Good morning, everyone. My name is Jack Greenberg with the Southwest Ideas Conference hosted by Three Part Advisors. Thank you all for joining us. First session of the day will begin momentarily with Atlas Energy Solutions, traded on the NYSE under the ticker AESI. Presenting on their behalf is Kyle Turlington, VP of IR. And with that, I'll hand it over to Kyle. Thank you.
Okay, good morning. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you to Three Part Advisors for putting on a great conference. This is one of our favorites of the year, and so we just really want to extend a big thank you to you guys for all y'all do. Just real quick, again, Kyle Turlington, Investor Relations. My COO is on his way and should be here, but probably he's going to miss this, so I apologize, but real quick, 10-second background on me. I spent almost 20 years on the sell side and the last 15 years as an energy specialist salesperson, and if you had told me a couple of years ago that I'd be running investor relations for "a sand company," I would have told you you were crazy because sand was usually one of my least favorite segments within the oil service space historically.
I came with great skepticism when our bankers several years ago pulled me aside and said, "Look, we've got an IPO coming early in 2023. It's Atlas Sand." Of course, they changed their name to Atlas Energy Solutions. I told our bankers they were crazy, that there was no way that there would ever be any interest in Atlas. As I started to look under the hood, though, I fell in love with the story. I thought it was one of the most unique stories within oil service. I think there's so few companies within OFS that have true moats around their business model. I think Atlas has a couple that I'd love to share with you. With that as a background, I'll dive into some of the key points here.
I'm going to try to be brief so you guys can ask me questions. I think this is one of the most important slides here. One of the first things that got me over the hurdle is having the opportunity to work with Bud Brigham. Bud was the CEO at the time. He is now Executive Chairman. Bud has had just a phenomenal track record of investing in the energy patch. He has enriched the lives of many people around Austin, Midland, and Dallas. Bud is an innovator. Bud started his first company, Brigham Exploration, I think in 1997, with a total of $30,000 of investments. You can see Bud did very well with that first investment. That company sold to Statoil for $4.7 billion. Bud, as always, used innovation as a way to find an advantage.
Bud used 3D seismic as a form of exploration and basically discovered the core of what is today the Bakken, which is just truly amazing, so being aligned with Bud, being a part of that team was something I couldn't pass up. After Bud sold Brigham Exploration to Statoil, he formed Brigham Resources in the Permian Basin, and he's pretty much been in the Permian Basin ever since. That company was going to go public in 2017, and then Diamondback acquired Brigham Resources at that time. Bud also started a minerals company, which is still public today. Brigham Minerals has merged with Sitio Royalties. They are public still, but when Bud was selling Brigham Resources in 2017, they were looking for a way to put capital back to work, and at that time, there was a big shift to in-basin sand.
And I can certainly go through the history of sand in a minute. But obviously, prior to that, we used to believe that the only solid proppant was the Northern White stuff in Minnesota and Milwaukee. And they were actually railing it down into the basin. But a couple of technology breakthroughs, everybody started realizing that this 100 mesh in-basin sand was just as effective. And so there became a land grab in 2017. And Atlas was early on in identifying. And I think it's really because of their E&P background of always kind of looking for the best rock. They kind of took that same approach in leasing up the giant open dunes. And so again, I think point number one here is that being aligned with Bud Brigham has been a very fruitful endeavor for many folks.
So I think now I'm kind of going into Atlas here a little bit. But I think the one thing to think about for Atlas is we do have an advantage on our geology. And so if you think about the Winkler Sand Trend, which kind of runs through the Central Basin Platform, it separates the Delaware and the Midland Basin. When Atlas was looking to potentially lock up some land, they discovered that the giant open dunes is really the advantage geology. And so there's two giant open dunes. There's a north dune and the south dune. On the north dune is where we have our Kermit facility. And I'm talking about kind of legacy Atlas here. We did acquire a company called Hi-Crush earlier this year. But for now, I'm just talking about legacy Atlas. They really identify that northern dune as sort of the best geology.
