All right, folks. Jamie, we ready to go? Okay, for our viewers online, I want to welcome you once again to the 2024 MicroCap Rodeo. Coming to you live from Sparks Steak House, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Thank you for joining us, and for those of you that are here now, we want to welcome you, again. I'm John Heffern, and one of the moderators today for the MicroCap Rodeo and our ninth session. We're just flying by here today. Representing TETRA Technologies, Elijio Serrano, their CFO, and here to give the presentation is the CEO of TETRA Technologies, Mr. Brady Murphy, everybody. Brady, come on up.
Thanks, John.
You're welcome.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon, and thanks to the MicroCap Rodeo conference organizers. This has been a really good day for us, good lineup of investors and interested investors, and we appreciate the opportunity to participate. Our forward-looking statements, get that out of the way. Just a quick recap of TETRA, who we are. Company was founded in 1981, so over 40 years old. The original origins of the company, which is still really very much a strong foundation of the company's business today, started in the completion fluids business, and we've evolved a very strong complementary industrial chemicals business within that segment. In more recent years, with the advent of unconventional oil and gas, we have expanded our leadership into water management, frac flowback, and sand management.
So those are the businesses that we are in. However, a few years ago, we recognized TETRA had some really core competencies, capabilities, and assets that we wanted to evolve to participate in the high-growth, low-carbon energy markets. And so that's certainly a key part of our strategy going forward, and we will highlight some of that today. Just a quick, you know, kind of global footprint view. We're not in all the markets, oil and gas markets around the world, but we are in the ones where we wanna be. We're in the key deepwater markets, Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, North Sea, and somewhat smaller in West Africa.
And we're also in the key unconventional markets, obviously, the US, Argentina, with the Vaca Muerta, and in a growing Middle East unconventional. It looks more and more compelling going forward. Just recapping a little bit of the company's financials. We're split two segments. We report externally our completion fluid segment and our water and flowback segment, almost equally last year in terms of revenue split. I mentioned the industrial component of our completion fluids is about 40% of that external segment. And something we're very proud of is the chart on the right-hand side, which shows really a continuous improvement that we've made in EBITDA margins in the business, even during one of the worst downturns that this industry has ever seen.
When I say industry, oil and gas industry, of twenty twenty and twenty twenty-one, due to COVID. Maintaining stability in our profitability, stayed cash flow positive, and then coming out of COVID now, accelerating those, that margin profile. I won't highlight all of the recent highlights, but there are a couple of, key ones I'd like to mention. First is the three-well TETRA CS Neptune Gulf of Mexico project. These are significant projects for the company. They move the needle for the company, even one well, in terms of revenue and, EBITDA margins. And this is our first three-well project that we've ever been awarded at one time. We've delivered our first full electrolyte for the long-duration energy storage to, Eos.
We're very, very optimistic about what that looks like for us in terms of our next year's financials. And we're continuing to advance our water desalination for beneficial reuse as part of our you know, future strategy for our water management business in North America. And we'll touch on more highlights for that in a little while. So the primary segments that we serve, not necessarily our reporting segments, but energy services, primarily oil and gas operators in the markets that we showed. Industrial chemicals, calcium chloride, zinc bromide, electrolytes, bromine resources, which we'll talk some more about as well. And then critical minerals. We are really blessed with fantastic acreage that we own in Southwest Arkansas, in the Smackover Formation, that is rich in critical minerals, bromine being one, lithium, another.
Actually, there's other critical minerals within the Smackover, and yeah, we tend to exploit over the future years. And we're uniquely positioned with the oil and gas operators, doing a lot of their water management today, but being able to extract critical minerals out of their produced water. And that's an evolving opportunity for us going forward. Just a little bit closer view on our completion fluids and products segment business. Very, very pleased with our position here. David Bat, those of you who follow the industry know he's a well-known analyst of oilfield service companies stating that TETRA stands out as the performance leader in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, Gulf of Mexico deepwater is not only one of the largest deepwater markets in the world, but it is the most technically challenging deepwater market in the world, which really puts a good light on what we've accomplished and where we're at in the marketplace. If you look at our revenue and EBITDA over the last several years, obviously, we saw a downturn due to COVID through 2021, but if you look how we've rebounded, that's about a 46% growth since the low point in 2021. We'll show you some market data in the coming couple of slides that indicates the deepwater market's grown about 25%. So we've been growing at almost twice the rate of the deepwater activity since 2021. The reasons for that, a couple of really key innovation leadership positions that we have.
