Question-and-Answer Session
[Operator Instructions]. Our first question will come from Michael Blum with Wachovia.
Michael Blum - Wachovia Securities
A couple of questions, can you hear me?
Curt Anastasio - Chief Executive Officer and President and Director
Yes, hearing you loud and clear.
Michael Blum - Wachovia Securities
Okay. Great. Just couple of questions. One, in terms of the decision to sort of scale back the '09 CapEx budget, can you just talk about the thought process there and maybe some of the dynamics behind it? For example, are you not getting high enough returns? Are you sort of scaling back those projects? Are the customers not willing to give you a higher tariff or high enough return? Is it your cost of capital? What are the different factors that are going into that?
Curt Anastasio - Chief Executive Officer and President and Director
Right. It's none of the things you mentioned. In other words, the projects are very high return. And our customer relations are excellent. And I have Mary Morgan here, but she can chime in later to tell you that we really are not getting any adverse consequences in terms of customers not wanting to renew contracts or anything like that. It's really to be prudent about the current financial crisis in the world and to maintain a position that we enjoy today, where we have plenty of liquidity. And I mentioned the $0.5 billion of availability on the revolver. Seasonally, when we peak on our working capital during the second quarter in the asphalt season, we look at that peak and we still have plenty availability there, but we just want to leave ourselves as much cushion as possible in the current market.
And scaling back to the $80 million, even though these are all high-return projects and all backed by big customers that's something, again, where we have the flexibility to step on the accelerator and get up to a more normalized level of say 150 to $200 million of internal growth capital expanding. If the dust settles on this financial crisis and we feel comfortable that... we see how it's going to get resolved. But Steve might want to chat... our CFO, Steve, is here. He might want to chime in more on that.
Steve Blank - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer
Yes. I think that's a pretty good summary, Curt. I mean, obviously the cost of capital has gone up with the sell-offs in equities and, also, the credit crisis on the debt side. So we've seen, as everybody else has, significant increase in the weighted average cost of capital. The projects that we've got in the budget for next year, which we just reviewed with the Board, are all considerably above our, albeit higher cost of capital. Of the $500 million of projects that we have talked about, probably only about 25 to 50 of those are far enough along that we feel that we can move forward confidently with them and gain the capital. The rest are early days and it just doesn't make sense to kind of budget a bunch of on-the-come things for next year, given the credit issues that we all face. I think we can... as Curt's mentioned, we can quickly ratchet those back up and develop things if we see a window here in the debt market. It's kind of silly to just try and say well, I'm going to debt finance everything under my revolver because the equity market is going to open up in three months from now or six months now. I think it's just prudent to go slow in this environment.
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