The reason for that, and we do share that dune with some of our friends in the basin, the south dune, we actually acquired all of it. And so no one has. We control 100% of that south dune. But in the north dune, where we have our largest plant, the reason why this is such an advantage here is that we have, we think, world-class geology for sand. And the reason for that is that this is all surface mining. And it's really deep deposits. And so it enables you to very effectively feed your plants with the sand. But another thing about the quality of the reserves is that our yields are tremendously high. And so we've got like 90%-95% yields. So for every ton of sand we feed into the plant, we get 90%-95% of that back out as product.
That enables us to have some of the lowest cost mining in the basin. It's not just the geology that gets us having the low cost. It's also our ability to dredge mine. This is really important. We're the only company now. Not all of our mines were able to do this. For the mines that are located on the northern and southern dune, we're the only company that actually dredge mines their sand. What that means is simply we use a dredge. We actually have an advantage water access at these facilities. We actually have a pond.
We actually have a dredge that sits on top of the pond that literally is going through and scraping the sides of the walls and sucking the sand into a slurry line that feeds the plant. What this does is it dramatically lowers our cost of mined sand. Everybody else in the basin, and we have to do this with some of our other plants where we don't have that advantage water system, is we have to use Caterpillar equipment, yellow iron. You can see that yellow iron. You need quite a bit of equipment. You need all the manpower to run that equipment. Obviously, there's a fair amount of diesel usage. You can compare that to the dredge. The dredge is so much more efficient. We think dredge mining saves about $2 each of their plants.
We are looking for ways to bring this dredge technology to some of the other mines, fixed mines that we have. We do have two neighboring plants that are nearby, our big Kermit dune that we acquired through Hi-Crush. We're looking for ways to bring this low-cost solution to those plants as well, and stay tuned. We're working on what we can do to lower their cost there, so when you think about sand, I think it's really important to be the lowest cost producer. Atlas' cost to produce sand is so much farther below the rest of the competition. Again, it's because of the geology. It's because of the ability to dredge mine. But there's also other things too. We do a lot of remote operations, so if you ever come visit us in Austin, I'd love to show you our fourth floor.
But there, we actually load all of our sand trucks remotely. And so it literally looks like kids are playing video games. But we have 1,500 trucks a day come through our facilities. And we load all those trucks from Austin, Texas. And what that does is that obviously dramatically lowers your turnover in that job because I don't think there's a lot of 27, 28-year-olds that want to spend their time in Kermit, Texas. And so keeping them in Austin is actually an advantage. And secondly, it's so expensive. Anybody in the world can tell you this. It's so expensive to house people out there because you've got to put them in man camps. You've got to pay for their commutes out there. And so it's really cost-effective to move as much personnel as we can away from the plant.
If you add up the geology, the ability to dredge mine, and then a lot of the remote operations, remote engineering that we do from Austin, our cost to produce sand, we think, especially at these legacy Atlas plants, are well sub-$10 a ton. When you add in the Hi-Crush assets, we'll talk about in a second, we're saying that overall our OpEx per ton are low double digits, $10-$11 a ton. That compares to the industry average, which is around kind of $15 a ton. That cost curve in the industry goes from Atlas at the very bottom all the way to $20 a ton.
When sand prices are weak like they are today, Atlas can make a really good margin because of our low cost versus our competition, who's today probably at gross margin break-even or gross margin negative on the cost of sand. It gives Atlas just ability to generate strong margin, strong cash flow, and strong and weak markets. Geology, I think, is truly a moat. We've locked up a lot of that good acreage. We are the only people that can dredge mine. That has created a buffer between us and the rest of our competition. We also, when we acquired Hi-Crush, one of the reasons why we attracted to them was they sat very next to us on the cost curve. They do have two fixed plants near us. They share that same geology advantage.
And again, we're hoping to find ways to lower their mining costs at some point and then do some of that remote operations with them. We're still working through those. So yeah, so I think geology is the second point I wanted to highlight. The third thing here is the Dune Express, which is the 42 mi conveyor that we are completing and actually should have completed. I'll show you some pictures here in a second. By the end of this year, the Dune Express is. Back when Atlas was formed, Bud and the team looked at the way sand was delivered around the basin. And think about it. We used to truck oil around the basin. We used to truck water around the basin. What do we do now? We put them in pipelines. But sand is basically the way sand gets delivered is still very archaic.
