Atlas Energy Solutions - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 2024 revenue declined 10.9% sequentially to $271.3M as Permian seasonal slowdown and lower pricing reduced product sales; adjusted EBITDA of $63.2M fell 11.1% q/q, while net income improved to $14.4M on lower cost of sales.
• Mix held up: services (logistics) revenue was $142.9M, down 10.2% q/q, while product sales were $128.4M, down 11.6% q/q; sales volumes fell 15% to 5.1M tons, with average realized pricing pressured by the RFP season.
• 2025 setup: management guided Q1 2025 adjusted EBITDA to $75–85M, volumes +10–15% q/q, 2025 capex ≈$115M (incl. $27M for Moser), ASP “low $20s,” and logistics margins stepping to mid–high 20s by Q3 as Dune Express ramps; dividend raised to $0.25/share.
• Catalysts: Dune Express ramp to full effective utilization by midyear, growing 100% customer volume commitments, and distributed power platform (Moser) that may dampen cash flow volatility; balance sheet was fortified via $264.5M equity raise and a $540M term loan refi.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Dune Express commissioning and ramp progressing; company already near 50–60% capacity, targeting full effective utilization by midyear; logistics margins expected to lift as Dune volumes grow.
• Strong contracting and customer traction: ~22M tons already committed for 2025 (targeting >25M tons), some customers committing 100% of 2025 volumes to Atlas; ASP for 2025 guided to “low $20s” reflecting stability from contracted mix.
• Dividend and strategic expansion: dividend increased to $0.25/share; acquisition of Moser (distributed power) adds more stable production-phase exposure and potential for organic growth to ~310 MW by end-2026.

What Went Wrong

• Q4 volumes and pricing softness: volumes fell 15% q/q to 5.1M tons; average realized pricing declined amid seasonal slowdown and RFP dynamics, weighing on revenue and adjusted EBITDA.
• Elevated costs and operational headwinds: plant OpEx/ton of $12.02 remained above normalized levels due to lower throughput and prior optimization initiatives (though expected to normalize as volumes recover).
• Market backdrop: Q4 reflected desperate pricing by distressed competitors; although behavior is normalizing, management expects only gradual sand pricing improvement, likely late in the year, and is watching for supply attrition among underutilized mines.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Welcome to Atlas Energy Solutions' fourth quarter and year-end 2024 financial and operational results conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow a formal presentation. If anyone requires operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Kyle Turlington (VP of Investor Relations)

Hello and welcome to the Atlas Energy Solutions Conference Call and Webcast for the fourth quarter of 2024. With us today are Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, John Turner, President and CEO, Blake McCarthy, CFO, and Chris Scholla, COO. Bud, John, Blake, and Chris will be sharing their comments on the company's operational and financial performance for the fourth quarter of 2024, after which we will open the call for Q&A. Before we begin our prepared remarks, I would like to remind everyone that this call will include forward-looking statements as defined under the U.S. securities laws. Such statements are based on the current information and management's expectations as of this statement and are not guarantees of future performance. Forward-looking statements involve certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict, as such our actual outcomes and results could differ materially.

You can learn more about these risks in the annual report on Form 10-K we filed with the SEC on February 27, 2024, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and current reports on Form 8-K and other SEC filings. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements. We will also make reference to certain non-GAAP financial measures such as Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Free Cash Flow, and other operating metrics and statistics. You will find the GAAP reconciliation comments and calculations in yesterday's press release. With that said, I will turn the call over to John Turner.

John Turner (President and CEO)

Thank you, Kyle, and thanks to everyone for joining us today to discuss our full year and fourth quarter 2024 operational and financial results. 2025 is set to be a transformational year for Atlas, and we have come out of the box at a full sprint. On January 12, we announced our first commercial delivery off the Dune Express. Our team is now focused on ramping our volumes, working towards our goal of full effective utilization by mid-year, if not sooner. Additionally, on January 24, we announced that we had delivered 100 loads of proppant utilizing our first two robo trucks, which are semi-trucks equipped with a self-driving system enabled through our partnership with Kodiak Robotics. By the end of this month, we expect the number to have grown to approximately 300 loads.

I want to take a minute to look back to Atlas' IPO in March of 2023 and demonstrate how much has changed since that time. At the time of our IPO, the Dune Express was just a 42-mile ride away. Today, we are making commercial deliveries off the second-longest conveyor ever built. We encountered quite a few eye rolls when we said we were going to bring autonomous driving technology to the oil fields of West Texas and New Mexico. Today, Atlas is now running the world's first commercial driverless delivery operation and will soon be doing autonomous deliveries off the Dune Express. The concept of multi-trailer operations was viewed as a novelty. Today, we are doing multi-trailer deliveries off the Dune Express, delivering 70-100 tons per driver versus over-the-road deliveries of approximately 24 tons.

