that gas, to provide more capacity into the system at a more competitive price. And so those are similar strategies, but in different regions where you have really high-volume customers today in a gas economy, where we compete with increased supply at better prices. And so Page 9 kind of shows where we are in this. And so Barcarena, as I mentioned, EPC contract finalized, expected terminal completions in January 2022. And we're really excited to be able to, over the next couple of quarters, announce some of the commercial activity that we have there. Obviously, we've announced an MOU with our sort of co-located industrial demand, and we're just having tremendous dialogue kind of across sectors. So the distribution companies in the north were very eager to kind of build out gas transportation capacity, with other industrial customers in what is actually a very highly industrialized region, but exists today solely on oil-based fuels, which are high-priced both because of transport and because of the fuel itself. And then in terms of transportation, so the North represents the sort of huge terminus for a lot of trucking capacity in Brazil that's bringing agricultural goods from the south. And also for marine fuels, so for the bunkering opportunity, the Barcarena ports, a huge area of industrial activity and export. And so across all those sectors, we're having great dialogue with people who want to convert to gas and really begin the process of this terminal being kind of the point of supply in the north of Brazil in the sole gas supply. In Santa Catarina, we expect to finalize our EPC contract shortly. Expect it online in the first quarter of next year. As we talked about replacing the declining gas supply from Bolivia but also just growing the overall capacity for gas in the region, a highly industrialized region with people running power, industry and transportation already on gas. And we're adding huge supply at a critical part of that pipeline. And so this is an opportunity not only for volume, but also for us to bring a much more competitive price because we're going to be much closer to the downstream customers, right, rather than bringing all the way from Bolivia. And so those high transportation prices are paying today, we're much cheaper when our terminals there. And then in Suape, we are finalizing our -- the transfer of the 288 megawatts of PPAs we bought from BR Distribuidora in the next 30 days. And we're very excited to bring an import point for gas to the northeast of the country, which again, is a gas economy from the TAG pipeline but facing high transport costs and high molecule prices from getting that gas from the southeast of the country all the way to the northeast. And so really strategic location to be able to bring gas in the country. Sergipe is in operations today. The power plant is currently running, as we mentioned, with some of the overall power shortages in Brazil. We have a great plan for increased value creation at Sergipe, both through incremental revenues on the power side, but also on the gas supply side. And so very excited to kind of continue the development of that asset as well as the operations we have today.

Great. Just focusing on Page 9 for just one second. One of the aspects of this that we think is that with the growth of the Brazilian market, we're going to have, by far, the best portfolio of assets and take advantage of that. What we really bought when we bought Hygo was really 2 things: it was a handful of development projects. And so if you look on the page, and you can see is these all will be completed basically at the end of this year and the first quarter of next year. So they're in their final stages of actually like the development part of it where you're actually putting steel into the ground and actually building these things now for the most part. You can see they started many years ago. So really, the hard work at Hygo was done in 2016 in the case of Santa Catarina; 2017 in Barcarena; 2018 in Suape. So -- and Sergipe is obviously under development right now for the pipeline, but the power plant has been built for a number of years is now running. So these 4 assets, though, when you look at the box on the right-hand side, our estimate is that volumes, 6.9 million gallons, a substantial amount of gallons, still actually a very small portion of the actual capacity of them. So if we're right on the volumetric increases in the country, these assets have a tremendous amount of upside, and we're very excited about this. We paid roughly $3 billion for Hygo. And that's really 2 distinct components. One was the power plant and the FSRU that's in Sergipe. So depending on how you value that, it's kind of $1 billion to $1.5 billion in value. So we basically paid a considerable sum, $1.5 billion for these very advanced developments. And now just turning those developments into actual operating terminals and actually commercializing is what the job is, but we are extremely happy with what we have seen thus far, and we think the prospects for this look terrific. So flipping the page to Puerto Rico, and I'll take a stab at this. First, the map of Puerto Rico on the left-hand side. The one thing that stands out immediately is that unlike Brazil, Puerto Rico is essentially unconnected to pipelines. And what you see from that very busy map on the left-hand side are power lines that bisect the country. And one of the challenges of Puerto Rico is that, in many cases, the power was located in places where the people were not. And so this was obviously made -- a problem was made manifest when we had the hurricane, it knocked down and impaired a number of these power lines. Because power was not necessarily where the people were, that's when they had big blackouts and they have real challenges in getting it. So obviously, they're very focused on addressing that, but they're also now very focused on regionalizing the power where -- to make it consistent with where the people are. So the majority of Puerto Rico's power today is thermal and oil-based. There's a small portion of renewables. They've got a big renewable mandate that they are focused on. But today, only 4% of it comes from renewable, 67% of the power comes from coal and oil. So there's a significant decarbonization mandate here, where you've got one of the most beautiful islands in the world and one that is really a great tourist attraction, and yet you've got a high percentage of their energy comes from dirty fossil fuels. So that's a big decarbonization. So there's 3,000 megawatts of power that's not connected to the pipeline. The thermal power, in particular, on the oil-based side is something we think there's going to be a significant amount of repurchasing now. So the strategies we've got in Puerto Rico on Page 11 are actually quite simple. So one is to supply the existing power plants. Our terminal provides gas to the power plant in San Juan harbor. So the 400-megawatt power plant there is actually operating on it today. And we think that there are other opportunities to decarbonize other assets that are there, number one. Number two is there definitely are thoughts to build new, more efficient gas-fired power. Again, as a transition power source to help get to a place where you've got both gas and renewables, having a bigger footprint on it. And then lastly, Puerto Rico has got a very, very significant industrial base. So there are significant tax incentives for people to locate their operations down there, particularly on the pharmaceutical side. Many of those people want energy security themselves. They want to have the ability to self-generate and so even though the customers are relatively small compared to the big power opportunities that are there, when you add them all up, they're significant. And that's basically the business for right now. Yes. So what have we done? So the -- as I mentioned at the beginning, the Puerto Rico facility was actually commissioned during COVID, and it was done in my view, heroically by people that were very focused on the outcome of getting the terminal completed and did so at a time of great uncertainty, in terms of the health issues now. We don't think that anyone suffered any health issues as a result that I do really take my hat off to the work ethic of the people that showed up there every day. And you can see what we have ended up with in this picture on the upper right-hand side, is lit up there at night is it is a terminal that is on the harbor. It's adjacent to the power plant, which sits behind it. And the picture on the left-hand side, you can see the Anthony Veder ship that is alongside there. Basically, the way that this one operates is that the ship acts as floating storage. So there's a ship that is berth there more or less permanently. And another ship then comes in, fills it up periodically. That gas is then taken off, regas and put directly into it. It also -- there's a truck-loading operation there, so we can fill ISO containers and whatnot. So operationally, since COVID-19, we've completed over 100 loads. We've got 6 customers, a pipeline of many more. So we think that this is a very productive asset for us right now. It's one which is serving a great need both in terms of energy security, but also environmentally, it's changing the profile of Puerto Rico away from primarily coal and oil-based fuels to one which we think has got a very, very, very strong natural gas future. So flipping the page, let's talk about Jamaica just for a few minutes. Jamaica was the first country that we did business. And you can see from this chart on the left-hand side, I'm very proud of the job that we have done with our -- with all the people who work for us down there and really taken a massive step in helping Jamaica decarbonize. We showed up down there. I think the first time I went was in January 2015. There was essentially no natural gas in the island. So it was 100% an oil-based energy profile at that point. That has rocketed skyward to a point where now 81% of the electricity is generated from gas. So basically, it has turned into the profile of what we think is appropriate right now, which is a combination of natural gas-fired generation combined with renewables. You can still -- you can see there's still some work left to be done. So we think that their energy system still has a couple of challenges, which is number one, they've got older power plants that need to be carbonized. We think that, that is in the process of happening. There's another power plant or 2 that will be decommissioned here in the coming months and years and hopefully replaced with natural gas. That will be an additional customer potentially for us. And then number two, we're absolutely seeing the first signs of a significant move in the shipping industry to decarbonize themselves as well. This is the area of transportation where I think you're likely to see the most significant changes. And the good news is, is that every ship itself is a big customer. When I put this all in the context of the original origin of our business where we actually took the train that one of our funds owned at the time and we turned it from burning diesel to natural gas, biggest regional train in America is down in Florida. It's called Florida East Coast Railway. It burns about 10 million gallons of diesel a year. That's the equivalent of about 16 million gallons of LNG and that's the equivalent of about one 5,000 containership over the year. So those big ships need a tremendous amount of energy. We've got -- we've been contacted for tenders on both the container businesses as well as the cruise industries. And I think by 2023, we fully expect to be using Jamaica as a hub to be providing fuel. It's -- when you flip the page and you look on Page 14, can see that Jamaica is located geographically in a very, very attractive way. It really sits astride the major shipping lines. And so it's pretty hard to go to the United States from Panama Canal and not run into Jamaica. And that's a good problem. It's got a wonderful harbor. It's actually adjacent to where our floating terminal is. And we think that there's going to be -- this will be the place where we'll see a significant amount of growth in the bunkering business for both crews and containers. So on Page 15, what has happened in Jamaica is something we think this pattern will be repeated in every country we're in, where you start with 1 or 2 customers and then lots of other industrial customers show up either to decarbonize our activities and use gas rather than oil or coal for boilers and industrial processes, et cetera, and also for the people that want to self-generate for energy security. So we've gone from really 1 customer originally to over 21 customers today, and we've got very, very busy and productive terminals on both sides of the island. You can see the Montego Bay is an onshore facility that is filled up periodically, that ship that you see in the picture there is filling up those big white tanks on the bottom of it, that gas is then either put into ISO containers and shipped or it's actually regas and put into a pipeline. It services a power plant right there. On the other side of the island, Old Harbour, is where we've got our offshore facility. So Old Harbour, notable to me because the water is pretty shallow in Old Harbour and it gets close to the shore. So we had to put this a couple of miles offshore, basically created what is essentially this very fancy dock that is out there, the going dock. That's where the ship is permanently based. That is an FSRU. So it basically takes that gas access storage, regas it then puts in pipelines and then ships into shore.

