We'll go ahead and get started. Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to day two of Sidoti's August conference. My name is Daniel Harriman, and I'm an analyst here at Sidoti. This morning, we're going to hear from Big Sky Industrial, ticker BSIN. We have the company's Chief Executive Officer with us, Ryan Smith. As most of you know, we're going to give Ryan about 20 minutes to go through the presentation, after which time I'm going to open it up for Q&A. If you do have any questions at any time during the presentation, feel free to type those into the Q&A box, and time permitting, we will get to as many as we can. Please join me in welcoming Ryan Smith. With that, Ryan, I'll hand it over to you. Thank you so much for being here.
Yeah. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for having me. Thanks Sidoti for having me. I appreciate the turnout for those listening in and submitting their questions already. I'll try to go through this pretty quickly and hit the high points so I can get to everybody's questions. I will skip some slides that are important, but can get a little repetitive in the 20-minute presentation. I'm Ryan Smith. I'm the CEO of Big Sky Industrial. We're traded on the Nasdaq. We've really pivoted our business over the last couple of years from a traditional oil and gas company to an industrial gas company that's focused on helium, on carbon management, and managing our legacy oil assets. I'll start running through these now. Forward-looking statements, if anybody wants to read these, they are on our website and very thorough.
The company really from a high level, from a glance, is kind of summarized in this slide, which I'll start on the left and just move over to the right. As I mentioned, and this oil reserve number should probably be lower than the industrial gas number on the layout of the slide. But we still have a significant oil business here, almost exclusively focused in Montana, do about 200 bbl, 250 bbl a day still, with a PV- 10 of roughly $20 million. It's probably a little higher than that now because oil prices have come up. But a very good base to which we still make money on and adds to the net present value stack of the company. Moving down, our industrial gas resource, which is really what we are focused on and see the most upside in.
These are just numbers, but what I will say is, if you take away something from this, they're very big numbers. You look at the assets on our map, it's very simple. I know it's a very simple display in the middle, but we have two very large assets in Montana that are very distinct, but very geographically close to each other. On the left, the blue dot, we have our Cut Bank oil field. It's a very large conventional oil field, and about 10 mi east of that, the green dot, is what we call the Big Sky Carbon Hub, which is an extremely large underground industrial gas structure. I would say visually think of it as a sports dome stadium, where on the top of the dome sits an extremely large helium reserve. Right now, we estimate that along with Ryder Scott.
Ryder Scott is our third party reserve engineer, I would say the preeminent reserve engineering firm in the world. A helium resource of 1.3 billion cu ft, which is absolutely massive. Below that dome, an extremely large, one of the largest in the world, CO2 deposits. That is close to 0.5 trillion cu ft of gas. For those not intimately familiar with volumes of gases, these are really big numbers. A PV of those two things right now on phase I of what we are doing, which we plan on expanding, which I will get into in a minute, of about $90 million. Our carbon management business, which is basically capturing CO2 from our processing plant and permanently sequestering it. We are going to be capturing and sequestering about 125,000 metric tons per year when our operations are online in the first quarter of next year.
Just for a mental comparison, that is about 25,000-30,000 car vehicle emissions taken off the road every year. In valuation framing, where I think this is an extremely compelling point in the company's equity is, we are trading at a significant discount to what our phase I net asset value is below half of that amount today for a project that has been highly de-risked and is coming online now in a matter of months. The column in the middle is an overview of the project and our assets in Montana. The column on the right is really a high level summary of the industrial gas assets. One takeaway I would say is, in reality, everything is finite, but this reserve and this asset is so large, it is going to be producing long after most of us on this call are gone. It is a 50+ year producing asset.
50 + is usually where you stop. It is probably closer to 150 than 50. It is fully owned by Big Sky, fully operated by Big Sky. Extremely minimal third party dependencies for us to develop and operate this asset. As part of our carbon management activities, we make a lot of money capturing the CO2 as part of our helium process and permanently sequestering it through the carbon sequestration 45Q tax credit program. Our first phase alone, over a 12-year period, that is about $130 million just on this first phase that we are completing right now. When does all this come from a business plan to making money? In the first quarter of next year. A lot of our big hurdles have been cleared. A lot of our long lead time items have been ordered. Helium offtake agreements, MRVs filed.
The timeline has been very de-risked up to this point and sequenced, and we are months away from having this online and gain commercial. This is one of the ones I will skip. It does describe kind of how we made our pivot from traditional oil and gas to industrial gas development with what we are doing now. On the right side, I will say we have as strong of a competitive moat that exists in this industry, not only from wholly owning the entirety of the asset base, which you cannot replicate, but we own all of the land, we own all the reserves, we own all the pipeline transport. We are the only game in town in this part of the world, and have accomplished almost everything that we need from a permitting standpoint to realize all these different buckets of value.
