Seifi Ghasemi
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Air Products and Chemicals
Thank you both, Scott and Melissa, for your comments. And now, let's turn to our business results. The stability of our business and the dedication of our people have been on full display as the talented and committed people at Air Products delivered good results again this quarter. Our people working together have kept our 750 facilities around the world operating and our customers supplied through the COVID-19 pandemic. In support of the hard work and dedication demonstrated by our employees, we have not reduced our staff or cut salaries during this difficult period.
I am proud to say that Air Products is emerging from this crisis and even stronger Company than before. We have continued to acquire new assets and businesses, successfully raised prices, and brought new plans on stream. We have also strengthened our organization by adding resources in various functions, mostly in engineering and project development to help us successfully pursue and execute the many exciting future projects we have in front of us.
At the same time, we also delivered Earnings per Share of $2.31 this quarter, which is 15% higher than last year despite absorbing costs related to our growth-driven development efforts. I am extremely proud of the accomplishments that we have achieved as a team, and I would like to thank all of our employees at Air Products for their dedication and hard work. We continue to execute projects and deliver strong financial results while maintaining our unwavering focus on safety. As slide number 4 shows, despite the challenging COVID-19 conditions, our team continues to focus on working safely, following our strict protocols to help protect themselves, our customers, and our communities.
As always, safety is the most important focus for all of us at Air Products, and our goal will always be 0 accidents and 0 incidents. Slides number 5, 6, and 7 include our goal, our management philosophy, and our 5 point strategic plans. We have seen this before, and these are the principles that we will follow every day and they will continue to guide us in the future. Now, please turn to slide number 8. We believe the environmental sustainability challenges facing the board are significant.
The scope and complexity of the mega projects necessary to address these challenges require talented people with a variety of skills and backgrounds from different parts of the world to work together as one team. As I mentioned earlier, we can solve these problems no matter how challenging as long as we all stay focused and united, working towards a common goal on a global basis.
We believe this is the calling of our Company and the higher purpose for all of us at Air Products. We can all please turn to slide number 9. We recently published an annual sustainability report which highlights our sustainability-driven growth opportunities and our many accomplishments in this area. For instance, our products help our customers avoid 72 million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions.
This means that for every ton of CO2 that we emit in making our products, we help our customers avoid 3 tons of CO2 emissions. In addition, more than half of our offerings are sustainable, and close to one-quarter of our electricity purchases are from renewable sources. We have also set new sustainability goals which are very much aligned with our growth strategy. Our third by 30 goal aims to reduce carbon intensity by one-third by 2030. Our growth opportunities have enabled progress towards this goal. And therefore, we expect to see significant progress later in the decade as our major projects come on stream and start to positively benefit our results. At Air Products, sustainability is our growth strategy. Hence, sustainability and our growth go hand-in-hand. As we strive to solve the world's environmental sustainability problems, we are also creating growth opportunities for the Company.
A prime example of such an opportunity is the innovative, world-class, net-zero hydrogen project in Edmonton, Alberta that we announced last June, and I will talk about a little more later on. Now, please turn to slide number 10, which highlights our key gasification projects. We are committed to our gasification strategy and are pursuing exciting projects around the world. We do expect to announce additional gasification projects in the future.
Now, specifically, I would like to give you an update on the one large gasification projects which I have discussed on previous earning calls. First, our $12 billion acquisition of Jazan Gasifier and Power Plant from Saudi Aramco. We continue to make significant progress working with our partners and the lenders. The team has worked hard to bring the project through the final stages of project financing and we still expect this project to reach final financial close by the end of our fiscal year that is 09/30/2021. Second, regarding Lu'An, the plant is operating at full capacity.
As I mentioned last quarter, we expect to recognize reduced fees through fiscal year '22 before we return to the full fee in 2023. Now, I would like to provide an overview of one new and very exciting developments before I discuss the major announcement we are making today, which is our capital deployment plans for the next six years. Just on slide 11, you can see the overview of our Beta project that we announced last month. This innovative project includes Gasification, Carbon Capture, and Hydrogen. The three pillars of our growth strategy coming together in one project, to support the energy transition. This project is fully aligned with Canada's clean energy diversification strategy and enables Canada to advance its competitive, low-carbon economy. It uses locally available hydrocarbons to make net-zero Hydrogen. As summarized on slide 12, the hydrogen will be produced using other thermal reforming technology, enabling 95% of the CO2 produced by the project to be captured then stored.
To achieve net zero, the remaining 5% carbon footprint will be upset by exporting the electricity generated by just net-zero hydrogen. The output will supply the output, the net-zero hydrogen will be supplied to our customers on our existing pipeline in Alberta as well as used to produce liquid hydrogen for the mobility and merchant markets. The project represents a CAD1.3 billion investment and is expected to come in the stream in 2024. As you can see on slide number 13, we continue to focus on the very exciting hydrogen for the mobility market. And we are pleased to announce a project with Cummins, to accelerate the integration of hydrogen fuel sales trucks globally. Cummins will provide a Hydrogen fuel electric powertrain and integrated it into heavy-duty trucks for Air Products.
As we begin the process of converting our global fleet of 2,000 distribution vehicles to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. We expect the first unit to be online in 2022, and the full conversion before 2030. Now, let me give you the highlights of our significant announcement today. 3.5 years ago, in 2018, we announced publicly that Air Products growth strategy guided by the global energy transition, and based on the three pillars of gasification, carbon capture, and hydrogen had the potential to create significant growth for our Company, and that we could foresee deploying or committing $15 billion of capital in the five years, from 2018 to end of 2022.
At that time, I remember clearly that our announcement was received within a degree of skepticism. Now today, I'm happy to show you as you can see on slide number 14, that we have deployed or committed almost $18 billion of capital, 1.5 years ahead of our plan. And I want to state that on the aggregate, the return on this capital is in line with the guidance we have given our investors before. This validates our long-term strategy.
But now that we are ahead of the plan, the question raised by our investors was, What about the future? I had promised the investors that we would address this question sometime during the summer of 2021. So here we are today, summer of 2021, announcing as you can see on slide 15 that based on what we see ahead, implementing our 4th focused strategy and based on a conservative estimate of our financial capacity, Air Products expects to deploy or commit more than $30 billion of capital for the 10 years, from 2018 to the end of 2027. Later in this call, Scott will go through the details.
But today, I wanted to make the point that as before, we are pursuing a growth strategy. We do have the right strategy to move forward. We are aided by the megatrends of the energy transition. We have the people and the core competencies. And we have the financial strength to make our dream a reality and deliver on what we promised our investors. Now please turn to slide 16, which shows our EPS growth. As you can see, we have delivered greater than 10% annual EPS growth since 2014 when I was appointed Chairman, President, and CEO of the Company.
These results are a testament to the hard work and commitment of the people of Air Products and I want to thank them again for their continued hard work and commitment. Now, please turn to slide number 17, a reminder that we share our Earnings growth via our investors. Both our EPS and dividends have grown double-digits since 2014. We are committed to delivering increased dividends while we continue to develop our exciting growth opportunities. We have significant cash flow that supports our substantial dividends and our growth strategy. And finally, slide number 18 shows our EBITDA margins. As always, my favorite slide. There it shows that the margins is up 1,200 basis points since 2014.
Now I'm happy to turn the call over to Scott to provide a financial overview. Scott.
