Our primary business objective is to create sustainable, capital-efficient growth in cash available for distribution to our unitholders while maintaining a strong credit profile and financial flexibility. Our growth objective is largely dependent on the availability of open and reasonably priced capital markets. Subject to the availability of the capital markets, we are pursuing the following business strategies:

• Continue to grow coal reserve holdings through acquisitions and investments in our existing market areas. We continually seek new reserves of coal both to offset the depletion from production and to increase future production. We expect to continue to add to our coal reserve holdings in Central Appalachia and the Illinois Basin in the future, but may consider the acquisition of reserves outside of these basins if the market and quality of the reserves satisfy our criteria. We have historically operated in Central Appalachia, our largest area of coal reserves, but we view the Illinois Basin as a growth area, both because of its proximity to power plants and because we expect future environmental regulations will require the scrubbing of most coals, and not just the higher sulfur coal that is typically found in this basin. We will consider acquisitions of coal reserves that are long-lived and that are of sufficient size to yield significant production or serve as a platform for complementary acquisitions.
• Expand in areas that complement our coal royalty business. Timber and coal infrastructure projects typically involve long-lived assets that generally produce predictable cash flows. We own or control approximately 243,000 acres of forestlands in Appalachia, which primarily produce various hardwoods, and we own a number of coal infrastructure facilities. We also have an equity interest in a coal handling joint venture, which is expected to provide development opportunities for coal-related infrastructure projects.
• Expand our natural gas midstream operations by adding new production to existing systems and acquiring or building new gathering and processing assets. We continually seek new supplies of natural gas both to offset the natural declines in production from the wells currently connected to our systems and to increase system throughput volumes. New natural gas supplies are obtained for all of our systems by contracting for production from new wells, connecting new wells drilled on dedicated acreage and by contracting for natural gas that has been released from competitors’ systems.
• Mitigate commodity price exposure in our natural gas midstream segment. Our natural gas midstream operations consist of a mix of fee-based and margin-based services that, together with our hedging activities, are expected to generate relatively stable cash flows. During the quarter ended December 31, 2010, approximately 22% of the system throughput volumes in our natural gas midstream segment were gathered or processed under fee-based contracts. Under fee-based contracts, we are not exposed directly to commodity price risk. The remainder of our system throughput volumes were gathered or processed under gas purchase/keep-whole arrangements and percentage-of-proceeds arrangements that are subject to commodity price risk. However, we expect to manage our exposure to commodity price risk by entering into hedging transactions. Based upon current volumes, we have entered into hedging agreements covering approximately 55% and 32% of our commodity-sensitive volumes in 2011 and 2012. Historically, we have generally targeted hedging 50% to 60% of our commodity-sensitive volumes covering a two-year period.