I will spend a little time on this and another slide probably the most. This, simplistically is our business. It's simple, but it's simple by design. What our business is when it's up and running is we have our wells that produce our gas, which has heavy helium contents in it. That helium, that gas flows through a gathering system, which we're literally installing today. That gas runs to our processing plant. The processing plant splits out the helium, purifies it, injects it in high pressure injection into a large tube like you would see a tube on an 18-wheeler driving down the highway. Our offtake partner, which is the largest industrial gas company in the world, drives to our plant every 10 days, picks up the tube, pays us on the spot for the helium they pick up, and drives off.
That's way number one. As part of that helium processing, production and processing, a very large amount of CO2 is created. We capture 100% of that CO2 at our plant and send it into the last leg of our gathering system and inject it underground to permanently sequester that CO2, which basically means put it underground never to come out again, with a large portion of it. The remainder of that CO2, we truck it 10 mi, straight shot, paved road to our oil field, inject it into the ground, increase reservoir pressure, incremental barrels come out of the ground because of the increased pressure underground, and we sell those increased barrels of oil and make money there. We make money on the helium, we make money on the increased oil, and where I really think the story becomes compelling is we make a lot on the carbon management.
Every molecule of CO2 that we capture and sequester or utilize, we get paid $85 per metric ton, escalating roughly 3% per year on a 12-year period for all of those volumes. We're capturing a lot of CO2 as part of this process, about 125,000 metric tons per year. If you do that math on the $85 + escalation plus the amount of CO2 that we're capturing, it comes out to a big number, about $130 million, which I'll get to in a minute of what we plan on doing with that money. But simplistically for this slide, we can monetize those 45Q long life, 12-year cash flow stream and pull that cash flow forward today to reinvest and continue building out phases of our development going forward. For those of you familiar with the story, we don't ever have a production problem.
Our resource is so large, it's never a question of how much gas can you produce. It's a question of how much processing you can put in. Because with a project like ours, the production is relatively cheap, but 80+% of the capital you spend, typical of other infrastructure and midstream projects, 80% of the capital you spend goes towards the processing and towards the infrastructure. The big question is how much can you put down, and how are you going to pay for that? This flywheel here kind of explains that. You're making money on a day-to-day basis on helium and CO2. You have an extremely large nine-figure number of 45Q tax credits that are sitting out there. We've already started working on the process to monetize those and bring that capital in, put in more processing.
At that point in time, every increased processing unit you put in, you are processing more gas, you are selling more helium, and importantly, you are continuing to generate more and more carbon capture 45Q credits. It really does become a cyclical cash flow generating, self-funding, non-dilutive vehicle. I will spend a very short amount of time on this. Earlier this year, we raised capital for our phase I, raised about $17 million in straight common equity. I will say we have no structure on our balance sheet. There is no warrants, there is no converse, there is no ugly stuff. We have as clean of a balance sheet as anybody that exists out there. We also entered into a $20 million project finance debt facility that funds our phase I project, going forward with a very low leverage, especially for an infrastructure asset forecast of about 1x net leverage.
I point out that in the market, infrastructure and midstream companies, I would say, typically run at 5x-8x leverage. We would never do that as a company. I am not comfortable doing that with the company. We are forecasted to be at about a 1x turn when we come online. I would point out, I expect us to increase our debt capacity, to have that availability. There is a lot of room between that 1x and that 5x. Just to have excess debt capacity, in my opinion, is always a thorough thing to have in place. I am going to skip this slide. This is just a little more detail on each of our three revenue streams. Each one is independent, each one is contracted or supported by bipartisan federal policy. Our helium offtake agreement, this was a big one that we signed.
We signed it in late March, early April of this year. Largest industrial gas company in the world, bar none, is our offtake client, which was extremely important for us, one, to have the credit quality of a counterparty, but also a party that is one of the largest companies in the world that diligenced our project, went through everything, and ended up entering into an eight-figure long-term agreement with us, which I view as a massive shot of credibility to our project. Quick numbers, a base price, $285 per Mcf on our helium. That escalates with CPI over a five-year contracted period. On a model basis, it is probably low $300s per Mcf.
I would point out that for those of you more familiar with the helium markets, there is a lot of promotion in the helium markets right now, just like any other, I would say, new topical industry, where you will see higher numbers than that. The supply chain on helium goes from gaseous helium that has to be liquified. Liquifying helium at scale is a very, very big boys game. Exxon, Messer, Linde, Air Liquide, these are the companies that control the liquefiers at scale. For a gaseous producer to have access to those, you have to transport your own helium. You have to get firm capacity on those liquefiers. That usually adds between $2 and $2.50 per Mcf.
