Athabasca Minerals Inc

XTSX:AMI

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Cheryl Grue, Director of Corporate Affairs]

Good morning, everyone, or afternoon, depending on where you are joining us from. I'm Cheryl Grue, Director of Corporate Affairs for Athabasca Minerals. Thank you for joining us today for our 2021 Q3 Investor Update. Today, we will be doing a brief review of the Q3 results, providing an update on our divisional performance and highlights and then a look ahead. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that this presentation contains forward-looking information regarding AMI's business. The information presented is subject to risks, market changes and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Thank you. I will now pass the presentation over to Robert Beekhuizen, CEO of Athabasca Minerals to begin the presentation.

[Robert J. Beekhuizen, CEO & Director]

Thank you, Cheryl. Can everybody hear me? Okay. We're on Slide 4, and we have a pretty fulsome slide deck today. So just for a time management standpoint, I think we're going to be all of 40 minutes. So I just want to kind of make that declaration from the get-go. We're going to go through our Q3 highlights as a typical quarterly call, but we also have an update to give on our divisional performance and our next steps in our 2022 outlook, followed by Q&A, where I'm also supported here today by our CFO, Mark Smith; and our COO, Dana Archibald, who will be able to also contribute to the discussion and the Q&A. Cheryl, can you turn to the next slide, please, Slide 5. Just to start off, and as a recap, the AMI is actually comprised of 4 divisions, and they're 4 distinct companies. We have our base AMI Aggregates division. That's where our corporate pits reside and our Coffey Lake government contract, 15-year contract, that's AMI Aggregates in the top left corner. We have AMI Silica, which is our sand division. That's where we hold our Prosvita project, our Montney asset and our up and coming and our declared acquisition yesterday on our U.S. operations in Wisconsin. Now we have AMI RockChain, which is our midstream model or technology-enabled company that moves aggregates from over 8,000 pits across the country and 2,000 trucking companies and with automated supply chain solutions. And we have TerraShift Engineering, which is our mining engineering resource and environmental engineering services company that serves -- effectively serves AMI's portfolio, but also has a slate of external customers and is growing. Just interesting to note here that AMI has 4 cash flowing divisions. The most noteworthy emergence here is in our sand sector where we have emerged from being a project venture division to an operational division here in 2021. Can we move to the next slide, please? Okay. Now I'll just kind of go over the Q3 highlights. And these have -- these metrics have been adjusted for the press releases this week, including the one yesterday on the U.S. acquisition. So we've jumped now from 69 million shares to 76 million, including the private -- 76 million shares, including the private placement. Our share price yesterday at close was $0.245. We've got a book value of $0.21 per share, a market cap in the order of $18 million. Insider ownership has increased with the private placement announcement to 26%, you'll see in the pie chart down below. Our previous investor calls, if you look back, we were around 18%, but now we're up to about 26% and we've got a pretty distributed shareholder base of over 1,000 shareholders, mainly retail, notwithstanding the insiders that I mentioned. From the start of the year until yesterday, we've seen a 75% increase in our share price. We've seen growth in our market capitalization and growth in our inside ownership. Can we go to the next slide, please, Cheryl? Just in terms of a recap of our press release on Monday and our financial results, 2021 has been a turnaround year for AMI, and we're generating good revenue now, certainly in comparison with the last 5 years. So you'll see in the actual Q3 was $4.3 million contribution on the revenue side. Now $400,000 in profit was a comprehensive loss of $0.4 million. Year-to-date numbers are more equally noteworthy. So we're at $8.8 million as of end of -- when I say year-to-date, I mean end of September. Certainly, we're in December, and those numbers have improved since then. But on reportable numbers, we are $8.8 million year-to-date as of end of Q3, cumulative with over $1 million profit. We're in a good cash position. We have $2 million in cash, and I'll touch on that at the end. It's certainly something that we want to maintain financial responsibility as we look at doing more interesting investments by the company in the growth of our future, but our cash balance is good. We have $6.3 million in liabilities and the shareholder equity of $14.2 million. And we've got $1 million, and we've got a total liability to shareholder equity of $20.5 million with a book value per share of $0.21. Next slide, please. You can see here just the trend. And as I mentioned earlier, we have a turnaround year underway, and we're feeling very optimistic about 2022 as well. But when I took over as the CEO back in 2017, just over 4 years ago, you can see the decline that was underway, and we were basically trying to reposition the company in a declining scenario. Back in really from 2015 to 2017 and certainly before that, Athabasca Minerals was a basket of resources. It didn't have the structure that I outlined here at the start. But you'll see that, as we have acquired more resources, as we establish RockChain, as we acquired and merged TerraShift Engineering. It has taken some thought to do that, but we're kind of on a parabolic curve where we were positioning for a good future 2020 COVID hit, and certainly, that had market-wide effects. But I've often said to our team, those companies that survive the storm are going to come out potentially