Peter Vanacker
Chief Executive Officer at LyondellBasell Industries
Thank you, Dave, and welcome to all of you. We appreciate your joining us today as we discuss our second quarter 2022 results. Let's begin with a short introduction of myself on Slide number 3. I'm very grateful to be here on my first earnings call since becoming CEO of LyondellBasell on May 23. I grew up in Belgium and undertook an education as a chemical engineer with a specialization in polymer engineering.
During my more than 32 years in the chemical industry, I've had the pleasure of working with LyondellBasell as a customer, a supplier and a partner. During my time with Bayer, we invested in Lyondell's technology and assets while forming joint ventures for the production of propylene oxide. At Treofan, LyondellBasell was our largest polypropylene suppliers. And at Neste, we partnered with LyondellBasell to achieve the world's first commercial production of polyethylene and polypropylene from sustainable bio-based feedstocks.
Since joining the Board of Directors in February and as starting as CEO in May, I have been meeting extensively with stakeholders around the world to learn more about how LyondellBasell has been so successful in creating value. More importantly, we have been asking ourselves how to best position the company to sustainably capture further value for years to come.
I've always admired LyondellBasell's rich legacy of innovation and technology development and I am pleased to confirm that our commitment and passion for safety and operational excellence are deeply embedded in our culture. These qualities will serve as well as work gets underway to advance our capabilities to capture latent value embedded within the company and establish LyondellBasell as a leader in serving the world's growing needs for circular and sustainable materials while reducing our carbon footprint.
As Dave mentioned, additional members of our Executive Committee will join our earnings calls starting today. I believe that it is important for our investors to get to know our excellent leaders at LyondellBasell better, and I'm really impressed by this team, their market knowledge and leadership and their passion for safety and value creation.
Let's now turn to slide number 4 to discuss our excellent results during the second quarter. I am very happy with the outstanding work that LyondellBasell's leadership and employees have accomplished. This is a great way to start, and gives me a lot of confidence for the future. Our businesses delivered strong earnings and cash generation during the second quarter, and driven by record results from our Intermediates & Derivatives segment, and strong Refining margins.
LyondellBasell's broad portfolio provided clear benefits as revenue grew sequentially by 13% while margins expanded to support a more than 20% improvement in EBITDA. Earnings were $5.19 per share and EBITDA was $2.5 billion, which resulted in $1.6 billion of cash from operating activities. Altogether, our company generated an impressive 24% return on invested capital over the last 12 months.
Let's turn to slide number 5 and review our safety performance. LyondellBasell's commitment to safety leadership is outstanding and well known. As CEO, I will make sure that safety remains a consistent and unwavering cornerstone of our company's culture. During my career, I have witnessed that companies that are leaders in safety are also best in class in reliability and productivity, and as a result, in value creation. In 2022 the year-to-date total recordable incident rate for our global workforce improved by more than 40% to 0.12. This represents substantial progress toward our ultimate goal of zero injuries. I want to commend all of our employees and contractors for their clear commitments to Goal Zero.
On slide number 6 we highlight some of our recent progress towards our sustainability goals. LyondellBasell's products, technologies and solutions provides very important contributions to a more sustainable world. In addition, we have committed to industry-leading sustainability targets that improve this value. Over the past few weeks we signed four renewable power purchase agreements for 380 megawatts of electrical generation capacity in Texas.
These wind and solar projects will be able to supply more than 10% of LyondellBasell's global electricity needs, and represents meaningful progress towards the company's climate goals to procure a minimum of 50% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2030. These projects are expected to reduce the company's annual carbon dioxide emissions approximately 370,000 tons and represents the average annual electricity needs from about 100,000 U.S. homes.
In addition to our renewable energy goals, LyondellBasell is growing our production of plastics, utilizing renewable feedstocks under our CirculenRenew brand. Last year, we processed 12,000 tons of renewable feedstock in Europe, and we are forecasting to increase this number to 40,000 tons across both Europe and United States during 2022. This material is being run through our existing ethylene cracker assets in Wesseling, Germany and Channelview, Texas with the goal to increase scale over the coming years since we see that the demand for these products is growing.
The growth of renewable feedstocks is one part of our broader mission to expand the reach of our sustainable products, including those sold under the Circulen brand. Since launching our Circulen brand in 2019, we have sold over 140,000 tons of products based on recycled and renewable feedstocks. This represents more than the amount of polyethylene and polypropylene consumed by the population of Houston in one year. LyondellBasell is doing more than simply talking about the circular economy. We are building real businesses that can help provide a more sustainable future for our customers and society.
Please turn to slide number 7 to review our quarterly profitability. During the second quarter, our business portfolio delivered $2.5 billion of EBITDA, an improvement of $430 million compared to the prior quarter. LyondellBasell's results reflect how our global business portfolio can serve changing consumer needs. As in-person activities resumes and global travel recovers our Oxyfuels and refining businesses are benefiting from increased demand.
Strong North American demand and favorable naphtha costs supported margins for our products in the Americas and Europe, respectively while higher ethane and energy costs as well as inflation, created headwinds in these regions. We started to see moderating European demand due to high inflation at the end of the second quarter and continue to pass through elevated energy and feedstock costs in the prices of our products where possible.
During the quarter, China's zero-COVID measures and logistics constraints continued to impact both regional and global markets. We expect progress in China will continue to be challenging over the next few months, but anticipate that demand will recover towards the end of 2022.
Let us turn to slide number 8 and review LyondellBasell's earnings over the course of the first complete business cycle for our company. From 2011 to 2019, our portfolio of businesses delivered an average of $6.7 billion of EBITDA. Favorable markets and our growing asset base delivered $9.2 billion of EBITDA over the last 12 months, an increase of nearly 40% over the prior cycle average.
With the commissioning of our new propylene oxide capacity underway, we expect that LyondellBasell's stepped up earnings performance will provide resilience through the next business cycle.
And with that, I will turn the call over to Michael first, then to each of our business leaders, who will describe our financial and segment results in more detail.
