Ramaco Resources - Earnings Call - Q2 2020

Transcript

Speaker 0

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Ramaco Resources Second Quarter twenty twenty Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. It is now my pleasure to introduce Chief Financial Officer, Jeremy Sussman.

Speaker 1

Thank you. On behalf of Ramaco Resources, I'd like to welcome all of you to our second quarter twenty twenty earnings conference call. With me this morning is Randy Atkins, our Executive Chairman Mike Bauersachs, our President and CEO and Chris Blanchard, our Chief Operating Officer. Before we start, I'd like to share our normal cautionary statement. Certain items discussed on today's call constitute forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These forward looking statements represent Ramaco's expectations concerning future events and that it's possible that results discussed will not be achieved. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside of Ramaco's control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward looking statements. Any forward looking statements speaks only as of the date on which it is made and except as required by law, Ramaco does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Lastly, I'd encourage everyone on this call to go on to our website, ramicoresources.com, and download today's investor presentation under the Events Calendar. With that said, let me introduce our Executive Chairman, Randy Atkins.

Atkins. Thank you, Jeremy. As always, I want to thank everyone for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. We're trying something a little bit different today given the current situation by we're calling in from essentially two different parts of the country. Part of our management team is in West Virginia, part of our management team is now out in Wyoming.

So I started last quarter's call by quoting some Chinese proverbs about operating in interesting times. I'm not sure how to characterize this quarter other than by saying I'm sure we would all like to never repeat the experience of operating in this kind of an environment again. First I want to point out that for Ramaco this quarter reflects only two months of economic activity for us, not three. We were essentially closed for much of the month of April and that in itself is a condition of course we hope never to repeat. Under the adage that sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart, it's also true that sometimes you get lucky by working hard.

And I think all of our team worked extremely hard and creatively last quarter. Fortunately, despite all the overall macro conditions, we were able to post a financially solid first half and second quarter. As you know, on the numbers, we booked EBITDA of roughly $19,000,000 in the first half and almost 11,000,000 for the second quarter. This is up about 30% quarter over quarter. Net income also bumped about 35% for the same period and of course Jeremy will follow me with some more granular detail on economic and financial statistics.

One unusual item that was in April was that we received approximately $8,400,000 in PPP or Paycheck Protection financing from the US Treasury. As a result, we have been able to book $7,000,000 of that this quarter as other income. As a result of securing that facility, we brought back about 200 minuteers that had been furloughed in late March given the effects of the pandemic. That financing has now been completely expended on qualified expenditures. We have also been advised by both our auditors and outside counsel that based on recent clarified accounting standards, we could treat this as other income this quarter since we properly qualify under the PPP for expected loan forgiveness.

We will be applying for such forgiveness later this year per discussions we've had with our PPP, agent bank. And Jeremy again can certainly supply some detail on the accounting treatment. When we looked at our operating results for the second quarter, during the months of May and June when we actually did operate, we had strong cost results at Elk and booked mine cost of about $64 per ton. We also managed to increase our liquidity this quarter by about $13,000,000 which came from funds received from the PPP facility equipment line. And we continue our central focus, which is to remain very conservatively geared in order to ride this market turmoil out and be poised to react with some degree of financial operating agility when the market conditions seem to normalize.

And with respect to the market in general, there are some macro trends, which we pointed out in our earnings release, which could lead somebody to become modestly optimistic. I'm afraid from our perspective that optimism is tempered by a heavy dose of humility. There are uniquely way too many unknowns at this play at the moment, all of which are outside of normal market forces which temper an ability to really make much clarity in terms of prediction. In reality, it would be pretty foolish to provide any meaningful strong sentiment on where the market will move on a forward macro basis, frankly even six weeks ahead, much less six months or a year. But with that being said, the tea leaves are out there for any of us to read.

And I'll provide just sort of a short list of some of the headlights we're looking at. First of all, general economic conditions in The US seem to be creeping forward. They're somehow looking for a reason to have some continued momentum. US steel capacity is up about 59% utilization since last month. US manufacturing of passenger cars has jumped from about 2,000 units in April to about 140,000 units in June, which is clearly below the 200 some thousand units for the same period of 2019, but that trend is probably what The U.

S. Steel groups are now looking at as they restart blast furnaces and certainly are approaching the 2021 domestic tender season. The forward curve is telling you that hope may be around the corner. The curve pricing in 2021 is now about $136 a ton FOB Australia against a current spot of about $107 That's about a 25% upward bet on a wider worldwide recovery. Turning to China, the Chinese arm between domestic and imported met coal hovers around a record $50 a ton and certainly China's domestic steel production has essentially fully rebounded.

And lastly, the same supply constraints which have been hanging around the hoop all year have now no doubt become aggravated by current market conditions. You've now got three demons. One is the extremely lousy market pricing conditions. You combine that with the fact that most producers have higher mining costs per ton than us and add to that the fact that most producers have little or no access to any new liquidity. This is kind of a perfect storm designed to precipitate some degree of supply contraction at some point.

