Good morning, everyone. Appreciate you all getting out of bed bright and early to be here for the first talk of the morning. Always nice to have a full house at 8:00 o'clock. Looking forward to sharing a little bit about Liberty with you this morning. I guess I better get a clicker so we could keep going here. I'm sure you're going to see a lot of this slide this morning. I won't spend too much time on it, but know that I'm going to probably make a few forward-looking statements today, so don't read too much into those. You know we live in a volatile world, and particularly in the frac side of things. That is absolutely true. Liberty will be 15 years old next year, and that's a pretty exciting milestone for us.
Certainly, I would tell you that when we dreamed up the idea of Liberty back in 2011, couldn't possibly have imagined the journey that we would find ourselves on. Just a quick note. I noticed the timer hasn't started, so I don't want to run too long if somebody wouldn't mind starting that countdown. Couldn't have imagined the journey that we would have found ourselves on over the next 15 years. We started out with a very, very simple mission at Liberty, and that was to build the best damn frac company, period. I don't know how many of you follow the Kimberlite survey, but the results for this year just came out, and I think now for eight years in a row, which is maybe as long as the Kimberlite survey has happened, Liberty has been ranked the number one frac company in the United States.
I'm incredibly proud that we have successfully accomplished the goal we set out to achieve. That's not a small mission to undertake, but to us, it seemed like something that was relatively straightforward given past experience in the service industry. Of course, we're very people-intensive. You can see we have a little more than five and a half thousand employees today. If you could create a culture where people would want to come and stay and make a career of it, particularly out in the field, we believed you could do differential things. You could deliver a differential offering that was unrivaled in the space.
That was our whole goal from the very outset, to create an environment where particularly those staff that are at the tip of the spear, the folks that are running the pumps, the blender, the hydration unit, who are doing equipment maintenance, the ETECs and the mechanics would want to come and stay, and not just stay for a while, but to stay for their career. If we could accomplish that, amazing things would happen. We find ourselves here 15 years later now. Last year, we did a little more than $4 billion in revenue. We have an operating platform that spans North America, and we have recently stepped out into Australia. We have launched the power business. We are going to evolve into the power generation world.
I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about the things, the steps along the way, the things that have led to this, the pieces of the puzzle that we have brought together. Before I go there, I want to take one more step back in history. We became a public company back in 2018, and as we were out on the road, we shared a slide with people, and it talked about how it was that you would make money in the frac business, what the formula was for profitability. It was a relatively straightforward formula. It starts with utilization, the amount of time that you find yourselves out on location doing work for a customer, times the throughput, the amount of work that you get done out there each and every day, times the price that you get paid for that work.
Of course, that's the variable we have the least control over, and certainly today, the one I'm probably hanging my head about the most, less the cost of doing business, and that derives the profitability. We have control over primarily three of those variables: the top two, the amount of time we're out on location; number two, the amount of work that we get done; and then number three, the cost around delivering that service. If we're great at those three things, then we're going to have a very successful business. I'm going to talk about the inputs to that. A bit of a rundown memory lane, so to speak. I've been in this business a little more than 25 years now. 1998 was when I got started, and I was privileged to find myself in the frac world.
I didn't know what a frac was when I started in 1998, but little did I know it would be something that would ultimately change the course of energy history here in the United States. I consider myself incredibly blessed to have been along on that journey, but even more blessed to have found my way into partnership with people who were truly pioneers in this. Chris started Pinnacle Technologies back in 1992. Again, in a bit of a blind squirrel finds nut story, found ourselves at the tip of the spear in developing unconventional fracturing. Dr. Mike Meyerhofer, who leads our engineering team, published what is now a pretty famous paper way back in 1999 called We Don't Need No Stinkin Propant. I think we had to take the word stinkin out because SPE didn't consider that appropriate language for a technical paper at the time.
