Be helpful if you could begin by explaining Alliance Resource Partners' structure as a master limited partnership and provide a snapshot of its various businesses and activities.
Sure, Mark, yeah, I'd be glad to do that. First off, I think I'd just like to, Mark, thank you and thank the folks over at NOBLE for providing us the opportunity again to come to one of your conferences, share our story here about Alliance. As you know, Mark, you've known us for a long time. We have a long history. As a publicly traded entity, we're actually celebrating our 26th year as a publicly traded entity here on NASDAQ this year. Thank you for hosting us again. Just getting to your questions, as you mentioned, Mark, we are structured as a master limited partnership. We get this question a lot, what is an MLP? It's really pretty simple. MLPs are really tax-advantaged, yield-oriented public vehicles. They are formed for the purpose of owning certain qualifying businesses. Typically, those businesses are related to energy infrastructure or other natural resource-related activities.
As the name implies, they are classified as a partnership for tax purposes. They are a pass-through entity. The entity actually does not pay federal income taxes on a general basis. Unitholders actually report their proportionate share of our annual income on their individual tax returns via K-1 filings that we provide. From an individual unitholder basis, there's a lot of tax advantages to the MLP structure. As I mentioned, it is a yield-oriented vehicle, so we do pay a good amount of cash distributions out to our unitholders. One of the benefits is that to a large extent, those cash distributions are treated as a non-taxable return of capital to our unitholders. When an investor, generally speaking, will not owe taxes as it relates to that distribution, as long as their tax basis remains above zero.
Really, when that tax comes due is when an individual unitholder decides to sell their units. The basis is adjusted at that point in time. Finally, if a unitholder holds it until they pass away, passes those units on to heirs, upon death, you get a stepped-up basis, prior distributions are not taxed. There's a lot of tax advantages to the MLP structure. From that aspect, everybody's tax situation is different. They need to consult their individual tax advisors in relationship to that. That's kind of it. That's the MLP structure, you know, overall. We like the MLP structure, but we're not here to talk about structure. We're here to talk about Alliance, you know, and Alliance and a snapshot of our businesses. We can get into that a little bit now. As I mentioned, we are celebrating our 26 years of publicly traded entity.
So, Alliance, we're a leading energy company. Today, our market cap is approximately $3.5 billion. We essentially have three lines of businesses. Our largest line of business is our legacy coal operations business. Today, that generates about 80%- 85% of our cash flow. It's been a very consistent business for us over time. It's been a very profitable business for us over time. We're actually the second largest producer in the Eastern United States. We operate seven underground mining complexes today. Those underground mining complexes are located in Western Kentucky, Southern Indiana, Southern Illinois, West Virginia, and Eastern Kentucky. Most of the markets we serve, about 92% of our sales this year are going to be to domestic electric power generation markets.
The second line of business that we have, we got into this back in the 2014 time period, as we do have a growing portfolio of oil and gas mineral interests, represents about 15% - 20% of our cash flows. These are royalty interests that we have. We don't actually operate in that, but it's a growing part of our business. This past year, in 2024, we generated about $115 million of segment-adjusted EBITDA out of this business, which is up from about $40 million just in the 2020 time period. Good growth going from that business and a business that we liked a lot. Finally, just to kind of wrap up a snapshot of our businesses, our third line of business, it's much smaller, but we feel like it offers good growth potential in the future.
We actually just classify it as other growth investments because it's kind of a mix of various investments we've made over the past few years. One of those investments is in our wholly owned energy technology company, Matrix. Another one of the investments that we have within this segment here, or grouping of assets here, is our wholly owned digital asset technology company. We actually mine Bitcoin. It's called Bitiki. Our latest equity investment that we've made is one that we made here this past July. It's actually in a coal-fired power plant, the Gavin coal-fired power plant in Ohio. In a nutshell, that provides a snapshot of what our structure looks like, as well as a snapshot of our businesses.
What are your expectations regarding the coal industry's fundamental outlook? How is Alliance positioned to grow profit and capture market share?