And one of my favorite one liners is the market could always remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid. So we'll see. It also goes without saying that the dance of the 2021 domestic tender season is now upon us. We have submitted, I guess, the last one this week of all our final bids for both high vol and low vol coals. And I will again this disappoint Lucas Pipes, who I suspect is on the line, and not provide him a list of either our customers or our bid prices.

But as you know, we have successfully executed in the domestic markets over the past few years. Hopefully, we'll be able to do so again this year. And I'm sure by the next time our next earning call rolls around, we will be able to report on frankly where everybody ended up in the dance. We're also making some new inroads into export markets we hadn't explored before. This past quarter, we did our first test shipment to a group in Brazil.

We also entered into a pretty interesting market arrangement with a highly regarded trading group in Brisbane, Australia called Square Resources. We hope Square will be able to provide us a window into several of the Asian markets we've not yet touched. And we look forward over time to building our Asian presence as the years move forward. On the development front, we are pursuing a policy of frankly keeping our powder dry until we can see more clarity. We've talked before about some pretty interesting low vol, low cost new mine projects, which I'm not going to iterate here in any detail.

But we feel we could bring on one or more of these online in a relatively short timeframe and at a very reasonable CapEx we've discussed. Because we could operate and execute on these projects so quickly, at this point we don't feel the need to pull the trigger on anything until we can see some real strength in the market direction. But once we see that clarity, we've got both the existing liquidity to prudently advance several of these projects at once, all within a six to twelve month time horizon. Ultimately, if we add all these projects up, they could provide a very meaningful new level of production for us. So to conclude my remarks, let me say that we continue to stay the course with frankly the same gospel we have preached for some time.

We are low debt, we're low ARO, we're low mine cost, we're strong liquidity and we've got a taste for being opportunistic. We're very comfortable with this operating philosophy, particularly in this kind of a market. And we operate to cover the downside in these frankly perilous times, but when we see finally a little bit of upside, we feel we can react quickly. And hopefully we'll be rewarded at some point for a degree of prudence. So now let me turn the platform back to Jeremy to provide some detail on our financial results.

So Jeremy? Thank you, Randy. In terms of second quarter twenty twenty financial highlights, please remember as Randy pointed out, we only had Elk Creek running for a little over two months. With that caveat, EPS of $06 was up from Q1 twenty twenty EPS of $05 and compared to $0.26 a year ago. Revenue was $36,000,000 down 13% from Q1 and down 45% from the same period of 2019.

Other income totaled $8,500,000 as we recognized roughly $7,000,000 of income for the anticipated forgiveness of funding under the Payment Protection Program loan. This was based on our Q2 twenty twenty usage of loan proceeds largely for eligible payroll expenses. The accounting for this funding as a grant is based on guidance issued in June from the American Institute of CPAs and blessed by our independent auditors. On the operational side, Q2 sales were $362,000 down 27% from the same period of 2019. Despite a lengthy furlough in April 2020 production of 390,000 tons exceeded our sales, which were weaker than originally projected based on demand contraction from COVID related issues.

Second quarter average price per ton came in at $91 which compared to $116 in the same period of 2019. Cash margins came down on the back of lower pricing and higher costs. Margins on company produced coal were $17 per ton in the 2020, down 35% from Q1 and down 62% from the same period of 2019. Cost of company produced coal came in at $74 per ton in Q2, up 4% from $71 per ton the same period of last year. It It is important to put second quarter costs into some context.

First, Elk Creek overall mine costs came in at $72 per ton for the entire quarter. Excluding April, mine cash costs at Elk Creek averaged $60.64 dollars per ton in the second quarter. While the April furlough was necessary from a cash management standpoint, the limited mine production caused overall Elk Creek mine cash costs to be adversely impacted by having fixed costs spread over fewer tons. I also want to touch upon capital expenditures a bit. Last quarter, we made the decision to stop virtually all of our growth CapEx, a decision which is still in place today.

During our last call, I said that there would be some growth CapEx bleeding into the second quarter. This was certainly the case as Q2 CapEx came in at $9,100,000 While this was down roughly 21% from the same period of 2019, it still included roughly $6,000,000 of growth CapEx from two items. Specifically, the final $3,400,000 of our $8,000,000 plate press project at Elk Creek was spent in Q2, which Chris will touch upon later. In addition, $3,000,000 was spent at our Berwind development complex. Subsequently, in early July, we made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce at Berwind by over 60%, which materially lowered our spend there.

Looking forward, we are now at maintenance CapEx levels on both a cash and an accrual basis and would expect third quarter twenty twenty CapEx to come in roughly two thirds below Q2 twenty twenty levels. This is in line with our historical guidance of $6 to $7 per ton of maintenance CapEx. In Q2, as Randy noted, we took on $13,200,000 of new debt consisting of $4,750,000 of new equipment debt and $8,400,000 from the PPP. As we said, we anticipate ultimate forgiveness for all or most of the original PPP loan. Moving on, our trailing twelve month net debt to adjusted EBITDA level remains the envy of the industry at just under 0.3 times as of June 30.