We mentioned CS Neptune. It was the winner of the prestigious 2020 Hart Energy Meritorious Award for Engineering Innovation. What we're introducing today, for the first time, and there'll be more material coming out on this, is TETRA X. It's a game-changing corrosion inhibitor with a 35 times improvement in the corrosive downhole environment, with temperatures over 300 degrees. So we will be actually marketing TETRA X with our completion fluids-based business for a premium, and we're targeting the 175 wells that are forecasted by Rystad to be drilled in 2025, that are over those, that 284, you know, benchmark temperature. So very exciting new product launch that we are actually announcing today.
If we look at the deepwater projections through 2028, we talked about the period from 2021 to 2024, but even going forward, it's projected to grow both Evercore's predictions on CapEx spending offshore on the left, and Rystad, in terms of rig count on the right, both of them showing about a 7% CAGR through 2028, and we're well positioned to take advantage of that growing market. Moving on to the water and flowback. On this segment, our strategy here has been to deliver the best-in-class service and technology in this segment, to a segment where a lot of technology does not exist, quite frankly, and we've tried to carve out that aspect of the market and been quite successful with it.
If you look at our market penetration going back to 2018, where we're almost at the same revenues in 2023 to compare to 2018, that's a 57% improvement in revenue per rig, you know, since that period of time, so it shows the market penetration that we've been successful with, and then obviously staying positive EBITDA and cash flow during COVID, and then where we are today. We'll talk a little about what we're doing going forward, so this is what we're driving in the segment, and it's really automating everything that we do. This is a labor-intensive business, traditionally. It's also a dangerous business. It's a HSE red zone for our customers because we're around pressure, and we wanna eliminate as many people as we possibly can in that red zone.
So we're BlueLinx, we're about 70% deployed in terms of automating an entire job remotely. Automated SandStorm, we're about 20% fleet implementation. We'll be doing another 20% each year as we move forward. And then the Automated Drill out, which is a brand-new technology, new market for us, we've not participated in. We've got two units deployed and getting very good customer traction with that going forward. So very excited about what we're able to accomplish over the next few years, being more efficient, increasing our EBITDA margins and returns for this segment. But the real exciting part for us in the water business is desalinating water for beneficial reuse. The amount of produced water is staggering, that comes along with the oil production in North America.
It shows the numbers here, just in the Permian Basin, 2024, 8.3 billion barrels of water. A good portion of that today is being disposed. There's a problem right now developing with that water that's being disposed, as many of you may know, with the seismicity events that are occurring, and we'll talk a bit about. This shows the seismicity issue as it relates to disposal. That, you know, 8 billion barrels or 7 billion barrels that's being disposed of down the hole is creating seismic events because the pore space is basically running out of where they can put all this disposed water. You can see the chart on the right shows the number of seismic events, and the magnitude is starting to increase as well.
So this is causing the state, the Railroad Commission, to start restricting some areas of disposal. Rystad came out with a report that estimated somewhere between a million and four million barrels a day is currently being restricted from being disposed just because of seismicity, and we expect that to increase. So TETRA's solution is to... Of course, we do a lot of recycling for frack today, so we've been doing the front end of this solution for quite some time. But we obviously have not been treating it for beneficial reuse yet. Although we have introduced the technology, we have a great partnership with a customer that has. We've demonstrated the technology through a very successful pilot. But this is the end-to-end solution that we're trying to deploy, transforming a waste into a resource.