I think, you know, when you think about the coal business, I think it's fair to say we're excited about the coal industry fundamental outlook right now, particularly in light of the recent support from the current administration. It's providing a lot of policy tailwinds to our sector. Those policy tailwinds are really focused and designed to highlight and reinforce coal's critical role in grid reliability. We've believed in that for a long time, but now this administration, through their policies, is providing some of those tailwinds to recognize that. All of that is designed to support who our primary customer is, it's power plants, and power plants supply electricity. It's all designed to provide that grid reliability with all the growth that's projected and overall electricity demand. That's one of the benefits that we see, certainly as a result of this.
I think one of the important things to point out just as it relates to Alliance, we've been committed to this business for a long time. We believed in the sector for years, even when others were questioning the long-term outlook. We believed we had decades to come for our coal operations of being able to generate meaningful cash flows for us. As you know, Mark, when we've talked over the past few years, we've been strong in that belief, and over the last couple of years, we've invested significantly in our coal operations to ensure that they're positioned to be the lowest cost they can be for the foreseeable future. Today, we are a low-cost producer. We have unique access to both domestic and export markets, and we have a proven track record of generating strong cash flows through any of the business cycles.
We feel like we're really well positioned to be able to capitalize on the expected increase in U.S. electricity demand, driven by data centers, onshoring and manufacturing, and in general, the AI revolution overall.
Now, domestic sales of coal increased, I think, to about 92% in 2024. This is, you know, relevant to Alliance. You know, compared to an average of about 86% in that 2021 to 2024 timeframe. What are your expectations for export sales going forward?
I think export sales, as you mentioned, 92% of sales this year in 2025 are going to be designed really more to the domestic market, which is higher than where it's been in the past. Even last year, we saw where we were much higher on the export side of our business. I think what we're seeing, we're seeing a bigger shift away from the export markets, at least for our business. I think for some of our peers too, they're focusing a little bit more on the domestic markets going forward. This year, as you mentioned, we'll do about 92%. I do think as we look forward into 2026, the domestic side is going to be a bigger part of our business, even next year, than that 92%.
Domestic pricing today, just where the supply-demand fundamentals are, it's just much more attractive than where the export market pricing is at this point. I do think export, we'll have the ability to ship some in the export. I just think as we look in 2026, we see the trend to more domestic customers overall. Actually, for us, we've always served the domestic markets. We've always had a piece of export. I think the most we've ever supplied in the export market is a little bit over 20%. This year, it's going to be closer to 8%. We actually like serving the domestic markets a little bit more, if at all possible. It just provides more stability for us. The domestic market tends to price things more on a longer-term basis. You have the ability to enter into one to three-year type contracts, sometimes five to seven years.
We do have some commitments that go out to 2030. You just don't see that in the export market. The export market is a good market, but it's priced on an annual basis. Whenever we provide our guidance, we haven't provided our guidance for 2026 at this particular point in time, but we'll do that in January. I would expect when we come out in January, you'll see even a higher mix of domestic tons versus export at that point in time.
You mentioned it earlier, but could you talk a little bit about the Trump administration's energy policy and the ramifications for the electric power and coal industries?
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's fair to say the support and the changes from this administration they are significant and they're very beneficial to the coal industry. I mean, we saw it just this past week, on September 29, some in the coal sector were calling it coal day. We had a coal day with the administration. The administration came out with a laundry list of actions that they're planning to take around the coal sector, one being from the EPA to extend the timeframe to comply with the effluent limitations guidelines through some proposed changes in the Clean Air Act's Regional Haze Rule. The Department of Energy or the Department of Interior actually intends to open up more federal acres out west.
It doesn't really benefit us as much, but just a sign of the support from the administration and the Department of Interior, where they're opening up more federal lands for coal leasing at reduced royalty rates and lower costs of permitting. The Department of Energy, as a part of this, intends to provide $625 million of funding for modernizing coal plants, upgrading the wastewater management systems of the coal plants to extend the life of the coal plants, enabling the coal plants to operate on dual fuels, and supporting investments to maintain boiler efficiency and reliability. That's just an example from this past week. In fact, all of that is in addition to the three executive orders and the one presidential proclamation that the administration signed back on April 8th, which marks some big changes in U.S. energy policy.