In addition, we have liquidity of $31,800,000 as of June 30. This is despite a number of working capital items that were treated as a first half twenty twenty use of cash. First, I'd point out that inventories have risen by $10,200,000 since the beginning of the year. Second, when comparing second quarter twenty twenty to the first quarter, we had a $1,400,000 increase in accounts receivable and a 4,900,000 decrease in accounts payable, which I would note now sit at their lowest quarter end level since 2016. We anticipate working capital items to be a source of cash in the back half of the year, especially in the fourth quarter.

Lastly, as Randy noted, I'd remind investors that we have designed our operations to be resilient in turbulent times and to take advantage of strength in markets in good times. We do not know when, but good times will roll again one day as they usually do. I would now like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Mike Bauersachs. Mike?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Jeremy. The 2020 marks one of the most unusual quarters experienced to date at Ramaco Resources. As the quarter progressed, we dealt with some of the worst uncertainty that we faced as a public company, with the primary concern being both our employees and how our customers will be impacted by the pandemic and in turn, the impact to our contracted sales. Our view today is that things have seemed to stabilize, with demand from the auto sector picking up and some domestic customers restarting blast furnaces idled earlier this year. While we will continue to face challenges during the back half of 2020, from a demand and shipment standpoint, it appears to be manageable, and we hope to see continued steady improvement, especially in the domestic space.

From a macro perspective, we continue to see slow recoveries and reduced demand in the traditional Atlantic Basin markets. China, the most influential mover in the marketplace, continues to recover nicely from steel production standpoint. Conversely, they appear to be more actively enforcing import quotas, keeping downward pressure on seaborne coking coal pricing. Recovering from COVID disruptions in the increasingly important India marketplace has been challenging, but recent data shows improvement. While there are concrete instances of production cutbacks, most sources point to a continued oversupply of coal production, particularly from The US, traditionally a swing supplier in the seaborne market.

It appears that the real key to near term recovery will need to be in the form of government stimulus, and even more impactful for the metallurgical sector, infrastructure spending. Like others, we were recently surprised by the European Union's ability to unite to enter into a stimulus effort for all members through shared borrowing. While recent projections show that the EU is expecting their economy to shrink by about 8.7% in 2020, they project a rebound in 2021 to growth of 6.1%. That stimulus should help reach their goal. This and additional actions domestically and internationally could have positive impacts on the near term prospects for our customers and, in turn, metallurgical coal producers.

We are taking small but positive steps efforts to expand our international sales position. We offloaded our first shipment in Korea in the second quarter with positive feedback from our customer. We just recently loaded a vessel bound for Europe, the first loading this year for a large new customer there. In another first, we agreed to a trial cargo to a large high volatile coking customer in Brazil, which will mark Ramaco's first shipment of any kind to South America. While the markets and opportunities for large quantities of international business remains murky, it's still very positive to note Ramaco's success in securing business with new customers during this unprecedented time in the market.

Since we last spoke, domestic customers have provided more guidance relative to material adverse change and force majeure impacts. Additionally, we've had an instance where a smaller customer has opted to take 10% fewer contracted tons. The cumulative impact of these events will certainly have a material impact on our back half performance. All of this uncertainty continues to make it difficult to provide any meaningful shipment guidance. We can also confirm that most domestic and other North American customers have come out for 2021 business.

While it's too early to determine where everything settles out, we remain confident in our ability to differentiate our products from the competition. We also have confidence in our staying power, long reserve life, and some of the lowest costs in the industry. Our well capitalized mines should be targeted by buyers who increasingly need to be worried about insolvencies and associated performance risk. One additional focus for 2021 is our effort with regard to our low sulfur products. Elk Creek has historically had comparatively low sulfur, but our mining has migrated into a couple of new areas that will allow us to market and ship an even better product.

As our customers face increasingly new restrictions on their emissions and have fewer producers who can make a low sulfur product, we hope to be part of their solution. Relative to production, following a furlough during most of April, we recalled our Elk Creek workforce. We have developed plans to match production with our expected lower shipment volumes for the 2020. All of our mines at Elk Creek are running well. We also extended our July 4 holiday week by adding one furlough week for some employees.

It remains to be seen if additional similar actions will be required in the second half. We continue to go to great lengths to address health and safety concerns related to COVID-nineteen. Our operations are diligently following guidelines, and we remain committed to doing everything possible to keep our employees safe. Chris will provide a more detailed discussion of our pandemic response. At our Berwind mine, we've had to make the difficult decision to make a substantial reduction in our workforce.

