All right. Hello everyone, thank you all for joining us during the Lytham Partners Spring 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner at Lytham Partners. Today we welcome Lee Beckelman, Chief Financial Officer at Smart Sand, who will be walking us through company slide presentation. As a reminder, Smart Sand trades under the ticker symbol SND on the Nasdaq. Lee, thanks so much for joining us. The floor is all yours.
Thanks, Robert, and thanks for giving us the opportunity to present today. I'm Lee Beckelman, CFO of Smart Sand. I've been with the company since 2014, and today I'd like to walk you through about the strengths and the positive attributes of Smart Sand. We are a Northern White producer. We're a pure-play Northern White producer, one of the largest Northern White producers in North America. 90% of our business today is supplying sand for frac sand, but we also have a growing industrial products business and a last-mile service business. The strengths of our company really start with our high-quality reserve base. We have over 450 million tons of reserves at three locations, in Oakdale, Wisconsin, Blair, Wisconsin, and Ottawa. In addition, of those reserves, 70% of those reserves are fine mesh sand.
That is important today because 90% of the frac sand demand is for fine mesh products. Our reserves match up well to the market. We have a large reserve base that are going to be able to allow us to compete effectively and provide this market for a long period of time. In addition, we have 10 million tons of high-quality processing capacity that are all connected to Class I railroads. We're directly connected to four Class I railroads and have the ability to get to the others as well very efficiently. Our Oakdale facility is 5.5 million tons of capacity. Our Ottawa, Illinois, facility is 1.6 million tons, and our Blair facility is 2.9 million tons of capacity. We sold about 5.5 million tons of sand last year, so we have a lot of available capacity.
We're running very efficiently at that level today, but we have the ability to grow with the market without having to spend a lot of incremental growth capital to do it, which we think is a real strength. In addition, we have a very sustainable long-term supply and logistics advantage. Our business is much logistics of getting the sand to our customers as making it, and we've invested heavily to be able to deliver sand in large unit train shipments of 100-150 cars and deliver that, loading that up at our mine sites at very efficient terminals at our mine sites and delivering those sands directly into the basins at terminals we either control or through third-party terminals.
We have four terminals today, with a terminal in Van Hook, North Dakota, servicing the Bakken market, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, servicing the Marcellus, two terminals in Minerva and Dennison, Ohio, that helps us service the Marcellus and the Utica basins. We also have terminals in third parties that allow us to get to all other basins in North America. Very focused on being a low operating cost structure, in that we are in a bulk commodity business, and we know to compete effectively through cycles, we have to be very efficient at the mine site, and we build our operations on being able to mine, process, and ship very efficiently at our locations, and then ship that sand very cost effectively to our customers at the mine site.
We are currently well positioned to take advantage of the, what we see as substantial growth opportunity in natural gas demand, and I'll touch on later in the presentation. This is really taking advantage of that growth potential in the basins we serve, and we're well positioned to do that. We also have moved into supporting our business and growing our industrial products business. This represents probably less than 5% of our sales today, but we grew it more than 50% last year, and we expect to continue to have double-digit growth in this area over the next several years.
This is a business that we primarily do out of our Ottawa facility because it's closely lined to Chicago metropolitan industrial markets and see a good opportunity to grow that business, hopefully to get up to maybe 10% of our total volumes over time and be a little bit of a more sustainable business, kind of grows with GDP. It has less of the volatility that we have in our oil and gas sector. Oil and gas will still be the primary business for us, but it's nice to have this as an additional buffer and support for the business. We've always had a very prudent capital structure. We have very low leverage today. Today, we have roughly $15 million of debt, with cash balances close to exceeding that. On a net debt basis, we're almost at zero. We'll continue to have low leverage.
It's one of the things that's helped us sustain ourselves through the multiple cycles we've had in the industry over the last several years and something we will use leverage from time to time to help support the business, but we're always going to maintain very prudent capital structures. That really lines up with our management philosophy. We have a management team that's aligned with investors. Our CEO and Founder, Charles Young, owns 18% of the business. Other insiders, including management and members of the board, collectively own another 18% as well. We have approximately 36% ownership in our company through insiders today, which lines us very well with looking for long-term value to support the growth of business and support our investors. We are committed to returning capital.
While we want to continue to grow the business, as I highlighted, we do have capacity available to grow. We also want to give value back to our shareholders, and we have demonstrated that commitment over the last three years. Since 2023, we've returned over $27 million to our shareholders in a combination of share buybacks and dividends. Going to the company overview, again, we're a full-service provider of frac sand and sand to industrial markets. It starts at our mine, where we mine the sand at our locations. We load the sand into rail cars at the location to be shipped to terminals in the basins, and ultimately, we can also provide the wellsite storage to process and deliver that sand from the trucks to the wellsite into the hopper for the frac sand, for the frac crews. Our process is very focused on being a very cost-effective process.
