Earnings call transcript: Atlas Energy Solutions Q4 2024 misses EPS forecast

Atlas (NYSE:ATCO) Energy Solutions Inc. reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2024, missing analysts’ expectations for earnings per share (EPS) and revenue. The company’s EPS came in at $0.13, below the forecasted $0.17, while revenue reached $271.3 million, slightly under the projected $273 million. Following the announcement, Atlas Energy Solutions’ stock fell by 5.68%, closing at $19.43, reflecting investor concerns over the earnings miss. According to InvestingPro data, three analysts have recently revised their earnings estimates downward for the upcoming period, though the company maintains a "GOOD" overall financial health score.

Key Takeaways

• Atlas Energy Solutions missed EPS and revenue forecasts for Q4 2024.
• The stock price dropped by 5.68% in reaction to the earnings report. Despite trading at a relatively high P/E ratio of 30.2, InvestingPro’s Fair Value analysis suggests the stock may be undervalued at current levels. The company also offers an attractive dividend yield of 4.85%, significantly above its 3-year average of 3%.
• The company completed several strategic initiatives, including the launch of a driverless delivery operation.
• Atlas Energy Solutions forecasts significant growth in 2025 with a target of over $400 million in Adjusted EBITDA.

Company Performance

Atlas Energy Solutions demonstrated growth in several operational areas despite missing financial forecasts. The company completed the Dune Express conveyor system and launched a driverless delivery operation, positioning itself as a leader in oilfield logistics innovation. Additionally, the acquisition of Moser Energy Systems marks its entry into the distributed power generation market. These strategic moves aim to bolster the company’s long-term competitive position in the Permian Basin. The company’s strategic initiatives are supported by strong revenue growth of 48.67% over the last twelve months and a healthy current ratio of 1.23.

Financial Highlights

• Full Year 2024 Revenue: $1.1 billion
• Q4 2024 Revenue: $271.3 million
• Total (EPA:TTEF) Adjusted EBITDA: $288.9 million (27% of revenue)
• Q4 Adjusted EBITDA: $63.2 million (23.3% of revenue)
• Net Income: $14.4 million (5.3% of revenue)
• Earnings Per Share: $0.13

Earnings vs. Forecast

Atlas Energy Solutions reported an EPS of $0.13, falling short of the $0.17 expected by analysts. The revenue of $271.3 million also missed the forecasted $273 million. This represents a 23.5% decline in EPS compared to expectations, which may have contributed to the negative market reaction.

Market Reaction

The company’s stock fell by 5.68% following the earnings report, closing at $19.43. This decline reflects investor disappointment with the earnings miss. The stock’s performance was within the context of its 52-week range, with a high of $26.86 and a low of $17.49.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, Atlas Energy Solutions is optimistic about 2025, projecting Adjusted EBITDA to exceed $400 million. The company expects to sell over 25 million tons of proppant, up from 20 million in 2024. CapEx for 2025 is projected at $115 million, with plans to expand power generation to 310 megawatts by the end of 2026. For deeper insights into Atlas Energy Solutions’ growth potential and comprehensive financial analysis, investors can access the detailed Pro Research Report available on InvestingPro, which covers over 1,400 US stocks with expert analysis and actionable intelligence.

Executive Commentary

Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, emphasized the company’s unique positioning: "Atlas is uniquely positioned to modernize proppant and logistics systems in the Permian Basin." He also highlighted the company’s comprehensive service offering: "We are the one stop shop for the largest raw material and delivery systems in the Permian energy manufacturing process."

Risks and Challenges

• Potential fluctuations in sand prices could impact revenue.
• The integration of Moser Energy Systems presents operational challenges.
• Economic uncertainties may affect demand in the energy sector.
• Competition in the Permian Basin remains intense.
• Regulatory changes could impact operational costs.

Atlas Energy Solutions remains focused on strategic growth initiatives, despite the challenges posed by its recent earnings miss. The company’s forward-looking strategies aim to enhance its market position and drive future profitability.

Full transcript - Atlas Energy Solutions Inc (AESI) Q4 2024:

Conference Operator: welcome to Atlas Energy Solutions Fourth Quarter and Year End twenty twenty four Financial and Operational Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. 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, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Hello, and welcome to the Atlas Energy Solutions conference call and webcast for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. With us today are Bud Brigham, Executive Chair John Turner, President and CEO Blake McCarthy, CFO and Chris Sciola, COO. Bud, John, Blake and Chris will be sharing their comments on the company’s operational and financial performance for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four, after which we will open the call for Q and 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 02/27/2024, our quarterly reports on Form 10 Q and current reports on Form eight 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, Atlas Energy Solutions: Thank you, Kyle, and thanks to everyone for joining us today to discuss our full year and fourth quarter twenty twenty four operational and financial results. 2025 is set to be a transformational year for Atlas and we have come out of the blocks at a full sprint. On January 12, we announced our first commercial delivery off the Dune Xpress. 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 profit 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 twenty twenty three and demonstrate how much has changed at that time. At the time of our IPO, the Dune Express was just a 42 mile right of way. Today, we’re 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 operation was viewed as a novelty. Today, we are doing multi trailer deliveries off the Dune Express delivering 70 to 100 tons per driver versus over the road deliveries of approximately 24 tons. Back in March of twenty twenty three, Atlas’ annual productive capacity stood at around 11,000,000 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 2.5 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 a big gain 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 the only the beginning for Atlas.

Yesterday, we closed on the acquisition of Moser Energy Systems, our platform investment into the distributed power market. With this 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 Mosier’s fleet from its current size of two twelve megawatts to approximately three ten megawatts by the end of twenty twenty six. 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 Mosier, welcome aboard. It’s going to be a fun ride. Turning back to our profit and logistics business. The Permian profit 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 DuneXpress, 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 recognize that outsourcing their sand and supply and delivery to distressed providers just to save a few bucks per ton as a recipe for disaster. Instead, we are seeing customers choose to commit 100% of the twenty twenty five sand volumes to Atlas, their partner of choice in profit and supply and logistics.

They correctly identified that they can rely on Atlas to eliminate the operational headache that Sands can represent in the oilfield. And when things do go wrong, we will break our backs making things right, which is why we entered the year in a highly contracted position that we expect to grow over the coming weeks. This is the turn of the year and with the great hope of large RFP volume wins on 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 in 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 Schola to provide more details around the commissioning of Dune Xpress and our exciting leap into driverless deliveries. Thanks, John. We continue to make significant progress in the operational ramp up of the Dune Xpress.

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 remain 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 Caligi Road and onload facility, connecting our legacy high crush Kermit mines to the Dune Xpress. This provides incremental flex volumes to the system, allowing us to better optimize silo volumes across multiple distribution points. The DuneXpress 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.

We’ve already begun transitioning autonomous deliveries off the Dune Xpress. 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’m extremely proud of our Atlas team.

What was once an ambitious vision is now becoming a market changing reality. 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.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Thanks, Chris. Atlas recorded full year 2024 revenue of $1,100,000,000 Total company’s adjusted EBITDA was $288,900,000 or 27% of revenue. Statistics revenue for the year was $540,500,000 For the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four, we reported total sales of $271,300,000 and adjusted EBITDA of $63,200,000 or 23.3% of revenue. Revenue from profit sales was $128,400,000 Total profit sales volumes for the quarter declined sequentially to 5,100,000 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 Encore 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 stand 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 $142,900,000 for the quarter.

Total cost of sales for Atlas excluding DD and A for the quarter were $191,000,000 consisting of $61,000,000 of planned operating costs, $124,300,000 related to service costs and $5,700,000 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 and A expense for the quarter was $19,100,000 elevated relative to our historical levels by consulting and litigation expenses.

Interest expense for the quarter was $12,300,000 Depreciation, depletion and amortization expense for the quarter was $30,400,000 Net income was $14,400,000 or 5.3% of revenue and earnings per share was $0.13 Net cash provided by operating activities for the quarter was $70,900,000 Adjusted EBITDA for the period was $63,200,000 and adjusted EBITDA margin of 23.3% Adjusted free cash flow, which we define as adjusted EBITDA with maintenance CapEx for the quarter was $47,900,000 or 17.7% of revenue. Growth CapEx during the quarter equated to $50,000,000 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 $15,300,000 As John mentioned earlier, we are raising our quarterly dividend to $0.25 per share, which represents a 4% increase and equates approximately to 4.8% annualized yield. Accounting for our latest dividend announcement, we have paid out $252,000,000 in total dividends in distribution since inception. The combination of our recent equity offering, which raised $254,100,000 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 22,000,000 tons committed in 2025 and expect that number to surpass 25,000,000 tons in relatively short order. We expect to sell north of 25,000,000 tons in 2025, which compares to around 20,000,000 tons sold in 2024. Our recent market share gains are testament to Atlas’ 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 ZuneXpress completed, our capital spending will come down significantly year over year. Total CapEx for 2025 is currently expected to be approximately $115,000,000 of which $27,000,000 is budgeted for expanding the asset base at Moser. The remainder is evenly split between growth and maintenance for our profit 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% to 15% sequentially relative to Q4 levels. For the first quarter twenty twenty five, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $75,000,000 and $85,000,000 As the year progresses, we expect our financials to more fully reflect the accretive impact of the DuneXpress 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 400,000,000 inclusive of ten months of contribution from the Moser acquisition. For future reporting,

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: we will break out our Power business as a separate segment.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Before we open up the call for Q

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: and A,

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: a few comments from our Chairman, Bud Brigham.

Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, Atlas Energy Solutions: 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 booms for picnics and birthday parties. Looking back now, it seems crazy that as recently as 2017, the majority of the sand being pumped downhole 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 Monahans, plants that uniquely included redundancy, conveyors and remote automation from here in Austin. Later, we added the Encore 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 forty two 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 profit 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 position in the profit and logistics space. Today, Atlas is the largest and lowest cost profit 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 oilfield 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 scaled operators, Scale and automation for profit 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 and 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 $252,000,000 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 and A.

Conference Operator: Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. Today’s first question is coming from Keith MacKay of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Hi, good morning and thanks for all the color so far.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: I just wanted to start out on the Dune Xpress. Can you speak to maybe how much volume you’ve moved down the Dune thus far since

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: the commissioning in early January there? And maybe some of the gating factors that are required to get to that full effect of utilization by mid year there?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. Thanks, Gene. This is Chris Scialla. Look, I think reflecting back, right? Hindsight being twenty twenty years ago, we really should have said that we were launching Q1 of twenty twenty twenty five 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 got 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% to 60% of capacity today. There will be some planned downtime in March. Start up, 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 the system nuisance trips and working to eliminate and reduce that daily planned commissioning downtimes.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. If you think about it from

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: a finance perspective, the full impact in logistics margins won’t be fully realized until mid year. But it will be a steady free tailwind as we work through the first half. So the tons delivered also did express our highest margin tons by far. So as we go from marginal amounts in early January to full run rate

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: at some point in Q2,

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: the margins realized by our logistics business, those will steadily increase Q3 representing the first quarter of full financial impact, bringing logistic margins into the mid to high 20s. So with respect to the first half, the impact is obviously small since Q1 as we made our first commercial delivery in January and have been ramping since then. So while it is in a straight line, look, when those are getting to our target annual run rate of 10,000,000 to 11,000,000 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 you say half of modeling

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: perspective. Got it. That’s helpful. Maybe just turning to capital allocation. I see if expecting to spend $150,000,000 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? This is John. Our goal is to keep the base dividend at a level where investors can be confident.

We’re going to get the cash every quarter no matter what the market conditions. And so 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 Mosier business or the Mosier acquisition is going to give us the ability to blunt some of that volatility associated with the completion side of the business. So, yes, I mean, in 2024 I mean, 2025, we do have some some growth initiatives going on there that are going to that are high return projects. We’re going to continue to evaluate those and continue to support 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 stop buyback. I mean our Board initiated a stop buyback program earlier last year.

And but one thing is obviously last year we were looking a lot of amortization debt pay down. 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 the higher return of projects. Got it. Thanks for that color. That’s it for me.

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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Good 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 arching plans for that segment as you kind of roll everything together? Yes. Don, I’ll start on that and then Heather can chime in. I mean, when we entered into the 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 significant need for power in the oil field. I don’t necessarily see the need for power any different than what you see in other parts of in other areas of the power business. We have pretty high return on our investments. And but that we can grow that organically and we have some ability to expand pretty rapidly that 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 makes sense for us to grow into.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes, just to piggyback on that. We view the Moser acquisition as the first investment in the 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 part of the day, although I’ll never rule out that out as the ideal presents itself. The manufacturing capacity of Moser, which is something that drew us to business, gives us a lot of flex in our ability to ramp up the growth of that business. So if concrete customer demand is there just by the investments, we can ramp that up rather quickly.

Additionally, Abba Solar has provided 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 swinging generators from a parking lot. Luckily, we have some people on that, the team much more than being 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.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: I appreciate that color. And one on the autonomous trucking, I mean, a lot of us two point five years ago before you went public were a little bit skeptical of that business, but you 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?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. This is Cristal. 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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: a bit ahead of schedule.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: 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 see a huge pop there until you reach scale. I think that inflection point occurs with us somewhere between that 50 to 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 see 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.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: And just one clarification, if I remember correctly, didn’t about 80% or 70% or something like that of of the cost of operating the truck labor?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes, sir.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: I appreciate it. I’ll turn it back.

Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Shawn Mitchell of Daniel Energy Partners. Please go ahead.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Maybe for Blake, the industry at large is kind of been, I guess, prepared for what I would call flat to down activity in The U. S. For 2025. This will 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 buy power companies get into the power business. But what are you seeing in terms of deal flow from a standpoint of consolidating the profit market in The U. S? And or when are we potentially going to see some of these people go away in the profit market? Or do you have an opinion or thoughts around that?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Well, I always have opinions, Sean. But I don’t know if most of work. But I think that in terms of deal flow, I think we saw a lot of consolidation opportunities in 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 same line portfolio sits within the Permian Basin right where we said the think about the assets legacy assets, we had the best assets from reserves and an OpEx per ton standpoint. And when we acquired Hi Crush, we acquired portfolio that sat neatly adjacent to us on the cost curve.

And so a

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: lot of the stuff

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: that would be available to us from an expansion standpoint would be to move 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 sand market. So I think the extreme cold winds 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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: to be weather in January and February.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: So it was really, really cold and that has an effect on both mining and logistics operations. So we had our own issues that are baked into guidance, but I think these weatherments hit some of our competitors who haven’t been investing heavily into maintenance much harder. And Sandsfly got really short in the market in a hurry. And this shows that how delicate that balance is. So we saw sand prices spike significantly in those weeks.

And while they’ve come back down to earthsome, 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. Mark certainly is a point of yield yet, but we are seeing much more rational behavior from our competitors around pricing. And I think I think people are actually thinking about the economics of the margin of production. When you’re running a skeleton crew on mines that you have a hard ceiling on what you produce and your OpEx per ton is significantly higher than it would be if your facility was at full utilization and the fixed cost numbers and business is just it’s just been on a high.

So when they have an opportunity to respond to sales and you want to have the seller production at that elevated level, because you’re not going to be adding a second shift because there’s zero confidence that the volume offset will be there. So it’s a difficult situation to be in, instead of a double edged sword. So you’re likely not covering overhead at this level, but you don’t want to throw down fire either. So it’s a tough situation for a lot of players out there. And I think they just need some insight why we take supply attrition.

It’s going to continue to play out in this market.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. 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 9,100 frac fleets in the Permian Basin for the past four years, but you actually show sand or profit 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 and trimal fracs. My question to you guys is, are you seeing I mean, obviously, we know the big E and Ps that have large scale development doing simul and trimel frac. Are we starting to see some

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: of the other

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: operators participate in the simultrimel frac on the completion side?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. This is Chris. 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 time. And 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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: of copy cat out there, right?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: And we’re seeing that trend continue across the board.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Okay. That’s helpful. Thanks, guys. I’ll turn it back.

Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Avi (JO:AVIJ) Modak of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Blake McCarthy, CFO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Hi, good morning. I think you guys talked about 25,000,000 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 is that of that as 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?

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Well, I think we’re going to

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: avoid overall market share conversations. But I think that we as John talked about, we set

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: a hard

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: floor on pricing during our fee season. We know that we offer certainly advantage reliability and better overall service levels. And operators can they know how this is going to be there. Their sales could show up on time and we’re not going to we do everything we can not to be the reason that people have EDP on-site. So we take that very, very seriously and that tends to pay us dividends when it comes to our customer relationships.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: And that’s evidenced by there’s some of the customers 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 lines they put on Atlas as a logistics provider. Yes. It was a key differentiator

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: during this ROT season is that operators knew they’re like it’s one thing you’re like, okay, hey, I can get the cheapest sand. But it might not be there in June’s live. Those guys might not be there. And they know that Alice 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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: there and getting those volumes.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: So we feel really good about where we’re aiming for that.

Blake McCarthy, CFO, Atlas Energy Solutions: 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?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. So we’ll continue to so we actually saw like on the ground level significant improvements just in process fees and stuff like that. That team is doing a great job. It just didn’t really flow through the financials just because you had the step down in volumes with the seasonal holiday slowdown. As you come back into as we reloaded capital budgets, we’ll see that volume uptick up in Q1 and more so in Q2.

And so you’ll see that fixed cost leverage start to flip through to the OpEx per ton. So thinking about getting to high tens in the Q1 level in Q1 numbers and continued improvement through midyear is a pretty we’re very proud of that kind of push out from a modeling perspective. We won’t get back to our full optimal levels until early twenty twenty six as we talked about when we get those new dredges in our primary and current line. But yes, there’s we’re continuing to focus on process improvements and optimization projects. They’re doing fantastic job.

So we’ll continue to see that be an accretive tailwind to the financials as we work through the year.