Back in March of 2023, Atlas' annual productive capacity stood at around 11 million tons, with no wet sand offering, and we were running only 11 last-mile crews that delivered just 20% of our total sales volumes. Today, our productive capacity is nearly two and a half times larger, with the largest wet sand offering in the Permian, and our logistics operation is currently running 26 crews delivering more than 80% of our total sales volumes. Since our IPO, we have also completed two transformational acquisitions that have expanded our solutions offering while enhancing our cash flow generation. Finally, at the time of the IPO, we kept reinforcing that shareholder returns and, critically, return of capital to shareholders were core to Atlas' corporate DNA.

On February 19, we announced a 4% increase to our quarterly dividend from $0.24 a share to $0.25 a share, which represents a 67% increase from our initial dividend of $0.15 a share. We talked to Big Game during our IPO, and while we have certainly had some bumps in the road, we have delivered on those promises. I could not be prouder of what our team has accomplished and the milestones we have achieved, but this is only the beginning for Atlas. Yesterday, we closed on the acquisition of Moser Energy Systems, our platform investment into the distributed power market. With its large fleet of natural gas-powered reciprocating generators, the Moser platform provides us with a new avenue of growth into a rapidly expanding market.

Moser also provides a greater degree of cash flow durability by adding significant exposure to the more stable production phase of the OFS value chain. As discussed on our call on January 27, we currently plan to grow Moser's fleet from its current size of 212 megawatts to approximately 310 megawatts by the end of 2026. Customer reception to the Moser acquisition has been very positive, to say the least, reinforcing our initial investment thesis. As we work through the integration process, if this customer interest begins to translate into hard contracts, we have ample room to accelerate the growth of this platform. To our new team members joining us from Moser, welcome aboard. It's going to be a fun ride. Turning back to our proppant and logistics business, the Permian proppant market is beginning to show early signs of the healing we have been looking for.

Spot sand prices fell to cyclical lows during the fourth quarter, driven by reduced customer demand related to seasonal slowdown and competitors throwing out desperation Hail Mary pricing during the RFP season. Coming into the RFP season with the imminent commercial deployment of the Dune Express, we armed our sales force with the objective to go out there and seize the volumes with our best customers. However, we certainly were not willing to contract our volumes at the desperation pricing thrown out there by our more distressed competitors. Fortunately, the key customers we have been targeting recognized that outsourcing their sand supply and delivery to distressed providers just to save a few bucks per ton is a recipe for disaster. Instead, we are seeing customers choose to commit 100% of their 2025 sand volumes to Atlas, their partner of choice in proppant supply and logistics.

They correctly identified that they can rely on Atlas to eliminate the operational headache that sand can represent in the oil field, and when things do go wrong, we will break our backs making things right, which is why we enter the year in a highly contracted position that we expect to grow over the coming weeks. Since the turn of the year and with the great hope of large RFP volume wins now a distant memory for many of our competitors, we have seen much more rational behavior on the pricing front. The combination of the seasonal recovery and completion activity and recent production issues across the industry due to extremely cold weather led to a spike in spot prices over the last few weeks. While spot prices have since moderated, we don't expect them to return to lows of the fourth quarter anytime soon.

Additionally, as some of the more disadvantaged mines continue to struggle with underutilization, we are actively watching for supply attrition in the market. Consequently, we are reasonably bullish about a gradual return to normalcy in sand pricing, although at this point, we don't expect that until late in the year. With that, I will now turn the call over to Chris Scholla to provide more details around the commissioning of Dune Express and our exciting leap into driverless deliveries.

Chris Scholla (COO)

Thanks, John. We continue to make significant progress in the operational ramp-up of the Dune Express. The commissioning process remains on schedule, and while there are still components and processes that require optimization, we are pleased with the steady progress thus far. Infrastructure systems of this size and scale don't simply reach full capacity at the flip of a switch. It takes time and meticulous refinement. That said, over the first two months of operation, we have seen a strong and consistent ramp, remaining on track to reach our full target capacity sometime in the second quarter. Another key milestone was achieved in December when we completed the construction of a two-mile caliche road and onload facility connecting our legacy Hi-Crush Kermit mines to the Dune Express. This provides incremental flex volumes to the system, allowing us to better optimize silo volumes across multiple distribution points.

The Dune Express is a highly sophisticated logistics ecosystem that requires close synchronization between our mining operations and logistics teams, and we are making rapid strides toward our desired end state. In addition, we are making meaningful advancements in our autonomous trucking program. By the end of this month, our two Kodiak-enabled autonomous trucks will have completed approximately 300 deliveries in the Delaware Basin, and we've already begun transitioning autonomous deliveries off the Dune Express. As we further integrate autonomy into our operations, we move closer to our ultimate goal of delivering sand directly to customer well sites without human intervention. Lastly, I want to take a moment to recognize the incredible team that is making this all possible. As John mentioned earlier, this has required long days and even longer nights, and I am extremely proud of our Atlas team.