So Page 16 is our terminal in Baja California Sur. So this terminal is really just tremendous kind of product market fit for what we're doing in NFE. But really what's allowed us to kind of get to where we are here is a great partnership with the governor in Mexico and with the state-owned power company, CFE. The government has made the peninsulas, so Baja and the Yucatan, really a key priority for development. And that's been a great partnership for us because what we saw here is a place that's an energy island in terms of being on a peninsula with the San Andreas Fault to the north and really not having currently sort of anything other than oil-based fuels. And so development of our terminal here is really strategic kind of across categories. And value proposition is just really strong. So being able to kind of talk to kind of all of our stakeholders on the peninsula, whether that be kind of large power plants or energy consumers who want more reliable and cheaper electricity and fuel, the terminal is going to provide that. And so we have issues here with reliability. We have issues here with price. And we have issues here with oil-based fuels. 95% of the power generated in the island today is thermal. And we sort of talked about the isolation. So on Page 17, we kind of show the 4 categories of things we're working towards. The first 2 we've done today. So supply CFE's existing plants with gas. So we've been able to come together with CFE and work really closely on a supply partnership for the existing gas plants that they have in Baja, which is going to be tremendous for the peninsula. Create our own merchant power, so installation of our power plant, co-located with the terminal, significantly increases the overall power supply in the region. And then convert existing plants to gas and bunkering are kind of the next 2 things that we're actively working on. So the other power plants that exist in the peninsula that can be converted to gas and run from a terminal, which we're actually working on again in our great partnership with CFE. And then the bunkering opportunity like we've talked about in Jamaica, like we talked about in Barcarena and other areas exist here as well. And there's a great amount of capacity that goes between the mainland and Baja that we hope to have exciting announcements soon on being able to convert to LNG. So across all these categories, our value proposition in the peninsula remains really strong. And so on Page 18, you can see here our committed volumes at 560,000 gallons a day, with another 1 million gallons likely. Commenced operations on July 14 using ISO Flex system, which has really been developed and rolled out here in Baja. And we've started to supply of the CFE power plants, and we're really excited that this terminal is now online, and we're able to grow the business.

Great. Next terminal is Nicaragua. So Nicaragua is at the far end of the energy poverty scale for us. It's an underdeveloped country, it's one that suffers as many of these countries do from both a lack of power generally. So the consumption is a fraction of what it is in the United States. And of course, what they have, much of it is antiquated and oil-based and inefficient. So it's kind of a double-edged sword of what they suffer from. We showed up in Nicaragua about 2.5 years ago. Our terminal in Puerto Sandino is essentially done. We're in the process of just completing the last bits of dredging, the turbines at the power plant are installed. There's actually a significant amount of like civil works that are going to complete this. But this is one that will turn on here in really the next couple of weeks. But I have Danny Knight, who actually did the commercial work on this, give us a little bit of overview here. Danny?

Sure. So the commercial opportunity is really for the -- initially for the baseload power plant, which we signed a little over a year ago last spring. It's a 300-megawatt PPA for 25 years, inflation index, and the offtake is directly with the government. The interconnect is with our -- with the SIEPAC grid. So then the second opportunity that we have is to export power up and down through other countries in Central America. And so -- and then the third opportunity is to supply gas and power to local industrial users.

Great. As you can see on Page 21, the -- these are current photos of what is going on. So our small ship operation, one thing we should say is that the ISO Flex, which something we unveiled about a year ago and what ISO Flex is, in very simple terms, is it's a manifold system that we created and patented, our technical team did, that allows us to fill up ISO containers directly from a large ship simultaneously and thus kind of skip a step of marine infrastructure. So basically, between both Mexico and Nicaragua, the logistics setup you'll see is a large ship, anchored a couple of miles offshore. The smaller ships that are actually still quite large. These small ships are kind of 250-plus feet long. So everything -- it's all context, but these are big ships that have 30 ISO containers on them. They plugged in with one hose into the system, manifold, then flips a switch, fills them all at once. Takes a little under an hour, you uncouple, take the small ship to shore and then with the crane or reach, a stack loader, you take them off, put them on trucks and drive them away. So it's a simple logistics exercise. And happily, it's one that works exactly as we had hoped it would. So obviously, we had great confidence in what the design was. We field-tested it. We worked with great partners on this. But the first testing of this and actually the commercialization of it happened just in the last few days on in Mexico. So it's a significant tool and a tool kit now. It works very well in these markets where you'd otherwise be very constrained in terms of bringing fuel onshore because the port facilities simply aren't big enough to accommodate kind of these larger scale ships. So that is Nicaragua. Ireland, is at the opposite end of the spectrum, so on Page 22. The overall picture of Ireland, Ireland has got one of the highest deployments of renewable power in the world. I don't know if you've been to Ireland, but it's a pretty windy place, and that's reflected in the wind assets that are there. They have historically had an indigenous source of supply offshore that is actually depleting rapidly. So the gas that comes from the gas field there is one that is going away at a pretty good clip. The rest of their gas supply comes from a single pipeline that comes from England to Scotland and then under the water into Ireland. Obviously, with only one source of gas long term, that's a source of real energy and security. And for an industrialized company with the size and scale of Ireland, that's not a great situation. So that's really the backdrop for what our terminal is very focused on. Ireland's gas market is substantial. It's expected to reach 6 million tons by 2025, and there's no alternative other than the expensive U.K. imports and the transportation cost. So basically, by building a terminal in the heart of the demand for energy in Ireland, it allows us to kind of bypass that expensive transport system and end up in the middle of it. So if you look at Page #23, the commercial opportunity there is very straightforward. One, build an import terminal that allows you then to sell into the marketplace. This would fall into the category of a prospectively a high-volume terminal, but one at very, very competitive prices. So lower margins but very high volumes. We think that the main focus for us will be to displace the gas that comes in from England. And then we can sell gas to Ireland's existing utility industrial customers. Number two is the carbon footprint of the energy grid in Ireland is quite good. As I said, they're one of the highest percentages of renewable power in the world, and that's one that has continued to grow. But they do have some thermal plants, particularly on the coal side that are being discontinued. So we think there's a need absolutely for new thermal generation. One of Ireland's industries that has been very, very productive is the data center industry. That's one that needs clean-sheet power, obviously, to operate efficiently. And so we have the right in our terminal to also build a 500-megawatt power plant. So those are the 2 main commercial strategies. In Page 24, this is a rendering of what the terminal will look like. So an onshore terminal, you can see at the top of the page, the power plant below it. We have approximately 600 acres of land. So there's a significant amount of industrial land that is available for development as well and the time line down below. So we expect to file our permits in the month of August. Filing permits in Ireland is a very, very regulated process. It's one where you're essentially preapproved as you make them. So we've given kind of a notice of strategic importance to Ireland's energy, and that's a big designation for us to then file. And we expect this to be fully operational in the second half of 2023. Lastly is Sri Lanka, which is our newest terminal. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Danny to walk through the overview on the commercial side there. Danny?