They use the public road networks, which aren't designed. If you've ever been out to these little areas, these are really desolate counties in the middle of kind of nowhere, and all of a sudden, the oil field has taken these places over, and now you go out there, these are some of the most dangerous roads in all of Texas, and so Bud and the team sit there and say, well, look, there's got to be a better way to do this, and they looked at a whole bunch of different technologies, and they eventually settled on the conveyor. They actually visited a conveyor outside of Austin that was working for a lignite mine. It was taking lignite from the mine to the power plant. Austin was decommissioning that, but as they started to study, the best way to move bulk aggregates around the world was actually conveyors.
There's 42 mi. It seems like it's the incredibly long conveyor. But if you look around the world, there's actually plenty of examples of conveyors that are even longer than this. Conveyors are obviously highly reliable. They have incredible uptime. So the team set out in 2017, 2018, shortly after Atlas was formed, and started working on securing the right-of-way for a conveyor. It took four years. Obviously, there's a pandemic in there. Negotiating with landowners to put up a conveyor, which it's not like a pipeline. I mean, a conveyor actually splits your property. So it's not an easy sell. After securing the right-of-way, and again, it's a credit to the Brigham Land team coming from an E&P background to secure that, the IPO was the next thing that was needed to sort of fund the proceeds to build the Dune Express.
What the Dune Express does is it dramatically lowers our cost to deliver sand. And it also has, obviously, some ESG benefit as well. But the cost to deliver sand, today, all of our competition uses where or I guess they could have their own logistics network. But it's over-the-road trucking networks. And so if you think about a well that's being drilled in the Permian Basin, typically, it takes about 10,000 tons of sand used in each well. I think that's for a 2 mi lateral. So most of the wells now are even longer than that. That's around 500 sand truck deliveries per well. And if you think about the number of wells that are drilled in the Permian, it's almost 3 million sand deliveries a year done in this little area in both the Midland and the Delaware Basin.
So you can start to see the type of traffic we're talking about. Again, the Dune Express, the cost to deliver sand down the Dune Express essentially shortens the delivery load. And what also is very interesting, there's some pictures there, is that, and by the way, that picture to the right is basically 39 of the 42 mi is that picture. But the Dune Express is pretty much structurally complete today. We are going through the commissioning process today. So basically, the electrical infrastructure, sort of the last piece of the puzzle. We should be actually running the belt here pretty soon. You'll probably see actually product on the belt, hopefully, by the end of the year.
We've kind of told the street that we think this thing will be up and running at some point in the first quarter and hopefully fully utilized or fully ramped up by the end of the second quarter, but again, we hope to have commercial deliveries on the Dune Express here very, very soon, but for the most part, it is completely, I think, three out of four flights are completely built, and again, we're trying to hopefully be running a belt without product on it here in one of the flights here in the next couple of days.
As I was talking about, one of the things that's also an advantage of the Dune Express is that when you, especially in the Delaware Basin, which is obviously where the Dune Express goes into, is that when you pick up sand at the Dune Express, the Dune Express sort of eliminates the use of public roads. And so we can actually do heavier deliveries because when you pick up sand today, you have to adhere to the Department of Transportation's weight limits, which typically only allows a sand truck to pick up 24 tons. The most they can, 23 and a half, I think, is the average load. Because for a lot of deliveries on the Dune Express, we'll never have to cross a public road, we can do heavier deliveries. And so we started to roll out a multi-trailer operation.
And then eventually, we're going to get into autonomous. I won't spend a ton of time on autonomous here in a second. But we have made some autonomous deliveries off the Dune Express or in those what we call them polygons, these heat zones that basically avoid having to go on the public road. So we can actually make one truck driver can do a heavier sand delivery. So 35, 70, 100 tons, depending on if it's a single, double, or triple trailer, which just makes that truck driver significantly more efficient. And again, dramatically lowers the cost. If one driver can do a 10 mi delivery with 100 tons, think how much more efficient he is than a driver today that let me just say one more thing. Let me go back here real quick. So the Dune Express is 42 mi long.