What was once an ambitious vision is now becoming a market-changing reality, and this is a testament to the team's hard work and dedication. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Blake McCarthy, for a financial update.

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

Thanks, Chris. Atlas recorded full year 2024 revenue of $1.1 billion. Total company's adjusted EBITDA was $288.9 million, or 27% of revenue. Logistics revenue for the year was $540.5 million. For the fourth quarter of 2024, we reported total sales of $271.3 million and adjusted EBITDA of $63.2 million, or 23.3% of revenue. Revenue from proppant sales was $128.4 million. Total proppant sales volumes for the quarter declined sequentially to 5.1 million tons. The decline was driven primarily by the seasonal slowdown in activity witnessed in the Permian as operators exhausted capital budgets. Despite the slowdown witnessed during the quarter, our OnCore distributed mining network set a quarterly volume record. Our average revenue per ton for the quarter was $25.31, which was bolstered by contractual payments related to required customer sand pickups not made during the holiday slowdown.

Adjusted for these payments, average sales price for the fourth quarter was $23.28 per ton. The sequential decline in realized pricing relative to those of the third quarter was less than expected due primarily to contracted volumes representing a larger percentage of the overall volume mix. Moving to service sales, which is revenue generated by our logistics operations, we reported revenue of $142.9 million for the quarter. Total cost of sales for Atlas, excluding DD&A for the quarter, were $191 million, consisting of $61 million in plant operating costs, $124.3 million related to service costs, and $5.7 million in royalties. For the fourth quarter, our per ton plant operating costs were $12.02 per ton, excluding royalties, which was down sequentially from the third quarter but still elevated versus our normalized levels.

Lower volumes and plant optimization expenses related to our previously announced initiatives in Q3 drove the elevated fourth quarter plant operating costs. We expect OPEX per ton cost to further normalize in the first quarter, primarily driven by higher volumes and more efficient operations. Cash SG&A expense for the quarter was $19.1 million, elevated relative to our historical levels by consulting and litigation expenses. Interest expense for the quarter was $12.3 million. Depreciation, depletion, and amortization expense for the quarter was $30.4 million. Net income was $14.4 million, or 5.3% of revenue, and earnings per share was $0.13. Net cash provided by operating activities for the quarter was $70.9 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the period was $63.2 million and adjusted EBITDA margin of 23.3%. Adjusted free cash flow, which we define as adjusted EBITDA less maintenance CapEx for the quarter, was $47.9 million, or 17.7% of revenue.

Growth CapEx during the quarter equated to $50 million, which included construction of the Dune Express, ancillary Dune Express expenditures like the sand highway and offload facilities, and upgrades to our primary Kermit plant. Maintenance CapEx during the quarter was $15.3 million. As John mentioned earlier, we are raising our quarterly dividend to $0.25 per share, which represents a 4% increase and equates approximately to a 4.8% annualized yield. Accounting for our latest dividend announcement, we have paid out $252 million in total dividends and distributions since inception. The combination of our recent equity offering, which raised $254.1 million of net proceeds from the sale of shares of our common stock after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions, and our recently announced debt refinancing simplifies our go-forward capital structure, collapsing four different loan facilities into a single-term loan, and reduces our annual debt service costs.

This should enable increased optionality as we look to optimally redeploy go-forward free cash flow through a combination of growth investment opportunities and return of capital to shareholders. As John also touched on in his remarks, we expect our plants to be quite busy this year. Today, we have approximately 22 million tons committed in 2025 and expect that number to surpass 25 million tons in relatively short order. We expect to sell north of 25 million tons in 2025, which compares to around 20 million tons sold in 2024. Our recent market share gains are a testament to Atlas's efforts to position itself as the reliable partner of choice to the best operators in the Permian Basin. Average sales price for the year is expected to be in the low 20s. With the construction of the Dune Express completed, our capital spending will come down significantly year over year.

Total CapEx for 2025 is currently expected to be approximately $115 million, of which $27 million is budgeted for expanding the asset base at Moser. The remainder is evenly split between growth and maintenance for our proppant and logistics business. With the turn of the calendar, our customers are now looking to deploy their refreshed capital budgets and are actively ramping activity despite recent disruptions caused by colder weather. Consequently, we expect Q1 volumes to be up 10%-15% sequentially relative to Q4 levels. For the first quarter of 2025, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $75 million and $85 million. As the year progresses, we expect our financials to more fully reflect the accretive impact of the Dune Express on our logistics margins and expect Q1 to represent the lowest quarter for this fiscal year.

Based on current market conditions and our expectations of incremental customer demand, we expect full year 2025 Adjusted EBITDA to be north of $400 million, inclusive of 10 months of contribution from the Moser acquisition. For future reporting, we will break out our power business as a separate segment. Before we open up the call for Q&A, a few comments from our chairman, Bud Brigham.

