Outlook for 2024 and beyond
Delivering our strategy will require clear and deliberate capital allocation choices. We intend to focus on investing in businesses where we believe we have an enduring competitive advantage. The outlook for cash capital spending in 2024 and 2025 is in the $22-25 billion per year range. Additionally, we aim to reduce structural costs by $2-3 billion by the end of 2025, compared with 2022.
Our target for shareholder distributions is 30-40% of cash flow from operations through the cycle. We may return cash to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share buybacks. We increased our dividend per share in 2023 and it is now 25% higher than the dividends for 2022. Subject to Board approval, we aim to grow the dividend per share by around 4% every year. When setting the level of shareholder distributions, the Board looks at a range of factors, including the macro environment, our underlying business earnings and cash flow, the current balance sheet, future investment, acquisition, and divestment plans and existing commitments.
In 2023, we renewed our focus on performance, discipline and simplification. We intend to demonstrate delivery of our targets, while strengthening the foundation of our lower-carbon businesses.
Recent times have been a stark reminder that energy security cannot be taken for granted. We support a balanced energy transition, where the world does not dismantle the current energy system faster than the clean energy system of the future can be built.
We are committed to our liquefied natural gas (LNG) business and growing it with some of the lowest emissions in our industry. We will increase capacity for our LNG portfolio by around 11 million tonnes per year in the second half of the decade – that is an annual increase of more than a quarter of our current capacity. LNG plays an important role as a lower-carbon alternative to coal and as a partner to wind and solar power for electricity generation. Our Upstream business aims to keep liquids production levels flat, while producing oil with lower emissions. We will be transforming our Downstream, Renewables and Energy Solutions business to offer more low-carbon solutions, while reducing sales of oil products.
The statements in this "Outlook" section are forward-looking statements based on management's current expectations and certain material assumptions and, accordingly, involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied herein.