That was really the launch of slick water fracturing, this whole idea that has transitioned us from a country that was importing a meaningful amount of energy to a country that now finds itself a net energy exporter. Pinnacle Technologies really, I think, carried the torch for a good stretch of the time with many partners around the development of many unconventional theories. We've carried that on at Liberty with the continuation and evolution of technology that ultimately continues to support that great work. Liberty today operates across North America. If you think back to that formula I was talking about, there are a few key pieces of the puzzle here that play into that.
When you think about utilization, the amount of time that you're out on location, the amount of time that customers call you to go to work, there are some things that they're thinking about when they make that decision. Of course, price is one of those things, but it's certainly not the only factor. In many cases, it's not the top factor. Execution on location. You want to go out there and you want to find a way to execute at the highest level possible with as safe an operating environment as possible. We have been working hard over Liberty's history to push towards execution over 24 hours a day, really to pump nonstop. That journey has come a long way. In 2011, when Liberty was founded, we were working daylight operations only. We only worked a 12-hour shift.
Fast forward to today, and we have found ourselves in situations where we have pumped more than 10 days continuously without a single interruption in the pumps running. That's really a phenomenal story around the utilization of an asset and ultimately the ability to drive down the cost of completing an unconventional well. It's the hard work that goes into that and all that underpins that, that ensures that you are out on location and that utilization is as high as possible. Technology is an important piece of the puzzle. We have a long history at Liberty of technology innovation that starts with things like containerized sand and the quiet fleet here in the DJ way back in the 2015-2016 downturn.
If you just look at the last five years in Liberty's world, we have rolled out eFrac in the form of digiFrac, along with the power generation to support that. We have rolled out three iterations of digiPrime. First of all, the MTU version, second, the Caterpillar version, and third, the variable speed Cummins version. We have acquired PropX and transitioned the logistics world in sand from a world of running dry sand only to a world of damp sand, and most recently actually transporting sand by slurry pipe rather than having to load it in a truck. We have launched a CNG business, the compression, delivery, and distribution of CNG on location, and upped the game on that, and now we are going to start in the power business. We have done an incredible amount from a technology standpoint on surface, but also in the subsurface.
We remain one of the only companies, I think, in the frac space today that still has a complete engineering department that includes a geology team, a reservoir evaluation team, a frac engineering team, and a big data analysis team that goes alongside of that to help support our customers in figuring out what the best possible frac design is to go along with that. We've layered on top of that artificial intelligence now, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time in a second talking about the impact of that on operations. You put all of those pieces of the puzzle together, you think back to that formula, and you find an outcome that looks like this. This is Liberty's cash return on capital invested over the entire history of the company. You can see that average is 24%.
That's 50% higher than the S&P 500 and meaningfully higher than the OSX average, about 2.5x . We said when we went public that we were never going to change our mindset about how we ran the company. As a private company, you look for opportunities to reinvest capital in the business, to find ways to grow your earnings on that capital. That comes through being the best provider to your customers in the form of technology, efficiency, throughput, safety, the supply chain, and all of the underpinnings that make that work. If you bring all of those things together and you're thoughtful about when you deploy capital, you can generate strong, strong returns like this. A capital returns program to shareholders is, of course, a part of our strategy.
To the extent we can, you can see that we have a pretty compelling proposition for reinvesting dollars in the company. That's a pretty lumpy graph. Of course, we've lived through two of the biggest downturns that I've seen in my career in the time that Liberty's been a company. The average of those things is pretty strong. You have to be thoughtful about when you invest. We've been through two of the biggest downturns. We made those opportunistic downturns. In the first downturn in 2015-2016, I had worked at Sanjel previously. They found themselves in a challenged position, having taken on some debt at exactly the wrong time, literally four months before the rug got yanked out from underneath of us. Ultimately, that allowed us to acquire the U.S. assets of Sanjel.
In 2019, Schlumberger approached us and asked if we would be willing to acquire their onshore North American frac business. COVID came just two months after we had that first conversation, but ultimately we were able to close that deal, announced it in August of 2020, closed it at the end of that year. Again, a transformative transaction done for us in the depths of the market that allowed Liberty to take a massive step forward post that. We have grown to be a pretty meaningful portfolio now. If you think about our organization and all that we offer across the platform, we set out to be the best damn frac company. I think now the term probably better, best damn energy company, would be a more appropriate descriptor of the company. There have been some reasons for that.
