number of businesses across North America focused on North America energy midstream assets, large position in natural gas. You see up in the right our overall segment EBITDA budgeted for 2018 of $8.1 billion. 56% of that is in the natural gas pipelines where we have the largest natural gas transmission, transportation, as well as storage network in North America. Very much like this position, we are seeing a real growth in the natural gas business, something unlike in 30-plus years I've ever seen, which is 10% year-over-year growth in natural gas supply and demand. Another big growth year expected in 2019. That does a couple things. One is it creates the potential for projects, and Christine alluded to two of them, two of our Permian pipeline projects, which I'll get to in a minute. It also fills up our existing infrastructure.
That helps improve renewal rates. It helps improve utilization of existing previously unused capacity, et cetera. Generally a very good positive tailwind going on in natural gas right now. We're connected to all the main resource players as well as the key markets, including the key export markets. In products pipelines, we're the largest independent transporter of petroleum products, about 2.1 million barrels a day. That's 10,000 miles of pipe added to our gas position of 70,000 miles. Terminals, we're the largest independent operator in North America. We've gradually migrated this business over to being primarily liquids focused, primarily refined products focused, which gives us, we think, good margin opportunities, and we've also built these assets up around primarily hub positions where we get some opportunities for additional value-added services. In CO2, we are the largest transporter of CO2 in North America.
This is a business that's been high returning for us. It's been predictable in terms of production. We usually hit our production targets within about 1.5% of what we've budgeted for. So a predictable business for us, good returns, and we combine two important things here. One is we've got access to a scarce resource, that's CO2, and there's certain oil that can only be liberated by CO2, and then also we have a good EOR team. So a very good business for us. We think we're a compelling investment thesis. $40 billion of market capitalization, investment-grade rated debt, and I'll get into our development there in just a moment. $7.5 billion of adjusted EBITDA. We've outlined what our dividend growth is.
We did that last year, and showing $0.80 for this year, and then 25% dividend growth in each of the two following years, 2019 and 2020. Unusual in our sector, we also have a share buyback program, $2 billion of which we used about $500 million so far, and that's over the same 2018-2020 time period. We're delivering. So over the last few years, we've talked about focusing on delevering the balance sheet, putting ourselves in position for a credit upgrade, and using our excess cash for delevering, for investing in good opportunity projects, and for good returning projects. Then if we have excess, returning that in the form of dividends, which I just talked about, but also share buybacks. We have, with our announcement yesterday at KMI, checked that first box off.
We had, as you may have seen, a transaction that we announced earlier in the year to sell our Trans Mountain pipeline project at KML. The Trans Mountain pipeline project, the existing pipeline as well as the project for CAD 4.5 billion. We closed on that transaction. We had a shareholder vote on Thursday. We closed on the transaction on Friday, we announced yesterday what we were going to do with the proceeds. The proceeds go out to KML public shareholders and go out to KMI as the 70% shareholder on the same terms. It's going to be distributed as a return of capital. That's a tax-efficient way to distribute it to the shareholders. That will happen. Because of a couple of technical points, we have to go out for a proxy. The proxy is not on a shareholder vote.
The shareholder vote is not on the use of proceeds. That decision has been made, how they'll be distributed. Rather, it's on a reverse stock split as well as a reduction in stated capital, which I can get into if anybody has questions on it. When we go through that process, again, the decision on how to distribute the proceeds and when is a management and board decision. That decision has been made. We expect the proceeds to be distributed the first week of January of next year. Looking at it from a KMI standpoint, those proceeds will be used to delever. We announced yesterday a new target for our leverage, where we had been at or below 5x debt to EBITDA. We announced a target of the mid-4s. With this transaction, we'll be at 4.6.
We announced the new target and showed you how we were going to make it this year. We're making it. We've gotten to a point where we should be eligible for an upgrade. We've done the work that we need to do on deleveraging the balance sheet. We may continue to delever further as we continue to fund the equity portion of our expansion projects, which we would expect to continue to do, particularly at our current equity values. We may gradually improve from there, but we don't need to. We are where we need to be, and that allows us to turn our attention, not that we ever took our attention off of this, of finding new projects, new opportunities to invest our capital, and to the extent we exhaust those opportunities to find ways to return value to our shareholders.