Thank you, Blake. I just want to briefly piggyback and amplify some of John's earlier comments about just how far Atlas has come since we founded the company. Growing up in Midland, I have vivid memories of visiting the nearby sand dunes for picnics and birthday parties. Looking back now, it seems crazy that as recently as 2017, the majority of the sand being pumped down hole into Permian wells was shipped from Wisconsin mines that were 1,200 miles away through a very expensive, complex, and unreliable supply chain. Over the last seven years, Atlas has delivered a continuum of constructive disruptions, enhancing the Permian as the premier producing region in the country and as a more efficient, reliable, and safer energy factory on the ground.

First, it was the state-of-the-art plants we built at Kermit and Monahans, plants that uniquely included redundancy, conveyors, and remote automation from here in Austin. Later, we added the OnCore mobile mines with our Hi-Crush acquisition, and now we've completed the revolutionary Dune Express, a project that many thought was a pipe dream, which effectively extends our Kermit mines 42 miles to the west into the premier producing region in the entire country. As a result of these Atlas innovations, we are now delivering sand with less than 20 trucking miles. That's a reduction from 1,200 miles of rail and trucking to less than 20 miles via increasingly efficient, automated, and safer delivery systems. Our last-mile deliveries are increasingly via multi-trailers, and we're continuing to stage in driverless deliveries with our Kodiak autonomous technologies.

As we've stated before, Atlas is uniquely positioned to modernize proppant and logistics systems in the Permian Basin, and we are doing just that with much more to come. I will briefly summarize some high-level facts about Atlas's position in the proppant and logistics space. Today, Atlas is the largest and lowest-cost proppant producer in the Permian, and that's for both wet and dry sand. We are also the largest last-mile provider. We are now running the world's first proppant conveyor system and the world's first driverless oil field delivery operation. We are both logistically and cost-advantaged to almost every drilling operation in the Midland and Delaware Basins. As the Permian continues to mature into a factory model with increasingly skilled operators, scale and automation for proppant and logistics are increasingly essential. Atlas is unique and differentiated.

We are the one-stop shop for the largest raw material and delivery systems in the Permian energy manufacturing process. And now we are also beginning our journey into distributed power generation with Moser Energy Systems. Our team is very excited about collaborating with the great Moser innovators to find ways to innovate, disrupt, and grow in the power market to solve problems for our E&P customers that we proudly serve. In closing, our mission is to improve human beings' access to the hydrocarbons that power our lives, and by doing so, we maximize the value creation for our shareholders. As we celebrate our two-year anniversary as a public company and approach eight years as a company, we remain steadfastly committed to that mission. I could not be prouder of our talented and inspirational employees who come to work every day delivering on that mission.

They are making the Permian Basin a more efficient, safer, and cleaner place to work and live. Last, and importantly, as mentioned, given our core commitment to our shareholders, accounting for the latest dividend announcement, I am proud to proclaim that since inception, Atlas has paid out $252 million in cash distributions, with more to come. This is only the beginning for Atlas. With that, I would like to now turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press Star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the Star keys. We do ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Again, that's Star 1 to register a question at this time. Today's first question is coming from Keith Mackay of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Sean Mitchell (Managing Partner)

Hi, good morning, and thanks for all the colors so far. I just wanted to start out on the Dune Express. Can you speak to maybe how much volume you've moved down the dune thus far since commissioning in early January there, and maybe some of the gating factors that are required to get to that full effective utilization by midyear there?

Chris Scholla (COO)

Yeah, thanks, team. This is Chris Scholla. Look, I think reflecting back, right, hindsight being 20, 20 years ago, we really should have said if we were launching Q1 of 2025 rather than kicking off a project leading into the Christmas and New Year's holiday. That always has a bit of an impact. And on that note, I do want to give a big thank you to our employees and vendors that really supported us over the holiday launch of this project. In general, we really haven't had to overcome any serious obstacles. I mean, we had some programming issues when we started out that kind of slowed us in December and January, but that was really just startup and optimization, synchronization of the system, if you will. We had to work through some power issues, but we have solutions there and are making really great improvements.

We're already running close to 50%-60% of capacity today. There will be some planned downtime in March as startup. You got to go tighten up that belt. But I would say overall, the ramp phase is really going as expected. We've already proven running the belt at a full capacity instantaneous run rate. And at this point in time, it's really about increasing our daily run time through reducing those system nuisance trips and working to eliminate and reduce that daily planned commissioning downtimes.

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

Yeah, if you think about it from a financial perspective, the full impact and logistics margins won't be fully realized until midyear, but it will be a steady accretive tailwind as we work through the first half. So the tons delivered off the Dune Express are our highest margin tons by far.