better, and that's how we view it, and we'd like to believe that our results are going to show that and are showing that. So we have a target at the end of the year of achieving almost $12 million. So if you look back at 2015, that's a significant recovery and certainly, since I've been CEO of the company. Next slide, please, Slide 10. We aim, as I've said on previous investor calls, we aim to deliver on our strategic plan every quarter. And this staircase, you've you may have seen before and you certainly can go back on previous investor calls. But you'll see that every quarter, if not every month, there's something significant going on with the company to kind of demonstrate that we're on plan and we're achieving milestones and noteworthy news. So at the beginning of the year, I apologize a little bit for the redundancy, you may have heard this before, obviously, in the summertime. But we increased our position in the -- with our in-basin assets, so we acquired 100% ownership of Privco1 and Privco2 for the Montney and the Duvernay deposits, and the Duvernay really supports the Prosvita project as we call it now. We won a 3-year contract with the RMA for the regional municipalities of Alberta. And the RMA also has a nationwide procurement arm called Canoe Procurement, and we're part of that, too. So RockChain is really now not only serving in a position to serve the 69 municipalities in Alberta, but also municipalities across Canada with whom we're engaged. TerraShift has picked up some significant contract awards early in the year. And also recently, again, we had a press release in their capacity as they support RockChain. In April, we launched RockChain 2.0. And by the way, we are working on 3.0 right now. We also secured at that time a $4 million transportation contract, and we had another corporate pit approved. In June, we made our [ 4A ] to the U.S., and we secured an operations agreement, which led us eventually to do the acquisition that we announced yesterday. Also in June, we filed for regulatory applications on our Prosvita project, and we're excited about that as well as a bookend to the U.S. operation. In July, I announced Paul Leveille as who's Co-Founder of TerraShift Engineering, which is also highly technology-enabled company to be AMI's CTO, Chief Technology Officer, for RockChain. There's a few metrics there. I'd encourage folks to go into the RockChain site, but it's really a remarkable business model. We have over 8,000 pits that we have networked into market solutions, over 2,000 trucking companies. We've done well over 1,000 bids. We're selling software as a solution. We're delivering aggregates or even having pit companies coming to us now asking to profile their assets on RockChain to all the other operators for a divestiture acquisition model that we're excited about. In August, we announced our Q2 results, which were already improving and they had surpassed at that point, anything that we had seen in the past 4 years. And then just recently, obviously, on Monday, our Q3 results, which I just showed are already better than the past 5 years. We announced yesterday our U.S. acquisition. And I mentioned a moment ago that RockChain recently is also extending its services with winning contracts with municipalities. Next slide, please. Now I'm just going to give a breakout in terms of divisional highlights and performance, noteworthy performance. So we'll move ahead to the summary slide. Here, we have really a synopsis of what we've done this year, and I'll break out under each of these gold headings accordingly. But AMI Silica, well, we've operationalized the division. So I mentioned a moment ago that this was our Project Venture division, really where we had significant strategic assets that we wanted to get cash flowing from the Duvernay and the Montney. But we also examined the market and saw an opportunity to get in the game this year, and we did. So we operationalize this division. It started generating cash in June through an operating contract, and that led to the second bullet under AMI Silica where we also have a declared asset acquisition with a 68% close here. We filed for a regulatory applications for approval with the Alberta government on the Prosvita Project, that project is on rail. And in trucking -- close trucking proximity to the Duvernay and a short rail into the Montney, and we have also refined our development target. We -- through our TerraShift Engineering, we've broadened our geophysics and geological expertise within the company. And had declared before that we have 150,000 hectares under mineral license. But we -- through our geophysical analysis, continue to refine that, and we're excited about that future too. RockChain, we've had exponential growth of revenues. I'll show some slides on that in a moment. We have sales for -- from customer deliveries of aggregates, unique transportation solutions. We actually have growing tech sales because our software is empowering for many large contractors that are always using aggregates and see the value of network in the market and how our software does that. So we're selling software subscriptions. And I mentioned with the 8,000-plus pits in the system, we're having operators wanting to having us profile their assets, whether it's the resource and/or equipment on our RockChain platform for awareness to all other operators, and we think that this is going to be a remarkable model, again, nationwide. We continue to advance the technology. So we're -- I mentioned earlier in our milestones that we had Rockchain 2.0 launched earlier this year. Paul Leveille, our CTO, was working with the programming team, and we're working on RockChain 3.0, as folks would expect technology continues to demand progress in order to stay ahead in this excellent business model that we have going with RockChain. TerraShift Engineering, we acquired that last year, and that's been a great enabler for our company. Not only does it