If you see somebody announcing egregiously high prices in press releases, I would say the vast majority of the time, those are headline numbers that are not taking into consideration all the transport costs, risks, pooling fees, that they're going to have to do to monetize their product. It was very important for me to not take on those risks. This $285 number you see is a net number to us with our counterparty holding all of the cost and the risk for transportation and capacity to their liquefaction facilities. Our helium commitment is 100% take or pay, which basically means everything that we produce out of our phase I facility, our counterparty is contractually obligated to take. That was very important.
I'm going to skip this slide because this is just a more granular overview of where our assets sit and how they look on a kind of zoomed in basis. I would say that although this is a pretty rural part of the country, a major interstate runs right through our asset base. That's very important for transportation purposes. The worst thing you can do on a project like ours is have to go down 10- 15 different country roads to get to your asset. We're right off the interstate with one road leading to our processing facility, which takes a large amount of execution risk and weather risk off the table. I will spend some time on this slide because it's very important. The table on the right shows where this company can go, in my opinion, in the extremely near term.
Our first phase that we're doing now on a standalone basis is a roughly, I'll call it, again, these numbers, they move around a little bit with pricing, but for simplicity purposes, is a $15 million a year EBITDA business. That's about 50% oil and 50% industrial gas. Going back to my comment that I made earlier, it's never a question for us how much gas you can produce. It's how much processing, how much we call it plant, on this slide, how much processing you can put down and how are you going to pay for that. What we show here, and what we're already planning on, and I've talked publicly, is we're already working on a phase II design. This shows it being 2x the size of phase I. Right now, we're looking at between 2x and 3 x the size of phase I.
But really, just the ramp ability on what we're doing today, which is fairly close to coming online and highly de-risked at this point in time, along with putting in a second processing facility right after our first one. You get to some really significant numbers going forward, as you can see on this chart on the right, with the question of how do you pay for it? Going back to my comment on tax credit 45Q monetization, it's an initiative that I've talked about a lot. It's an initiative that we've already started working on and made very good progress on.
If you go back to our $130 million phase I 45Q tax credit generation, we have a very large market in the U.S., $50 billion- $60 billion per year, where the biggest companies in the world, big tech, Google's the biggest buyer, big insurance, big financial services.
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Ultra, ultra high net worth, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley client bases that partner with companies like ours that generate these credits and buy those credits from us. A typical transaction looks like $0.90- $0.95 on the dollar at about a 6%-7% discount rate on that gross 12-year number. If you do that math to our interest, that comes out to us monetizing our 12-year stream for, again, ballpark $70 million- $80 million of a cash injection that is non-dilutive. It kind of answers its own question on how do you pay for expansion going forward in a responsible, non-dilutive manner. It's monetizing those credits. As you see here, every time you put in a processing plant, you're processing more gas, you are selling more helium, and you're generating more and more credits.
I wanted to keep this slide simple, but as we continue to phase this going forward with more and more processing capacity, these numbers only get bigger on the share count that stays relatively constant to where it's at. This is another slide that I'm going to skip that just shows that the infrastructure up here, although being a rural area, is as ideal as it could possibly be for a project like ours. I won't go through this in every detail. This is a catalyst list. I think there's a very big discrepancy in the market right now on all of the risk boxes that we've checked and all of the catalysts that we've checked up to this point, and I'll say the much fewer remaining execution and catalyst items that we have going forward with where our NAV sits and where we currently trade.
Our team here has done a very good job over the last 18 months laying out a schedule, following that schedule, successfully checking all of these boxes, and really continuing to reduce the necessary de-risking items that we have coming up before we have first commercial production. This is the last slide I'll go through. Again, we have a highly differentiated asset. Any company on the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, I think we're sitting by ourselves in terms of what we're doing, and being a unique process. Large reserves, 100% operated by us. The economics, the trading multiples, return on capital employed, any financial metric that you want to lay out, we sit at a very attractive point at this point of our process. Our execution, we've invested a lot of our own money. We've drilled wells, we've filed our permits.
We're getting very close to this coming online. Why Big Sky now? I think just to reiterate what I already said, I think there is a significant multiple turn gap in the stuff that we've accomplished and where we sit today with all the hurdles that we've met so far, and where the near term upside is on the stock from where we trade. There's some more slides in the back that are kind of helium macro slides that I won't get into now. I think they're very good if you want to get more up to speed with the industrial gas market. Dan, with that, I'll wrap it up and answer any questions anybody may have.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Ryan. As a reminder, if you do have any questions, please feel free to type those into the box. We do have a little bit of time left to kind of go through some. Ryan, just kind of wanted to start bigger picture, and I know you touched on this a little bit in one of the last slides, but with your targeting early 2027, can you just kind of give us a picture of what main things need to happen between now and then? Maybe what the biggest item is on that critical path to generating revenue?