So as we go from marginal amounts in early January to full run rate at some point in Q2, the margins realized by our logistics business, those will steadily increase. Q3 representing the first quarter of full financial impact, bringing logistics margins into the mid- to high-20s. So with respect to the first half, the impact is obviously smallest in Q1 as we made our first commercial delivery in January and have been ramping since then. So while it isn't a straight line, the flow points us to getting to our target annual run rate of 10-11 million tons on an annualized basis at some point in Q2. So if you think about it, marginal impact in Q1, more of a tailwind in Q2, and full impact in the second half from a modeling perspective.

Sean Mitchell (Managing Partner)

Oh, got it. That's helpful. Maybe just turning to capital allocation to see if expecting to spend 150 million CapEx this year, which certainly is down year over year. But can you maybe speak to how you're balancing some of the opportunities that you see in the organic portfolio now with returning cash to shareholders? Do you have an expected free cash flow allocation in terms of split between returns and growth and other things, or is it really just on a highest return basis?

John Turner (President and CEO)

This is John. Our goal is to keep the base dividend at a level where investors can be confident that they're going to get the cash every quarter no matter what the market conditions. And so we're obviously looking to stress our cash flows. Our opportunities right now from the standpoint of our CapEx expenditures next year are based on simply what's the best return possible to our investors. And so as we continue to go throughout the year, I mean, we're just not going to raise our dividend significantly. We're going to continue to grow that dividend. Moving into the Moser acquisition is going to give us the ability to blunt some of that volatility associated with the completion side of the business. So yeah, I mean, in 2024, I mean, 2025, we do have some growth initiatives going on there that are high return projects.

We're going to continue to evaluate those and continue to deploy capital to those types of investments. But then our goal is to continue to raise, continue to raise the dividend and also look at other opportunities to potentially stock buyback. I mean, our board initiated a stock buyback program earlier last year. But one thing is, obviously, last year we were looking at a lot of amortization and debt paydown. So when you look at our new term loan, that frees up some cash flow for us to either return to the investors or make additional investments into those higher returning projects.

Sean Mitchell (Managing Partner)

Got it. Thanks for that color. That's it for me.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Don Crist of Johnson Rice. Please go ahead.

Don Crist (Senior Research Analyst)

Morning, guys, and thanks for letting me in. I wanted to start with Moser. Congrats on getting that closed quickly. And obviously, it's a different market than some of the other companies that have entered that market and more of a rental market that Moser operates in today. Can you talk about your future plans? Is there plans to go into bigger turbines or kind of what are your overall overarching plans for that segment as you kind of roll everything together?

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

Yeah, Don, I'll start on that, and then others can chime in. I mean, when we acquired Moser or made the acquisition, we were obviously thinking it's a good platform for Atlas to expand into the power business. Right now, there's a significant need for power in the oil fields. I don't necessarily see the need for power any different than what you see in other parts and other areas of the power business. We have pretty high returns on our investments. But we can grow that organically, and we have some ability to expand pretty rapidly those investments on the Moser platform. But we're always going to keep our eye out for areas and other parts of the power business that make sense for us to grow into.

Yeah, just to piggyback on that, we view the Moser acquisition as the first investment in a power platform that we think we can grow to be a very significant piece of the overall Atlas portfolio. And that's not necessarily just our M&A, although I'll never rule out that another is the right deal for itself. The manufacturing capacity of Moser was just something that drew us to the business. It gives us a lot of flex in our ability to ramp up the growth of that business. So if concrete customer demand is there to justify the investments, we can ramp that up rather quickly. Additionally, Atlas has prided itself on leading with innovation and disruption, and we think there's a lot of room for that in this market. So we don't want to just be slinging generators from a parking lot.

Luckily, we have some people on the team much smarter than me that are hit the ground running, and they're going to start making waves in this market, and we're really excited to see what they're going to do.

Don Crist (Senior Research Analyst)

I appreciate that color. And one on the autonomous trucking. I mean, a lot of us two and a half years ago before you went public were a little bit skeptical of that business, but y'all have really grown that and made big strides there. Can you talk about, number one, the cost savings of using autonomous versus a regular driver truck? And what are your plans going forward? How big can that business be just on the autonomous side?

Chris Scholla (COO)

Yeah, this is Chris Scholla. I can take that one. Look, I think Kodiak has been a great partner, and these guys have done everything they've said that they would do, right? They've delivered their technology actually a bit ahead of schedule. But look, I mean, the deal we have with them is a performance-based deal. So as long as they keep executing on that trend, you're going to see our fleet really continue to grow. I think on the scaling and margin improvement, most new businesses, they don't really see a huge pop there until you reach scale. And I think that inflection point occurs with us somewhere between 50-70 trucks in service. And you look at, to answer your question on the growth potential of this, right? You look at all the deliveries we've made to date.

It's been on lease roads with light traffic, right? Low speeds, 25 miles an hour. So it may be a bit too early to tell when we'll start seeing those over-the-road type deliveries. But once those capabilities include over-the-road, I think you'll see our autonomous fleet really expand quickly.