serve our internal portfolio well, but it has an increasing customer base. It's a much better model than what Athabasca Minerals had historically. When I joined, we had the remnants of a geology department. I was overhead, but we feel with this model and when we restructured the company, we, at the time, did away with the internal department only to turn around and reacquire that expertise more meaningfully with TerraShift as part of the team. Again, not only does it serve our internal needs, but it generates revenue for the company, and it's actually doing quite well and I have a slide on that in a moment. And then AMI Aggregates is really the history of the company. We continue to get a good base cash flow from that. We're excited about the future of this part of our company. So for all the things that we are doing, it's nice to see across the board that each of our divisions are contributing to the corporate pot with cash flow. On the Aggregate side, again, there's a focus on partnerships. And we're excited about our corporate position and partnering, certainly with our indigenous partnerships to bring product into the market to serve local needs. Really, what I want to highlight here as well as in January of this year, we laid out a strategic plan for our Board. And I did touch on some points in our first investor call earlier in the year. I just want to emphasize here that our management team has worked very hard and well, and we have surpassed all our goals that we have set in 2021, and we're excited about a robust future here for 2022. So we stand behind what we try and do, and hopefully, our new milestones show that, and I want to create some confidence with the shareholders and investors that we deliver to our plan, and we have. Next slide, please. I want to start off with AMI Silica here, just based on the advent of this division here with revenues, as I had mentioned. So we're already over 5 months into an operations contract. And the photos that you see on the slide here, those are the actual operations that we have acquired. So we have an excellent mine with about an estimated 30-year life. We have a plant that's only 6 years old, designed by one of the top EPC contractors in the United States that has over 30 million tonnes of facility design history to it. This operation does 2 million tonnes a year, and it has done it historically. We are contract operating this mine, as I mentioned. We know this operation quite well. It comes with transload that will take a full unit train. And certainly, the customers that we are serving want unit train delivery capabilities, and we have that you can see on the right-hand side of the photo, just the capacity that we can handle. We acquired this on a declared acquisition of $1 million, and it comes with $6.4 million of mining reclamation obligations. Again, we have reclamation obligations with all our corporate resources. You deal with those at the end of life. So we intend to back that reclamation obligation with a bond. And we've done that with Coffey Lake, for example. You reclaim that down the road. So with an extent of operating life that we hope and expect with this operation will deal with the reclamation later on. It doesn't change our cash position now. So we got in with excellent set of assets. And we have a strong partner here. We've done this deal, AMI Silica LLC is incorporated in the United States. And as was mentioned here in the press release yesterday, JMAC Resources, and JMAC has participated as a 50% operating partner. It's a strong partner for us. As we navigate the U.S. market earlier in the year, it was great to have that support. AMI's leadership team is actively present on site, and we have an excellent operating team that I can't say enough good things about. We're happy that they're part of the AMI family, and we look forward to doing great things together here as we build out a promising future. We have over 1,100 acres of land. So just when you look at the assets associated in relation to the price point, it was a significant buy for us. Folks are probably wondering who would we buy from and where is it? It's in Wisconsin. I'm under -- we're under a confidentiality agreement with respect to the seller. So I need permission to declare the name and so I'm not going to do that. But this is an asset that was operated by -- historically by a major corporation that had decided during the decline of the energy market and certainly as COVID hit, that it wasn't in part of their strategic plan for the future. Certainly, aggregates and sand are a big part of AMI's future, and we thought as much as in the last number of years and certainly last year, that as the sand market got beat up that it would eventually rectify. So with a number of different companies in Wisconsin getting out of sand, we saw an opportunity to get in. And this operation is actually on CN Rail. So it has a straight run right into Canada. We know the Canadian market pretty well. Even on our Prosvita Project, we have a 5-year offtake agreement with Shell. We have customers that we were serving even under the operations contract that we will continue to serve and we can do that effectively with this operation on CN Rail, let alone the fact that the product of this operation also finds its way into the U.S. market. So it's a great quality asset. More to come on that. When we did the acquisition, we modeled it for conservatively for half capacity. I mentioned it has done 2 million tonnes in the past, but our economics show a significant return even at 50% capacity. We think that doing 1 million or more is -- in a turnup market is very achievable. And again, we're saying that not -- we're saying that based on the fact that we're already serving customers, and we're taking a real operation on the fly. So if you were to say even at 1 million tonnes with a $5 margin, that's $5 million conservatively, and that's split in our joint venture, 50-50. And then you look