We talked about a little bit earlier, it prioritizes grid reliability, energy security, and domestic coal-fired generation in response to the big increases that are anticipated and that we're seeing in terms of electricity demand. All of it's designed to extend the life of the coal-fired power plants. I do think what you'll see in the here and now is that the plants aren't going to, the coal plants that were originally announced to close, I don't think they're going to close. I think that demand stays online. I think that actually results in, could actually result in an uptick in demand. Who knows on that? I think the one thing that's important to point out is it makes everything much easier.
It keeps the mines running that are running today, keeps the power plants running that are running today, and it makes it easier to schedule transportation to get everything in there. All of those things, we think, are going to benefit Alliance. I mean, we're the second largest producer in the Eastern U.S., and we stand to benefit from all those changes.
It is a very rational approach to ensure affordable, reliable, and secure sources of energy to meet the growing demands for electricity. Alliance Resource Partners has a growing portfolio of mineral and royalty interests in strategic oil and gas producing regions in the U.S. How has that business evolved and what are your expectations going forward?
You know, we really like what we've been building in our oil and gas minerals portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, we began investing in this sector in 2014. Once we started investing in this sector, it was really a way to begin diversifying and growing our business from our coal-only portfolio. At that time, that was during the second term of the Obama administration, we were generating good cash flows from the coal business. We felt like it made sense to start to look at some different other types of investments, not knowing what the ultimate outlook for the coal sector was going to be. We took some of our cash flow and began investing in oil and gas minerals. We first did it in a very passive way. We invested in a fund that was focused on acquiring oil and gas mineral interests back in 2014.
We made several fund investments during that period of time and started to see the results of that. We liked what we saw from those equity investments over the first five years. In 2019, we strategically decided we wanted to be much more actively involved in the oil and gas minerals business. In 2019, we made two large minerals acquisitions, and we hired a dedicated management team that was focused on the business at that time. Fast forward to today, over the last decade or so, we've invested over $750 million in the sector. As I mentioned, in 2024, it was around $115 million of segment-adjusted EBITDA, which was about 17% of our EBITDA at that point in time. A lot of the cash flow that we generate, we've got a strong position in the Permian Basin, which is the highest growth area in terms of oil and gas productions.
As I mentioned, we're not an operator. We just collect the royalty payments, many from the leading blue chip operators that are out there, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Occidental, to name a few. All operators that tend to drill throughout the business cycle. You've got oil prices that are lower today. They're still drilling today as they were a year or two ago when oil prices were in the $70s or $80s. We intend to keep focused on this business. We intend to grow this business by reinvesting the cash flow that we generate from this business back into the business to acquire more mineral acquisitions in a disciplined way. So far, we've grown it on a leverage-free basis. We do have the ability to leverage up if we see a good acquisition package that we want to take advantage of that may be a little larger in scale.
I think as you look into the future, you look eight years down the road or so, by doing this in this way, I don't see any reason that this segment can't be twice as large as what it is today.
Now, would you also please touch on investments the partnership has made outside its traditional businesses, and in particular the investment in Gavin generation and how that opportunity originated?
You bet. I think, as you mentioned, in addition to our coal and oil and gas investments, we have been making other investments, as you mentioned, outside of those areas. A lot of those recent investments really started in the 2021, 2022 time period. We've actually made a number of investments during that period, even back before that in this area. Some of the investments we've made more recently, we actually made some investments I touched on a little bit earlier where we mine Bitcoin today. We had some excess power at our operations. We're looking to put that asset to use. We started mining Bitcoin back in the 2020, 2021 time period. Today, I actually hold over $60 million of Bitcoin on our balance sheet. We've made investments in a battery recycling company. We've made investments in an electric motor company called Infinitum. That's one we're pretty excited about.
I think one of the main focuses on this small investments or other growth investment area that we've made, it's a growing platform for us. One of our main focuses has been through our wholly owned Matrix subsidiary. Matrix is an energy technology company, I should say, that provides safety and productivity solutions to the mining and industrial sectors through proximity detection technology, through collision avoidance technology, and actually through a joint development agreement and in partnership with the electric motor company I just mentioned before, Infinitum. We have been developing with them motors that we believe will be applicable to mining operations across the country and across the world with electric motors that we've been testing out in our mines and to good success. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves.