Don Crist (Senior Research Analyst)

Just one clarification. If I remember correctly, isn't about 80% or 70% or something like that of the cost of operating the truck labor?

Chris Scholla (COO)

Yes, sir.

Don Crist (Senior Research Analyst)

I appreciate it. I'll turn it back.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Sean Mitchell of Daniel Energy Partners. Please go ahead.

Sean Mitchell (Managing Partner)

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe for Blake, the industry at large has kind of been, I guess, prepared for what I would call flat to down activity in the U.S. for 2025. This would be kind of the second year I would call flattish activity in North America. What are you guys seeing? We're seeing service companies like buyout companies get into the power business, but what are you seeing in terms of deal flow from a standpoint of consolidating the proppant market in the U.S.? And/or when are we potentially going to see some of these people go away in the proppant market? Or do you have an opinion or thoughts around that?

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

I always have opinions, Sean. I don't know if I'm supposed to speak, but I think that in terms of deal flow, I think we saw a lot of consolidation opportunities into late last year where people were proactively reaching out to us. But I think we've been pretty public about we are very happy with where our sand mine portfolio sits within the Permian Basin, right? Where we think if you think about the Atlas legacy assets, we had the best assets from reserves and an offtake per ton standpoint. And when we acquired Hi-Crush, we acquired a portfolio that sat immediately adjacent to us on the cost curve. And so a lot of the stuff that would be available to us from an expansion standpoint would be diluted to our overall portfolio. And we don't want to really undermine the overall portfolio at this point.

Thinking about the sand market overall, I think that in John's comments, there was some positive undertones with respect to what we're seeing in the sand market, so I think the extreme cold events that we had in January and last week exposed some of the fragility that characterized the overall sand network in West Texas. Everyone plans for there to be weather in January and February, but it was really, really cold, and that had an effect on both mining and logistics operations. So we have our own issues that are baked into guidance, but I think these weather events hit some of our competitors who haven't been investing heavily into maintenance much harder, and sand supply got really short in the market in a hurry, and it shows how delicate that balance is, so we saw sand prices spike significantly in those weeks.

And while they've come back down to earth some, they haven't come close to getting back to the mid-teens levels that were thrown around the spot market in Q4. We think that's a really healthy development. The market certainly isn't fully healed yet, but we are seeing much more rational behavior from our competitors around pricing. And I think that's due to people actually thinking about the economics of margins of production. When you're running a skeleton crew on a mine, that you have a hard ceiling on what you can produce. And your OpEx per ton is significantly higher than it would be if your facility was in full utilization. The fixed cost leverage of this business is just going to go higher.

So when they have an opportunity for spot sand sales, they have to sell the production at that elevated level because you're not going to be adding a second shift if there's zero confidence that the volume offset will be there. So it's a difficult situation to be in. It's a bit of a double-edged sword. So you're likely not covering overhead at this level, but you don't want to throw gas on fire either. So it's a tough situation for a lot of players out there. And I think that gives you a clear insight into why we think supply attrition is going to continue to play out in this market.

Sean Mitchell (Managing Partner)

Yeah, that's great color. Thanks. Maybe one more for me. Just you have a slide in the deck, I think slide 17, where you show Permian frac count. It's essentially been, I don't know, I want to call it flat between 90 and 100 frac fleets in the Permian Basin for the past four years, but you actually show sand or proppant volume trending higher. And it looks like that continues again this year, even with frac count potentially going lower. I think a lot of this is driven by what you say in your slide deck, simul-frac and trimul-frac. My question to you guys is, are you seeing, I mean, obviously, we know the big E&Ps that have large-scale development doing simul-frac and trimul-frac. Are we starting to see some of the other operators participate in the simul-frac trimul-frac on the completion side?

Chris Scholla (COO)

Yeah. At this point, we really are seeing that trend expand out. I mean, one of our smaller independents that have been with us for years are kicking off their first simul. I think that's just a great example of continuing to roll out, if you will, that effectiveness of the technology, the factory on the ground, and as these technology and completion enhancements make it from the big guys, I think there is a little bit of copycat out there, right, and we're seeing that trend continue across the board.

Sean Mitchell (Managing Partner)

Okay. That's helpful. Thanks, guys. I'll turn it back.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Adi Modak of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Ati Modak (VP of Energy Equity Research)

Hi. Good morning. I think you guys talked about 25 million tons in volume for the full year. And then you mentioned some key customers as well. So I was just wondering if you can talk about what share of that is the key customers. Where is the pricing conversation with them? And maybe if you can talk about the longer-term activity expectations of those customers based on your conversations.

Chris Scholla (COO)

I guess we're going to avoid overall market share conversations, but I think that, as John talked about, we set a hard floor on pricing during our peak season. We know that we offer a certainly advantaged reliability and better overall service levels. And operators, they know Atlas is going to be there. Their sand's going to show up on time, and we're not going to. We do everything we can not to be the reason that people have NPT on site. So we take that very, very seriously. And that tends to pay us dividends when it comes to our customer relationships.

That's evidenced by if there's customers that are coming to partner with Atlas on 100% of their sand needs, it's not something that we've seen in the past. So I think that's just a proof that the market and the customers show the reliability, the durability, and the reliance they put on Atlas as a logistics provider.

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

Yeah. It was a key differentiator during this RFP season is that operators knew they're like, it's one thing to be like, "Okay, hey, I can get the cheapest sand," but it might not be there in June and July because those guys might not be there. And they know that Atlas is going to be there and that we're going to do everything we can to partner with them for the long term. And our sales team did a fantastic job of going out there and getting those volumes. And so we feel really good about where we're going to be today.

Ati Modak (VP of Energy Equity Research)

That makes sense. And then maybe on the mine side, if you can give us what your latest thoughts are on the cost profile progression. I know you talked about the fourth quarter numbers, but just if you can give us how we should think about the progression on there for the full year.

Chris Scholla (COO)

Yeah. So we'll continue to so we actually saw on the ground level significant improvements just in processes and stuff like that. That team's doing a great job. It just didn't really flow through financials just because you had the step-down in volumes with the seasonal holiday slowdown. As you come back into with reloaded capital budgets, we'll see that volume uptick up in Q1 and even more so in Q2. And so you'll see that fixed cost leverage start to flow through for the off-expert time. So thinking about getting to high teens in the Q1 level and Q1 numbers and continued improvement through mid-year is a pretty fair part of that kind of helps push you from a modeling perspective. We won't get back to our full optimal levels until early 2026, as we talked about when we get those new dredges at our primary Kermit mine.

But we're continuing to focus on process improvements and optimization projects. They're doing a fantastic job. So we'll continue to see that be a great tailwind to the financials as we work through the year.

Ati Modak (VP of Energy Equity Research)

That's awesome. Thank you, guys.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from David Smith of Pickering Energy Partners. Please go ahead.

David Smith (Director of Research)

Hey, good morning, and thank you for taking my question.

Chris Scholla (COO)

Morning, David.

Morning.

David Smith (Director of Research)

Most of my questions were asked or addressed in the prepared remarks. But sorry if I didn't catch this. Did you mention where your current contract coverage sits for the year?

John Turner (President and CEO)

I think we said we currently have approximately 22 million tons contracted already and expect that number to move up as we work through the rest of the first quarter. I think that there's this misconception that RFP season stops at New Year's Eve, but some players' contract processes drag through January, February. So that number will move up between now and the Q1 following.

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

We enter into contracts pretty much in every quarter, maybe with the exception of the late third quarter. We are contracting sand and logistics services throughout the year.

David Smith (Director of Research)

Appreciate it. And I was curious if you see interest from customers to sign longer-term contracts. And if so, how do you think about the trade-off between interest and longer duration versus the relatively lower current prices?

John Turner (President and CEO)

Yeah. I think for us, we really, as John mentioned earlier, we've really seen a pull from customers to move to more turnkey-type model, 100% supply. Here's my frac schedule. You guys cover it. And I think that all comes with our ability to execute, continue to work with our customers, and proactively remove those bottlenecks. So look, for a three- to five-year term, are you probably going to have a little bit lower pricing on long-term deals than spot pricing or six-month arrangements? Yeah, absolutely, right? But I think that's made up for it in volume by far. And from a total customer perspective, that's what we really want to do is partner with our customers, continue to get 100% of their volumes, and execute and remove bottlenecks in their operation.

David Smith (Director of Research)

Appreciate the color. That's it for me. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Michael Scialla of Stephens. Please go ahead.

Michael Scialla (Managing Director)

Hi. Good morning. Blake, could you say again how much of the 25 CapEx is going toward growth? I was jotting it down and missed it. And can you give any detail on what those growth opportunities look like?

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

Yeah. So just the CapEx breakdown again. So we've gotten to $115 million for 2025 CapEx. $27 million of that is committed to growing the Moser platform. And the remainder is evenly split between maintenance and growth for our legacy business. On the growth CapEx side for the legacy business, we continue to invest into our logistics and last-mile operations. We've got some exciting projects there that have a fantastic return profile. And we're really excited to share those with the street over the coming months.

Michael Scialla (Managing Director)

Okay. Can you talk about any of the opportunities on the power gen side in that $27 million? I think you had mentioned that there are some applications that could require more than 10 megawatts. Anything there in particular that is worth noting?