Yeah. It's kind of two ways to answer that question, operationally and then catalyst based. I think operationally, the very unsexy topic of remaining focused on execution, remaining focused on budget, remaining focused on time. We drilled our wells, we've laid our gathering system. We're phase 2/3 through the processing plant build-out now. All of our long lead time items have already been ordered and paid for. So from an operational standpoint, it's really staying just laser focused on execution and making sure that we're on budget. From a catalyst perspective, we have one more permit, our MRV, monitoring, reporting and verification report, that we need approval on. I've said publicly we expect it by the end of the year. I've also said publicly that I expect it much sooner than that. That approval is what unlocks all of our carbon management activities.
I don't think it's a stretch to say once we get that approval, I believe it unlocks hundreds of millions of dollars for us over the next 6- 24 months and starts the carbon management timeline going.
Do you think that over the next 6- 24 months, do you feel like the market, as it continues to understand your story now as kind of an industrial gas and carbon business and not a small oil and gas company, do you expect that progress over the next couple of years to reach milestones that may drive a re-rating in how the market views what you guys do now?
I absolutely do. Great question, and I do. I think that you always have your risk spectrum on when people invest in companies and business plans from a great thesis, getting stuff done, finally flipping the switch and turning it online and making money, and then how are you going to scale it? My personal view on this is there's nobody on a U.S. exchange that is doing what we do and has the scale of what we have. The critical supply topic everywhere in the United States right now, whether it's helium, whether it's CO2, whether it's calcium chloride, propane, brine, et cetera, for everything that the U.S. says that they're going to be doing going forward, AI build-outs, aerospace, missile defense, increased healthcare.
The United States is short on all of these things, and it's not a question of are you going to be short, it's how short are we going to be? Right now, if you want exposure to these critical supply items, you have to go buy Exxon or you have to go buy Oxy or Kinder Morgan. Nobody buys Exxon for helium production and carbon management, right? Even though they produce 70% of the helium in the United States. On the re-rating topic, I think that there's going to be one winner that drives institutional dollars, where a portfolio manager says, "I have to check the box on getting an allocation to a critical supply domestic, de-political risk entity." My goal is for Big Sky to be that company.
As you continue to move forward under the business plan, the execution, the flipping the switch, to understanding how do you scale it and how do you pay for it, I do. I think all of those lead to an ultimate re-rating that matches M&A and public comps of a 10x multiple business.
No, that's really helpful. You touched on this a little bit, but I want to give you some more time to talk it up. The offtake agreement that you guys signed in the spring, I think you said eight figures or something within that range. Can you just talk about what a big deal that was in terms of a proof point that somebody else out there is valuing what you guys are trying to accomplish?
Yeah, for sure. It was extremely important for us to go with the biggest and the best, right? In the helium buying world, there's two kinds, right? There's the biggest companies in the world, and then there's a lot of guys who are, I'll just politely say, are not the biggest and not creditworthy counterparties. When you go out and you bid for your helium, you go out to the world and you receive quotes back. We went out and I think we received 11 quotes back from different buyers. Our goal was to always go with the biggest and the best, which we were fortunate enough to accomplish. Just like any Fortune 100 company in the world, right? They do their diligence much more than a small strip center helium buying company would do.
They, in a good way, tore our project apart, tore our resource apart, tore our engineering apart to get comfortable that if we're going to get in bed with you for the next multiple years, you better have what you think you have, and it better work how you say it's going to work. Not only from a credit risk and a counterparty risk, the unquantifiable but very real confidence injection and credibility injection that we get from entering into a long-term binding deal with somebody like that, I think it's immense, and I think it's as much of a positive box check of do you have a real project as anything.
For sure. Well, we've come up on time. We weren't able to get to all the questions, but I will just remind those in the audience that the company on their website does have the presentation available. Because of time, Ryan wasn't able to go through everything, but there is a significant amount of information on some of those slides related to maybe some of the questions that we did have. Ryan, on behalf of everybody at Sidoti, thank you so much for your time this morning and willingness to go through the presentation. For those of you in the audience, we appreciate your participation, and I'm sorry that we weren't able to get to everything. Ryan, again, thank you so much for sharing the story, and we wish you the best of luck moving forward.
Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me, and I appreciate everybody for listening.
Goodbye, everybody. Thanks.
Take care.