These motors, they're lighter, they're more efficient, they seem like they're more durable, and they're much lower cost than the motors that we're using on our mining equipment today. That's an area that we're excited in through our Matrix subsidiary. You also asked about the Gavin investment that we made. This is our most recent equity investment. Actually, when you look at all these other equity investments, they're outside the fossil fuel space. The Gavin investment almost comes full circle here from these other investments. It's an equity investment back in the fossil fuel sector, and it's actually an equity investment in the Gavin coal-fired power plant . To some extent, it could be deemed to be a vertical integration strategy at some particular point in time, not at this stage. I mean, we don't supply into Gavin today. We have in the past, and we could in the future.
This particular investment we just closed in July; we actually announced it back in January, February time period, just needed some regulatory approval. In a nutshell, it's a small equity investment in the power plant, about 5.5%. We would have liked to have had a bigger ownership piece of it. It's in partnership with ECP, who is a large private equity entity that owns power plants. They had acquired this power plant and were selling off equity interest into that, and that's kind of how that partnership came about. It's one we're excited about. We're happy with the investment, and we're looking to see if we can leverage that and see where opportunities potentially could go in the future in partnership with ECP and potentially others in the future.
Could you also just elaborate on Alliance's capital allocation priorities?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, capital allocation, it's very important to any business, right? You know, it's like all businesses are very focused on, you know, how they're going to allocate their capital, how they're going to grow their businesses. We're very focused on that too. I think first off, it's important to point out that we really manage the business for the long term here. I mean, if you look at our management team, our management team is significant equity owners in the company. We manage it conservatively. We want to be sure, as you know, our first priority, that our balance sheet is strong. Our leverage is low. We're 0.8x gross debt to trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA, 0.7x on a net basis.
Really, if you look over the last four years or so, maybe five years, we're under one times on a net basis if you go back to 2021. When we look at capital allocation, we focus on the balance sheet first. Balance sheet is very important to us. Secondly, we look to allocate the capital to our coal operations. It's our largest segment. We want to make sure that our coal operations are well funded and that they can be as low cost and efficient as possible over the long term. When you look at our business this year for 2025, we will invest between $285 million- $320 million of capital in our mining operations to be sure the coal operations are positioned and able to operate at the lowest cost they can going forward. That's our second priority on the capital allocation side.
Third, I touched on a little bit earlier, is in our oil and gas royalties business. We look to reinvest our cash flow within that business. This year, that'll be right around $100 million or so. We do have, in terms of capital allocation priorities, a dollar set aside as we're looking at this to purchase additional oil and gas minerals business. Finally, providing cash back to our unitholders. That's our final focus in terms of cash capital allocation. We want to be sure we provide an attractive yield to our unitholders. A lot of companies may buy back stock. We pay distributions. That's our primary form of how we provide capital back to our unitholders. Our board looks at that on a quarterly basis. They take a good hard look at that, and they'll make adjustments either up or down as they seem appropriate.
For example, back in 2023, the board adjusted the distribution upwards. During that period of time, we had a nice uptick in commodity prices as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war, and the board adjusted the distribution upward during that period of time. We've been paying that until here recently where this past quarter, as we were looking at our business opportunities going forward, the board felt like a slight reduction in the distribution made sense. We just want to be sure that we're positioned well to take advantage of future growth investments as we see that going forward. We made a modest adjustment down. It doesn't change the bottom line cash flow or anything of the company.
It's just a prioritization of those cash flows to where we wanted to have a little bit more available to make investments in oil and gas minerals by way of example, or something like the Gavin coal-fired power plant that we just announced over this period of time. We do think those opportunities are going to be there, and we'll make those adjustments accordingly based upon where the business is.
For our viewers, Alliance Resource Partners trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker ARLP. Cary, thank you so much for joining us today.
Mark, really appreciate it and appreciate all the time and opportunity to be able to present here at the NOBLE Conference.