So Sri Lanka is an island off the eastern coast of India, population of about 22 million people. The island is entirely reliant on fuel imports and currently lacks a lot of available baseload power plants that run efficiently. The average power price is about 15-plus cents. Notably, there's an existing 300-megawatt power plant that is capable of running on gas today and another 650 megawatts of planned or under construction power plants that are supposed to run on gas. So that totals about 1 gigawatt of natural gas capable power plants within the next 2 years. When we look at Sri Lanka, we think there's really 3 buckets of opportunity. One, developing Sri Lanka's first LNG import terminal. Last week, we signed a framework agreement with the government to develop this LNG import terminal to supply gas to the existing 300-megawatt plant. In addition, we signed an agreement with the government to acquire a 40% stake in this power plant. The next bucket is expanding on the baseload power plants. We signed an MOU with LTL Holdings, a local developer to develop a 350-megawatt plant, which they have a 20-year PPA with the government, and this should be operational within the next 12 to 18 months. And then finally, there is the opportunity to convert existing oil-based generation within the Colombo region. Our terminal will be right outside the capital city of Colombo, which is where most of the population, the existing generation currently exist and is currently planned. And so our terminal went up and running, we'll be capable of supplying at least 1 gigawatt of gas-fired power in one single location. And so when you turn to Page 27, we think that the total committed volume is about 1.2 million gallons per day with the opportunity to grow that. There's another 300-megawatt tender that was just launched by the government with bids due in September of this year. And so when you look at the time line down below, we think that we will be fully permitted by the end of this year, with terminal operations commencing by the end of 2022 and the new 350-megawatt plant in the first quarter of 2023.

Yes. So that's the end of the discussion about the different countries. Referring back to Page #6 because this is now that we've kind of gone through this. I think it gives you a good frame of reference to it. Look back again at this energy consumed per capita, and it gives you a very good road map for what we think the commercial opportunities are. In those places where Sri Lanka's, as an example, we just went through, 578 kilowatts per capita compared to 11,500. So a fraction of where the United States is. Clearly, they are in great need for incremental power. That's what we're seeing there. It's an island of 20 million people, where they still consume on a per capita basis, a relatively modest amount. So those markets that have real energy poverty, building new power is what they need, right? That's a big part of it. There are still opportunities, as we're doing here, which is to decarbonizes existing plants. But those, in terms of the developing markets are the ones that we think are the most attractive because they have these 2 characteristics. Number one, needing new power, that's a good opportunity for us. And decarbonizing existing stuff because they've got dirty expensive power of this oil-based that we're in the process of dealing with. So this is a good -- I mean, this is a page that I'll refer to all the time. When we look at new markets, it's exactly the series of metrics that I pull up. And so I just thought I would share with you to give you a bit of a frame of reference of how we think about this. So what I've done for the rest of the presentation is essentially posed a series of rhetorical questions that are intended to answer questions that we know that investors have, analysts have and they are most frequently asked questions. And so basically pose the question and then hopefully answer it here adequately. So one of the questions that we get very frequently is how exposed are you to commodity risk? Well, the answer is, not that exposed at all, and actually Kasciandro Senem who runs our commodities group here, will actually talk about it. But it's a big concern for us. Obviously, it's a big focus, and I've made a big -- a consistent point about this. The purchase of gas is by far our largest single expense, right? So far more than the people and the operations to actually run it because we're running a commodity-based business. And so that's a big size for us. Our overall perspective is we want to minimize that as much as possible and essentially be in the spread business, where we're doing one of two things. We're either selling gas or we're selling power and we're buying gas from the marketplace in different forms and then just simply managing all the logistics and all the operational risk in the middle and taking out a spread. That's what we think is the most attractive profile as a company. We think that's what investors are focused on. That's what we're focused on. So that's the framework for how we think about it. Now what's happened in the markets, of course, in the last 6 to 9 months and not just the LNG markets, but commodity markets generally is prices have gone up dramatically. And that's caused people concerns, rightfully so, they're like, okay, great. We've seen commodity prices go up across the board. We've seen LNG prices really spike, how concerned are you about that? What have you done about it? So that's the nature of this rhetorical question, and I'll turn it over to Kasciandro to address.

Thank you, Wes. So just a little bit of background, first time that I'm speaking with you all. So my name is Kasciandro Senem, and I'm the Manager Director for LNG, so which means that my job description here is pretty much to buy the LNG that we are selling on the terminals around the world, okay? And I want to provide you guys an answer for 3 main questions that are coming. One is what is our exposure today and to the LNG market. What we expect to do in the future as well with the additional volumes that we sell. And how do FLNG, the Fast LNG fits to that portfolio, okay? So just a little bit on Page 29, just a little bit of a market view. Market is very tight now. It's been tight since end of last year. We saw that China is the big driver. That's a big question mark in the market now and, of course, weather, right? So basically, China is now the biggest LNG buyer in the world. It was buying like 3% or 4% of the market in 2008, 2009, when I started to trade, and now it's more than 20% of the global market. So it's a big increase. They have been buying like they have been breaking records quarter after quarter. But looking at the future, like our expectation for long-term views and -- mid and long-term views did not change much. We are negotiating a number of LNGs by contracts to meet our demand. And we are not seeing that pressure from the sellers to increase price perspective for mid- and long-term contracts, right? So there is a huge amount of LNG coming online in the next 5 years. It's in that, is the expectation of the market that's like a long term.

So you think that the changes in price are largely technical in the short term, right? It's been weather events. China's perspective -- when you look at the charts, it's an amazing statistic. China, in 2005, essentially had no LNG imported, that's not that long ago. Even a handful of years ago, it was 3 import terminals is now...

35.

35 import terminals. So it's hard to keep track of what it is. It's not 20% of the worldwide LNG markets and the largest single importer. So that's been a big wildcard. It can go the other way, though. The pipeline is actually developed from Russia. It could actually be a significant source of gas. So that can be a volatile source, but that has certainly contributed to the price increases in the short term. But the long-term contracts, we look at -- and Kasciandro will talk about our portfolio of our long-term contracts. Those are Henry Hub-based for the most part, right? And they range in a fairly tight range.

Yes, exactly. So for our -- like this part of our portfolio, Atlantic supply is the main source of supply, and that's Henry Hub-based contracts. And we are like seeing like 115% Henry Hub plus -- from 200 to 250 for like mid- to long-term contracts, and that is not changing, right? Last year or this year, it's pretty much the same price, right? So we expect it to continue. Like as U.S. LNG has like a big role for the expansion of the LNG production in the world in the future as well. Okay. So just turning to Page 30. Now talking about like NFE exposure to that LNG market. And the answer is pretty much that we covered our exposure. So we have purchased enough gas to cover our committed volumes so far. So if we see the terminals of Sergipe, Jamaica, Miami, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Nicaragua, we are having like a little bit more than 30 cargoes of LNG a year of demand. And we purchase the equivalent number of gas as well from the market. So basically, we took out the risk of the LNG prices in the market from our portfolio. So we are completely covered going forward. Okay. So for the additional terminals, then like we are going to -- and we have an internal type coordination, like at the time that we sell, we need to be in the market also purchasing. So when Andrew or when Danny are like negotiating the sales contracts, we are in tight coordination, and I'm negotiating with the LNG suppliers at the same moment to reduce our risk, okay? And that will be the same way we're going to proceed in the future. So we now have 3 main suppliers to main suppliers to our portfolio, reliable suppliers. Shell, Cheniere, Ocean LNG, which is the JV between Qatargas and ExxonMobil. So 3 very reliable suppliers for our portfolio. And as we expand and as we sell more volumes, we are going to be negotiating and concluding LNG term deals to meet our demands. So far, we have around like 107 -- 170 cargoes purchased for the next 5 years, which is around like $3 billion of purchase. So that's a big -- it's a big amount of money that we are paying other LNG suppliers to produce their LNG. So -- and that's like supply negotiations with everybody in the world. This is our like bread and butter. We need to do that every day. I think the discussion is now, like, can we do it better? Can we add something that will make our portfolio of supply cheaper? And that comes to the discussion of the Fast LNG projects.