But if you were going to drive it from so the red star is where the plant is. If you were going to make that drive and use the public road networks and drive to the end of the Dune Express, it's about a 70 mi haul because you have to go around to use the public road networks to get there. Think how much more efficient a driver is today doing 10 mi deliveries with 100 tons versus a 70 mi delivery using 24 tons. You can see the efficiency. And that kind of shows you the effectiveness of a driver. The Dune Express is going to dramatically lower our logistics costs. And we think next year, you'll see our logistics margins expand quite dramatically with the Dune Express. The Dune Express can hold 13 million tons, assuming kind of 80%-85% uptime.
Most conveyors are typically up more than 90% of the time. I can go into a bunch more detail about this, but this is one of the most technically advanced, excuse me, conveyors ever built with a lot of technology in here that we think is going to make it one of the most reliable conveyors in the world. So again, this is just a huge advantage. Again, this serves the Delaware Basin and I think certainly gives Atlas quite a bit of unique advantage versus our competition. I think this is the second moat that I wanted to talk about, and then lastly, real quick, I mentioned this a couple of times. We acquired Hi-Crush earlier this year. It feels like it was like three years ago, but it was in February of this year. Hi-Crush was attracted to us for several reasons.
Number one, they sat next to us on the cost curve. So we basically, we think, consolidated the low end of the cost curve, which we think is important because obviously, sand prices are always quite volatile. And today, they're very weak, which we'll talk about in a second. But Hi-Crush had also another advantage is they created these proximity mines or mobile mines, which became super popular. These are sort of wet sand mobile mines in the Midland Basin. Hi-Crush has, at the time we acquired them, seven mobile mines. Today, we're at nine. And these are smaller mines that typically serve customers in that region. One of the disadvantages of serving the Midland Basin from our plants in the Winkler Sand Trend was the distance you have to send the sand. So sand prices were actually an immaterial part of it.
But for us to deliver sand, especially in Howard County, it could cost us as much as $70 just on the delivery fee alone. These mobile mines are located very close to the operator's activity. It really shortens the delivery cost and are super popular. The negative of these mobile mines is they are wet sand, which is a slightly lower quality product. But the cost advantages far outweigh the lower quality. And then they also have just a couple of years of reserves. These are sort of smaller mines. And so we're always constantly moving those and finding the key is to make sure that we find tier one deposits for these mobile mines, which is not easy to do. But Hi-Crush really serves the Midland Basin quite well.
And when we looked at the customer overlap when we did the deal, Atlas was very strong in the Delaware. Hi-Crush was really strong in the Midland. It was a perfect synergy. Now, when you think about all the M&A that's going back and forth, a lot of companies that were big in the Midland are now acquired properties in the Delaware. So now there's folks that are big in both areas. And we're the only company that can really serve, in my opinion, both basins adequately. So the other thing that Hi-Crush did real quick was Hi-Crush gave us they had two dry plants that are near our Kermit facility where the Dune Express is connected. And so what this has enabled us to do is that Kermit facility can produce anywhere from 10-12 million tons annually.
The Dune Express can hold 13 million tons, if not more. We were worried that we were going to one of the things that Hi-Crush gave us is the ability to connect those mines to the Dune Express so that they have two nearby facilities that are about a mile and a half away from our Kermit facility. Today, we're building a road. We're going to be able to connect those volumes to the Dune Express so we can add more volumes there. Hi-Crush helped us consolidate the low end of the cost curve. It gave us these proximity mines, these mobile mines in the Midland Basin to help us serve that area more effectively. It gave us a low-cost solution to add volumes down the Dune Express.