at what we've bought it for. It's a great rate of return. And the asset value, if you were to build this plant today, it's -- and the operations and the transload, the whole thing with the equipment, it's well over $100 million. We know that from doing our due diligence, and it's a high-caliber asset. So we're pretty excited about that, and we'll talk about the future here as we get to the end of the slide deck. Next slide, please, Cheryl, Slide 14. Could you move ahead? Yes, Thank you. We're a sand company. We're in a materials company. With our sand and the focus that we have on premium domestic sand, we see the opportunity to serve a number of markets. So we're not just an energy services-related market. We -- obviously, we're going to serve that market with the upturn, but we have clients in the construction business. And so construction materials will be a destination market. This is the sand that we have across our portfolio, serves well for concrete, serves well for energy. The high caliber sand in the U.S. is excellent sand, and we'll reveal some stats on that in the future. But we're excited about entering the glass solar market. So this is not a grassroot project that's going to take a number of years. It's an operating facility that can immediately we can start the conversations with customers in these sectors, including glass and solar and environmental remediation. We're seeing a lot of the news with respect to the effects of weather and flooding. And so again, we want to be positioned to serve the environmental remediation market as well with our products. So there's a good market diversification and the analysis of our product correlates very well with serving these markets. And it's on both sides of the border. The fact that we're in the United States now has given geographic outreach for Athabasca Minerals across North America. Next slide, please. I just want to come back to some earlier parts of our portfolio with respect to AMI Silica. So the Prosvita Project, which was formally in press releases called the Duvernay project. You'll see the star on the right-hand side. It's very much a project of interest. We are -- have filed our -- I mentioned we filed regulatory applications here in June. We're talking with the community and government officials. Dana Archibald, our COO, were recently in the legislature this past week, actually on Monday, talking to senior government officials about the interest in the Prosvita Project. 70% of the sand that finds its way into the Canadian market comes from the United States. And certainly, we're going to serve that as a bookend with our Wisconsin, but we still want to be able to bring good premium domestic resources into play, and the Prosvita Project is up to bat. We have a great opportunity based on that proximity, as I've said before. We have over 30 million tonnes of resource, and it's sitting right next to an industrial zone area where there's synergies for water and power. And we have a goal of creating a green of silica sand operation in North America. We want to do 800,000 to 1 million tonnes. And by the way, just on our -- coming back to the U.S., Wisconsin operation, at 2 million tonnes production capacity that we have down there is made up of 2 1 million-tonne per year plants, 1 million tonne per year wash plant, 2 of them and 1 million tonne per year dry plant. So theoretically, one of the thoughts that we had is, even if we ran that at 1 million tonnes, we have a spare plant potentially to pick up and move up into Canada. Not to say that we are going to do that because if we have an opportunity to fill a Wisconsin plant to nameplate capacity, which has been done before, for more than 1 year, then we'll do that. But it's good to know that we -- in essence, we have 2 plants in the Wisconsin location, each of about 1 million tonnes, and we're looking for 1 million tonnes in Prosvita. So it's a good fallback to control the capital costs, and we know the equipment. We could take it apart and move a plant up to Canada if we want it. Now water is an opportunity for us based on the industrial synergies that we're exploring with our neighbor. And I mentioned before, and it's been in our prior press releases that we have a 5-year Off-Take agreement with Shell. We've been patiently waiting for us to get the plant in production, certainly understood the challenges that everybody faced with 2020 and COVID, but that Off-Take agreement is still very much in effect. And it's positioned for once our facility is commissioned. So we're still excited about this project, if you were to add up the potential that we can serve the Canadian market. If we conservatively do 1 million tonnes out of the U.S., if not more, and then close to that here in Canada with our Prosvita Project, let alone the Montney to come after that, Canadian market will take 6 million tonnes a year. And we're hoping to contribute at least 2 million tonnes into the equation from our bookends in the U.S. with high-quality sand there, which customers like can certainly to introduce the premium domestic sand from our in-basin Prosvita Project. Montney, I mentioned you can see the large -- on the right hand, the shading for the mineral resource that we hold. And we're just refining a more discrete development zone. It will be -- we've done some field testing this year on that, and we look forward to advancing that, too. Next slide, please, Cheryl, on Slide 16. This is just an indication of the change in the sand market. So it's coming back up as you can see on the green estimates. That's how we see that as well. Our sources are -- it's not just AMI speaking to this graph. You can see down on the footnote below that sources, there are sources for supporting the histograms that you see here on volumes taken in Canada. But there has been a rise in sand usage from 2013 right to 2017 and '18. And certainly, a lot of that sand, as I mentioned, was coming out of the United States, including