Darren W. Woods
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Exxon Mobil
Thanks, Stephen. It's a pleasure to share our 2021 results with you today which demonstrates the significant progress we've made to advance our strategy and position the Company to sustainably grow shareholder value.
Our effective pandemic response, focused investments during the down cycle and structural cost savings positioned us to realize the full benefit of the market recovery last year. We delivered strong financial and operating performance, significantly increased earnings and cash flow to fund our advantaged investments, reduced debt to pre-pandemic levels and continued our long history of sharing our success with shareholders.
Today, we'll outline some of our progress towards reaching our strategic goals, to lead in earnings and cash flow growth, drive to a net-zero future, build successful lower-emissions businesses, and maintain optionality in our portfolio to match the pace of the energy transition.
Let me touch on a couple of key points. First, we're working to fully leverage our competitive advantages, including our scale, to drive step changes in cost and efficiency. We're also actively managing our strong portfolio and continuing our keen focus on operating performance and disciplined capital and operating spend. We're also accelerating our work to reduce emissions and drive innovations focused on the hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as heavy industry and commercial transportation.
An important part of this activity is our ambition to achieve net-zero emissions from our operations by 2050. Also important is the good progress we've made building our Low Carbon Solutions business which is rapidly expanding, utilizing existing policy. As you're all aware, we're also pursuing very large-scale opportunities that will give us first-mover advantage as we advocate for the new policy necessary to support these step-out projects.
Our results demonstrate the benefits of the actions we've taken. We're continuing to manage and evolve the Company to further strengthen our competitive advantages, growing value through the transition, regardless of its pace.
Turning now to some perspectives in 2021. As I said, we've made tremendous progress advancing our strategy over the past year. We remained focused on safety and reliability, delivering a second consecutive year of outstanding performance. In emission reductions, we expect to meet our 2025 reduction plans four years early. That led us to set even more aggressive plans for 2030. The experience we gained developing reduction roadmaps for our assets gives us confidence for what we can ultimately achieve. This helped form the basis of our recently announced ambition to achieve net-zero emissions in our operations by 2050.
Of course a big part of our work in this area involved our Low Carbon Solutions business. As I mentioned, this new business has made exceptional progress building a large inventory of new business opportunities with a focus on carbon capture, hydrogen and biofuels. Importantly, we're also addressing emissions by providing high-performance products that deliver solutions to help our customers reduce their emissions. Demand for these products was very strong in 2021, enabling 7% growth in our performance product volumes. This helped drive record annual earnings in our Chemical business.
Strengthening our portfolio across all of our businesses continues to be a key part of our strategic focus to increase shareholder returns. To that end, we had more exploration success in Guyana with six discoveries in 2021 and two additional discoveries already this year. This has expanded the estimated recoverable resource on the Stabroek block to more than 10 billion oil-equivalent barrels and we're on schedule to start production this quarter at Liza Phase 2.
In the Permian, we continued to drive improvements in drilling and completions, increasing average productions by nearly 100,000 oil-equivalent barrels [Phonetic] per day to approximately 460,000. We started up the Corpus Christi Chemical facility under budget and ahead of schedule. And we've continued to monetize non-core assets, generating more than $3 billion of cash proceeds from divestments during the year. Our actions are yielding strong results and, as I said, positioned us to benefit from demand recovery. We grew earnings to $23 billion and drove nearly $2 billion of structural efficiencies in 2021 on top of the $3 billion the year before. This puts us in a good position to significantly exceed our goal of $6 billion of structural cost savings per year by 2023, relative to 2019.
We maintained our disciplined approach to investments, focused on competitively advantaged low-cost-of-supply opportunities and on growing our portfolio of high-value products. Capex was $16.6 billion for the year, which was near the low end of our guidance.
As a result of our cost reductions, improved efficiency, and capital discipline, we've lowered our Brent breakeven price to $41 per barrel. We're continuing to drive that down even more, expecting to average $35 a barrel between now and 2027.
Cash flow from operating activities increased to $48 billion, the highest since 2012. We used the available cash to restore our balance sheet, essentially paying back what we borrowed in 2020, reducing our debt-to-capital ratio to about 21%. As a result of our restored financial strength, we increased the annual dividend for the 39th consecutive year and announced a $10 billion share repurchase program that started last month. Overall, a strong list of accomplishments.
Now looking ahead to this year. Our plan is robust and progresses our strategic objectives. I'll highlight a few key items on this page. First, we will increase our competitively advantaged low-cost-of-supply production with the startup of Liza Phase 2 in Guyana and the Coral LNG development in Mozambique. The same is true for the Permian where our focus remains on driving further capital efficiency and high-value growth.
We're already ramping up manufacturing at Corpus Christi, and expecting to startup our Baton Rouge polypropylene expansion later this year. These projects will continue to grow production of our high-value chemical performance products. We're applying the same capabilities and expertise developed over decades to progress our net-zero ambitions and grow our Low Carbon Solutions business. In that business, we expect to reach final investment decisions on large-scale carbon capture and storage projects at LaBarge, Wyoming, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
We're continuing to advance the flagship carbon capture opportunity in Houston. It now has 14 participating companies and has the potential to capture up to 100 million metric tons of CO2 per year by 2040. We also anticipate beginning to lift renewable diesel from our agreement with Global Clean Energy's biorefinery in California later this year, as well as making a final investment decision on our renewable diesel project at our Strathcona refinery in Canada, expanding our lower-emission fuels offering.
And finally, we expect to further strengthen our balance sheet, and progress our share repurchase program while continuing to retain capital flexibility and optionality to adapt to market conditions and opportunities.
Leveraging our core competitive advantages, we're well positioned for future success, irrespective of the path or pace. We have the flexibility to shift resources between our traditional and low-carbon businesses at any rate required. This provides a lot of optionality and positions us to lead industry in the energy transition and in earnings and cash flow growth.
We thank you for joining us today and look forward to sharing more with you during our Investor Day on March 2. Unfortunately, because of ongoing COVID considerations, we'll conduct the events virtually again this year. We do look forward to the day when we can get back to hosting you all in person.
Before we take your questions, I'd like to take a moment to thank Stephen for his leadership and significant contributions. As after 30 years of service, he will be retiring at the end of this month. I wish Stephen and his wife, Kim, the very best. You'll be missed. I'd also like to welcome Jennifer Driscoll, who will be joining later this month as our Vice President of Investor Relations.
