Seifollah Ghasemi
Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer at Air Products and Chemicals
Thank you, Simon, and good day to everyone. Thank you for taking time from your very busy schedule to be on our call today. I want to begin by saying a few words regarding Air Products' response to the current situation in Eastern Europe. We are deeply concerned by the human tragedy in Ukraine and the impact that this conflict has on the world. We condemn this aggression and encourage all efforts for peace.
Our hearts go out to those affected and we are continuing to support our employees in this region. As a company, we are providing humanitarian support including assistance to the International Committee of the Red Cross from the Air Products Fund Foundation. Our employees have also responded with care and generosity, reaching out to their affected colleagues and making contributions to various organizations supporting relief efforts.
Our presence in Ukraine is minimum with about $5 million in sales last fiscal year, and we have suspended the development of a small separation unit in the country. Our businesses in Russia is also very small with less than $25 million in sales last fiscal year. We are in the process of exiting Russia and will stop doing business in that country. Now before we get into the details, I want to thank each and everyone about 20,000 employees around the world for their hard work, commitment and dedication to operational excellence and to serving our customers.
Last quarter, despite the very difficult conditions caused by war, significant inflation in energy costs, supply chain disruptions and lingering effects of the COVID-19 virus, our people delivered strong results with an earnings per share of $2.38, which is 14% higher than the previous year. As always, our people's commitment and dedication is our competitive advantage as we move forward. Now please look at Slide number three, focusing on safety which is our highest priority.
Our second quarter safety performance was similar to last quarter, but still behind last year. Although we are proud of the fact that we have made significant progress in this area over the past few years, this result is not acceptable. Our goal remains zero accidents and zero incidents, and we are committed to achieving that goal across the organization. Slides number four to number seven include our goal, our management velocity and our five plans for moving forward. And we have also included our higher purpose slide to explain what we are trying to do every day when we come to work. We have shared these slides with investors many times before, but we always have them as part of our package to emphasize the point that these are the principles that we will follow every day, and they will continue to guide us as we move forward.
As we have explained to our investors in the past, our strategy for moving forward is based on two pillars. The first is absolute excellence in running our existing industrial gases business. That is to operate with the greatest efficiency and productivity, invest and maintain our market share and improve pricing to compensate for inflation.
Our results that we have just announced confirm that we are successfully implementing this strategy, since we are delivering strong results under very difficult and challenging circumstances. The second pillar of our strategy for the future is to take advantage of our unique technologies and expertise to be a meaningful player in the significant worldwide effort to transition to clean energy.
Specifically in this area, we are focused on developing and executing mega projects to produce blue and green hydrogen and other sustainable fuels for the world. In summary, this explains the content of the almost $20 billion of projects that we have in our backlog, and there are more of these projects to come. In the second quarter of fiscal year '22, we announced projects that confirm in a significant way our commitment to these two strategic pillars.
First, in our base business, as you can see on Slide number eight, we announced $1.3 billion of investment in two major projects for the electronic industry. These are real mega projects with long-term take-or-pay contracts with some of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world. We are proud to be executing these projects that confirm our significant position in the semiconductor industry.
As related to the second pillar of our strategy, as you can see on the Slide number nine, we announced that we are building a $2 billion facility in Southern California to convert a conventional refinery to one that produces sustainable aviation fuel called SAF. This facility will use as its raw material renewed organic material such as base cooking oil, animal fats, etc., and use substantial amount of hydrogen to convert these raw materials to fuel for airplanes.
The total capacity of this plant will be approximately 340 million gallons per year. Although this sounds like a big number, in 2019, world jet fuel consumption was more than 100 billion gallons. The Board airlines are looking to decarbonize. Major corporations in the Board are focused on reducing the carbon emissions generated by their airline business travel. And there are already significant incentives in place to encourage the move towards sustainable aviation fuel.
This is the fundamental reason aligned with our strategy to pursue this opportunity. We started developing this project three years ago in partnership with World Energy, a private company that is currently the leading producer of sustainable airlines fuel. Our agreement is that Air Products will engineer, build and own the facility and World Energy will provide the raw material.
World Energy will also sell the project -- the product and has a contractual commitment to pay Air Products a fixed fee that ensures an acceptable return on Air Products investment. We are very excited about these projects since it also uses a significant amount of hydrogen that we can supply from our established and extensive hydrogen pipeline in Southern California.
Our partner in this project, World Energy, is a private company. So I know and fully appreciate that there is little information available about them in the public domain. We have permission from the principles of the company to disclose the following information, which can be found on Slide number 10. This information is self-explanatory and we are delighted to work with World Energy on this great project.
I'd just like to point out that on the bottom of Slide number 10, we have included sales and profitability numbers, $400 million sales and $54 million of profit. That is just for the products that World Energy sells out of the Paramount refinery that we are converting today. In addition to that, World Energy has the capacity in their other plants in America and Canada to produce 150 million gallons a year of biodiesel.
The sales number and profitability of those numbers are not disclosed. I also want to report to you at this time that we continue to make good progress in building and bringing on stream key mega projects that we have already announced. Slide number 11 highlights the major projects that we expect to bring on stream in 2023. Now I would like to take a moment to reflect on our performance over the past eight years.
In July 2014, during my first conference call with investors as Chairman, President and CEO of Air Products, I promised the shareholders that our goal was to deliver over the long term a 10% per year average cumulative growth in Air Products earnings per share. On Slide 12, you can see that for the past eight years, we have delivered more than what we promised eight years ago. And our goal for the future is to continue to deliver similar results as we move forward.
On Slide 13, you can see that we have shared the positive growth with our investors and increase our dividend on average 10% per year over the last eight years. And finally, please turn to Slide number 14, still my favorite slide. It shows our EBITDA margin since 2014. Despite all of the turmoil in the Board, significant energy, cost inflation and supply chain disruptions, our EBITDA margin last quarter was almost a 1,000 basis points higher than in 2014.
Now it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Melissa to discuss our results in more details. Melissa?