the U.S. operation that we acquired. With the decline in energy prices, naturally, there was a shift from 2018 right down to 2020. And so -- but that's rebounding, and there you have it here on the right-hand side in terms of estimations for the future and us entering the game, I think, with good fundamentals with our projects and our operations. Next slide, please. Now I want to just talk about RockChain. So I right from the start, I mentioned our 4 different divisions. The 2 that seem to attract a lot of attention here are RockChain and our sand division. RockChain, we're really excited about. It continues to grow. We think it has a exponential growth potential. We started the software on this just a couple of years ago. And then really last year got it cash flowing. We did $1.5 million, and we've just done this internally. We've got very good capable people. But even from last year, as we grow this out, we're now up at $5 million, we have provincial contracts and nationwide contracts. So it's got an exciting growth path. It is powered by technology. So when we talk to clients, certainly in the B2B world that have established supply chains, it still takes quite some time to source aggregates, find out where they are, go out to tender, receive those bids coming back in, it can take them literally weeks. We can turn this around for them and have better answers in 24 hours. It's all about purchasing power, and we've made it our business to know the market. We have an increasing number of transactions. If you go on to amirockchain.com, you'll see the metrics has -- they're updated. We have new emerging services. So I find it interesting, looking at big companies like Amazon and how they started in books, for example, in '97 and what they learned and recognized and they continue to see the potential of technology open up business opportunities and the rest is history for Amazon for what they are today. Not that I'm putting RockChain in that league, but we see the same fundamentals where we started off network in the market on delivery solutions, and then we're into transportation solutions. Now we're selling software as a solution. And I mentioned earlier, we have resource companies now wanting us to help them on divestiture acquisition, and there's even more to come. We see a place for RockChain Financial down the road and some other opportunities that are under development right now, as we continue to improve the technology and how it serves and for really multiple revenue streams. So there's new emerging services. It's a pervasive nationwide market. It is ripe for a positive disruption and it's happening. And the purchasing power of this platform is remarkable. And we're adding to our sales team, and we're excited about the growth, as you can see on the trajectory that we are aiming to achieve. Next slide, please. TerraShift, I mentioned we acquired that last year, and this has been a great enabler. The TerraShift team is just an amazing bunch of young dynamic energetic people and technology-focused, very efficient in their approach. They do resource environmental engineering services. We've -- we're working with clients developing strategic resources at the very early stage. We're not just selling a man hour here, we're selling expertise. And with RockChain, that's quite interesting with TerraShift and RockChain, we can help a client develop a resource. And it's not just the getting it through the permit process, we actually help them with the business case. As it relates to aggregates, some of our -- many of our clients have future aggregate resources that they want developed. And we can, through the combination of TerraShift and their know-how and RockChain's understanding of the market, not only get the applications approved, but actually help them on the business case, and we're doing that. And that is a different kind of model than just a pure engineering company selling a man hour. So we're expanding. You can see the growth. So the blue bar was quarter-over-quarter, TerraShift did about $100,000. For example, when we bought it, they did about $400,000 in revenue. We're going to triple that this year. And that's just being part of the AMI portfolio and harnessing the opportunities that are coming from the other parts of our business. So it is a real important year in the Athabasca Minerals engine. So strong margins. So we're complemented not only in selling products within Athabasca Minerals, but we're selling services. And so that, again, gives us some ballast in our revenue equation. It's bringing important value contributions to AMI. The bottom left-hand corner, for example, you'll see a picture where 1 of the municipalities in Alberta asked for TerraShift to come out and manage a municipal operation for the delivery of aggregates. And so that photos in actual photo. You'll see the photo, most of the photos here in the slide deck do come from actual Athabasca operations or divisional operations. Next slide, please. Aggregate, AMI Aggregates, again, that our base division. So we have like 13 corporate pits. We have a 15-year government contract from AMI -- sorry, with Coffey Lake and the province of Alberta. We are cash flowing. It does provide added revenue stability. Aggregates are everywhere. So they will continue to be used no matter what the technology transformations that are taking place across the market. We are providing aggregates through RockChain or through our corporate pits that serve wind farms and all sorts of other progressive projects that are coming up, but aggregates is still a common stable that's across all industries. We see a growing demand. So again, an uptick from last year. We're moving product every quarter out of Coffey Lake. We're also moving product out of our Kearl pit and our Pelican pits, and we have some forecasted demand from -- in Western Alberta from possible for our Hargwen and our Emerson pits to deliver there, too. So again, it just contributes