That was a real milestone. It was years of work. We've reduced debt substantially over that period, and we've taken our leverage level from 5.6x down to 4.6x. Significant progress there. Investing in high return projects, return cash to shareholders. Again, we've described how we're going to do that from a dividend standpoint. We're having a great 2018. We're exceeding our leverage metrics target. We're doing well in all of our businesses. What we've set out to do, we've done, and we're turning a corner here with our announcement yesterday. We've continued to issue zero equity since 2015, and we expect to be able to do that for the foreseeable future. We've got a good dividend coverage ratio. We have a leverage target of around 4.5x, which we are meeting.
You see our debt maturities there, we have some debt maturing in February and debt maturing in December. We'll use the proceeds from the Trans Mountain transaction to reduce that debt. Overall, we've generated predictable fee-based cash flows, and we've used our great footprint, our great network of assets, which are fee-based, and through fee-based structures as well as hedging of the commodity exposure that we have. 96% of our 2018 budgeted cash flow is completely independent of commodity prices. We're a leader in each of the segments, as I showed you on the first page. Critically important to us is being a safe operator as well as an efficient operator. We measure ourselves against industry benchmarks, and we perform consistently better on nearly all of those benchmarks. 34 of 36, I believe, is where we currently stand. We do that while operating very efficiently.
We treat the money as our investors' money, not management's money. That's the way we operate. We keep looking for ways to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost. We leverage the footprint for growth. We've got about $6 billion of secured projects in the backlog. We continue to look to ways to add that. We think we're running at $2 billion to $3 billion per year of expansion capital projects. There may be more, maybe less in any given year, but we think that's a reasonable run rate. Across our network, we continue to be very disciplined. I'll show you some slides on the performance on the capital investments that we do make. We've maintained financial flexibility, and we've been very aligned with you. With management and the board owning a 15% ownership stake, we run the company like shareholders because we are shareholders.
We're strongly positioned to benefit from natural gas. U.S. production continues to grow, expected to grow over 40% over the next 10 years, and from key basins, which we are tied into. On the demand side, we've seen big growth from power. We're seeing growth in LNG and continue to see more. That's going to be the biggest growth area. Net exports to Mexico, of which we account for about two-thirds, move across our pipeline systems. There's petchem, industrial, other demand sources that we see. The main point here is we're producing immense amount of natural gas, and we can grow it year over year, and there's more of it to be produced.
What we're trying to do is find a way to get it from the places where it's produced and put it to the places where it needs to leave, either be consumed or exported out of the country. Our network of assets is well-positioned to participate in that. As you see, we're attached to every major producing area with transmission assets as well as some gathering and processing assets. Then we're well-positioned for LNG exports to Mexico, power demand. We're developing our own liquefaction facility at Elba Island in Georgia. Very nicely positioned and levered to the overall natural gas story. $6.3 billion of secured projects, of which about two-thirds, as I mentioned, $4.2 billion, is natural gas. Here you see a breakdown on it. It's the Elba liquefaction facility, $1.2 billion. We expect to get that in service in the fourth quarter of this year.
That's the current projection. We'll continue to add units as we go through into 2019. We provide a lot of expansions to support LNG exports. Where we're not the developer of the liquefaction facility, we're providing the upstream infrastructure, midstream infrastructure, both transportation and storage, to be able to serve those Permian takeaway projects, which I'll have some more detail on. In the Bakken, we're well-positioned, like our G&P position there, and we're expanding that position, investing about $0.5 billion worth of capital in it. Marcellus, we have southbound projects that were at the tail end of what was about a $2 billion set of projects to move gas from Marcellus and Utica down to the Gulf Coast. We have one more of those potentially to do that's not in our backlog.
I think you'll see a step change in terms of the rate that's required in order to be able to provide new export capacity. Our Tennessee system comes right through the Marcellus. It's now reversed and flows south to Louisiana, and we're in a position to continue to provide outlets to the producers in that region. We support power generation supply projects, various of those, we've got $2.1 billion in other segments of which about $1.4 billion is in EOR, the rest is finishing out some projects in our liquids business segments. Building out LNG. There are a number of ways in which you can participate in LNG.
You can be a developer, you can go out and develop projects, you can underwrite the liquefaction and go out and place those molecules in the global market, or you can build and develop the facility and put that space all under capacity to someone who's willing to take that risk and that opportunity. That's what we did at Elba. Our participation there is we build, we own, we operate the facility, and Shell takes the capacity and places the molecules in the international market. We're not going to do the first one. We like doing the Elba model, and that's what we're looking for as a potential on our Gulf LNG facility, which is currently a regas, and is the last brownfield facility for potential development.