Beneficial reuse applications being agriculture, irrigation, and industrial applications. That'll be a step change for the industry, quite frankly, and give a solution to this disposal problem that is only gonna get worse. Just mentioning the pilot that we covered, we were able to recover 92% of the desalinated water. In that water was only 40 parts per million TDS, up between 40 and 200, I should say, ranging. But just compare that to the municipal drinking water of about 300 parts per million TDS. So this is a very high, highly purified water. The commercial plant that we have been negotiating with our customer, the commercial terms have been agreed. We're waiting permitting from the Railroad Commission to move forward with.
They've pushed us to do a similar type of pilot in the Permian Basin, 'cause that seems to be their priority, and we understand that due to the seismicity. So last phase of our strategy is expanding into emerging markets. Bromine is used in our completion fluids, our high-value, deepwater completion fluids, but we've also been able to purify it and file a patent for the manufacturing process to make a highly purified electrolyte, zinc bromide, long-duration energy storage technology. Our partnership with Eos, we have a contract with them, five-year contract, to supply 75% of their electrolyte needs and all of their zinc bromide needs. And we'll show a chart here in a little while, but that is a significantly growth opportunity for not just for TETRA, but the industry as a whole.
Water management, we talked about what we're doing today for the services, but really, the end game for us is get to our produced water beneficial reuse technology commercialized. And then underdeveloped brine assets, we mentioned the Smackover resources that we have, rich in lithium. That's another project that we are working with our partners, Saltwerx, owned by ExxonMobil, to move that project forward. The areas that we are leveraging, the capabilities that we have, we mentioned the Smackover resources we have. We have the chemistry, we have the manufacturing capabilities. We're not developing a new set of core competencies within TETRA. We're leveraging the core capabilities and assets that we have to participate in these really high-growth, highly exciting markets. I...
When I show this chart, I say I've seen this a thousand times. My business manager showed me the proverbial hockey stick, but the reality is, this is not a forecast. This is an actual, published by the EIA, of utility scale, long-duration energy storage growth, since 2020, a 70% CAGR, and quite frankly, we don't see this number slowing down from what we can see. We talked about our partnership with Eos. I've already mentioned our agreement with them, so we'll pass this one, but this shows the resource base that we have, the 40,000 acres that we have in Arkansas. You have to think of it in terms of two segments of acreage. The acreage, Saltwerx here is the subsidiary owned by ExxonMobil.
We did a partnership with them for sixty-one hundred acres for the Evergreen Unit, which is approved by the Arkansas Oil and Gas, to move forward with our bromine. Then, once the royalty is approved for lithium, we will have the rights to do both bromine and lithium through that partnership. The other thirty-five thousand acres, we did a deal with Standard Lithium, who've now partnered with Equinor, to develop that thirty-five thousand acres. No capital required from our side, but we do get a 2.5% royalty off of their lithium sales. The bromine tower, the project, we released that DFS a month or so ago. This is a meaningful project for us that allows us to vertically integrate.
Will, you know, significantly improve our margins on our current business for a lower cost, gives us some control in our, future supply chain, and minimizes dependence on open market purchases. But just as important as this improved profitability is the access to more volume, 'cause we're in a growing offshore market for oil and gas. We got Eos expanding exponentially, and we need more bromine to be able to satisfy both of those markets. Thus, the bromine project that we are moving forward with, at least in terms of phases. The DFS project, I won't go through each of these financials.
I'll just highlight, if we took our current business today, our bromine-based completion fluids business, plus Eos, and we vertically integrated and replaced our long-term supply, the financial benefit of that, replacing that in our current business is a $710 million NPV10, and a 62% IRR. It does require $270 million of CapEx, a two-year construction period, and we'll touch on that in just a minute. So we understand that the $270 million is a good chunk of capital. We do have a plan to cover that with our forecasted cash flows for the next coming years, plus our available credit. However, we wanna take this in a very measured approach. We're gonna take this in stages.
We're currently evaluating a phase one, which is a subset of DFS that we published, which will be thirty million pounds, but significantly less upfront CapEx than the two hundred and seventy. And then, as we move into future years, our cash flow maintains what we're forecasting, we will move on to phase two and phase three. Now, this does require us to have a bridging agreement for a bromine supply, and we are in negotiations to have that in place. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to a few slides for Elijio. Thank you.
Thank you, Brady. Q2 , we reported revenues, second best in the history of the company, in the recent history, and EBITDA of $30 million. And that is despite what we've been seeing over the past several quarters, a slowdown in the U.S. onshore activity. We report our Q3 results on October 30, and encourage you guys to listen in to our Q3 results. From a balance sheet perspective, we've been preparing the balance sheet so that we can initiate the investments that Brady talked about in Arkansas. You can see on the top left that we dropped total debt from $189 million to $133 million, then $120 million during the COVID years. So when many of our peers were struggling and going through financial restructurings, we're generating a significant amount of cash and paying down debt.
We're leveraging the balance sheet to fund the initiative. Our leverage ratio is currently at 1.6 times, with net debt of $142 million. Then on the top right, you can see how liquidity has expanded from $70-$80 million during the COVID period to where we're at about $180 million liquidity, which includes a $75 million delayed draw feature that we negotiated when we put a term loan and refinanced that. We don't have any debt that matures until 2030, and we've got that at an attractive rate.
From all the initiatives we're working on, we're executing on a strategy that takes our existing products and services, our chemistry know-how, and expands it into areas that have a much higher growth rate and a much higher margin, moving from the low margin onshore water flowback business and a smaller market on the offshore side that we still do quite well.
We believe a lot of the product offerings that we have around either desalinating and treating water, using offshore fluids for battery storage, or using our chemistry know-how to extract and sell lithium, will position us to move into markets that the valuations from those earnings in the future will be meaningfully better than what we're seeing today, and we think that that will create significant shareholder value, going forward. Appreciate your time. Appreciate you listening. We'll open up for questions for those in the room here.
Future business. Is market price tied to the number of liquid water treatment plants that you're going to be treating?
Yeah, so the good thing about our desalination, produced water is going to continue to increase just by nature of the wells, the way they evolve over time, right? So the wells that are producing today are going to be producing more water, a higher percentage of water over the coming years. So we don't see any scenario where the amount of produced water is going to be reduced. We only see it increasing with time. Yes, sir.
I have a couple of questions for on desalination. Any sense of, during the committee, then following that, when you get the first commercial unit?
Yeah. So we are finalizing with our primary customer. We've been working with the Permian Basin pilot project that we have been discussing. We're very optimistic because of what the Railroad Commission has indicated previously, the delaying South Texas, that this project will get, hopefully, fast-tracked for permitting purposes. And then once that happens, that project will move forward, and then hopefully shortly thereafter, the South Texas plant will be approved. That's our expectation.
South Texas. Next question. Background of the bromine project-
Yeah.
Phase one, two, and three, any guidance in terms of timing and then CapEx amounts that are linked?
Yeah, we're. I think we've stated publicly, we're funding that project currently as our cash flow allows us to, after we, you know, our base business CapEx. So, as we look at next year, we'll probably be putting some numbers out there in terms of what we expect to do. We've not published a fully baked commercials on the first stage approach. We've published the DFS financials. We've not done the phase one. That will be something we will be doing in the coming months.
Uh,
No, not by twenty-ninth. No. Yeah, right. Not by the earnings. Right. That's correct. Yes?
Desalination, traditional sense of the word usually means taking seawater-
Yes.
It's salt, but you left it salty brine.
Yes.
That one looks pretty oily to me. That other stuff looks pretty dark. That looks like some the residual oil from the drilling.
You mean on the slide?
Yeah, on the slide.
That showed the produced water versus our desalinated water. So that was before we treated it, the comparison. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was after our treatment.