All right. If you flip to Page #32, what is FLNG and what are we doing about it? Well, floating LNG is simply building a liquefier on a ship that allows you to access offshore gas fields as opposed to building it on land. There currently today are 7 ships through either operational or in development. You can see they're scattered around the world. There's a very small one down in Argentina. There's the blue one that we own an interest in with the Golar folks off the coast of Cameroon. The one above that is the Gimi, which is being developed for BP that is supposed to be deployed in the next year or 2. And then the one on the other side of Africa is the Coral Mozambique project which, I think, has paused for the moment, but that's expected to go forward and be completed in the next couple of years as well. And then there's a couple of projects that are up and running in Asia. So in total, if you add up all of these right now, it's about 15 million tons of production. Last year, by frame of reference, there was about 390 million tons roughly produced, is that right?

Yes.

Yes. So there's a little more capacity than that. So 15 out of 390 is a relatively small percentage. Of the FLNG projects that are proposed around the world and are being in various stages of getting to FID, though, it's a much bigger number. It's 120 million. So 120 million, obviously, of the roughly 500 million is obviously a much bigger percentage of it. And so my view about this is that much in the way that Golar and others pioneered the use of FSRUs, so basically taking ships and turn them into storage and then regas assets, that was a very novel, very pioneering strategy 15 or 20 years ago, and it's a very, very mainstream strategy today. My own opinion is that the FLNG, which sounds like a more adventurous and more novel approach to what -- to getting gas liquefied today, I think will be a very, very mainstream activity over the next kind of 3 to 5 years. And when you flip to Page #33, the reason why I have so much confidence in that is that there's a tremendous amount of gas that exists in these markets offshore. Obviously, Brazil has got massive amount of gas, and they're presold stuff offshore. There's a significant amount of gas offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. West Africa is one of the world's hotspots of it. There's actually a considerable amount of gas in the Middle East, you then have gas in Asia. So there's kind of gas projects everywhere and having FLNG allows you to access that. And there's just a handful of things. This was the situation that we were in early in the year. We made the investment in Hygo. And as part of that, we also ended up with an investment in the Hilli. We have a very significant technical staff here on the liquefication as well. We've operated a liquefier ourselves for a number of years very, very successfully. And so back in January, I went to the technical group. If you look to Page 34, and I asked a very simple question. I said, look, we think that FLNG has got a huge role in the world. It's a way for us to access cheaper gas in these different markets, and that's great. But it takes too long and it costs too much money to build one. And so the question that I posed them, I said, look, basically, the way that it's done right now is they're building a ship new or taking the existing ship and repurposing it. And that was really the thread of the idea. And I said, if they can do that, why can't we take other forms of marine infrastructure that exists and repurpose it as well? Because at the end of the day, all we're really looking for is kind of 75,000 to 100,000 square feet of deck space. And if we can sit the liquefier onto that, much we know it works well in marine conditions because we have proof-of-concept with the Hilli and other ships out there that have operated actually very, very efficiently and very, very reliably. And so can we do this? And this cartoon on Page 34, which we shared with you before, is essentially the snapshot of what we've done. So take an existing marine infrastructure, jackup rigs in this case, put the liquefier onto it, it then takes the gas, it treats it if it's necessary. It liquefies it. It then puts it into long-term storage. And then ships come alongside and actually take that out. So at this point, I'd like to pause and turn it over to Alap Shah, who's in charge of this project for us. FLNG is something that is very, very important to us long term. We think that the upside from this part of our business is dramatic if we're actually successful in finding the right gas resources and deploying these things properly. We talk about this every day. So I have a standing 8:00 meeting where we'd have both the technical update from Alap and his folks, the gas updates from Kasciandro and others to try and put those 2 things together and have made a tremendous amount of progress over the last couple of months. So Alap?

Thanks, Wes. Good afternoon, everybody. So in the last few months, we have invested a lot of energy and urgency onto this FLNG, Fast LNG execution. And just to give you a little bit of my background, I used to work at Black & Veatch for 22 years and part of the team that did Golar Hilli. And I remember those days. And I think this is a similar kind of experience I'm having, but it's a repeat. So the second time is much easier than the first time. And so the main differentiator between the typical FLNG like Golar Hilli is that we can sequence this marine work with the liquefaction modularization work streams in parallel. And what it does, it basically cuts the schedule in half of the typical FLNG project because one of the most important drive here is the timing. And we are trying to do this in a record amount of time, which is -- that's why it is called Fast LNG. So we -- our goal is to get this thing done by end of 2022, which gives me about 18 to 20 months. We started this in March 9 when Wes declared the FID on this project. And so I'm in the fifth month of execution. And I'm telling you is that such a good progress that we have made so far, and I can go over a lot of details. But very highlight of this is that we have bought all 3 rigs. So the marine infrastructure is already bought. And then we have -- two of them are already in Kiewit shipyard in Ingleside, Texas. So if any of you want to come over and see those huge rigs, most welcome. And then it is already being repurposed. So -- and then the third rig is on the way to the shipyard, and we'll be there next week. And then we have procured all long lead items on this project. So the idea -- the concept here is that we are -- we already bought all the long-lead items, and we are going to put that into a fab yard, a fabrication yard. We're going to start making modules over there. And then in parallel, we are cleaning up the rigs and the rigs will be ready to put those modules, or I call it, LEGO boxes on the rig, and we'll start to do that in July 2022 at Kiewit shipyard. And then it's basically making it assemble, connect those LEGO pieces. And then start doing the commissioning. And so the reason why we can do that is because we went to the right people in the industry. And just to give you a little bit idea there, we have form PO issue to Chart and Baker Hughes and Siemens and Fluor and Kiewit. Those are world class companies, and we are getting great technical support from them. And they are very excited about making this project as a benchmark in the LNG industry to make it as fast as possible and within the minimum amount of money that we can be able to do that because of the marine infrastructure right now we are buying is really at an attractive pricing. So we are relentlessly driving ourselves and our partners to get smarter, cheaper, faster. And so that we can beat the current schedule and budget expectations. And we have great support from Wes and the leadership team here. So I get decisions like right on the spot. And I don't have to wait for months to make a decision. And so that's the reason why we can do this in a very quick time and get it done. So, so far, so good, and we will keep you updated every quarter on this one.