Last thing I'm going to say real quick, too. I mentioned a couple of times the sand market is certainly weak. We've talked about that on our calls. What's interesting about the sand market is that one of the negatives about the sand market is that it's pretty fragmented. And it's also pretty easy to add supply. The argument against that, though, it's yes, it's easy to add supply. But it's really hard to add low-cost supply. I think a lot of those tier one locations have been sort of discovered. And so today, because of the fact that until recently, we spent almost two years with sand prices north of $30 a ton. And that added around, I don't know, 10-15 million tons of capacity that's entered the market. Again, that has led to the market being somewhat oversupplied.
Actually, proppant demand, despite all the rumors about rig count declines, etc., because of improvement in longer laterals, more proppant per stage, improvement in completion efficiencies, proppant demand has been actually pretty steady during this period of softer activity. So we think over the next six months, three months, you're going to see a lot of this higher-cost capacity exit the market and help balance supply and demand for sand. So right now, it's not fun. We're seeing sand prices in the high teens, which is, again, as I talked about earlier, if you think about the cost curve of our competition, that's gross margin breakeven or certainly negative operating margins for a lot of our competition. And we think as some of this capacity comes out of the market, it created a more balanced market.
We're already starting to see signs of capacity being shed in the market today. I don't know how I did on that. I think that was 20 minutes. That is kind of the quick and dirty on Atlas. I am more than happy to answer any questions and go into any of this stuff in more detail.
How much would the Dune Express reduce your logistics costs?
It's about half of what it is. Today, if we were, let's just say that if we were doing an over-the-road delivery into the heart of the Delaware Basin from our plant. I know the Dune Express is 42 mi. That's how the crow flies. Again, as I said earlier, it's about a 70 mi delivery.
And so that 70 mi delivery is somewhere between $20 and $25 a ton, which is what it costs for a third-party truck to do it. And again, it just depends. But we think our cost to deliver using the Dune Express would be about half that. And so we could charge a similar rate because that's the only alternative a customer has and capture a lot of that margin. Yes.
Remind me a little bit of the history of the publicly traded sand companies and even what came before them and how that's kind of changed over time.
Sure.
In fact, when Bud had started Brigham Exploration in the Bakken, if you go back to the 2005, 2007, 2010 timeframe, there was a company called CARBO Ceramics where people were like, "Look, the only way that you can actually" so prop is obviously used to keep the shale rock from collapsing on each other and create highways for the hydrocarbons to flow during the completion process. Well, it used to believe that you needed this sort of super strength prop, this ceramic prop, which was the only thing that could keep the shale rock from collapsing. And so CARBO Ceramics was a darling stock, super hot stock. And then people were like, "Well, these Chinese can make a much cheaper ceramic prop." And they were like, "No, you can't use that." Well, people started using that. And it worked.
And then, because of the cost of ceramics were so high, people started experimenting with Northern White sand. And that was supposed to be the super whatever the prop strength was supposed to be close to the ceramics and sort of the Wagyu beef of sand. And so it used to be for years, well, the only thing we can use now is Northern White. And so we used to rail it into the basin. And that's basically the cost for sand was just astronomical. You had to rail it down there. Then you had to pick it up from these transload stations and deliver it to the well site. And the supply chain was a disaster because it would take forever for the sand to get there. And E&Ps are constantly waiting on sand. I mean, that was the biggest bottleneck at a job.
So they got all this frack equipment waiting there. And they're waiting for the train to come. And anyways, and so that was the Permian Basin for a number of years. But then EOG, actually, I think, is the one. And I could be wrong on this. But EOG was like, "Look, this is ridiculous." And when they went to these Northern White plants, there was this 100 mesh sand, which was kind of lower crush strength, smaller sand. And they actually experimented with, and that was basically they were giving that away. They actually explored fracking a well with 100 mesh. And they found that actually, if you use more of it, it's just as effective as using the ceramics or the Northern White sand.
That unleashed at that time, I think it was around 2015, 2016, when they experimented with that. Then it became obvious that this in-basin sand could work. The majority of the product we sell is 100 mesh. We also sell 40/70, which again is just a little bit larger prop. Once people realized that 100 mesh could work, then it became a race to secure the best geology in the basin. We've completely backed out. The Permian Basin is completely backed out all Northern White sand. Almost every single well that's drilled in the Permian today is in-basin prop. One of the things I forgot to mention to you, too, after we acquired Hi-Crush, we are by far and away the market share leader in the Permian.
