We have Ryan Lance, our chairman and CEO; Bill Bullock, executive vice president and chief financial officer; Dominic Macklon, executive vice president of strategy, sustainability, and technology; Tim Leach, executive vice president of Lower 48; and Nick Olds, executive vice president for global operations.
We produced 1.6 million barrels per day and brought first production online at GMT2 in Alaska, the third Montney well pad, and the Malikai Phase 2 and S&P Phase 2 projects in Malaysia.
Financially, we achieved a 14% full-year return on capital employed or 16% on a cash-adjusted basis and generated $15.7 billion in CFO, with over $10 billion in free cash flow.
And we returned $6 billion to our shareholders, representing 38% of our cash from operations.
In the Asia Pacific region, we exercised our pre-emption right to acquire an additional 10% in APLNG and announced the sale of assets in Indonesia for $1.4 billion.
In the Lower 48, we generated $0.3 billion in proceeds from the sale of noncore assets last year, and last week, we signed an agreement to sell an additional property set, outside of our core areas for an additional $440 million.
Collectively, these transactions reduced both the average cost of supply and the GHG intensity of our more than 20-billion-barrel resource base and we're well down the road toward achieving our $4 billion to $5 billion in dispositions by 2023.
We also introduced a new variable return of cash, or VROC, tiered to our distribution framework and provided a full-year target of $7 billion in total returns of capital to our shareholders.
Based on current prices on the forward curve, we've increased the target to $8 billion, with the incremental $1 billion coming in the form of increased share repurchases and a higher variable return of cash.
The $0.30 per share VROC announced for the second quarter represents a 50% increase over our inaugural variable return to shareholders that we paid this quarter.
Now, to put the $8 billion in perspective, it equates to an increase of more than 30% from the $6 billion returned last year and a greater than 50% increase in projected cash return to shareholders.
We need to generate competitive returns on and of capital for our shareholders and achieve our Paris-aligned net-zero ambition by 2050.
We increased our medium-term emissions intensity reduction target to 40% to 50% by 2030 and expanded it to include both gross operated and net equity production.
And as highlighted in our December release, we've allocated $0.2 billion of this year's capital program for projects to reduce the company's Scope 1 and 2 emissions intensity and investments in several early stage, low-carbon opportunities that address end-use emissions.
Looking at fourth-quarter earnings, we generated $2.27 per share in adjusted earnings.
Lower 48 production averaged 818,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day for the quarter, including 483,000 from the Permian, 213,000 from the Eagle Ford and 100,000 from the Bakken.
As previously communicated, our Permian and overall Lower 48 production were both increased roughly 40,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the quarter due to the conversion from two- to three-stream accounting for the acquired Concho assets.
At the end of the year, we had 20 operated drilling rigs and nine frac crews working in the Lower 48, including those developing the acreage we recently acquired from Shell.
Turning to cash from operations, we generated $5.5 billion in CFO, excluding working capital, resulting in free cash flow of $3.9 billion in the quarter.
For the full year 2021, we generated $15.7 billion in CFO, $10.4 billion of free cash flow, and returned $6 billion to shareholders.
In addition to the asset dispositions Ryan covered, we also sold 117 million shares we held in Synovis in the year, generating $1.1 billion in proceeds that we used to fund repurchases of our own shares.
This left us with a little over 90 million Synovis shares at the end of the year, which we intend to fully monetize by the end of this quarter.
We ended the year with over $5 billion in cash, maintaining our differential balance sheet strength, even after completing the all-cash acquisition of Shell's Delaware Basin assets.
Our businesses are running very well around the globe, and we have had an overall reserve replacement ratio of nearly 380%, establishing an incredibly powerful platform for the company as we head into this year and beyond.
Now, demonstrating this point and appreciating that it's helpful for the market to have an accurate sense of our stronger CFO generating capacity, at a WTI price of $75 a barrel with a $3 differential to Brent and a Henry Hub price of $3.75, we estimate our 2022 full-year cash from operations would be approximately $21 billion, which reflects us reentering a tax-paying position in the U.S. this year at those price levels.
And our free cash flow for the year would be roughly $14 billion.

Summary:
Based on current prices on the forward curve, we've increased the target to $8 billion, with the incremental $1 billion coming in the form of increased share repurchases and a higher variable return of cash.
Now, to put the $8 billion in perspective, it equates to an increase of more than 30% from the $6 billion returned last year and a greater than 50% increase in projected cash return to shareholders.
And as highlighted in our December release, we've allocated $0.2 billion of this year's capital program for projects to reduce the company's Scope 1 and 2 emissions intensity and investments in several early stage, low-carbon opportunities that address end-use emissions.
Looking at fourth-quarter earnings, we generated $2.27 per share in adjusted earnings.
We ended the year with over $5 billion in cash, maintaining our differential balance sheet strength, even after completing the all-cash acquisition of Shell's Delaware Basin assets.