We have worked hard to stray not too far from the frac vertical. We have wanted to make sure that, A, we have control over the critical inputs that help us be successful out on location, and, B, the opportunity to wrap our arms around additional wallet share as we think about doing that work. It's when we go into a market like we're in today, and the market is what the market is, and we recognize that pricing is on a bit of a trend downwards. It's helpful to be able to have a conversation around how we can make that opportunity a win-win. Okay, we understand that we maybe have to cede some price, but are there some other opportunities Liberty could bring to the table? Could we be the supplier of sand, the supplier of chemical? Could we bring natural gas to location?
Could we look after your logistics program? Having a platform like this enables us to have that conversation, and in an environment like we're in today, possibly have to give some price, ideally to find ourselves with something in exchange for that, a little bit bigger share of the wallet that enables us to retain some of those margin dollars. It's also critical for ensuring success in those variables I talked about. When we think about utilization on location, when we think about driving efficiency, it's critical to have control over the variables that ultimately decide whether or not you can be successful there. If you think about executing on a frac job, there are really a couple of very, very important things you cannot do without. You cannot do without fuel, you cannot do without sand, and you cannot do without water.
If you don't have those three things, you are not going to find your way to a frac job. Now, we don't do anything on the water side of things, but we were very, very conscious about retaining control over as much of the logistics program as possible, ultimately led to us acquiring PropX and making sure that we had a strong logistics offering inside of our portfolio. I think of all of the pressure pumpers out there, we probably deliver more of the sand that we pump down hole than any one of our peers, and that's because we strive to keep control over that. That's an important input for us when we think about executing 24/7, 365, driving efficiencies to the highest possible level. Fuel was a big one. Diesel fuels are ubiquitous. You can find that almost anywhere, out in the oil field.
As we started the transition to natural gas, as we began launching our Digi platform, first in the form of digiFrac, which is gas-fired power generation, driving an electric pump, and then ultimately digiPrime, which is a natural gas direct drive solution engine transmission pump, we came to recognize that that fuel source, the supply of that natural gas, was going to be critical to our success. That's not so ubiquitous in the field. It's not so easy to find natural gas out there, particularly delivered in the volumes, quality, and with the precision that we need to ensure execution. We made a very, very conscious decision as we launched the Digi platform to get into the CNG business. We own our compression facilities in both here in the DJ and down in Texas. We own our own trucking fleet to deliver that CNG to the field.
We own the equipment to distribute that gas to our equipment on location. We own gas processing equipment for when we are going to use field gas. All of that with the goal of ensuring that we can execute at the highest level, that our pumps are getting not only the volume of fuel, but at the right conditions and with the right quality to ensure successful execution. When we started on eFrac, we made the very conscious decision to own power generation. We chose not to use a third party because, if there's one thing that could let you down, it would be a lack of electricity. That has been true in every one of these cases. These are things that we view as critical to our success as an entity, very, very closely tied to our core business of frac.
They represent an important piece of our puzzle today. Ultimately, the addition of all of those things has dramatically changed the earnings profile. You can see a bit of a transition here from our early years, 2017, 2018, 2019. Not hugely vertically integrated at that point in time. We did not have the CNG business. We did not have PropX internal to the company. We did not own the sand mines at that point in time. We didn't have wireline as part of our world. All of those things together have enabled us to, in an arguably more challenging timeframe, deliver higher earnings and EBITDA on a company basis. That's the compelling proposition for us to consider looking or to continue to look at additional opportunities that underpin our core business. Ultimately, to take some of those skill sets and step out into a different world.