And so on Page 35, you look at this. So the -- we bought 3 jackup rigs, 2 for liquification, 1 for gas treatment, right? Because basically, you think about the problem is gas comes out of the ground or comes underneath the water in this case. Then it's a question of what the quality of that gas is whether they need you to separate out any of the other hydrocarbons that are part of it. So that's the gas treatment part. The actual process of liquification we know now is actually quite a simple one. So if you have treated gas, you basically run it through the equivalent of a hair dryer to dehumidify it because you can't freeze something that's got water in it. You then plug it into the one real piece of technology, which is the cold box. Add compression and power and magically, LNG kind of spills at the bottom. It really is that simple. And so the jackup rigs are designed to hold the different components of the liquification process. Alap's job, which is a hard one, but he's very capable as his is whole squad of folks, is to miniaturize or modularize, to kind of fit what would be on acres of land into 100,000 square feet of stuff onto this. The jackup rigs are very suitable for more shallow water deployments. So typically a couple of hundred feet, like 300, 400 feet of water. There also is a lot of gas that exists in much, much deeper locations and the right parallel for that are basically very large drillship like [indiscernible] is a good example of that, that basically acts as, again, a floating base of operations where you then put this on to it. So those are the 2 types of deployments that you'll see. And this first one, as Alap said, will be done next summer, commission through the fall and ready to go onto a gas field by the end of the year. So Page 36, what's the goal for this? So the FID on our first project, $541 million. So I'm just rounding that to $500 million for 1.4 million tons of gas. And what we're looking for in identifying a gas partner is really a win-win situation. And where -- from our standpoint, the benefits are that we can deploy this in a way that is relatable from a timing standpoint, so it's faster. Number two, it's cheaper than the cost of constructing on land. And our real goal is to generate LNG at the end of the day at a significant discount as a result of this. So you're buying at 50% roughly of market. And what that allows us to do also then is satisfy our own demand. So if we were just doing this without being integrated, it would be a somewhat riskier proposition because we'd be making LNG, we wouldn't necessarily have a home for it, there would be another step to it. Here we have downstream demand that Kasciandro walked through what we've done with our portfolio of gas to satisfied the needs today, but that changes and increases over time. This allows us to kind of fit that need. From the partner's perspective and the partners here we're really talking about our government, they have stranded assets, and they lack both the capital and the technical ability to go and get it, especially ones that we think that are real sweet spots are some of the smaller fields. So there's still quite sizable, but they're still smaller. So just by frame of reference, 1.4 million tons of LNG that's produced continually over 20 years is a total of about 1 Tcf of gas. So when you think of the gas fields we're looking for, it's really something which is in excess of that. A 1 or 2 or 3 TCF field, which is a sizable field, is still not one that -- without some kind of -- with that technology like this, would really be able to be developed in a cost-effective manner. So we think there's a huge sweet spot for these kinds of gas that's out there. What we do then for the government is we generate returns they would not get otherwise, number one. Number two, unlike the other E&P companies that might look to extract resources and take it away, we also then would look to then produce gas for domestic uses. In particular, of course, now these countries have the same issues they all have, which is they have energy poverty or they have expensive power. This addresses both of those. So it generates significant returns for the government as a result of this. And then also provides gas for local industries, which lead to jobs and economic growth and all the other things they want. So this is truly something, which we think is a win-win situation for us. And with this, we think the economics of it are compelling. One of the -- you all are -- and many of our investors on this call, I've had many people walk into my office over the year and tell me they can earn 20% in one strategy or another at some dislocation, and that's great. What's very unique in the world is to find somebody who can actually generate a higher return like that for a very extended duration. And when you look at the deployment of this, if you've got -- you're going to generate a significant amount of LNG at a discount to the market and can generate kind of a 20-ish-plus return, but not for a year or 2, but for 10 or 15 or 20 years, that's a massively attractive asset, and it's one that we think adds a tremendous amount of value to the portfolio. That's why we're so focused on it. So what the goals are for us today are very simple. One, we expect to select the field for our first deployment in the next 30 to 60 days. We're having dialogues, led by Kasciandro, and I'm heavily involved in those as well, where we're talking to different gas providers around the world, a total of 10 different fields. So we feel like there's a lot of choices and things to -- for us to pick. And then our goal is to commence operations for this at the same time that Alap does his fine work and produces the infrastructure for us at the end of next year. So question number three, "How do we pay for our growth?" is also a frequently asked question because, of course, with all the activity we've got high on people's minds is, do we need to issue additional equity? Will there be dilutive things in the future? And the simple answer we think is no. With that, I will turn it over to Chris.

Great. Thanks, Wes. So as we answer this question, we have to start with where we are today. Pardon me. So let's have a look at Slide #39. As you can see, I mean, we've been careful and measured in creating a very simple balance sheet and capital structure. Today, we have about $2.95 billion of corporate debt. And in a total of 1 -- excuse me, $4.6 billion of total consolidated debt, which includes the asset level debt at Sergipe and the Hilli. The total leverage is about 3.7x. If you use the run rate, $1.5 billion of operating margin. And our base case earnings go up to about $1.9 billion or below 3x, which is our target leverage ratio as we continue to grow and increase market share in existing jurisdictions like Brazil and new ones like Sri Lanka and Ireland. From a debt service coverage perspective, it's important to make note of this, we put it at the bottom of the page, is that we have ample coverage on our corporate debt at a little over 8.25 turns of coverage on the base case and a little over 5 on the committed earnings case. If you quickly turn to Slide #40, probably 40 and 41 go hand-in-hand, but to walk through the funding needs and our growth plans to achieve them, we have about $250 million required to fully fund and pay for Mexico and Nicaragua; $475 million remaining for the first FLNG, Fast LNG asset; $350 million for Brazil, plus the power plant at the Suape terminal; 300 -- excuse me, it was around the $450 million for Sri Lanka and Ireland; and then we have about $100 million that we'll spend over the course of the next couple of years for regulatory and maintenance CapEx on the vessels, which is an important question we get asked a lot these days. So it's around $1.6 billion that we'll spend over the next few years. And we can fund that through a variety of cash flows from operations, financing against some of the unencumbered assets we have and then asset sales, which we've talked about in previous calls. On Page #41, we've walked you through kind of our intention and our plan here. So excuse me, page -- yes, Page 41. We've just signed a new letter of credit facility, which we are excited about. This allows us to use the facility to free up for currently restricted cash and also allows for more efficient use of working capital. On June 17, we announced the sale and the leaseback of the Jamalco combined heat and power plant, which will bring in $280 million with $100 million of that already committed. The third thing to point out here is our ship financings. We intend to finance the unencumbered assets, the vessel specifically, for around $800 million and we have $300 million in commitments ahead of any formal syndication. And that leaves us around $400 million of remaining CapEx, which we can fund through capital raised off of assets that we could sell, which include the Nanook, some of the power plants and other noncore assets. Important to note, you had a couple of hundred million dollars in cash plus availability under the line at the end of Q2 and we have cash flows from operations -- material cash flows from operations over the next several quarters that will help fund this growth -- these growth objectives. With that, I'll turn it over to Wes to talk about...

Great. So sustainability, it is really one of the last sections we have in our report here, and I'll have Ken talk about what we're doing here specifically. If you flip to Page 43, the sustainability, as I said at the beginning, is this is something that I think that we are going to be talking about every day for the rest of our lives. It's the most obvious investment theme I can imagine. It's got enormous upside in terms of the focus and attention to capital that's going to come into it. And it's got enormous challenges in terms of creating kind of investable product. But when you look at this chart on the left-hand side of Page 43, 51 billion tons. That's a number we pull out of Bill Gates' book in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases that are released every year. Those numbers have risen exponentially when you go back to the industrial revolution and going forward. And with all the weather events and all the things that we know are happening every day, this is something that would become more and more and more of a focus of ourselves as well as everyone else. The pie chart on the right-hand side, when we look at this, we are very focused on those things, which we think we can play a real role in. And I mentioned this before, 75% of all the greenhouse gas emissions come from 3 main sectors, which are industrials, power and transportation. We have a lot of experience and exposure to all of those 3 things. And what we have basically concluded is that our focus on this is very, very specifically on decarbonize and transport and industrial industries with clean hydrogen-based fuels. And what that means is that we talk about on Page #44. So why hydrogen? When you saw Jeff Bezos' rocket going out in the space yesterday, which is quite a moment for -- at least for me personally, and I suspect for many of us here. He was burning liquefied hydrogen and burning it and it's completely emission-free. So that obviously is the goal and a very, very kind of clear manifestation of what we want. And so how do we get that hydrogen? Well, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It burns clean and contains 0 carbon. There's no carbon [ dots ] that is released. It also can be put into fuel cells and also generate electricity without any emissions. So that's great. The challenge is that it's the smallest molecule. So if you think back to your periodic tables that you looked at it when you're in high school or in college, that hydrogen's in the upper left-hand corner, it's the smallest, lightest atom. And so while it's very, very abundant, when you get it, it's actually a challenge than what you're going to do with it because it costs a lot of money to liquefy it. You liquefy it roughly twice the negative temperatures you would natural gas, so it costs a lot of money to liquefy it. Or to compress it also then kind of takes a lot of money. So that's a challenge to it, and we have our solution to that. Where is hydrogen found today? Well, I think about 95% of all the hydrogen that is produced today comes from natural gas. So natural gas, chemical composition is CH4. The H4 is the clue. There's a lot that is there. Through the process that's known a steam methane reform. You basically take that and separate it into hydrogen, which is good; and CO2, which is bad. Rule of thumb, that process itself actually generates roughly 10 tons of CO2 for every ton of hydrogen. So that sounds dirty because it is actually quite dirty. I think estimates are that actually creating hydrogen, the cleanest fuel, ironically, is one of the biggest polluters of greenhouse gas. So that process by itself, the SMR process by itself, contributes 3%, 4%, 5% of all global emissions from that process. So simply decarbonizing the hydrogen process to be a big step towards it. The other place where hydrogen is problem is in water. Water is something that's the green hydrogen solution. So trying to create electrolysis or some way of separating the H2O into the H and the O and do so efficiently is something, of course, we think is very interesting. We've made an investment in a -- what we think is the most efficient electrolyzer company, it's Israeli-based company that we talked about before. But in terms of commercial viability today, there's no question that taking the hydrogen from the gas and cleaning up that process is by far the better solution. So let me turn it over to Ken Nicholson. Ken is a senior partner, has worked with me, with us as my partner for many, many years in the Transportation Industrials Group, and he's really the person who's leading the charge for us in this commercial offer. Ken?