If Permian sand demands around 70 million tons annually, we have capacity. Our plants can produce from around 27-30 million tons. And so we're about 1/3 of the market. Our next closest competitor, actually, they just merged. And our next closest competitor is a company called Iron Oak. And they're around 16 million tons annual. And then it falls off where you've got single mine companies. The next largest is probably 7-6 million tons. And then the tail goes on way too long. Hopefully, we'll start to see some consolidation in the industry. But I just want to give you a sense of our size, too. I forgot to mention that earlier.
What was the total cost of the Dune Express? And what's the expected payback?
Sure. $400 million is the cost of the construction of the Dune Express.
It's remarkable that this thing is actually going to come in on time and on budget if you think about how rare that is. But it's a true credit to the construction team and our management team to bring this on. Again, we're hopeful that we can have a commercial delivery by the end of the year, if not early January. The payback, we think the Dune Express is going to contribute anywhere from $125 million-$175 million of EBITDA once it's fully ramped up annually. And it should have a 20-year I mean, conveyors run for forever. And so we've put in again, I can spend a lot of time talking about the technology that's put on this thing. But this thing should run for 20-something years. So three-year payback or less on the Dune Express, I think, is reasonable. So super excited about this project.
A couple of things real quick if we got two more minutes or something like that. But I did mention the technology that's been put on the Dune Express. Again, as I said earlier, conveyors are actually a really common way. If we were a mining company and I told you that we were building a conveyor from our port to our mine, you would say, "Okay, that's cool. No question, not a big deal." But the fact that we're doing this in the middle of West Texas, everybody looks at us like we're crazy. But conveyors are a very reliable way to move aggregate in a perfect, I think, application for sand. But the belt's U-shaped. You can see the cover. The far right-hand picture is kind of what the module looks like. And it's covered. So we've tested it in wind tunnels and under severe conditions.
We designed it to make sure it stays on the belt. Obviously, if there's a horrific storm coming, we can just shut the belt down and let the storm pass. But the belt runs at about 10 miles per hour. We have these things called smart idlers, which are the rollers that the belt rolls on. Those we've put microchips in those rollers that give us warnings when they start to fail. The biggest failure points for a conveyor is the belt. The belt not being maintained, ripping or tearing is what causes conveyors to have downtime. These rollers basically tell us before they're starting to fail. Because when rollers fail, then the belt starts running unevenly, and then it starts having problems.
So we designed it to where we will know ahead of time, "Okay, roller 3715, whatever, is failing." We can go in there and while the belt is still running, pull that idler off, that roller off, and replace it. And the belt's continuing to run. And so we think it's going to be one of the most reliable conveyors ever built. Again, West Texas is really flat ground. Pretty much, feel free to if you guys ever want to go out there. Obviously, it's about an hour's drive from the Midland Airport to get to see part of it. But it's actually really simple. There's a lease road crossing right here. And that's a really good example of when we're inside these polygons or in these heat zones, we call them, this is where our sand traffic will travel along these lease roads.
And you guys all have been to ranches in Texas. That's why we're able to because that's private lands. We don't have to adhere to the weight limits on these public roads. But that's a lease road crossing. You can see the conveyor goes under it. That is the connecting that is at our plant that goes into the silos. And so that's where the belt will be loaded. And then the picture on the bottom right is actually a flood zone crossing. I don't know. I mean, I guess once in every 100 years, it floods out there. I have no idea. But just in case, we built a flood zone crossing. And that's what that bottom right-hand picture is. And then there are. I don't know why we don't have a picture.
But there's six major highway crossings that goes over Frying Pan Road, Highway 118, etc., out there. And those are kind of cool to see. But hopefully, yeah, pretty soon here, we'll have sand going down this thing, so.
What do you suspect the maintenance CapEx will be?