This is an important slide I want to spend a little bit of time on. The industry spends a lot of time talking about headline fleet count. When we started Liberty back in 2011, really started heading into 2012 as we really got our feet underneath of us, we considered a frac fleet 40,000 horsepower. That was how many pumps we attached to a fleet. That's about 16 pumps. Today, if you looked across our fleet, I would tell you that we have fleets as small as 60,000 horsepower and probably approaching 120,000 horsepower now attached to a single fleet. When you hear the number active fleet count, what does that mean to you? How much horsepower is attached to that? How do you think about that in the context of effectively utilized assets available in the field today?
What does that mean when we start to think about what's going to happen when eventually we start our way back out of the downturn we find ourselves in? Incremental demand for frac equipment starts to show up. How quickly does the market tighten? What does that mean from a pricing signal standpoint? I have suggested, I don't think anybody's taken on the challenge yet, but I've suggested that one of the data companies needs to start thinking about our world in horsepower hours. That's the unit of work that we think about. Amount of horsepower required times the number of hours that it's going to pump. If you could wrap your arms around that for our industry, that would give you some sense of how much work has to be done and how fully utilized the asset base is today.
I would tell you that our headline fleet count is coming down. We announced on our last earnings call that we were lowering our headline fleet count. Yet, as I stand in front of you today, every single pump that we have is required in the field. That's because our fleets continue to evolve. As we think about this very challenging market that we're in, one of the opportunities for lowering the cost of producing a barrel of oil or an MCF of gas is finding additional efficiency on location. Rather than just continuing to ask for price, one of the things we can do is go looking for ways to change the economic outlook. We can do that through something like simulf rac. Now, simulfr ac has dramatically moved efficiency on location.
It's dramatically moved the number of lateral feet that's getting done, but it changes the amount of horsepower that is required. Depending on how the E&P chooses to execute that, it could be as little as 25% or 30% incremental horsepower on location. It could be as much as 2x the horsepower required on location. We are doing more simulf rac work this year than we have ever done in our history, and my expectation is that will continue to climb. Simul frac will never be ubiquitous in the industry. There are places where it simply won't work given logistics constraints around water availability, size of the pad, limiting the amount of horsepower we could get, whether or not we can get that much sand there on a daily basis.
Things like that will mean that simulfr ac doesn't exist everywhere, but it can happen on a lot more pads than it's happening on today. As we think about what that means for utilization of assets, it's critical to think about, first of all, on one side, the demand and what that picture looks like, not measured in fleet count, but measured in horsepower required to go. In partnership with that, what's happening to the asset base in times like this when we're a little bit more challenged as an industry? We use an average 10% attrition rate across the board for the fleet. I would argue that in times like this, when economics get more challenged, one of the ways you can lower fleet operating costs is through cannibalization of equipment that's on the fence.
Once that equipment's lost its transmission or its power end or something like that, it is never coming back. I would argue that attrition probably climbs to something closer to 15% in that sort of environment. We see a fair bit more horsepower disappear out the back, that older tier two diesel stuff, than is certainly coming in the front. We launched LPI. I talked a little bit about the gas side of things. That's been an important piece of the puzzle for us is having control over CNG, but ultimately it means a lot more than that. It offers the opportunity to our end-use customers to provide not only the fuel, but also the management of that and then long-term power management. LPI is going to be our power platform.
That's where we're going to house generation outside of the megawatts that we use just to run our frac fleets. We've ordered our first 400 MW of power generation. We've talked about that. As we work to put that together in the field, there's a pretty compelling commercial proposition that comes along with that. The question always is, once the grid gets there, aren't you done? I think absolutely not. If you go out and look in the paper today, you will read story after story after story about what's happening to prices on the grid. The inability of the grid to keep electricity prices flat. They are certainly growing, not at inflation, but at numbers meaningfully higher than that. Power generation co-located with an asset offers you a very, very different opportunity.
