All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started now. We're just, we're waiting an extra minute there to try to give people some more time to, to get over here from lunch and from some of the panels. But, you know, we'll, we'll get started with Kinder Morgan here. We've got, David Michels, CFO, with us today. You know, really excited to, to hear the conversation. This is, you know, one of the, the large-cap blue-chip names in the midstream space with, a lot of really interesting exposure to the natural gas demand themes that have been really topical over the last couple of years. So, should be a really good conversation. I'll, I'll turn it over to David now.
All right, thanks, JR. I appreciate it. Welcome in, everybody. Glad you guys could make it, and hopefully you all stay awake after the lunch meal you just had. So first, the most important thing here you're gonna hear is our forward-looking statement slide. And so, please review this and our SEC filings for risks that could materially affect our expected results. Additionally, I'll be discussing forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP measures during the presentation. So for a full list of all of those measures and reconciliations, you can see our presentation on our website. All right, that out of the way. So Kinder Morgan is a large infrastructure, energy infrastructure player, owner, and operator in the U.S., largely focused in the U.S., although, as we'll talk about with the liquefied natural gas play, we're increasingly exposed to some of the international dynamics on the global stage.
We move 40% of all of the United States natural gas supplies on a daily basis. We own 80,000 mi of pipeline collectively. That's enough pipeline to circle the Earth three times. It's a lot of assets. And as you can see on the left-hand side here, the largest portion of our business, the portion of our cash flow is natural gas. That's what we're gonna spend our time talking about today. It's 65% of our cash flow today, and north of 80% of our backlog projects, our growth investment projects are focused on natural gas transmission and storage. Our overall strategy of the company was founded 28 years ago by Rich Kinder and Bill Morgan, and the business strategy hasn't changed much in that time.
They've built a portfolio of assets that are fee-based, that are core to our position in the energy business. We focus on natural gas investments. We maintain a strong balance sheet with adequate liquidity, and we prioritize the use of the cash flow that we generate to fund our investments internally so that we can minimize the reliance on external capital raises. Minimizing commodity prices and our exposure to commodity prices has also been a key part of our strategy, so our assets are long-haul, mostly take-or-pay , stable cash flows, regardless of what the underlying commodity price movement looks like, so that insulates us from a lot of the commodity price volatility that we see on a regular basis in this industry, and of course, we have a bias to return value to our shareholders. We are aligned with our shareholders.
13% of shares outstanding are owned by management, and so we're aligned, and we have a bias to return that value in the form, primarily in the form of a large or of a large and slightly increasing dividend. We talked a little bit about the predictable cash flows and stable cash flows in 2025. 64% of our cash flows are take-or-pay . Another 5% of our cash flows are hedged for the year. So that means nearly 70% of our cash flows are fixed and known for 2025. take-or-pay cash flows are cash flows where counterparties have reserved capacity in our storage fields, on our pipelines, and they pay us for that capacity, whether or not they use them.
Similar to a rent you pay for an apartment, that's very high-quality forms of cash flow. We're very proud that it's almost two-thirds of our portfolio. On the fee-based business here, this is business that's similar to a toll road. If a car or truck comes down that toll road, it pays the fee, the toll. If not, we don't get one. But this is a business where these assets are physically connected to the refinery complex in the United States and, in many cases, the end-use demand markets for those refined products. As long as the refinery complex continues to operate at the same or similar levels, we get our revenue and margins from that business. It's very steady.
We'll have a graph on that later, but you'll see it's actually slowly increasing because of rate escalations that we have in that business annually, over time. So take-or-pay is a very, very high-quality form of cash flow. And the fee-based cash flow that we have here has been extremely reliable over the years. We have improved or continued to improve our business mix over the years as well. From 2014 to 2025, you can see we greatly reduced our exposure to enhanced oil recovery business. There's some oil production in that. And we've also greatly reduced our exposure to gathering and processing businesses. The gathering and processing businesses in the natural gas space are great, but they do come with some incremental volatility because it's reliant on the activity and the drilling activity in those basins.
It also comes with a little bit more direct commodity price exposure. And so what we have done is we've focused our efforts on building out the longer-haul pipelines across states, FERC-regulated, because they are, again, they're in line with that strategy that we've had to minimize commodity price exposure and focus on visible, stable cash flows. And there you can see the refined product contribution to our overall business has stayed very steady. It's been growing, on a gross basis, on a percentage of our portfolio basis. It's come down a little bit, but it's stayed pretty, pretty fixed, so that's our base business. Where we're going from there is we're growing. We're investing a great deal of capital in the natural gas transmission and storage markets.
Since 2020, you know, when COVID happened and we had the global pandemic, our backlog of projects that we were investing in came down quite a bit. Many of those projects came off the table. There was a great deal of uncertainty and so forth. And our backlog reduced to the lowest level it had been in a long, long time, probably back to when we first started tracking it. We started rebuilding it in 2022. We stayed relatively flat in 2023. And then last year, we sanctioned $6 billion worth of projects, and our backlog has ballooned to this $8.1 billion that you see before you. And these are very attractive returning projects as well. So not only is this a very large magnitude of projects, but they're coming at a very attractive return.
$8.1 billion is largely gonna be spent over the next five years, but we think that underestimates the amount of projects that we're actually going to achieve during that time. We think we're gonna be spending around $2.5 billion a year on new investments, new energy infrastructure investments. So if you take that $2.5 billion and apply the six times multiple to it, that gets you north of $400 million of EBITDA, which is about a 5% growth rate. Strong visible growth rate, largely backed by these projects that are, in most cases, already sanctioned, many of them under contract. Highly confident visible growth. As we'll talk about in a minute, the fundamentals facing the natural gas market in the U.S. are very strong. We expect to add to this level of project spend.
So 2025, so what does that, where are we coming from and where are we going? So 2025, we're growing our EPS by 10%, growing our EBITDA by 4%. We're reducing our leverage to a 3.8x debt to EBITDA, which is the lowest leverage level we've had in about a decade. It's a little bit lower than our midpoint of our leverage target, which is three and a leverage target range, which is three and a half to four and a half times. So we're a little bit below the midpoint, meaning we've got some dry powder there. We've got some spare capacity on our balance sheet, which further positions us well for these growth opportunities we're seeing come to the market. So here's the backdrop for natural gas demand in the U.S.
The natural gas market, for total U.S. demand for U.S. supplies is depending on who you're looking at, is between 105 billion and 110 billion cu ft a day. And that's expected to grow depending on if you look at Wood Mackenzie's forecast by about 20 Bcf a day and our forecast, our Kinder Morgan forecast of 28 Bcf a day. We're a little bit more bullish than Wood Mackenzie is on the power demand growth. But regardless of the forecast you look at, it's, you know, 20% growth on top of, on top of the market through the end of the decade, which is just tremendous, tremendous growth and represents a great incremental set of opportunities for us to play a part in building additional infrastructure to meet these needs. So where's that demand coming from?
I'm gonna break this down into really just two main pieces because the drivers are really focused on LNG feedstock, incremental LNG feedstock, stock, and power generation, incremental natural gas needed for additional power generation needs in the United States. So we currently serve. Kinder Morgan serves 45% of the natural gas that goes to liquefaction facilities that's liquefied and then exported internationally. And you can see the number one on this slide down on the Gulf Coast. That's where most of the LNG, incremental LNG growth demand is coming from. And our pipelines are highlighted in this map. And you can see we just got a tremendous network right there to help feed these additional facilities.
One additional point I'd like to make here is, it used to be where you could just build a pipeline from one of these facilities to the nearest pipe, so just a lateral off an existing network, and that was sufficient. Now, most of those pipelines are relatively full, so now you have to build back into a more liquid point, sometimes all the way back to the supply basin, which means for each one of these new LNG facilities, sometimes that results in two or three pretty major infrastructure projects, so for those of us in the infrastructure space, this represents really great growth opportunity for us and for our peers. Power generation and power demand in the U.S. is more geographically dispersed.
And so you can see the number two there highlighted across the Southeast and the Rockies in Illinois, the Northeast, Arkansas, the Southeast, and Texas. It's all over the board. And while AI and data centers are part of the story there, and I know that's the hot topic these days, it's much more broad-based than that. Coal conversions continue to happen across the country, in electrification of certain industries, additional EVs coming to the market, reshoring of manufacturing, all of that's adding to power generation demand across the U.S. And so we're playing a part in that. Much of that backlog I talked about earlier is focused on power generation, meeting some of this additional power generation demand. But there's more to feed.
Multiple other drivers as well, but really the big two are the ones that I just talked about. So this is more detail on the LNG market. Here's, you know, our footprint relative to a number of LNG facilities across the Gulf, and you could see the LNG market is expected, this is Wood Mackenzie, expected to more than double from 2024 through 2030, and again, that's on a total market of just over 100 Bcf a day. So you can just see the magnitude of incremental demand for this gas to this area of the country. It's really pretty spectacular. And the power generation, here's just some more information on where a lot of that power generation demand is coming from, some of the different categories that I mentioned earlier.
The one incremental piece I would add here is on the bottom right. You can see we've said we're actively pursuing well in excess of 5 Bcf a day of new power generation opportunities. You know, some of those are direct connections to data centers, but most of those are connections through utilities who are just trying to bolster the grid because a number of these factors are adding to the overall energy demands on their grids. This is also a pretty interesting slide. You know, we talk generally about additional natural gas demand on an annual basis. However, for those of us in the infrastructure space, we don't build infrastructure based on annual averages. We build infrastructure based on peak demand. The peak demand for natural gas in the U.S. has become greater.
It's peakier, and is growing faster than the annual averages would suggest. A number of factors there. There's more intermittent power generation supplies on grids, meaning the one remaining reliable dispatchable power source, natural gas, is called on more and more during those peak cold days and even during some of the heat, the higher, highest heating degree days to come on and backstop some of that intermittent fuel generation source. The top two all-time record demand days for natural gas occurred this past January. And we're seeing that year in and year out. We're seeing more and more peak records being broken. That adds to volatility. So not only does this help bolster some of the incremental natural gas infrastructure that we need to build, but it also transmission infrastructure that we need to build.
But it also puts a lot of pressure on additional or more additional demand for storage, natural gas storage across the country because that's really what how you help satisfy a number of these peak points here that are well above the amount of gas that's being added to the grid on a daily basis. You need the storage in order to backstop that. So where's all the gas coming from? The incremental gas that'll be needed is largely gonna come from the Permian, which is number one, and the Haynesville, number two. But we're gonna need more than that. We're gonna need more gas than just those two basins can supply given those really tremendous amounts of additional demands for natural gas. So, you know, we've got a number of other items in here.
You know, the Appalachian area, Utica, Marcellus up in number three. The problem with that is the infrastructure to take that gas away from that area and deliver it to end-use markets is really challenged. Permitting is a challenge up there. The ability to pass those costs through to the end user is a challenge in the New England markets, but some additional natural gas is likely to be produced out of the Utica, Marcellus area, the Rockies and some of the other areas in the north, middle north states and then the Eagle Ford Basin down in South Texas will help backstop that. All of this is good for infrastructure players like us because additional bottlenecks will be created that'll need to be debottlenecked, and that helps us identify and achieve additional growth opportunities and grow our EBITDA.
You know, I said earlier we're well positioned to take advantage of the trends that are evolving across the U.S. Here's a greater view of the footprint that we have across the U.S., color-coding our pipelines and our major transmission lines. Then some statistics on the right, which I think just drives it home. We transport 40% of all of the U.S. gas that's produced in the U.S. We deliver about 45% of all of the feed gas that's being exported today. We expect to continue to go after additional opportunities for additional LNG feedstocks that'll be needed, driving additional growth for us.
About 50% of all of the exports to Mexico today, we deliver through our pipelines, and we represent about a 45% market share for all of the power generation from natural gas, the natural gas that's going into power generation, across the southern states. That's important because that's really where we're seeing most of the power generation growth is in the southern states. So we've got great footprints and really good market positions in all of those categories. This highlights one of the points that I made earlier about the existing grid and network being filled up. The tight top right part of this slide, you can see that the average utilization of our top five pipelines was 74% in 2016. In 2024, that's now 87%.
And since most of our pipeline capacity is contracted over an annual basis, that means our pipelines are running full. These pipes are basically full because there's greater demand in the summertime and the wintertime and a lot less in the shoulder months. That means on average, they're basically full. So from 2016 to 2024, when the natural gas market grew by almost 40%, a lot of that was accommodated by filling up existing networks, underutilized networks. And now from 2024 to 2030, when we're growing by almost 20%, that's gonna take additional investment and additional infrastructure to accommodate as opposed to just relying on some underutilized assets across the country. And that's translating itself into greater value for that service and people who are and then counterparties who are willing to sign up for greater terms.
You can see on our Texas Intrastate Pipelines, the average remaining term for contracts has increased from 5.3 to 7.3. And on EPNG, that's grown from 5.8 to 8.8 years. So where are our major projects? This slide helps illustrate where we're building the next set of natural gas infrastructure projects. The top three are our big ones. They're all north of $1.5 billion each, Kinder Morgan share. The South System 4 expansion project, which stretches over into the Carolinas, it's number one. And then that is brought further into a more liquid corridor in Mississippi by number three, which really connects number one into those more liquid corridor areas. And that's Mississippi Crossing. We sanctioned both of those projects last year. We're very excited about 'em. We, you know, now we've gotta go and build them, which is gonna be the more difficult part.
But we got 'em signed up. We've got great counterparties on that, on those assets and those projects and so we're very excited about it. Very strong returns and number two, the other large one that we had here is within Texas so we're gonna be able to get it to market a lot earlier. You can see the in-service date there of the first quarter of 2027 versus South System 4 and Mississippi Crossing, which are a little bit later and that's the benefit of building intrastate assets versus, you know, interstate assets.
But it's a very nice pipeline asset for us because it takes gas from a very liquid pipeline node in Katy, Texas, West of Houston, goes around Houston down into the Port Arthur markets, which is where there's a lot of LNG players in Port Arthur, and there's industrial players and petrochemical facility players as well. And then I would note the rest of the projects are all below $500 million, and while they don't move the needle as much, they're very capital efficient. These are gonna be easier to build because they're smaller, they fly under the radar a little bit more. And we really like those types of projects as well 'cause they're debottlenecking, they're a little bit smaller, and are a little bit easier to permit and build.
Outside of the natural gas business, we do have other business segments. This slide shows two of our business segments combined into one because they're both focused on refined products. So our Products Pipelines business and our Terminals business, combined are focused on refined products. So gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. We're not really growing these businesses all that much, although they do have a little bit of automatic growth because of some of the rate escalators that they enjoy. You can see on the bottom right-hand side the slight growth, a very steady cash projection and then per production, and then a little bit of growth on top of that because of the automatic escalators. We view this as the heart of our cash cow businesses that are generating really nice cash, really healthy free cash flow.
There's not a lot of capital required to maintain these assets, and so a very high degree of cash free cash flow. Then we take that free cash flow and we use it to fund our natural gas projects. Then the last business unit that we have is our CO2 segment. This is both our enhanced oil recovery business as well as our Energy Transition Ventures business. It's a very small part of our overall company, less than 10%, but enhanced oil recovery business, we take carbon dioxide, we inject it into old mature oil wells, very high returns on that business and a good amount of free cash flow on the right-hand side. You can see there between $250 million and $550 million a year. Then part of that business is our Energy Transition Ventures business.
This is where we're trying to identify ways that we can participate in the energy transition landscape. The area that we've recently focused on so far is the renewable natural gas business. So renewable natural gas is capturing biogas that's coming off of landfills and wastewater treatment facilities, cleaning it up, processing it, and then it becomes, you know, it's molecularly equivalent to the natural gas that comes out of the ground. Future opportunities potentially exist in carbon capture and sequestration because of that enhanced oil recovery business that we have. We have a particular expertise that would allow us to play in the sequestration business. So we're looking at ways to do that. And then potentially down the road, there's some other opportunities, but those are earlier days.
So really to wrap up here, you know, we're focused on natural gas, as we've talked about, two-thirds of our cash flows. We're focused on the types of businesses that maintain steady cash flows, visible cash flows, protects us and insulates us from downturns in the market. We have an under-levered balance sheet, which positions us well for future opportunities, allows us to take advantage of some of the dry powder that we have to go after some of those opportunities that we've identified and some that are on the horizon. We have a clear growth trajectory because of that $8.1 billion growth project backlog that'll help us grow nicely for the next five years. We expect to build on top of that.
And then the management team is highly aligned with our investors with a 13% share ownership across the management ranks. So, you know, highly favorable natural gas market conditions, both domestically and internationally. We've got a nice financial backdrop here to help us take advantage of that. So we're pretty excited about the opportunity set. JR?
Thanks, David. Great job there. We've got probably what, three, four minutes, before we need to go downstairs. So if we've got any questions from the audience, we can get into those. But maybe I'll just start with one.
David's just kind of, you know, wanting to put a little bit of a finer point on one of the notes that you went through there, which is, you know, you go back to that project backlog. You increased it by $5 billion in basically one year's timeframe. You said it's, you know, it's under a six times build multiple. That build multiple went up, what, less than one turn in total. When you think about the types of projects that you're adding there, obviously very attractive returns. Maybe talk about that in the context of the questions we're getting right now around steel tariffs a lot.
Just kind of speak to maybe some of the ways that you're able to maybe mitigate some of those costs or, you know, maybe pass through the costs and, and just kind of protect that return profile. So I think that would be just kind of a good way to connect to so
me current events there. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we have a long history of building infrastructure. And so we use a lot of the lessons learned in previous cycles to help protect us in contracting for new major infrastructure.
So in this current round of infrastructure builds, those three big projects I've talked about before, you know, number one, we look to try to secure as much of the equipment, and enough, in as many of the service contracts as we can immediately after sanctioning so that we can lock in those prices so they're not, we're not subject to unreasonable escalations, tariffs, and so we did that and we were able to lock in a lot of that material for much of these growth projects. Number one. Number two, we look for ways to share in any cost overruns with our customers, to the extent that they're willing to do that. We were able to secure some cost overrun protection in some of these projects.
And so that helps us to the degree that we're not able to lock in as much of all of the project costs upfront, then to the extent we run over, we're able to share some of those costs. And then lastly, we build in an appropriate amount of contingency dollars in each of our project budgets so that we have a little bit of cushion in there should we see, you know, unforeseen things come to the project execution phase. So among those three things, I think right now we're sitting very, very comfortably. Of course, you know, we have a long way to go to build and develop those things. But, you know, based on where we've started other projects, I think we're in a really good spot with those big three.
Any questions from the audience here? Maybe just one more for me while we've got another couple minutes. I think somewhere in the slides you said that there's about seven Bcf a day of LNG projects that you're still kind of pursuing contracting around, if that's right, and so I guess kind of the connection there is you've had a $5 billion increase to the backlog, but there's clearly a lot more that's still on the come here, and I think the part that maybe we miss is with your Trident, you know, pipeline, you're getting around Houston, which is a big obstacle. You talked in the slides about how it's hard to you can't just build a lateral, you have to build these larger projects in a lot of cases.
Just kind of connect some of those themes there where, you know, there's a lot that needs to be done, not everybody can do it. And maybe why Kinder Morgan's gonna be one of the differentiated ways to play all this.
Yeah. Yeah. I think with traditionally, you know, back in the first wave of the LNG facility buildout, there really was just a, there's gonna be one party who wins that one project to connect to Cheniere, because they just need to connect Cheniere into the corridor of Texas Intrastate pipes and you're done.
Now, what you're gonna need to do is build to the corridor and then maybe build storage, but probably build even further to a more liquid point and in some cases all the way back to the hub and so or to the supply basin. So, I think what is exciting for us is we may not be the player that connects to the specific new train that's being built, but we may have, because of our massive footprint, we may have the advantage to build them to a liquid supply point or all the way back to the basin. So the seven Bcf of additional LNG projects that we're focused on, not all of those are directly connecting to the LNG plant, but they're playing some role in that overall portfolio.
And so that's pretty exciting, and that's new, this second wave or third wave of LNG buildout.
I think with that, we will leave it here for the presentation, but feel free to follow us downstairs to the breakout. Thank you.