Great. Thanks, Wes. So I'm going to walk through blue ammonia. Talk a little bit about what it is and what our strategy is for producing it and selling it as a clean fuel. Well, ammonia, generally is the ideal carrier and storage liquid for hydrogen. Chemically speaking, ammonia is 3 parts hydrogen, 1 part nitrogen. It is relatively straightforward to make. It's used primarily as a fertilizer today, but it is an incredible clean fuel when made the right way. This slide, Page 45, kind of walks you through from left to right, how you make blue ammonia. It starts with the SMR process that Wes described, take natural gas, split out the hydrogen and carbon. And then capturing the carbon and sequestering it in the ground. You need licenses and what have you to do that. Many states are developing new policies for the sequestration of carbon, but several states, Wyoming, Texas and others all have established policies and actually, carbon is actively sequestered today. So linking up the sequestration to the traditional ammonia production process makes blue ammonia or makes blue hydrogen, I should say, add nitrogen and you have ammonia available to be shipped in small quantities, large quantities. It does not require extreme refrigeration. It does not require extreme compression. Moving to Page 46. So this is our strategy for our clean fuels company that we are forming around the hydrogen clean fuel opportunity. We are currently assembling our management team. We plan to announce our first project by the end of this summer and just the next month or 2. The plan is to buy an existing ammonia facility here in the United States, there are about 40 total facilities that are of the right size and have the right characteristics. And we're looking at all of them. I think they're about half a dozen, maybe a little bit more that are the best candidates for us. We will convert or retrofit at the ammonia facility to produce blue ammonia by capturing and sequestering the CO2. That is a relatively straightforward retrofit to an existing ammonia facility, and then we will be in the business of producing and selling ammonia as a clean hydrogen-based fuel. We are close to announcing, I think, our first offtake agreement. We're in a -- in a discussion with a handful of counterparties for offtake of blue ammonia. It's an incredibly valuable business once created, and we'll talk about the math on the next page. But our plan is to set this up as a separate company, capitalize it separately, likely with tax-exempt debt. Many of these projects are eligible for tax and financing. And as a separate company, then spin it off and distribute shares to NFE shareholders. On Page 47, just to walk through the economics. To put it in its most simple way to build a blue ammonia production facility, the total CapEx, including the acquisition of the facility and the retrofitting, is about a $300 million investment to produce 1,000 tons per day of blue ammonia. Assuming a feedstock price, which is just the price of natural gas, $3 per MMBtu, by far, the largest cost component to producing blue ammonia is acquiring the natural gas power is number two, but it's not a hell of a lot of power, but 20 to 25 megawatts. So at a $3 MMBtu cost of gas, you contribute about $50 million a year at our estimate for current prices for blue ammonia. Blue ammonia is not a terribly well-established market right now. As I said, ammonia is largely used in the agricultural sector as a fertilizer, but it is a rapidly developing market. And one of the things that is causing it to rapidly develop is the adoption by most well-developed countries of carbon taxes or carbon incentives to reduce carbon emissions in each of their respective nationalities. 61 countries today have some form of a policy in place. We expect this number 61 to be 120 in the next few years. Carbon taxes are going up materially in Scandinavia. They're at the highest in the world at $137 per ton of a penalty that counterparties pay today, without carbon tax is having any impact. We estimate the going price of ammonia to be $200 to $300 a ton. It costs about $140 a ton to make blue ammonia. But there's tremendous upside in pricing, $300, $400, $500 per ton as more carbon taxes are implemented throughout the world.

The bet that we would make commercially that I think is a very good bet is that, as the world kind of rolls forward in the sustainability side, that carbon taxes become much and much bigger part of our lives. So if you look at the chart on Page 47, you can see in the last 20 years, you've had a material increase in terms of the number of places the carbon taxes are levied and the quantum of the taxes that they are charging have also increased fairly dramatically. I personally feel like it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's likely to happen in the next 3, 5, 7 years as people really get focused on this. And really, what you need is you need governments to be serious about carbon taxing activities and thus, making a hydrogen or a clean fuel alternative a better fuel for transport or industrial purposes for all the things you're using fossil fuels for. I personally feel like that's a very good bet. Today, you don't get paid a significant premium for blue ammonia. There's not much of this that's created and you're not paid a significant premium right now. But I really believe absolutely and have a lot of conviction that as the next 12, 24, 36 months roll out, that's going to change dramatically. And the dialogues that Ken and myself and others have had with users of it prospectively would actually support that as well, so I think it's a pretty much maturing. So 2 other very quick things. We published our first Annual Sustainability Report. I have a hard copy. We have some hard copy here in front of us. This report includes our approach to sustainability, our accomplishments, our targets, the emissions footprint we've got, environmental records, social investments, governance data, all the things that we think are material. Our goal is to be in all things as transparent as we can be for investors. We've included industry standard reporting for the SASB, TCFD, the UN Sustainable Development Goals. So all of the things that are considered to be top shelf in terms of transparency. So that's accessible to you, and we're happy to talk with you about. We've got a lot of focus on it internally, but this is something we are very, very serious about. Lastly, just in terms of valuation. I mean, I'm a little bit frustrated by the valuation right now, but I do think that things tend to find their own level when the numbers reflect that. I put a very, very simple chart on Page 50, that supports what we think is a reasonable range of valuation with the businesses that we have in hand. So this is not really forecasting new countries and terminals or substantial amounts of growth, these are all things that are basically in hand in the process of being monetized right now, and you end up with valuations between $80 and $120, obviously, which is a substantial premium for where we are right now. The one aspect of our business that I think is worth remarking on because I think of it this way is when you organize yourself in your terminals by country, what you're really creating are individual businesses and themselves are quite sizable. And it's entirely possible that as we grow our businesses that one of our strategies over time could be to capitalize, sell, partner individual countries along the way if we actually can't get the valuation for the overall entity. So I'm not a big fan of conglomerate pricing. I think that's one of the challenges with it. It becomes a sum of the parts. This is not that. But for example, when you look at Brazil, which we paid a few billion dollars for our numbers in Brazil, once our terminals are operating here next year, are -- make that much more valuable than what we paid for it. That gives us a lot of flexibility both in terms of the valuation of our company and then also looking to partner on these things because any of these individual markets that produces $100 million, $200 million, $500 million or more million in EBITDA, obviously, those are very, very big businesses by themselves. Our approach to this, from a management standpoint, I view it almost like a portfolio of individual businesses. We want a head of commercial. We want a head of operations in each one of these places. Finance and accounting, so provide all the services because we have all the logistics services that are provided across the whole portfolio. So things like ships, things like the gas, things like the transportation and other logistical stuff, but you end up with these series of very, very valuable individual businesses that could be capitalized separately if that was something that was necessary. So obviously, I feel great about the business. I think the year that we just had is a remarkable one, all things considered. And even if it was not a pandemic year, it would have been a remarkable one. So thank you for your patience about this. I know we've gone for a long time here, so we'll take just a couple of questions. And then, of course, myself, Chris, Josh, Andrew, Kasciandro, Alap will be available to answer questions for you. Maybe we'll just pause there and take a couple of questions and then end probably there.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Alonso Guerra-Garcia with Scotiabank.