Blake McCarthy, CFO, Atlas Energy Solutions: That’s awesome. Thank you, guys.

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

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Most of my questions were asked or addressed in my 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, Atlas Energy Solutions: I think we currently

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: have approximately 22,000,000 tons contracted already and expect that number to move up as we work through

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: the rest of the first quarter.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: I think that there’s this misconception that RFP season stops at New Year’s Eve, but some of the some players, the contract processes dragged through January, February. So that number will move up between now and Q1 call.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: And we enter in a contract pretty much in every quarter, maybe with the exception of the late third quarter. But we are attracting sand and the logistics services throughout the year.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: 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? Yes. I think for us, we really as John mentioned earlier, we’ve really seen customers a pull from customers to move to more Temeris 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. Yes, absolutely right.

But I think that’s made up for 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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: remove

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: bottlenecks in their operation. Appreciate the color. That’s it for me. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Michael Scialla, Stephens. Please go ahead.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: 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?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. So just the CapEx breakdown again, so we’ve got to get $115,000,000 for 2025 CapEx, $27,000,000 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 legacy business, we continue to invest into our logistics and last mile operations. We’ve got some exciting projects there that have fantastic return profiles and we’re really excited to share those with the street over the coming months.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Okay. Can you talk about any of the opportunities on the Power Gen side in that $27,000,000 I think you’ve mentioned that there are some applications that could require more than 10 megawatts, anything there in particular that is worth noting?

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. So in that number and that $27,000,000 for Moser in that within that and that’s the cumulative Moser number. That includes a small amount very small amount of maintenance. But what really attracted to us is to 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 talk about, includes growing that megawatt base from two twelve megawatts to three ten by the end of twenty twenty six. So we will 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 we’re John mentioned it in kind of a quarterly comment a little bit, but customer response to this acquisition has been really positive.

So it’s our sales guys are always complaining. They’re beyond hard. But when the phone when their job consists of picking up the phone and answering customer inquiries, it gets a little easier. And we’ve got 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 the best one.

Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, Atlas Energy Solutions: Sounds good. Thank you.

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

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Hey, good morning, everybody. Hey, Kurt. Hi, Kurt.

Conference Operator: So I guess

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: a couple of follow ups. So 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 pretty sure what normalized is anymore. But in the context of that, is a mid kind of 20s per tonne what you would consider normalized in today’s environment? Yes.

I mean, mid to low 20s is what I would say normalized. I mean, we were really referring to what was going on in the fourth quarter. Right, right. Yes. 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, $40,000,000 40 5 million dollars of annualized EBITDA on a ten month sizing basis, you guys. So just can you help me connect the dots? So it sounds like there’s already contract in place.

So what was the commentary about depending on other contracts being signed? That is 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 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.

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 lower things up your sleeve?

Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, Atlas Energy Solutions: Non health business, an operated business and a loyalty business.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: Can you repeat that question? We were having a little hard time hearing here.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. Yes. No, no. Look, I just said, look. But you started this business, right, with frac sand and you layered on a premium logistics services and now 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?

Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, Atlas Energy Solutions: Well, I think, I mean, certainly Atlas has demonstrated by the Monster acquisition provides a unique and platform for modernizing the oilfield. First profit is missing critical for every single well in the oilfield and then the delivery

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: of that

Bud Brigham, Executive Chair, Atlas Energy Solutions: profit, the logistics is integral to the efficiency of the factory on the ground. So So I think there’s going to continue to be more opportunities to innovate and associated with that green shoots for apples. Again, most of the 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. 1 of the things that came up earlier that I think is important maybe and I’ll just take the opportunity to point it out is that as the oilfield becomes more efficient and you see that with the drilling rigs and you see that with the frac crews, they tend to those efficiencies tend to cannibalize that equipment.

But Palmis is on the other side of that, because as the frac spreads get more efficient, that just needs more sand consumption. So we’re kind of the inverse of that and benefit from that in a way kind of like a mistreatment process. 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. Absolutely.

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: John, we’ve come up to the

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: top of the hour. I think we

Kyle Turlington, Vice President, Investor Relations, Atlas Energy Solutions: have time for one more question.

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: That was it? Okay. We’re showing those further questions. Thank you.

Conference Operator: Mr. Turner, do you have any closing comments?

John Turner, President and CEO, Atlas Energy Solutions: Yes. I want to thank everybody for coming to join us for this call. So we’re very excited about what Atlas has done and about the future. And Atlas is we look forward to reporting our first quarter results and operational results here in a few months. Thanks.

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

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