to the pot of Athabasca Minerals and is a nice ballast in the equation in conjunction with our other 3 divisions. Next slide, please. This kind of brings us to the end of the presentation. So I mentioned we're -- we've had a good turnaround year in 2021. And our next steps in our outlook for 2022 is progressive. We see an opportunity, obviously, for continued revenue growth. Next steps for AMI Silica. We've announced the acquisition. We have a 60-day close period to transfer the licenses and the permits over. And as we do that, we want to expand our sales and our offtake agreements and revenues associated with that operation to hit the targets that we have modeled in our equation. We're going to continue to push on the Prosvita Project and get that through regulatory approval so that we can start construction. The feed is already done. We are just working with the potential synergies that we see with our industrial neighbors in the area to make this the greenest sand operation -- processing operation in North America and we're motivated to make that real. I talked about the Montney, and so we're going to continue to delineate that resource so that we have a good in-basin solution, especially as the LNG comes into operation. Once the pipeline and the projects that are being done in the Kitimat area are ready, we want to be ready as well with the uptick that's going to go to supply gas for LNG and what they need for aggregates and sand there. So that will come from both our Prosvita, by the way, which can by rail, penetrate that market, but also our Montney resource. Now RockChain, you saw the growth trajectory. We want to continue on that upward tangent, launch RockChain 3.0, which is well underway and capture those new revenue streams. But we're expanding our sales team, and we want to do this nationwide, and we're getting some very interesting inquiries out of the United States. RockChain is hitting the radar, just because there's nobody doing that down there, and we've got a proven model that's making money. And I've mentioned in prior presentations that we've already mapped out resources into RockChain for the states of Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado and next, obviously, will be Wisconsin with AMI's operations down there. We want to know our backyard well. And then we want to form relationships there that allow for RockChain U.S. to really get going in 2022. More to come on that. TerraShift Engineering, well, a great trajectory. So we want to continue to grow our resource clients and our contracts that's happening, expand to environmental services. So among other things, TerraShift is doing waste management, and we're excited about that market as well. So aside from resource and resource development, we see a great opportunities in the Environmental Services, which we are actually engaged in and also in discussions with strategic partners. So Again, more to come on that. But as I said from the start, what we talk about here, we aim to deliver on. And we hope in the coming months, you'll see news right across the board that justifies what we're seeing here today. And on the AMI Aggregates side, again, we see a good healthy uptick potential for aggregates in various regions where we have pits. And also, we've made it an important strategy in our company to foster partnerships, including -- and especially with indigenous peoples in their communities. So we're very active in that. We have a number of key relationships. Aggregates are a common staple, as I mentioned from the outset, and it's a great opportunity to partner with indigenous communities to provide products that are needed by all kinds of industries. And we make that a focus, and we are making that a focus and we look forward to telling our investors and our shareholders about accomplishments in that regard. So overall, we have a key goal to increase our revenue growth again in 2022. We've got a good year behind us now almost that would support that trajectory into 2022 for cash flowing divisions and maintaining that healthy cash balance. We know how many shares are out in the marketplace. We want to build up our cash position. We've got assets that we can borrow against. We're not going to overly dilute our stock. We really want to be careful with protecting the value of our shares for our shareholders and doing that with a position of strength and having a good cash balance and having good assets and cash flowing operations will support our financing strategies that will maintain healthy share value. And we'll get this company back to where it was years ago, I think, with a much better business model. If you look back historically on AMI, our stock reached $3 back, I think, in 2014. And it didn't have the building blocks that we have today. So we're determined to do that. We're determined to show the investment and investment community and our shareholders that we are delivering. If you look at our news, over the course of time, we continue to deliver, and we're going to continue to build value. There are certain companies in the United States that are in the materials space that are publicly traded that are worth billions. There's not too many publicly traded companies that are in the aggregates material space in Canada, and we see that as a testimony for us to be that Canadian company with U.S. operations and really grow the value for the future. So that is the presentation. I think, Cheryl, next slide. Now we'll open up for questions and answer, but I will pause. I want -- I mentioned from the outset that Dana Archibald, our COO, is here online today and in our Calgary office. He's normally based in our Edmonton office, but he is here today. Mark Smith, our CFO, is here. And if I missed anything, gentlemen, please provide our listeners today with any further comments. Other than that, we're going to open up for questions and answers. So I'll pause here at this point. Any further comments, Mark or Dana?

[Mark Smith, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes . There was 1 question that came in at just about the quality of the sand of our U.S. acquisition and sectors that we can target with that. So in terms of servicing the energy market, I mean, this is Northern White Tier-1, 99% silica content quality sand that is well suited for servicing the energy sector. But this sand is also suitable for other industries and products as well because there is a range of [ 6 ] sizes that can be used for different applications. And one area that we really see for driving growth and profitability from this asset is growing into the green energy space in terms of glass for solar panels as well as expanding into the construction and infrastructure space, both of which with the buttons build back better plan for the United States are going to be huge areas of growth in the coming years that we can provide a lot of business for. And with the recovery of energy commodity prices, the revenue growth under the base Northern White Energy [ order ] sand sales is also going to be very strong in the coming years.

[Robert J. Beekhuizen, CEO & Director]

Great. Thank you, Mark. I see we have -- I'm just looking at some questions here. You have customers -- already there's a question coming in. Do you have stockpiled materials to sell for the winter months? So a good question. Yes, we are serving -- through our operations contract, we are serving existing clients. Sorry, just a sec. I'll start my video here. I had my video off. Can folks see me now? So yes, we have existing clients through the 5 months of operating the U.S. operations on behalf of a major corporation, we've delivered to their clients. And as one would expect through the acquisition, and we want to sustain those client relationships. So -- and we are naturally discussing the need for sand by these clients in 2022 actively. So that's underway. And in terms of stockpiled material, yes, we do have stock material to carry us through the winter. So we're looking forward to serving the energy companies that need sand, particularly in Q1, and we'll be positioned for that, too.