So first of all, I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the big win last night. So congratulations on an incredible achievement there in Milwaukee Bucks.

Thank you very much.

For sure. Maybe for my first question, I appreciate you addressing the LNG supply. You mentioned as you get closer to Brazil and Sri Lanka that you'll plan to cover those volumes. I understand the first Fast LNG represents a portion of that. There's a lot of growth in those markets, especially in Brazil and before, even including Ireland. How do you balance entering to additional supply agreements versus developing additional Fast LNGs, which could take longer to develop?

Well, I think -- and I'm going to let Kasciandro to address it specifically. But I think that the base case for your view and your expectation is that to meet the demand in those markets, if you were to do it today, you would do it exactly as we have done. So if you think about our portfolio of cargoes we have bought, these longer-term supply, our Henry Hub base, Henry Hub, times 115, plus an added ranges anywhere from just over 2 to just under 3. So it's -- the average is around 2.5. And so those contracts are readily available. There's many, many people around the world who would love to provide that supply to us on a long-term basis. And I think your expectation should be that we would supply gas in that way if we were asked to do it today. What we have done is covered up everything which is current and producing right now. I separated out the ones that are in the process of being finalized in Brazil and Sri Lanka. In particular, Ireland, we'll then follow those. And if we were in a position exactly then as we are today, we would look to do that in the marketplace as we would in the ordinary course. Obviously, our goal is to cover in some portion of those volumes with FLNG because the margins on that are going to be extremely attractive. And so we'll -- it'll be some combination of that over time. But the market is -- I mean, Kasciandro talks to all these people every day. But we -- the market is very, very available in terms of similar types of volumes we have, right?

Yes, definitely. So yes, that's -- it will be a composition of FLNG plus our long-term contracts, right? And of course, long-term contracts will be playing a major role as -- in the following months, in the following years. And as Wes said, like we are speaking with all the potential LNG suppliers in each specific region. So for the Atlantic, for Brazil, for example, as you recall, probably U.S. LNG, West Africa LNG is a better fit, right? So for Sri Lanka, the other terminal that you mentioned, that's like a very popular terminal for me nowadays, like I've been receiving calls every single day with suppliers' interest to supply that terminal because it's in a very busy route of LNG carriers crossing there. So the strategy for each place will follow the definitive agreements that we signed in those places. And as we have and with progress, the FLNG will be like covering part of that demand as well. Okay?

Yes. Got it. I guess maybe as a follow-up on Sergipe specifically. You mentioned the value creation potential there. I wonder if you could expand on that and sort of what you're looking at. I mean along those lines, looking at some of the volumes that you're forecasting out of Brazil in the second half of this year, look pretty substantial. So also curious about -- is that covered by the PPAs? Or is that merchant power part of that opportunity?

Yes. Thanks. It's Andrew. Thanks for the question. A couple of different opportunities, I think. You obviously mentioned the PPAs we have now, but being able to connect to that terminal into the wider transportation grid is one of our goals. And so then that opens us up to potential gas supply opportunities through Sergipe. And then also, as you mentioned, there are other sort of power opportunities that we have there that we think we can capitalize on as well in terms of kind of optimizing the production of the capacity that we have, kind of in the construct of the PPAs. And in other ways, we also have permitted expansion projects there. And so a couple of different ways that we're looking at optimizing Sergipe, along with generally just optimizing the business, like you would any other business as well. And so across many fronts there, we're super active on that. I personally have been involved in Sergipe in my previous life at Goldman Sachs as well. So it's been about 3 or 4 years for me now. So very enjoyable to kind of see it at the stage we're at today where we're up and running and able to kind of take these next optimization steps. And we obviously have a great relationship with our partner there as well.

And the capital structure that's put in place by Andrew means that now unravels so we hired the right guy to do it because of his role in the first.

Our next question comes from Mike Webber with Webber Research.

Try to keep it pretty tight and high level. Wes, as it pertains maybe just strictly to the upstream business -- I'm sorry, as it pertains to the downstream business in Hygo, I think a number of the people on the call are going to be relatively familiar with maybe some of the previously established time lines and commercialization patterns associated with the development of that Brazilian business. And obviously, you guys have spent a lot of time going through those -- your progress there in great detail. But could you maybe back away from that for a second and look at it from a high level. How is your commercialization effort and process different from what we've seen at Hygo, be it Sergipe or Barcarena or Santa Clara -- or Santa Catarina? You've had some time with it under your belt. Should we see material differences from the economics there versus what we've seen from Hygo and where would we start to see that show up first? I know you've been pretty aggressively pursuing some LDCs around Santa Catarina. Is that the first place where we could see a material deviation? And how should we think about that just from a high level?

Yes. I mean, it's a great question. The primary difference between us and the Hygo plan was just simply that the terminal is now much closer to completion, right? So we paid $1.5 billion for stuff that had been developed for years to get to the point where it's now at the kind of the 10-yard line to be completed. So -- and we inherited a development team that's extremely capable. I'm very, very impressed with these guys, and I have a very high bar for that activity. I built a lot of stuff over the years, and I think these guys are -- and gals are actually incredibly capable. So I look at those development time lines and the stuff turning on at the end of this year, first quarter of next year, and I feel a great amount of confidence that's actually going to happen. What that allows you to do, though, is then have much more detailed and specific conversations with people because talking about a development that is years away from happening, it's very hard to have a real commercial dialogue about that because you're not solving anybody's problems. Now that we're in the middle of July on our way to August, and we're talking about turning a terminal on in December, January, February, it's a much more relatable set of facts. And so I think you'll see a lot more specific acts from us on the commercial side. Not necessarily because we're a lot better than what they were, we're just now working with projects that are nearly completed. So that's what you really see. When you look at it from south to north, the Santa Catarina terminal, the one obvious thing to really relate to there is that the LDCs with their tenders that are out there, we are in a perfect geographic position to actually like source, that is something Andrew has in the thick of. I feel very confident that we're going to have a lot of productivity out of that side of it. The far end of the terminals up in Barcarena, you're off the grid, right? So that's not in the pipeline. That's at the mouthpiece of the Amazon River, which is a gigantic economic sources. As Andrew detailed, we've got 3 gigawatts of power up there that's running on diesel. So the decarbonizing power in the Amazon, there should be a special place in heaven for the people that decarbonize that particular part of the world. So that's a great economic outcome. It's also a great sustainability outcome. And the area where we are located in the terminal, Norsk Hydro is right there, which has obviously been a -- something we've had a very, very active dialogue, with, but there's industrial customers within a stone's throw everywhere around there. So -- and those are -- those customers look more like the -- generally, the "lower volume, higher margin" customers because they're not in the pipeline. And Norsk Hydro is quite a large volume. So that's the exception that makes the rule. But up and down the river, we think that will look a lot like some of the other terminals we've got in other developing countries just because they're off grid, whereas the stuff in Santa Catarina, Suape, that is very much like high volume, lower margin, but potentially incredible amounts of supply just given what the geographies are. But I think the short answer, and I gave you a long one -- the short answer to your question is time is really are our friend in that we are now quite close to commercial COD. And with that, you can have just much, much more robust commercial conversations than you would if you're a year or 2 away from completion.