Aside from all that, aside from direct participation in LNG, the really very low risk and high reward opportunity for us is in holding the upstream natural gas transportation and storage network that's needed to serve third-party LNG facilities. What we're doing is building the pipe, expanding the pipe, and providing the storage service that LNG providers are going to need. That's easy for us. We know how to build pipelines, we know how to expand our pipeline network, and it creates a very good opportunity for us. We've signed up about 4.5 Bcf of capacity and about $900 million worth of capital. Very capital efficient way for us to participate in that growing market. Here's our Elba facility. As I mentioned, expecting the first unit to come on in the fourth quarter. We're two projects here.
It's the liquefaction facility itself, which is about a $1.4 billion project, $745 million our share. The terminal facility, which is $430 million. That's a Kinder Morgan project. The in-service is, again, phased through the fourth quarter of this year through the third quarter of 2019 as these 10 modular units are placed into service. We have our certificate, of course. We're under construction, well advanced in construction right now, and closing in on completion of the first unit. Permian production. We have one announced, FID'd, and in-the-backlog project to date. That's the Gulf Coast Express project. Actually, I'll go to that first. This is about a 450-mile pipe starting in Waha and terminating in Aguadulce, Texas where it interconnects with our Texas intrastate system.
This will give Permian gas, about 2 Bcf of Permian gas, the opportunity to access markets along the Texas coast, power, industrial, and petchem, but really importantly also, markets in Mexico and access to the LNG facilities. We have this fully under contract, project in October of 2019 in service. Really remarkable, we barely had this thing FID'd, we started working on another one. That speaks to just the overall growth in Permian production and its need to find an outlet. As I'm sure all of you know, the Permian gas is associated gas. In some cases, it really has negative value. It needs to be moved somewhere in order to untrap or unlock the oil that's there. There is a strong desire to get that gas out and get value for it.
Permian is one of the lowest priced regions in North America. Not the lowest, but one of the lowest. Now the premium markets are in the Houston Ship Channel and in Southern Louisiana. We've got the pipe to get them from one place to the other, and all within the state of Texas. We need an Army Corps of Engineers permit, but we don't need a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission permit. A more rapid permitting environment, a more predictable construction environment, good value going to our producers. 2 Bcf of gas hitting a 5 Bcf network today on our Texas Gulf Coast system, which will create opportunities not only for our shippers, but also create opportunities for us on that asset as we bring an incremental 2 Bcf of gas into our network.
The next step would be the PHP pipeline project, which we've made a couple of announcements about and said that we think we may have something to say here in the third quarter, and we've continued to make progress on that. We have good shipper commitments that have come in. We have some equity that's associated with those commitments coming in. A great project that will bring an incremental 2 Bcf to our system. A system that today runs at about 5 Bcf is going to see 4 Bcf coming into that network, which will create follow-on opportunities for us and for our shippers. We connect them to the markets that's going to allow them to dispose of the natural gas that they're producing in association with the crude in West Texas. Look, we're well along on this.
We continue to make very good progress. As soon as we have it wrapped up, we'll FID it and announce it. All right. That's the Permian opportunity. Our liquids business. I'll start with the lower right-hand corner there. We participate in refined products export markets because we provide the dock space in the Houston Ship Channel. You can see refined products exports have been increasing along our docks over the last several years. We also have a large refined products pipeline business. This is not a fast growth business like natural gas is, but there's incremental growth that's happening every year, and it's going to continue to grow marginally when you consider global consumption needs. Our position in the Houston Ship Channel, again, predominantly refined products position, but connected by pipelines inbound and outbound. It's interconnected between and among our facilities by cross-channel pipelines.
We have 12 barge docks, 11 ship docks. We're connected by train. We have a nine-bay truck rack. This is an example of the kind of thing we're trying to build in our terminals business, a hub position in a critical market with lots of options for our customers, lots of options for us, lots of infrastructure that we're interconnected with refineries inbound and cross-country pipelines outbound, as well as international export markets for the refined products. We built the premier clearing point for domestic and international markets, 43 million barrels of total capacity, and a significant refined products position. Really the dominant position in the Houston Ship Channel at this point. Beyond the current backlog, there's continued need for energy infrastructure investment. More than $400 billion over the next 20 years in natural gas alone.