For next year, I think our maintenance CapEx is going to be around $40-$50 million. So pretty low maintenance CapEx. So again, I think most analysts are modeling low $400 million of EBITDA for us next year. And this is in a period of really weak sand pricing. But the maintenance CapEx on all the plants, all of our projects next year, we think will be something like $40-$50 million. So I think what makes Atlas such a unique story is that here we are in the COVID-level type pricing for sand.
I think Atlas can still generate a significant amount of free cash flow next year. It's sort of the bottom of the cycle. We're already paying about, I think, $0.24 a share in dividends each quarter. So just under a 5% yield today. We hope once the cash flows of the Dune Express start to come to fruition. I think we'd hope to. This entity is set up to. Bud loves dividends. And so I think that we'll be continuing to increase shareholder returns. And once sand prices normalize, we'll have quite a bit of ability. And we announced a buyback authorization in place. And so I could see that being part of the way we return cash to shareholders as well. Again, it'll be very interesting to see.
With sand pricing being so soft right now, again, it depends on how quickly we start to see capacity being shed before we start to see sand prices normalize. And we think we can do that. We think sand prices can normalize without activity increasing. It's just, again, a lot of these mines are run very inefficiently. They were designed for $30 sand. And when sand prices get to these kind of high teens levels, they don't have the geology. They don't have the ability to properly maintain their plants. It's going to be very interesting to see what gets shed. Is that my time? Okay. I think that's it. Four minutes. Okay, super. Yes.
Do you have any residual costs from bringing the COVID facility back online after the fire?
Thank you for yeah.
So we did have some operational issues, and so thank you for that. So in April this year, we had the feed system that takes the sand from the dryers to the silos was damaged. We were unable to load properly with silos, and so we had some much higher operating costs. In order to, we kept the plant. The plant was only closed for like two weeks. But in order to fulfill customer orders, we had to go with a much higher, more expensive temporary loadout. And my CEO was here. He could go through quite a bit of detail on that. But we do believe that those costs are now in the rearview mirror. We did experience slightly higher costs in the third quarter. Part of that was bleed over from the feed system rebuild.
But part of it was also costs as we started to push more volumes through the Kermit facility in preparation of the Dune Express. We were running into some bottleneck issues. The plant wasn't producing what it should have done. It's like a car is supposed to go drive 100 miles an hour. We were stuck at 60. And there was a fair amount of capital that went into the plant in order to debottleneck. And what we have said on our call is that in the first couple of weeks of October, that plant was hitting record production capacity. So we are experiencing slightly higher OpEx costs in the fourth quarter because some of this bled over. But we think exiting the year, we'll be back to our normalized cost structure.
And again, I think on the call, we said low double digits OpEx per ton for next year, which again is typically lower than anybody else in the industry. But yes, it should all be pretty much it's in the rearview mirror. But you'll probably see it more normalized in the first quarter.
So to increase dredging, [is it a technology issue or just a water issue?]
So it's a water issue. So this falls under the better be lucky than good. But we picked the Kermit facility. Both the north dune and the south dune both have the same advantage where there's a water table that sits right below the surface. And it actually stays there. We're sort of down dipped from everybody. We're sort of the sponge of that area.
And so, for example, Hi-Crush, which is 1.5 mi their plant's 1.5 mi away, their water actually flows to us. And so they can't keep a pond. And so therefore, they can't keep water in their pond. So they can't dredge feed. And so we're fortunate. And we actually discovered this after we built the plant. But it's an advantage water table. The water just sits there. And it gives us the ability to do that. What we hope we can do eventually is feed the Hi-Crush plants that are 1.5 mi away, feed all of those from our pond. And we'll just slurry the feed to their plants and remove all the yellow iron from their facilities, which will help lower their costs. That's something we're hoping to do. We're having some dredge issues at that facility.
And so once we have extra dredge capacity, which we think we will by the end of this year, early next year, we'll start to do that at Hi-Crush and hopefully lower their costs as well. But it's remarkable. It's kind of that advantage water table is the real reason we're able to do that.