Once the capital is invested, and presuming we have control over the fuel supply, which we certainly do from a midstream standpoint, there is a real opportunity to provide long-term surety around the price of power generation. It's certainly at a price that could be very, very competitive with the grid today. I would argue highly competitive with the grid five years from now. I think this offers a very, very long-term compelling proposition. We are focused primarily on gas recip. This is some work that a fellow by the name of Rob West at Thunder Said Energy did, just to give some context around what asset might be the right asset to bring to the table given the price of gas and the uptime required. You've all heard the term five nines reliability. That's what data centers ask for: 99.999% uptime.
If you look at where you think gas prices might fall over the coming years, you will see that gas recip fits very, very nicely in there. It fills pretty much that entire sweet spot. We're not going to build a 1 GW data center with gas recip. That simply wouldn't make any sense. Up to several hundred megawatts, it is absolutely the right answer to bring to the table. The asset is incredibly efficient, depending on the engine you choose, with a conversion rate, effectively the energy available on fuel converted to electricity, of 50%. That means that compared to the best gas turbine, simple cycle, you will burn 50%- 60% less fuel to accomplish the same thing as you would with a gas turbine. We have focused our efforts early on in that gas recip space.
I expect as the business grows, turbines will become a piece of the puzzle, but today focused on gas recip. This is just an outlook at the whole energy services platform. We have aimed to provide soup to nuts around power generation, from design and construction all the way through end of power generation management. Excited about that journey that we are on. We recently announced a partnership with Oklo, Small Modular Nuclear Reactor. Our role as the gas recip provider is to provide a firm in-service date to show up there when that customer wants to get started and to deliver that power generation. As SMRs become commercialized, to slide that in underneath as the baseload capacity and then provide that peaker capacity on top. Data center loads fluctuate by as much as 50% in fractions of a second.
That is not something that a nuclear reactor handles very, very well from a power generation standpoint. That is something that we can manage with gas, with gas peaker paired with batteries and supercapacitors. Quite excited about that partnership. We have a few other things that we have invested in that we think will play a long-term role in the power generation stack, alongside of that. That includes Fervo, enhanced geothermal, Natron, who is a sodium-ion battery provider, a little less power density, but much higher cycle count, very high discharge rates, and a North American supply chain. Of course, we're actually working in Australia now. We view natural gas as an important piece of the puzzle going forward, and we're excited to be supporting the development of the Beetaloo Basin in Australia. Why invest in Liberty? There's a long list of reasons there.
Hopefully, all of the things I have talked about have given you some sense of how thoughtful we have been about the business and what the future holds. I want to take the last couple of minutes to step outside of this world and talk about something else, though. Just a couple of slides, but it wouldn't be a Liberty presentation without us talking about bettering human lives. That is our very, very simple mission at Liberty: to better the lives of the people who work at Liberty, the communities that we work in, and those of the people around the world who deserve access to energy. I love this slide. Arjun Murthy deserves credit for the phrase "the lucky 1 billion." If you live in the Middle East, in Western Europe, in North America, in Japan, South Korea, or Australia, you are part of the lucky 1 billion.
You consume, on average, 13 barrels of oil per person per year. You can see in the United States, we're dramatically higher than that. If you are amongst the unlucky 7 billion, you consume, on average, 3 barrels of oil per person per year. We believe that's something that needs to change. If we close that gap by even, by just doubling their production or close that gap by even half, we'd have to more than double oil production on the globe today. Peak oil production in 2030? I think not. I don't think there's a compelling story that could be made for providing the amount of energy that is going to be required over the coming years to lift all of these people out of poverty to something closer to the lifestyle that you and I enjoy without access to meaningful amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas.
We will stand proudly behind that message for years to come and proudly do what we do each and every day. In line with that, we started a foundation last year called the Bettering Human Lives Foundation. We have a goal by 2030 to transition a million homes and a thousand schools in Sub-Saharan Africa from cooking over fires fueled by wood, dung, crop waste, whatever they might find, to clean burning LPG. We're working hard on that mission. That's on our website as well if you would like to look that up and find out how to support that, but it's a mission we're proud to be behind and looking forward to what the future holds there. With that, I'll wrap it up, and I think we head to another room for questions. Thanks very much.