Looking at our opportunities, what we're exposed to, particularly southbound capacity, additional southbound capacity to feed the Marcellus, the growing Marcellus production. Storage to support renewable power generation and LNG exports. Storage is going to be, we believe, although it's not showing up in storage spreads today, is going to be increasingly valuable as you look at the intermittent sources on which the power market is increasingly relying on in the form of renewable power. We believe the combination of our transportation assets and our storage assets allows us to sell really a different product to our market, and that product is deliverability. In those markets like California, where the transition is to more and more renewable energy, they still need the reliable backup, and they need, if anything, need more our peak deliverability than they did before they added all these renewables.
We think it's a good opportunity for us to continue to participate in renewable firming. We also think there's going to be demand for storage that's associated with LNG exports. It's not going to be a real consistent, necessarily every day in and day out, movement of the commodity. These are big numbers, and so from time to time, there's going to be a need for that storage, along with the normal need for seasonal storage, which is the bulk of U.S. storage is geared to that need, the difference between summer utilization and winter utilization. We have a great storage position, and we believe that should continue to see increased value over time. Downstream connectivity for Permian volumes. We are working on that, I mentioned the two big projects, but there's more to it than that.
We have existing assets in the Permian Basin on EPNG, also on NGPL, which we own 50% of. Any bit of capacity that we can make available to Permian producers, we sell. We've even sold capacity. We've been selling capacity on good terms from Rockies assets, which traditionally have served. There's been more Rockies export capacity than there has been production for a very long time. Now anything that gives people an opportunity to get out of the Permian is valuable and can be sold. This speaks to something, I think, again, that is important to us as we look at our base business.
Even separate and aside from projects and capital expansions and things like that we might do in order to expand our network and our footprint, we benefit from the uplift that's associated with just seeing a 10% year-over-year increase in the amount of natural gas that's produced and used over the course of the year. Fills up existing capacity, makes renewal rates better. Participating and benefiting from it, not only in terms of new projects, but also in terms of what it does for our existing asset base. The transportation for additional supply for LNG exports, again, that's big, and big for us. Haynesville 2.0. A lot of activity returning to Haynesville. We have some assets that are very well-positioned there. On gathering and processing, we have a very nice position in the Bakken. Our producer there is extremely successful and is developing additional production.
We're investing in that business. Haynesville, we built out a fairly large network, had volumes come up and then go back down. Now they're coming back up again, and we can be very capital efficient in our investments there to meet the need for new production as it comes on. We have a new owner of the acreage behind that asset that is interested in investing in it. Our Eagle Ford position in South Texas is. Eagle Ford is a more challenged base and it's recovering, but it's recovering in the face of more export pipe than is currently needed. It's very much integrated into our natural gas network in Texas. Other assets like Copano, Oklahoma, and some of our Rockies assets, maybe not as core to our business. Good gathering and processing positions, particularly in the Haynesville, Eagle Ford, and in the Bakken.
Good opportunities for us to deploy additional capital. Given everything that we've done over the last several years to improve our balance sheet, to give people visibility on our dividends, to continue to find good projects to invest in, notwithstanding all that, we continue to trade at a discount to our peers. We think particularly by solving the issue on our overall leverage, putting ourselves in a position to be a triple B flat entity, finding good opportunities to continue to invest, resolving the uncertainty around the Trans Mountain situation in Canada in a favorable way to our shareholders at KML and KMI. We think, when you look at our trading relative to our peers, that there's room for upside there, and that's what this chart is speaking to.
If you look at the top two, DCF yield and EBITDA multiple, those would imply 40%-50% share price upside for KMI by themselves. We've got a good dividend growth rate, obviously, and we have good dividend coverage, which we would expect to maintain. Going forward, we're increasing the dividend, but we would expect for the very long term to have a well-covered dividend, right? Have a well-covered dividend and a strong balance sheet and continue to find good projects to invest our capital in. We think of ourselves as a core holding in any portfolio, should be a core holding in any portfolio. Diversified energy infrastructure, one of the 10 largest energy companies in the S&P 500. We're core to the North American energy economy. If you look at North American energy production, NGLs, natural gas, crude, refined products, it's all growing.