[Dana Archibald, Chief Operating Officer]

Excellent. I had a question here too, just asking what type of frac sand we have there. And I think Mark had actually already mentioned it there, but this is considered a Northern White sand source. And there's another question here just with regards to our Hinton transload. So yes, we did at one time, had a hinton transload. I think that was sold back in 2014. But the one thing that we are doing is we are working with different transloading companies within Western Canada and the United States and building relationships with them.

[Robert J. Beekhuizen, CEO & Director]

Yes. That's a good question, actually. We're very much in tune as Dana said, to the transload market. And we look forward to dropping at multiple points, but it was the old bed transload, I think, that was sold back in when 2015 or '16, prior to my time.

[Dana Archibald, Chief Operating Officer]

Correct.

[Robert J. Beekhuizen, CEO & Director]

There is a question there on, how suitable -- Dana, how suitable is our Alberta sand to support the energy sector?

[Dana Archibald, Chief Operating Officer]

Yes. So that's a great question. And so it's interesting, we sort of got this project bookend. And really, it was the bookend for our domestic sand or premium domestic play. And our domestic sand actually measures up quite well against the Northern White. It's -- I won't get into too much of the specifics, but with regards to the crush value, we're sort of on that sort of bottom half with the Northern White, but it appears quite well. So with the Prosvita Project, we're looking on bringing on nameplate 800,000 to 1 million tonnes a year. And so with the market sitting at 6 to -- 6 million tonnes and growing into the future there, we're hoping to actually bring that online, and it will be another source of sand that will be pulling from.

[Robert J. Beekhuizen, CEO & Director]

So yes, just the [indiscernible] -- sorry, there's a [indiscernible] here. There is a comment here on that question of Alberta sand and only making up 30% of the market. Well, the majority of Alberta sand, in fact, is Tier-2 sand. And that's why it doesn't really supplant the delivery of the Tier-1 sand out of Wisconsin. So -- but when you have premium domestic sand like ourselves, and that's why we have a 5-year Off-Take agreement with Shell. They've scrutinized our product. If you look at 2 million tonnes being produced locally already serving the market. If you can introduce a premium domestic that benchmarks well with the Tier-1 sand out of Wisconsin, then it's going to find use because aggregates are really determined in pricing by the impact of logistics. And there we are with a premium domestic sand that's a truck right in to serve the Duvernay and Deep Basin as well as being on rail to serve the Montney. So it's a very well-positioned deposit with excellent infrastructure around us. And so there's going to be takers for it, and there is already with our Shell Off-Take agreement.

[Dana Archibald, Chief Operating Officer]

Right. So another question coming there, just asking about Tier-2 sand. So what Tier-2 sand is characterized it and it's kind of lower crush value or silica content than a Tier-1 sand? So basically, what it doesn't perform as well under pressure down fold. So when we're talking about premium versus Tier-2, that's sort of the difference. So Tier-1 being high silica content by crush value, including lower silicon content for crush value. I think there was just a couple of things actually, the presentation today was extremely fulsome. I just had a couple of quick comments there just to sort of reemphasize a couple of things that Mark reemphasizes it as well is just though, in 2022, we are definitely moving into a strong market fundamentals towards the sand market. And we've done a good job of increasing our current clients nomination volumes for 2022 and working on bringing on new clients online, and we've been quite successful with that. And then just on the base business side, Rob had mentioned the importance of working with some of the indigenous communities there. And we're currently working with 1 very closely of the Wood Buffalo region with a strong focus on increasing the throughput of our corporate pits up there. And we're definitely building some really strong relationships on that side for a positive 2022 here in the base business.

[Robert J. Beekhuizen, CEO & Director]

I see, we have 2 other questions here. Sorry, there's an echo here, if somebody can turn off the mic in the back. One was asking about the Firebag deposit. What's the status? So we have our permits to operate, and we actually see -- it's a good question. We see opportunity for all the oil sands operations up in the Fort McMurray area and their multibillion-dollar assets each, they continue to need aggregates, including sand. And so out of the Kearl pit, interestingly enough, we're already moving sand this year, and we see opportunity to supply sand from our corporate pits, including Firebag. Initially, that asset was acquired to serve the energy market, but we found our additional deposits in basin that are closer. So it's -- Firebag deposit from a frac sand standpoint is only a 4-hour truck ride away from our Prosvita Project, but more interestingly is a high-caliber sand serving other parts of construction and environmental and operating needs for the large oil sands operators. And so very much, we're looking at Firebag and activating that here in the near future to keep up with the demands for that sector. There was another question here about the old lawsuit question mark. And that was with Syncrude back in the day. That's all been fully resolved. That was resolved back in 2019. As I mentioned, that was a legacy -- it was a legacy lawsuit, agree just one, but it was resolved without any impact to AMI's balance sheet. We're on good terms with Syncrude, and we worked through those prior misunderstandings that existed before my time. We found a good solution that works for both companies. And we got through that without a lot of an impact to our balance sheet. So we're on good terms. We're excited about serving all the operators up there, including Syncrude. And yes, so it's -- I think we're in a good spot all around. I do want to thank everybody for attending, if that's the end of our questions here. We've been on for just about 50 minutes. So I thank you for your time and your attention. I want to also thank our new employees in the United States that might be online here, welcome to the AMI team. We're excited and happy to have you on board and also excited for our investors and our shareholders to bring value in the future. So more to come, and that would conclude our investor call today. So thank you.