Michael McMurray
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at LyondellBasell Industries
Good morning, PJ. Good morning, everyone, and my sincere thanks to you and the entire Citi team for having us back at the conference. And as you said, no doubt, the last two years have been pretty interesting, so an interesting time to change companies.
So before I get to the questions, I wanted to frame our conversation with a few slides. I'm sure this first slide here, everyone has memorized. So, I'm just going to move on.
All right. So LyondellBasell's portfolio of businesses performed very well during the pandemic, and we are now poised to emerge stronger as the global economy moves forward. Over the past two years, demand for most of our products exceeded expectations and historic trends. While transportation, fuels and automotive production have lagged, these markets are now in recovery and much pent-up demand remains ahead.
LyondellBasell stayed the course with our disciplined financial strategy during the pandemic. We leveraged our investment-grade balance sheet to pursue accretive M&A at the bottom of the cycle. We also paid our dividend last year with cash from operations and increased our dividend by 8% this year. In September, we resumed our share repurchases, while continuing our progress towards paying down $4 billion of debt in 2021. With our growth investments reaching completion, LYB is maximizing the cash flows from our larger asset base and sharing the benefits with our investors.
Moving on to Slide 4. Slide 4 provides a snapshot of our last 12 months' performance. Our two, Olefins and Polyolefins segments alone delivered over $6.5 billion of EBITDA. In our Intermediates and Derivatives segment, strong demand and tight markets are driving exceptional margins for our propylene oxide and acetyls products used in furniture, building and construction and other durable goods markets. Our sizable oxyfuels business in this segment should return to more typical profitability during 2022, with improving mobility and lower butane prices.
Our Advanced Polymer Solutions segment adapted to pandemic-related shutdowns of automotive production and chip-related production constraints in 2020 and 2021. We expect demand in this segment will return to pre-pandemic levels during 2022 and 2023. After struggling with unprecedented declines in demand for transportation fuels, our refinery returned to profitability in the third quarter and is expected to post another profitable quarter in the fourth quarter as we finish 2021.
Finally, our Technology division appears to be on track to set another record year, with strong sales of catalyst and polyolefin technology licensing.
Now moving on to Slide 5. On Slide 5, it is very clear that our cash generation in 2021 has rebounded from last year's headwinds and we are on track to post record-free operating cash flow results for the full year. In early November, cash flows were further bolstered by the receipt of nearly $900 million from a tax refund of more than $1 billion related to our 2020 US tax filings.
Our goal is to pay down $4 billion of debt in 2021. And at the end of the third quarter, we had paid down $2.4 billion of debt. And during October, we repaid another $650 million of callable debt. And at November 17, we commenced a tender offer for up to $1 billion of outstanding notes and the tender will get done here in a relatively short-term and we will have reduced gross debt by $4 billion this year.
In addition to bolstering our balance sheet, we are also putting our cash flows to work by repurchasing our shares. As of last Friday, we have repurchased 3.3 million LYB shares since resuming buybacks since September of this year. Our cash flows are strong and more than sufficient to support a safe and growing dividend, a stronger balance sheet and a lower share count.
Moving on to Slide 6. In late September, we announced our increased commitments to help address the global challenges of climate change. Our goal is to achieve a 30% absolute reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2 emissions by 2030, and reach a net zero for these emissions by 2050. Our commitments are based on substantive planning across the company to identify the product -- projects, the technologies and investments required to achieve our ambitious targets.
Our aim is to be a leader in the area of circular plastics by reducing the usage of fossil fuels as a feedstock for our products by increasing the utilization of plastic waste through mechanical and molecular recycling.
We are building new business models for circular plastics with our Circulen products made through mechanical recycling, advanced recycling and renewable feedstocks. Our company is unlikely to invent new technologies for low-carbon energy. Instead, we will be a fast-follower in partnering, licensing and procuring sustainable energy solutions from technology leaders in this space.
On Slide 7, you can see the additional sources of earnings that we have added to our portfolio through reinvestment over the past several years. The estimated EBITDA from these investments do not assume a continuation of today's elevated margins, but instead are based on each of these assets operating at full capacity using historical margins seen from 2017 through 2019.
We believe these years are representative of typical mid-cycle margins for our businesses. By the end of next year when the new PO/TBA facility in Houston is fully operational, these investments will have the capability to add up to $1.5 billion of additional EBITDA to our mid-cycle earnings, a significant step change for LyondellBasell.
On Slide 8, you can see that from 2011 through 2019, our EBITDA averaged approximately $6.5 billion. With our growth projects completed, we think our mid-cycle earnings will see a step change to an average potential of approximately $8 billion over the coming years. 2021 will clearly be higher than this mid-cycle average.
In summary, PJ, we have a lot of momentum with growth underway and a substantive strategy for increasing sustainability across our businesses. We remain true to our core values as a safe, reliable and cost efficient operator. These attributes provide advantage during all phases of economic cycles. Our growth investments are producing a step change in LYB's earning power. We are efficiently converting EBITDA into cash and deploying that cash according to a disciplined capital allocation strategy. We have a dual-commitment to our investment-grade credit rating and ensuring the security of our strong and growing dividend. And finally, we are bolstering shareholder equity by paying down debt and reducing our outstanding share count.
With that, PJ, I would be glad to take your questions.