I see that, yeah, but the dark brown, I mean, yeah, it's one thing, seawater, that doesn't look like-
Yeah, this is not seawater, though. This is oil and gas water. Yeah, yeah. But so look, you make a good point, though. Seawater has been desalinated for many years, but there's two really important differences between seawater and produced water. One is the TDS. The total dissolved solids is significantly higher in the Permian basins, for instance, 150 parts per million, versus seawater, 30 parts per million. So that's one. The other one is the total organic compounds and chemicals that come back in produced water from fracking operations, other production chemicals, they have to be taken out as well. And obviously, seawater doesn't have to deal with that. So that's why we had to bring some pretreatment into the process.
Thanks.
Yeah, so the minerals, that 8% of volume that is very, very highly concentrated in minerals, the operators will take that and dilute it and dispose of that, but they've reduced their volume that they have to dispose 90%.
Oh, okay.
Yeah. Yes, sir. Yes, it is. Yeah. Is that the question you were asking? Is our customer domiciled in Texas? We've not announced that publicly yet. We will when we announce the plan. Yep. Yes. And New Mexico, but that chart was the Permian Basin in Texas. In the produced water? All the produced waters are very different. I just wanted to make that point. I mean, between the Marcellus, South Texas, Permian, even Delaware, Powder River, they're all very different. There are some toxic chemicals in some of those waters that we've found. But obviously, we have to eliminate those before we'll get a permit and demonstrate that we can safely discharge it. Yeah, that's one of the applications. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, sir.
About twenty years, the stock price is down. So what is the sort of reason for that, and why would it be different going forward in the next five years?
Yeah, I mean, the company has a history going back. It was in and out of a lot of other businesses, you know, quite frankly, before I arrived at the company, and some of those businesses have sold off. Oilfield services in general has not fared well from a valuation standpoint. We fully recognize that, but we have a very good business that generates $100 million of EBITDA, and we have a path to significantly improve that in the new energy segments. And we understand we have to, you know, demonstrate what those numbers are, but we're highly confident we will execute on those. And I think that will change not only the share price, but the multiple that TETRA gets as being viewed today as an oilfield service, small cap oilfield service company.
After that, the future earnings are less, less dependent on the cycles of the oil and gas sector, and more in a broader growth market that will eliminate that volatility.
What percentage is normal growth oriented?
Over the last several years, the oil and gas industry have been single-digit growth. We think that the new initiatives, battery storage, lithium, plus desalination, is gonna be 20% type growth year- over- year.
Revenues?
Yes, significant.
Yes, sir.
Looking at your last earnings report in terms of, it looks like you had $170 million or so in revenue, and you know, it looks like EBITDA was down significantly compared to the prior year. Was there anything special in 2024, and this particular quarter affected the margin? I'm not trying to shoot, but I'm asking trajectory going forward.
Yeah.
More like 2023 than 2020.
Yeah, obviously, we can't give any forward-looking guidance at this point for Q3 or the rest of the year. I will say we're very optimistic about next year for sure, with EOS coming online and some of the other projects. But one thing that is about our business, as we get more and more deepwater activity, it does become lumpier. A big completion job that we have for a deepwater completion, it changes our revenue profile in any given quarter. So you know, you almost have to look at our business as a year-on-year business just because of those projects and how they hit.
So you're saying that if I look at that $170 million in Q3 better margin business than the last year?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
The timing of a lot of deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico was very favorable in Q2 of 2023.
Yeah.
Less in Q2 of 2024.
Yeah. Yeah.
But do you give, like, a longer-term target of, you know, say, you know, we think this business can support, you know, long-term EBITDA margin of X, pre-tax margin of X? Give that kind of target.
You want to answer that?
Yeah. If we develop all the engineering studies to support battery growth, lithium and desalination, if we expect that we'll have an Investor Day in the coming quarters, then lays out that trajectory.
Investor Day?
Right, and right now, we're not comfortable publishing that until we have all our ducks in a row with engineering studies and economic analysis to support any comments we make.
Did nothing get pushed back at all by the hurricane?
We'll talk about that in our Q3.