It's all growing right now, all of it is growing in a place where it's not necessarily being used and needs to be moved, and that's where midstream infrastructure players like us come into play. Well-positioned for growth with a $6.3 billion backlog, a good footprint to grow off of. Good flexibility to be able to execute, have a healthy balance sheet, new EBITDA target, which we believe we have met, we've found good ways to deliver shareholder value. We generate a lot of cash in this business, a lot of cash, our objective is to find the best ways to use that cash. As we put our balance sheet in a very healthy, strong position, we have the opportunity to continue to invest in projects look for other ways to return value to shareholders. Finally, as I've said, we're aligned with you.
We're working for you. With that, I will take any questions you have, we have a separate breakout session in about six minutes too.
Maybe I'll kick it off. In the last couple of years, you've had to play defense. You've had to de-lever, it kind of tied your hands in things that you maybe would want to do. The DNA of Kinder, in my opinion, has been someone who's typically played offense. Been acquisitive in past years. Now that you're kind of at pretty much close to the targeted leverage, how should we think about, are you guys still going to be playing defense or are you going to turn the corner and maybe be a little more playing offense, what kind of opportunities would that entail?
Sure. Well, first I'd say it sure felt like we were playing offense the last 30 months. I think it took a lot of active work, and a lot of active management in order to be able to accomplish what we did on the balance sheet. We high-graded our backlog. We brought in partners where it made sense. We got promoted on those JVs to get us additional returns for our shareholders. We did some good divestiture transactions, most recent one being last week. We did a lot of work to get ourselves in a position of strength, and so we never took the offense off the field. During that time too, we didn't turn projects away. We continued to look at projects and find good projects to do. Gulf Coast Express, the most recent example, hopefully Permian Highway, the next example of that.
We continue to find ways to do things. The place where we've historically played offense, where we've been sidelined a little bit to your point, Christine, is that our relative trading multiple has not made our currency attractive in acquisitions. We would like to be back in a position where we can do that. That's where about half of all the capital we've deployed since the inception of the company has gone, has been in M&A. We've had hits and misses like everybody. Overall, if you look at the track record, we're good at it. We're able to take costs out. We're able to find synergies, commercial synergies, capital synergies, and do things like position ourselves for what we're now seeing in natural gas, which happened with the El Paso acquisition.
We saw this coming to some extent, and we put ourselves in a position to do that. Yes, we'd like to be back in that position again, but we will not have an itchy trigger finger. We are going to be disciplined. That's what's gotten us to this point to date, is we've been disciplined, and we will continue to be disciplined, and we won't do something just to get a deal done that's marginally accretive or something. We're going to be looking for good opportunities. We think that in time, those good opportunities will be available, particularly as the value of our currency improves.
Maybe also with the sale of Trans Mountain, your Canadian footprint has gotten a lot smaller. So has obviously your growth potential up there. How should we think about the remaining assets there? Do you think over a longer term it's something that you want to grow, or is it something that maybe you want to potentially shrink?
Right. Our Canadian footprint will consist of the Cochin pipeline system, and it also consists of our significant merchant terminal position in Edmonton. Those are attractive assets. We've been experiencing good renewal rates there and a great bulk terminal facility in Vancouver Harbor, which we are investing in now, and we are growing. We just added another growth project to that. This is a business that we like, and they're good midstream assets. We can certainly continue to invest in them and grow them. Very low leverage on this entity. All of that to say, we don't have to do anything except to continue to run and manage these assets. However, as we said, all alternatives will be considered. If you look at some of the objective facts here, this is a small midstream company with attractive assets and with no debt on the balance sheet.
All right? About $200 million a year of EBITDA or so without any significant leverage. About the only leverage is the preferred shareholder interest, which gets 50% debt treatment for it. Very low leverage, good set of midstream assets, continue to invest in. It can stand pat. It is small. Its original purpose was to take these assets and get the financing in place for TMX. That purpose no longer exists, obviously. It's a set of midstream assets in what we think is an attractive seller's market for those assets. There are plenty of midstream players, including people with complementary positions to ours, who we think will be interested. We are going to explore that over the coming months. They're attractive to KMI. We have to work out the governance and make sure that works out.
I would say that objectively, again, just talking about objective observations here, the multiple at which KMI trades and the multiple at which a set of midstream assets like these would trade, there's a dilutive effect there. Whether KMI could make those numbers work, I think is very much an open question. The fact that these are attractive assets in a good market for those assets, I think those are facts. Over the coming months, we'll see how this particular process plays out, but we'll always be in a position of not having to say yes to anything. We can always say no because the assets themselves will stand on their own.
Great. We are out of time, but breakout will be in Liberty III.