Got you. Okay. That's helpful. And then on the FLNG side, obviously, it's an asset class that previous owners are Golar, people who have followed the industry are going to be vaguely familiar with. You've got a pretty novel solution there. And integrating those volumes certainly is a helpful backstop that what would typically be a high degree of commercial risk associated with those kind of assets. I noticed -- I'm trying to find the slide or -- I jotted it down in my notes that I think you've got for a pro forma or kind of a long-term figure of 6 to 7, maybe targeted FLNG assets. Obviously, there'd be an awful lot of volumes to put through your own system and I would apply a ton of downstream growth. Is the right idea there that you guys are -- are you guys pursuing a third-party commercialization effort there as well as looking to -- for those volumes into your own network? And if so, is that something you're pursuing now? Or is that something you'll pursue if and when needed? Just a little bit of color there because your approach here is obviously a little bit unique relative to what we've seen from independent operators in the past?

Yes. I think we have the downstream needs for it right now. So either Kasciandro like use the phone lines and his contacts and the marketplace to help us source supply or we'll do it ourselves. I think the simple answer is let's walk before we run. We want to get one of these up, get proof of concept. We know that it actually works. We want to build it ourselves, get it deployed and generated to have seen great confidence on what the economics of it and the time lines are. And I do think that the application for this could be much broader than that, right? The resource base offshore is gigantic. And it really is the parallel that I use is the FSRU. That seemed like a very novel and adventurous strategy when Golar and Hygo and others were engaged in originally 15 years ago, but now it's very mainstream. I predict this will be very mainstream. I think you're buying -- the marine assets we're buying, we paid $31 million for jackup rigs that cost $500-plus million new. So you're buying them for basically scrap value because you really just want the deck space to put your liquification onto it. And then the ability to then stick that in the middle of the ocean where the gas resources are. So look, I think the potential for the floating LNG is tremendous. And I think that the ability to access it next year is -- that's our time frame. It gives us a very unique perspective on it. So let's get one or two of these built and deployed and producing, and then we'll see. But I think it's a big, big component of integrating at least in motion of our supply. So -- but no, we're not -- I mean, you asked the question, we are not like considering any commercial sources. We don't need to sell it to anybody else. We have ample demand ourselves. So that's not a need. So...

One more, and I'll turn it over, just on the renewable side and some helpful detail on your push into blue ammonia. Just curious in terms of maybe how and why you landed on blue ammonia or ammonia in general as the preferred hydrogen carrier versus methanol? And then in terms of maybe that development, how much of that was reverse inquiry from customers that are looking to potentially diversify away from LNG eventually? I know there's been a bunch of investment in Korea and Japan to that end in terms of fuel cells and propulsion and whatnot, looking at ammonia specifically. So a little bit of color there would be helpful.

Dan?

Yes. The ammonia versus methanol, I would say ammonia is just quicker. Quicker, lower cost to enter, easier to make. Methanol is a more advanced process, so get into the business quicker. There is demand out there, and it is rapidly developing. So in response to your second question is yes, absolutely, reverse inquiry from customers on the industrial side and the transportation side. Ammonia, as a carrier for hydrogen, I mean the railroad space, something we know a lot about here at Fortress. I mean Class I railroads are all rapidly developing hydrogen fuel cell technology. And they need hydrogen to do that. Transporting hydrogen to rail yards and throughout the country in the form of hydrogen is difficult and expensive. It's just much easier to do in the form of ammonia, and then you can crack it relatively simply when you get to the rail yard and provide the hydrogen. So it just -- it is the most actionable and investable opportunity right here and right now. And the economics are good today, and they are clearly going to get better over time.

Yes. And I think that the solution that we looked at, to me, the requirement was it had to be something that could be scalable and really substantial in size, right? I didn't want to do something that was a hobby or something that was like and have a modest outcome because we're really trying to do something meaningful. I mean my goal is to be an emissions-free company by 2030, and that sounds aggressive. And tell you to look at what's happening around the world, it doesn't seem so aggressive to me at all. And I personally think that when people have sustainability goals in 2050, what they have done is pick the date that is beyond their expected life span. And so they don't have any accountability to that. So I could say 2050, but I think that, that's kind of the -- that's kind of a ridiculous position to take. So we said we want something that actually could be substantial in size, something that could be actionable now that could have a meaningful impact on that pie chart of the 51 billion tons. And hydrogen is clearly the answer from my standpoint. But Hydrogen itself is a problem to transport. We know a lot about transporting stuff. And so if you just combine it with nitrogen from air, you end up with NH3, now you've got something you can burn. You look at it. You could burn it in combustion engines right now, by the way. No, just as is. So we know on the turbine side, the GE, Siemens, every turbine manufacturer in the world is trying to figure out how to come up with a solution to it. We know MAN Engine, they're talking about using for ammonia is something under development that's been very, very seriously considered by the shipping industry. So I think that all signs lead towards this being a very mainstream activity. The small point right now is that it's not commercially as attractive as it will be, but once the carbon taxes kick in, I think it will push that a lot more. Because at the end of the day, look at it from a power standpoint, $240 a ton equates to about, what, kind of $8.50, $9 in MMBtu equivalent gas. So you can buy natural gas for your power plant in the United States, the most kind of competitive market in the world that maybe $4 or $5, maybe $6 max, you're now at $8 or $9 for ammonia. Well, it's more expensive, but it's not that much more expensive. It doesn't take that much more in terms of carbon taxes or equity -- there's two things to happen. If the companies are producing electricity, got paid a much higher equity value because they are emissions-free that would make them a much better buyer of it. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, if the governments are really active about imposing carbon taxes, that would make the fossil fuel equivalent of my $4, $5, $6 gas be more expensive and it close that gap. So I don't think it takes a lot of imagination to imagine a world where those two things could -- those lines could cross. And the ammonia thing, it's just not that complicated. The SMR process, I mean, I said this once before. The worldwide market for hydrogen last year, our estimate is $125 billion. Worldwide market for LNG was about $90 billion. So it's actually a bigger market in hydrogen today. So it's not some theoretical market at all, and it's made through SMR. If you carbon capture that, you now have a clean product. And so I think there's a very, very addressable market for it. And Ken said, our path is going to be -- either we're going to buy a plant or we're going to build a plant, right, and we're agnostic. I guess if I could buy it, I'd rather buy it because I wouldn't have to build it, right? So -- but it's not a hard thing to do. And then we just -- the big thing is then what's the downstream offtake of this thing that's going to make it work? I think it's going to be there. I really do. I think that, that is an absolute surefire thing. So...

Got you. Yes. I'll take -- I've got -- yes, I'd love to keep the conversation going offline on downstream opportunities here, but appreciate the time, guys.

The last thing because we're out of time here. Just one of the other questions, which I didn't write in a piece of paper, I get asked all the time, is the overhanging issues from some of our other large shareholders. And so first and foremost, any of our shareholders that own a lot of the stock, own a stock because they paid for it, and it's absolutely 100% their right to do whatever it is. I talked at length with Tor Olav and the Golar guys. I spoke to him about it yesterday, and he said, I just want to express real support for the company and what we're doing. We view Tor not only to be a friend, but also a partner. There's a lot of things we could do in particular on the FLNG side together. And he said, absolutely, we're not a seller of our stock right now. So you can talk to Tor about that. We have conversations with Stonepeak, with the big pension front they made big investments. They'll make their own decision on it. I think that -- and my goal really is to create as much transparency around that and accommodate people. So if they want liquidity, and they want to get it out, we'll get it out. All I can do from my standpoint is try and be as clear as I can be about what we think our needs for equity capital are, which is what -- one of my rhetorical questions is like, how are we going to pay for all of this? And we think we've got a very, very, very simple and very executable plan to do so. And so the circumstances can always change, but I feel very good about our prospects for self-financing effectively. And then the rest of it will take care of itself. But I think there's a very compelling case valuation-wise. We're going to spend time with investors and try and make our case on that side. And most importantly, we're going to come to work every day and try and make all these projections that we have here turn into reality. So thanks, again, for everybody for dialing in and spending the time with us. And we look forward to following up with you, and we'll talk to you on our earnings call here in a couple of weeks. Great.

Thank you, operator.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.