Again, at our mine location, for example, our Oakdale location, we have over 250 million tons of reserves on 1,300 acres. It starts by mining in the pits to mine the sand. The sand is then taken by truck all on site, and/or piped to our wet plants, where we process the sand to clean out the impurities and deliver the feed into the dryers, which dries the sand and sorts it into products. We load the sand at the mine sites to be delivered to the terminals. We also have very low royalty rates because we're mining, processing, and loading the sand all at one location. That leads us to have minimal trucking and very low operating cost in support of our business. In terms of the market, we see a lot of good growth potential in the market.
I know oil prices have spiked up recently with the conflict in Iran, that's good for our oil basins. Over 60%-70% of our sand today goes into basins that are supporting natural gas growth, we believe the long-term fundamentals for natural gas growth are very strong in the U.S. and in Canada for the foreseeable future. That's really being driven by two things. First is the growth in LNG capacity, second is power generation to support the growing need for AI data centers. You can see at the top of this chart, LNG capacity today is roughly 18 billion cubic feet a day in the U.S. That's expected under announced projects to double by 2030. That's looking to grow to maybe 30-40 Bcf a day of capacity support LNG export out of the U.S. alone.
Canada, while at a smaller scale, is looking to double its capacity as well. That's going to lead to significant growth over the next five years in terms of incremental demand U.S. producers will be needing to produce to support that growth. In addition, AI power generation to support AI data centers is growing rapidly as well. Annual electricity demand is expected to surge over the next five years, growing roughly 4% a year. From 2000- 2020, power generation in the U.S. was relatively flat, but with the AI data demand, power generation's coming on very rapidly and needs to come on to support that. A lot of that power generation is going to be fed by natural gas. You can see in the bottom right that growth potential of another 5-7 Bcf a day of incremental capacity.
Altogether, if this all comes out as planned over the next five years, you could see the demand for U.S. production growing from roughly 110 Bcf a day today that we produced and needing to get to 130 to maybe 140 Bcf a day, which means there's going to be a lot more natural gas wells that need to come online and get completed to support that growth potential. Additionally, there's a couple other factors really driving demand for frac sand in the U.S., and that's really lateral lengths. Producers are trying to get more and more efficient. They're using less frac crews and less rigs, but they're trying to drill wells that produce more production per well. One of the ways they're doing that is really increasing the lateral lengths of their wells.
These are basically lateral lengths by basin going back to the first quarter of 2022 through the fourth quarter of this year. You can see those lateral lengths continue to grow very rapidly over that time frame. These curves don't expect to really drop off yet. One of the biggest ones you can see on here is this yellow line, which is the eastern U.S. That's the Marcellus and the Utica. That's the largest basins that we serve today, and it represents, depending on the month, maybe 50% or more of our demand. You can see that their lateral lengths continue to grow rapidly, which implies there'll be more sand for every well that's drilled.
Additionally, not only are they increasing the lateral lengths, they're also increasing what I call the intensity of the fracs, where they're using more sand per lateral foot to try to get more production out of each foot of the well. That is shown on these charts, where you can see pretty rapid growth of the amount of proppant. The sand is the proppant in the fracking process, and that continues to grow very rapidly, and producers continue to use not only more sand because they're having longer laterals, but also more sand per every foot of that lateral that's being completed. This is leading to what we're seeing is a pretty good expected year for growth in the United States. This is just U.S. We're expecting similar kind of growth patterns in Canada as well.
Right now, this is a projection of a Spears & Associates is showing an expected growth of U.S. this year to be grown by at least 15% in terms of the frac sand demand we'll be seeing in the U.S. markets. We expect Canada to have similar kind of growth profile. We kind of highlighted this earlier, we have three locations, over 450 million tons of reserves, 2 million tons of capacity. Those locations are all connected to different railroads. That's important, one of the reasons we have multiple locations, because not all railroads serve all basins equally. Being able to connect to all of the major Class I railroads allows us to efficiently, effectively service all operating basins in North America.
Our three primary basins are the Appalachian basins of the Northeast United States, the Marcellus and the Utica, the Bakken in North Dakota, and the Montney and Duvernay Shales in Canada. We also have the ability to ship anywhere in the U.S., including all the markets in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, through our connections. Through our processes I highlighted earlier, by mining, processing, and building the large transload facilities at our locations, we're able to effectively and efficiently serve our customers at a very low cost operation. This is just a good example, this is just an aerial picture of our Oakdale facility. It's our largest facility. It was our original facility. We started this facility at 1.1 million tons, it's grown to 5.5 million tons today.