The mine is continuing to operate at substantially reduced levels. We continue to ship coal to our primary customer who has altered their consumption downward for the remainder of the year. We do want to make it clear that management has a number of options for the path forward at Berwind. It includes having the option to develop a small block of coal in the Pocahontas Number 4 Seam accessible near our Berwind infrastructure. Access to this reserve is above drainage, and coal can be developed in a few months if market conditions support it.

Alternatives also include proceeding with our Berwind slope, which will take approximately six months to complete. We continue to believe that our high quality, low pressure Berwind Pocahontas four seam coal will be a great fit for a long list of customers, both domestic and abroad, who continue to express interest and inquire about availability for trial shipments. We continue to labor over CapEx decisions in light of the current market weakness and virus uncertainty. As we see how things develop over the third quarter and where we end up with domestic settlements, we are hopeful to provide more color on growth CapEx in our third quarter call. Our guidance continues to remain suspended today.

Last quarter, I discussed the lack of capital and the fact that we continue to see lack of investment in the sector. We also discussed challenged cost structures and predicted that there will be more failures and potentially more bankruptcies from some of our competition. Unfortunately, during the last week or so, we saw another competitor file for Chapter 11. We also reminded investors that we remain actively focused on taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves. In fact, Ramaco just entered into an agreement with the debtor in the Black Jewel bankruptcy to acquire a couple of permits that provide access to high quality jawbone seam reserves that we control.

This small transaction was surgical in nature but could create meaningful value and allow us to avoid capital expenditures in the future. Indeed, we remain focused on similar situations. Ramaco Resources continues to perform profitable levels in less than ideal conditions, especially compared to our peers. While management believes that Ramaco is substantially undervalued by the market, the market cap gap between much larger producers is narrowing. In some cases, our valuation is greater than much larger competitors.

It would appear that investors are beginning to see the differences in management philosophy that make a company like Ramaco able to withstand downturns. ARO liabilities, while not immediately due, still result in eventually spending the cash. Debt will be repaid, a result in entering bankruptcy. Ramaco may be the only company in the coal sector to have not pledged the majority of its assets against debt. As we have said previously, we remain confident that the way our company is structured will prove to be one of the winning strategies that ultimately benefit from the current virus induced downturn.

In summary, I would like to thank everyone who is participating in this call, especially those analysts who continue to cover METC. Like others in the sector, Ramaco is facing a clear set of challenges as we work our way through the remainder of 2020. As a management team, we're not just focused on problems and obstacles, we're also focused on opportunities. I would now like to turn things over to Chris Blanchard, who will provide some additional insight into our second quarter and our operations in general.

Speaker 3

Thank you, Mike. We do have a few key operational milestones from the second quarter and some of our strategies for the remainder of 2020 that I will briefly discuss this morning. First, our primary operational concern as always remains the health and safety of our workforce. During this period of the COVID nineteen global pandemic, our focus has widened to consider how the virus can affect our minors both at home and at work. We've taken what we believe to be prudent and proactive steps as the pandemic has developed, and we continue to adapt our policies and procedures as conditions have changed over the past month.

As previously mentioned, one of the most material steps taken was the furlough of operations during the month of April, following the March declaration of a global pandemic and the uncertainty that was created throughout both the steel sector as well as the coal space. Most of our operations were idled three weeks during April to assess the situation and to develop action and prevention plans. We returned focused upon social distancing, personal protective equipment, and sanitation of all common areas and equipment. Face coverings were provided to all employees prior to any of the now widespread recommendations or requirements. We continue to require face coverings in all enclosed areas or where social distancing is not possible.

We are now also having all offices and buildings deep sanitized on a regular schedule. Also, despite our focus on limiting and minimizing capital spending during the current period, we are deploying additional capital dollars for additional personnel carriers so that our underground miners can travel in multiple machines and have more space from their coworkers during these otherwise portions of the workday. As the coronavirus continues to spread and cases increase in the locations of West Virginia and Virginia where our miners live, we continue to adapt our policies to the latest governmental guidelines and modify our work rules to provide the most flexibility for our workers' families while also providing the safest locations for them to work. Contingency and action plans are in place for different COVID-nineteen scenarios that may occur. Now turning to one of our capital projects that we discussed earlier.

During the second quarter, we completed construction, commissioned and brought into full operation our second plate press building at the Elk Creek plant. We have now upgraded Elk Creek to have a total of four operational fine refuse plate presses. Where our first two presses gave us some needed relief and flexibility on disposal of our fine waste rod. The second edition containing the third and fourth presses gives us the excess capacity and confidence that Elk Creek now has the technology in place to, has the technology in place to place refuse economically for the entire life of the Elk Creek complex. The additional presses also give Elk Creek enough ratable capacity to be able to handle the future disposal needs of the preparation plant even after upgrade, which is under consideration and is a part of our medium term growth strategy.

We believe that long term, the permitting of new sites for disposal of waste rock in Central Appalachia will turn more towards combined refuse placement and away from traditional slurry impoundments, and now Ramaco is positioned to operate successfully under either scenario. With this project complete, we do not anticipate any similarly material capital spending at Elk Creek in 2020 with planned projects limited to maintenance capital for the expansion of our mines underground and maintenance of our existing fleet of equipment. Turning to the state of our actual operations, Elk Creek mines all generally continue to operate in favorable mining conditions. Naturally, these are coal mines and we have ebbs and flows at each location, but overall, the complex is poised to perform and exceed expectations for the foreseeable future. We have also moved into areas of our reserve where we are actually seeing the qualities of our coals improve month over month, which is certainly counter to the generally deteriorating quality of the Central Appalachian Basin as a whole.

We clearly saw the contrast in cash costs between quarters. In the first quarter, costs were lower as our production sales and deliveries were largely in balance and closer to capacity. In the second quarter, however, we saw costs creep upward as production was negatively impacted by the furlough and some deferrals of shipments. Even more pronounced was the stark difference between April 2020 and the cost in the remainder of the quarter. This serves to emphasize the competitive advantage that Ramaco has as a result of favorable geology, a solid and experienced workforce and judicious investments in the best infrastructure and equipment to access those reserves.

When we operate our mines at or even near capacity, our cash costs will be amongst the lowest in the industry. As we move throughout the 2020, Ramaco's strategy is to match our production profile with our customers' delivery schedule and needs while still remaining nimble to participate in spot sales and export tenders as they arise. At the same time, management will continue to take a disciplined approach sales. While there is no doubt that with our cost advantages and production profile, we could usually underbid our peers, with the current supply overhang in the coal space, this is one race to the bottom that we do not need to win. We'll continue to focus on prudently targeting synergistic markets and key customers while positioning the company for the eventual return to normalcy.

Turning to Berlin and following the same principles that we're following at Elk Creek, we had to recently make some very difficult decisions. In addition to the decision in early April to idle our slope construction project, in June, we throttled back production shifts. And finally, in July, we're forced to make permanent production reductions as a result of the state of the overall coal market and the reduced needs of our customers. Unfortunately, these changes had to be made. I want to formally recognize all of our Berwind employees' efforts.

Since inception, these miners have safely mined and developed this coal mine through, at times, extremely challenging mining conditions. I look forward to the future when we were able to continue our production ramp up at Berwind and bring to fruition the planning and efforts that have been exerted the past couple of years. Our Berwind Slope project remains on a hot idle status with all excavation equipment and infrastructure in place for near immediate restart. Once restarted and excavation commences, we believe we can see daylight in the low volatile Pocahontas number four horizon within six months and can quickly move to lower cost, higher productivity, higher quality production. Within the initial six months of p four seam coal production starting or approximately twelve months following the slope construction commencement, we believe we can mine at the fully budgeted production capacity of 650,000 to 750,000 annual clean tons.

The thicker coal seam conditions will result in higher productivities, higher plant recoveries, less mechanical downtime and less usage of consumables related to the sandstone strata of the current Berwind mine seam conditions. All of these will put our produced mine costs substantially lower than our current experience has been with the development in the Pocahontas 3 Seam. While we continue to balance our liquidity, customer requirements and production growth plans through this period of uncertainty, we continue to look at other potential low volatile production options. One potential development area would be to access and mine a small reserve in the Pocahontas 4 Seam located in close proximity to the initial development in our Berwind P3 Minutee. Access to these tons is permitted and requires only very modest capital expenditure.

These tons will be of similar quality to the long term coal that we expect to mine and deliver from our Berwind P4 reserve. While this reserve is not contiguous with the Berwind P4 Minutee, it does give us another option in the short term with less uncertainty and variability than our current development mining in the thinner Pocahontas three seam. Dependent on our targeted production rate in this reserve, this coal mine could provide a bridge for Ramaco's low volatile portfolio through 2021 until and until the main Berwind P4 minutee is fully operational. We look forward to crystallizing our production and development strategy over the next few months as the domestic and export tenders and sales process run their course. We remain committed to the overall growth of Ramaco's annual production from its current levels to over 4,000,000 annual tons and believe that given the appropriate market, this could be completed within twenty four months.

This now concludes management's prepared remarks and I will turn the program back to Randy.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Mike. So at this point, we would be happy to take some questions from any of the analyst or investor community out there. So moderator, if you could proceed.

Speaker 0

Certainly. And our first question comes from the line of Lucas Pipes with B. Riley.

Speaker 4

Hey, good morning, everyone. Randy, I may have missed it in the prepared remarks, but would you be able to fill us in on domestic pricing in 2021, ideally by customer and by product? More Go

Speaker 1

ahead. I'm sorry.

Speaker 4

No, I said more seriously, of course. I wondered, is there anything that you've been able to clean on 2021 demand, based on the amount and timing of domestic tenders to date?

Speaker 1

Sure. Well, I appreciate that remark, Lucas, because you've been basically email bombing me for the last two weeks to try to get this pricing information and I'm glad you have come to the realization that we're probably not going to step up again this year on your behalf. But keep trying, Lucas, we appreciate it. So I think as far as the 'twenty one tender season is concerned, as I said, it's they came out a little bit early. I think the reality check is that the steel companies are probably again trying to feel their way through a fog in terms of assessing their own demand requirements for 2021.

We felt last year they probably underbought just a little bit, but I suspect in hindsight that probably proved precedent from their standpoint. I think looking at 'twenty one, the size tenders that they've come out with are a little bit better than the 'twenty numbers. We're not exactly dealing in a market environment where we have a surging benchmark to price again. So we have to approach this with a certain realism there. And we've got some producers that are obviously in various forms of continued financial distress.

So that will play a role I'm sure in how some of our peers look at and bid into the market. So I think in general, a number of commentators some of our peers have also taken the posture that they view maybe the second half of next year as being a little brighter than I right really can't disagree with that notion, but I again as I mentioned in my remarks, we've got a lot of humility in terms of trying to view forward markets when you could have things like resurgence of the virus that might impede or even reverse any positive steps in economic recovery. By the same token you might have steps that would develop a vaccine quickly, maybe get everybody back on their feet a little bit quicker and that might have a very positive impact on the market. So I think again for all of us, at least on our side of the table here, we approach the market with a certain realism. We approach the market with a certain optimism.

But as I said, most importantly, we approach our market view with a lot of humility. So I hope that kind of addressed most of your issues.

Speaker 4

Very helpful. Just a quick follow-up kind of immediately on this domestic on the domestic market. Now you are in the enviable position of not having substantial leverage like some of your peers. So is there kind of a school of thought where you say, look, this right now, we've tried to contract in the middle of a pandemic. Let's hold off.

Let's maybe just keep more powder dry and plan on selling more in the international market that may recover by 2021. That kind of to what extent is that could that be a part of the strategy? And then secondly, and then that's it for me, really intrigued by the new partnership in the Asia Pacific market and wondered if you could kind of give us a sense of what percent of sales may go to Asia over the coming years. Would really appreciate your perspective on these two. Sure.

Speaker 1

Thanks again. Thank you. So I think maybe part one, we're not going to get too granular with you, but I think obviously our leverage position certainly gives us some wind in our sails. But candidly, I think our cost position equally provides us a little bit of differentiation with our peers as we approach pricing decisions. But as Mike certainly alluded to, we've got some pretty good quality coals and we're not sort of a dual thermal producer.

So I think that gives us a little bit of, as I said, additional wind in our sails because we're dealing with pure met products that are of high quality and low cost. So I think that gives us a pretty good seat at the table to take some realistic approaches and you kind of know what our general percentages of market percentage penetration have been in years gone by on domestic. Part of that's by design, part of that's sort of opportunistic. I think we kind of approach with the general same philosophy we have in years past. So we'll see.

The arrangement with Square which we are viewing as a very positive development came around from your colleague Sussman here, who in a past life as an analyst had done some work in Australia and had met this group who had reached out frankly to him trying to find frankly what they regarded as an ideal U. S. Domestic partner in which to grow a relationship and expanding into some Asian markets that they handle. They're pretty decent sized both trading and sales group. I think they handle a little bit under 10,000,000 tons a year of met, which is a pretty healthy number.

And they are in a vast array of markets over there throughout the Asian Basin. Sitting here in Kentucky, West Virginia or Wyoming, it's pretty tough to keep your finger on the daily pulse of any markets that are very, very far away. And they have offices frankly throughout the Far East. And we will look forward to building that relationship over time. We think they're very good people and a very experienced knowledgeable group and we look forward to that relationship.

Speaker 4

Very good to hear. Appreciate that and continue best of luck. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Okay. Lucas, thank you very much.

Speaker 0

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Mark Levin with Benchmark.

Speaker 5

Okay, great. Thanks very much. Lucas asked a lot of the domestic related questions. I know you guys have sent a high proportion or sold a high proportion of your volume into the domestic market. I recall and I can't remember when it was, it might have been a conference call or two ago.

Mike Bowers actually was talking about trying to kind of keep a foothold there. I mean, it reasonable to assume in 2021 that you would at least sell half or more than half of your volume into the domestic market? Or have things changed so monumentally that that shouldn't necessarily be the case?

Speaker 1

I think I'm going to let Mike follow-up on this and give a perhaps more expansive answer. But I think just in general, Mark, you've got to be kind of opportunistic. When you're talking about spot sales, you're never quite sure when that market is going to develop and what volume and certainly what pricing characteristics. So our approach, as I said, let's cover the downside and upside will kind of take care of itself. So I think we always start with pretty healthy load of domestic business.

And then once we kind of feel we got that covered, we're going to kind of treat some dry powder for the export business. What that number looks like percentage wise, it's probably going to bounce around. But Mike, why don't you pick up on that remark and talk about maybe some of the new export opportunities that we're looking at and also the ones we've kind of started an execution on.

Speaker 2

Yes. I think first of all, Mark, continue to make our domestic or North American sales a real key priority for us. To have contracted sales that have kind of a twelve month kind of look ahead is really important. It helps us think about what capital we can deploy and have some certainty. And I think you'll see us continue to have an outsized amount of our coal sales that are domestic.

And I mentioned some of the quality differential things that we're looking at this year. I mean, really think that there are a number of our customers that are really going to like some of the stuff that we put in front of them because it's important for many of our customers and especially with the low sulfur products we've got at Elk Creek. Internationally, we continue and we've got internal coal sales guys that are very experienced internationally.

Speaker 4

While the

Speaker 2

Atlantic Basin continues to slow recovery, I think it's going to continue to be difficult to do large amounts in the Atlantic Basin, which is one of the reasons why we continue to focus on Asia and of course have sent a successful test shipment to Korea. And one of the challenges, of course, with Asia is just the distance from, you know, from the Eastern ports. And while we think that growth mode is is good, in that part of the world and that's where the growth is going to be. You have to build a presence. But I think that probably the market we're maybe the most optimistic about really is Brazil and South America.

We think our coals are a great fit for many of those customers down there. And I think you'll see us really focused on trying to grow the market share that we have down there with basically being set up to participate in virtually all of the tenders in that part of the world now. Hopefully that helps a little bit.

Speaker 5

No, that was very helpful. Two quick questions.

Speaker 1

Go ahead. We go to your next question, let me just add one sort of coda to that. So as we talked about frankly, think in the last quarter's call, and I alluded to in my earlier remarks today, we've got a couple of pretty interesting development projects. They're all low vol. That could potentially add a little bit under a million tons for us, which is a very meaningful percentage of new production, particularly against sort of where we are coming out this year which is somewhere where I think we'd give a bandwidth of about somewhere south of 2,000,000 tons this year.

So if we were able to add that kind of tonnage for next year, that gives us a pretty good delta in terms of exploring some other export opportunities which we might want to not lock in necessarily today. Since we could bring those things somewhere in a six to twelve month timeframe depending upon of course which specific project it is, I think that gives us a lot more runway, as we sit here in August 2020, as to where we think we could perhaps end up by even August 2021, much less the full year. So, that doesn't really I think help you too much on modeling. But from a general perspective, if the market does start to look stronger and we think it's got some real legs under it, We're probably going to be in the position to take some serious looks at starting up one or more new projects. I guess the Berwind really wouldn't call it a new project, but we're certainly ready to pull the trigger on a couple of things that could certainly change the perspective for 2021, again, if we're looking at a good market.

Speaker 5

That's very helpful. Two quick ones and then I'm going get off, and let someone else ask a question if they have them. The first is, the reference to 12% of the sales potentially being at risk due to force majeure letters. Maybe Jeremy or you, Randy, can give me some ideas and thoughts about how do you model the back half of the year with that kind of out there? I mean, what's the best way for us to approach modeling your shipments in the back half, given that kind of footnote that you have in your release?

Speaker 1

Yes. I'm going to let Jeremy take that, but I mean that's a perfect example of why sitting here as a producer talking to you all who are trying to constructively create models for you know, with as much accuracy as you can and you're dealing with matters that are pretty much certainly beyond the control of the producer and frankly in some respects perhaps beyond the control of even the customer. So Jeremy, take a stab at that from a numbers standpoint. Yes, mean that is one of the reasons why we've elected to still not give any official guidance, Mark. The reality is we've given you the committed tons as the contracts were signed and certainly, we're going to work with our customers, given that I think both sides value the long term relationships and hopefully preserve as much, if not all of that, as we can, whether it's calendar 2020 into 2021, we'll just have to see.

Speaker 5

And my final one was in a previous time you guys are going through, we talked about, I think Chris was talking about doubling production or being positioned to double production over the next, I can't remember if it was eighteen or twenty four months. Is the what is the total incremental capital that would be required to double your production from this point onward if you had to approximate it?

Speaker 1

Well, I think I'll certainly let Chris sort of target the general part of your question. But I think we're moving numbers around. We would certainly define that with high specificity at such point as we were going to pull the trigger. But I think in our previous calls we've said that that number, depending upon which number of mines and of course which mines we would bring on, that could look somewhere in the $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 capital, new capital rather, expenditure and that probably as I said gets us certainly the tonnage at Berwind that Chris alluded to, which is kind of a max out of seven fifty plus thousand tons. And then we've got a couple other smaller properties that we could develop.

Maybe Chris, just roll back the time machine on our last call to just give a couple of high level comments on these production opportunities.

Speaker 3

Yes. Thanks, Randy. So those numbers are roughly in line and obviously it depends which projects we would tackle. But on the low vol side, somewhere between ten and fifteen get you all the way there for all the projects. Then looking at the high vol side, there's a number of expansion mines we could do at Elk Creek that are a little bit lower and then we have a little bit larger capital expenditure if we choose to do the plant upgrade.

But depending on how quickly and how many of those we put in place all within that twenty four month period, probably 15,000,000 on the low side up to 20,000,000 slightly over 20,000,000 if we were to do everything all at once, if that answers your question generally.

Speaker 5

Yes. So essentially, it's I mean, to get to $4,000,000 only another $20,000,000 of capital incremental capital on the high side.

Speaker 1

Yes. Probably, I go ahead, Chris.

Speaker 3

No, I was just going

Speaker 1

to say a lot of

Speaker 3

the reason the capital spend is a little bit lower than you'd expect is we transition a lot of our mobile equipment fleet from our development mining at Berwind into our thicker Pocahontas four. So you get a lot of bang for your capital buck at that expansion project.

Speaker 4

Thank you very much.

Speaker 1

Mark also, this is Randy, as we look at the market in general, we've had periods, I still sort of remember with a certain sense of fond nostalgia the 2016 market where the benchmark ran from about, you know, $60 to $80 in early part of the year to touching $300 toward the end of the year. And I can assure you if we find ourselves in another uplift like that, perhaps not even as dramatic a proportion, but you would find that we would be in a position to kind of move with pretty real dispatch to ramp up some more permanent production, which I think would get us to the four to four and a half less incrementally than we would if we were kind of hitting a couple singles and doubles as we go along in just kind of a flatter market like we are experiencing today.

Speaker 5

Perfect, thanks very much.

Speaker 1

Thank you, Mark.

Speaker 0

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Scott Schier with Clarksons.

Speaker 6

Hi, good morning, everyone. On the restart of development activities, once we start to see a market recovery, how quickly and flexible will you be in this restart? Will it be more immediate once you see demand starting to return? Or will there be a little bit of a lag effect both for getting workers back and just to make sure that the pricing recovery holds?

Speaker 1

Thanks Scott. Think again I'm going to maybe make a brief remark and then turn it back over to Chris. I think from an ability to react, one of our hallmarks is we think we're pretty nimble and opportunistic. We have of course discussed with our board pretty much all of these development projects in reasonable detail so they're very familiar with them. We've got dry powder in the sense of our liquidity that we could spend some money pretty quickly.

Needless to say because we haven't borrowed much money our banks are pretty comfortable with where we are and aside from our own liquidity we probably have additional resources we could draw upon if necessary to expand the spend. But with that, Chris, why don't you again kind of reiterate some of the more operational detail as it would relate to some of these production increases?

Speaker 3

So I think once we have a little bit of clarity both on market direction and the demand and the needs of our customers, it would be we could deploy capital and deploy the dollars for the development projects as fast or slowly as we needed. From the workforce standpoint, we're doing everything we can at this point to protect the workforce in place. And unfortunately, we had to make the reductions we did at Berwind. However, at least as it stands right now, we believe that we could grow the workforce as needed to staff the mines that are part of the expansion, in large part because of the development time on the Berwind Slope and some of the other developments running between six months and twelve months.

Speaker 6

Okay, great. That's helpful. And then moving on to costs. Without the impact of some of the higher costs from Berwind, at least in the third quarter, do you think it's reasonable to assume the cash cost to move lower into the mid-60s now that they're really just kind of being driven by Elk Creek, obviously, assuming that sales remain relatively stable and there aren't any additional COVID-nineteen impacts?

Speaker 1

Sure. Thanks, Scott. I'm going to let both Mike and Chris comment on that. So Mike, why don't you start on the cost?

Speaker 2

Yes, sure. I mean, not having that impact with that development mining does absolutely impact our entire sort of cost structure when you look at the average number. When we look at our coal mines at Elk Creek, we continue to be in really good conditions. And I'll let Chris kind of add on top of that. But yes, I I think we feel it's very helpful to have a cost structure like that when you're in this kind of environment.

But Chris?

Speaker 3

No, I think we would see we would expect our cost to return to that range. I would remind everybody on the call that the fourth quarter historically is one of the weaker quarters because of the two holiday periods that are in that quarter already. But accepting that normal shutdown period, we expect we can run Elk Creek and with the sort of minimal impact from the Berwind development project that they should be in that range absent external coronavirus COVID type impacts.

Speaker 6

Okay. That's good to hear. I think that'll do it for me. Thanks for taking my questions and best of luck.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Scott.

Speaker 0

Thank you. I will now turn the conference back over to Executive Chairman, Randy Atkins for closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Great. Thank you, moderator. Well, again, as always, we appreciate everybody participating in this call for Q2. As I said, these are pretty strange times and like all of us, we're doing our best to cope with kind of sailing through some pretty uncharted waters. Knock on wood hope we're being pretty good stewards for our investors.

We hope to be able to certainly improve on that as the market conditions, we all hope improve. And most importantly, I would say to everybody on the call, please stay safe, stay well and we'll look forward to speaking with you here in a few months. Thank you very much.

Speaker 0

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.