Blake McCarthy (CFO)

Yeah. So in that number, and that $27 million for Moser within that, that's the cumulative Moser number. That includes a small amount, a very small amount of maintenance. But what really struck into this investment was their internal manufacturing capacity. And the return profiles on those generators with their cost basis is just so fantastic. So that number, as we talked about, includes growing that megawatt base from 212 megawatts to 310 by the end of 2026. So we'll be working to fully deploy the existing fleet, which requires some remanufacturing work. And then on top of that, adding new capacity. So that's going to be that Moser contribution is going to grow between now and the end of the year. And John mentioned it was kind of a throwaway comment a little bit, but customer response to this acquisition has been really positive.

So our sales guys are always complaining. They're hard. But when their job consists of picking up the phone and answering customer inquiries, it gets a little easier. And we're getting quite a few of those. And so certainly given us some food for thought about how we want to think about the growth potential of this business because it's been a little overwhelming to us.

Michael Scialla (Managing Director)

Sounds good. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question is coming from Kurt Hallead of Benchmark. Please go ahead.

Kurt Hallead (Head of Global Energy)

Hey, good morning, everybody.

John Turner (President and CEO)

Hey, Kurt.

Bud Brigham (Executive Chair)

Hey, Kurt.

Kurt Hallead (Head of Global Energy)

So I got a couple of follow-ups. I think John, in your commentary, you referenced that you expect sand pricing to return to normalized levels. And as we know in this business, I'm not really sure what normalized is anymore. But in the context of that, is a mid-20s per ton what you would consider normalized in today's environment?

John Turner (President and CEO)

Yeah. I mean, middle of 20s is what I would consider normalized. I mean, we were really referring to what was going on in the fourth quarter.

Kurt Hallead (Head of Global Energy)

Right, right. Yeah. So okay. That's fine. And then second question is on the Moser acquisition. You referenced again some commentary about some things dependent upon additional, I guess, off-take agreements or contracts or whatever. In your initial press release, you referenced Moser's running about, let's call it, $40-45 million of annualized EBITDA on a 10-month, I think, basis, you guys. So just can you help me connect the dots? So it sounds like there's already contracts in place. So what was the commentary about depending on other contracts being signed?

John Turner (President and CEO)

That was what Blake was referring to. We've had a lot of positive feedback from our customer base on the acquisition of Moser, which kind of really reaffirms our decision to make the acquisition. And we don't have anything necessarily in a hard contract right now, but that's something that we're working on. And it's obviously something that we can easily bring on additional volume and capacity if we need to with our manufacturing operations. So that's really what that's talking about, Kurt.

Kurt Hallead (Head of Global Energy)

Okay. And then maybe one for Bud. Bud, you started the business around frac sand and evolved that into a premium logistics services business. And now you're adding on to some power solutions. So maybe you could share with us kind of what your vision is over the next three to five years in terms of building out these three pieces, or you got a couple of other things up your sleeve?

Bud Brigham (Executive Chair)

Can you read some of this?

You can read the vision.

John Turner (President and CEO)

Do you have a non-op business, an operated business, and an royalty business?

Can you repeat that question? We were having a little hard time hearing you.

Kurt Hallead (Head of Global Energy)

Look, I just said, look, Bud, you started this business, right, with frac sand, and you layered on a premium logistics services, and now you're rolling into power solutions, so I'm just kind of curious what you see over the next three to five years. Are these the kind of three core building blocks, or do you have a couple more tricks up your sleeve, so to speak?

Chris Scholla (COO)

I think, I mean, certainly Atlas has demonstrated by the Moser acquisition provides a unique platform for modernizing the oil field. Of course, proppant is mission critical for every single well in the oil field. And then the delivery of that proppant, the logistics is integral to the efficiency of the factory on the ground. So I think there's going to continue to be more opportunities to innovate and associate with those green shoots for Atlas. Again, Moser and distributed power in the oil field is just one example of that. I do think the other companies are really just providing liquidity and bringing sophistication and experience and knowledge to the other asset classes in the Permian.

One of the things that came up earlier that I think is important, maybe I'll just take the opportunity to point it out, is that as the oil field becomes more efficient, and you see that with the drilling rigs, and you see that with the frac crews, those efficiencies tend to cannibalize that equipment. But Atlas is on the other side of that because as the frac spreads get more efficient, that just means more sand consumption. So we're kind of the inverse of that and benefit from that in a way kind of like a midstream enterprise. There's going to be more sand flowing into the wells in the Permian.

So I just think Atlas is in a great place in terms of as the Permian development accelerates with the larger scale operators, with larger operations, Atlas has the scale and the technology to complement the operators and to reliably provide them the services that they need. Hopefully, that helps you a little bit.

Kurt Hallead (Head of Global Energy)

Absolutely. Thank you for the answer.

John, if we come up to the top of the hour, I think we have time for one more question. That was it? Okay.

Operator (participant)

We're showing the further questions into. Mr. Turner, do you have any closing comments?

John Turner (President and CEO)

Yeah. I want to thank everybody for coming to join us for this call. We're very excited about what Atlas has done and about the future, and we look forward to reporting our first quarter results and operational results here in a few months. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time and enjoy.