This is a facility that has five dryers, two wet plants, one outside, one inside, over 11 miles of rail track, and they have a lot of opportunity to continue to grow this facility. This is our Ottawa facility in Illinois. It's a smaller facility, 1.6 million tons, has about 100 million tons of reserves. It has a fully enclosed wet plant, so it's able to operate year-round. Our Oakdale facility is connected to the Canadian Pacific and the Union Pacific. The Ottawa is connected directly to the Burlington Northern. Our final facility that we bought in 2022, idle from Hi-Crush, is our Blair facility. This was important for allowing us to really grow our Canadian market. Prior to owning this facility, we sold very little sand in Canada.
This year, our current run rate is 10%-15% of our volumes are going into the Canadian market. This is a facility that, again, is connected to the Canadian National Railway, and that is a railroad we needed to have access to be able to support the Montney and Duvernay shales. We're very focused, again, we're as much a logistics company as we are a mining and production company. Don't have time to go fully through this, but the main focuses here is that we were always focused from the start that the frac sand business is a bulk commodity business that is really driven by being able to ship in large unit train shipments of 100-150 cars. That's 11,000-15,000 tons to get loaded at our plant site and get directly delivered to the basin.
It allows us to really be able to reduce our amount of rail time, be able to use rail carriers' power efficiently just so we can negotiate much lower rail rates with them, and also allows us to turn our rail cars to be able to lower that overall unit cost of our logistics. More importantly, it allows us to really deliver very large quantities of sand to our customers very sustainably and efficiency. Today, in those longer lateral lengths, some producers are using anywhere from approaching 15- 20 to, in some cases, 25,000 tons of sand per well. Being able to deliver that very efficiently, effectively, and sustainably is important to support our customer base. These are just three pictures. This is our Van Hook terminal. This is our Waynesburg terminal in Pennsylvania.
We acquired two Ohio terminals that really opened up the Utica Shale for us. Prior to owning these terminals in 2023, we had very low volumes in Utica Shale. Utica Shale today, this year, may represent 10%-20% of our volumes. We also have an industrial products business. I talked about this earlier. It grew 60% year-over-year in 2025. We expect to continue to have double-digit growth. This is allowing us to serve key industrial markets, and we primarily do this through our Ottawa facility. While it will never be a large part of our business, we're looking to see this business grow from maybe 5% of our volumes today to 10% or a little more than that, and provide a stable base to support our larger oil and gas business.
Finally, I've already touched a bit on these things through the conversation, our model is really built on having a large, high-quality reserve base. It's 70%+ fine mesh sand, which matches the market. Low-cost operations, very efficient and sustainable bulk unit train shipments of our sand, a last-mile offering that we think we have an opportunity to provide additional service to our customers while also leveraging our existing asset base and diversifying into an industrial products business. We'll continue to have a very prudent capital structure. We will use leverage from time to time, we're going to keep it at low levels. That allows us to be able to manage through the cycles of the oil and gas business, allows us to take advantage during the downturns to strategically grow our business with assets. We bought both Ottawa and Blair.
They were both idle. We were able to buy that capacity and almost double our capacity for a very low cost because we had a very prudent capital structure that allowed us to be able to take advantage of that when those opportunities presented themselves. We are a management team that's very committed to long-term shareholder value. High insider ownership. A family, three brothers are in the business that are executive team. We're very committed long term to supporting this business. We have an asset base that can grow and support this business for a long period of time. While we want to grow the business, we're going to manage our capital very effectively and continue to be able to give the opportunity opportunistically to give value back to our shareholders in terms of stock buybacks and dividends. Since 2023, we've bought back 6.6 million shares.
We currently have a $20 million buyback program in place, and over the last three years, we've done several dividends. We did a $0.10 dividend in October 2024. We did two dividends in 2025, and we just recently did a $0.10 dividend in May of this year. We'll stay very focused on improving our financial and operating performance and continue to be focused on being the leading provider of Northern White sand in the North American market. Thank you.
All right, Lee. Thank you very much for the presentation here today. Thank you, everybody, for watching. If there are any questions or perhaps you'd like to schedule a meeting with management here, shoot me an email, Blum, B-L-U-M, @lythampartners.com. To learn more about Lytham, visit our website or be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to get alerted on future presentations such as the one here with Lee and Smart Sand. Thank you again, Lee, for the time. Thank you to everybody for watching. Hope you have a great conference.
Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity.