Are Increased Exports of US Liquefied Natural Gas in the Public Interest?, with Ben Cahill

Notable Quotes

• Juggling climate goals and fossil fuel production: “In many ways, the [United States] is grappling with what it means that we are this big fossil fuel exporter. For a lot of environmental groups, it just seems incoherent for the United States to make net zero on climate commitments while it has the status of exporting a huge amount of fossil fuels to the rest of the world.” (8:46)
• Paths to reducing fossil fuel use: “You don’t kill fossil fuel demand by killing individual supply projects. I just don’t see the evidence for this … Where fossil fuel demand exists, companies and countries tend to rise up to meet that demand. To me, it’s much more meaningful to focus on cutting demand through electric vehicle adoption, support for renewable energy and infrastructure permitting reform, and all the rest.” (10:20)
• National and global efforts to reduce emissions associated with natural gas: “The Biden administration has made some important moves to drive down emissions from domestic oil and gas production … Also, the Department of Energy, the State Department, the European Commission, and something like 15 countries around the world are collaborating on ways to try to track and reduce emissions across gas and liquefied natural gas supply chains.” (27:02)

Top of the Stack

• Escaping the Resource Curse, edited by Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Joseph E. Stiglitz
• The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a visiting research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. As you probably heard, the Biden administration recently announced a pause on approvals of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities—thrilling some and enraging others.

I'll ask Ben to help us understand how the United States became the world's largest LNG exporter, the arguments for and against increasing those exports, and how the federal government will ultimately decide what is or is not in the public interest on this topic. We'll also talk about how other countries—particularly Russia, Japan, and in Europe—are seeking to influence the future of US LNG. Stay with us.

Ben Cahill from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and UT Austin, welcome to Resources Radio.

Ben Cahill: Thanks so much, Daniel. It's really great to be here with you.

Daniel Raimi: It's great to have you. I'm a little surprised we haven't had you before to talk about all of your really fascinating work. Today, we're going to talk about your work on liquefied natural gas exports. We're going to use this term “LNG” a lot today to refer to liquefied natural gas. But, before we get into the weeds, we always ask our guests how they got interested in working on energy or environmental topics. What drew you into this path?

Ben Cahill: For me, I think it was a bit of an accident, like a lot of your guests. I was always interested in politics and international affairs, but I never really thought about working in energy and climate too closely when I was younger. One of my first jobs out of college was at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Basically, I worked at a place that did social sciences research.

One of the projects that we did was advising the government of São Tomé and Príncipe on how to manage expected oil revenues, because there was a lot of oil exploration going on there. It was the first time that I'd really read about the resource curse and all the challenges of managing resource revenue from extraction in oil and gas–producing states. I got really interested in that, and I thought, “Maybe I should focus on this.”

Then, I went to graduate school and had a concentration in energy and started working as a consultant. I originally started in political risk analysis. Then, I did more corporate strategy and corporate analysis of the oil and gas industry. Increasingly, I've worked on more transition issues, including at CSIS for the last three and a half years. In general, I'm trying to use this knowledge that I've built up in the oil and gas sector to try to think about methane issues and other issues around climate concerns associated with oil and gas and how the whole industry is moving and changing.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. And you mentioned São Tomé and Príncipe. I know those are islands, but I don't actually know where they are on the map.

Ben Cahill: They’re off the west coast of Africa—small volcanic islands. For a brief period of time in the early 2000s, they were oil-exploration hotspots. No one actually discovered anything. But, at the time, there was some innovative work done to try to set up an oil revenue–management law and think about creating a national oil company—building all the institutions that you need when you have the sudden influx of resource revenue. That turned into a book project that I worked on as a research assistant and just touched off this interest in this book called Resource Curse and how that's played out in different places around the world.

Daniel Raimi: All of that work is super interesting. I wish we had time to talk about all of it. But today we're going to focus, as I mentioned, on LNG exports. Let's start with a little bit of history, because the history is pretty remarkable. Let's imagine it's 20 years ago, we're both younger and more fabulous, and we're having a drink, but we're still energy nerds. I say to you, 20 years ago, "I'll bet you, Ben, $1,000 that by 2024 the United States will be the world's largest exporter of LNG." How would you have reacted?

Ben Cahill: To be fair, I didn't know too much about LNG 20 years ago. I've picked up a thing or two over the years. I would've taken that bet. Most people would've thought you were crazy at that point, because, in the early to mid-2000s, the gas supply deficit in the United States had been growing for a while. The country had already built LNG import terminals, or receiving terminals, and was in the midst of building out regasification.

Many people anticipated the gas supply deficit would only grow over time, and the United States would have to import more and more LNG. In fact, I just came across a slide from Stephen Stapczynski, who's a great LNG reporter for Bloomberg. It was from an investment bank in the year 2004, predicting that the United States would become the world's largest LNG importer. Obviously, the exact opposite happened. So, it's fun to be an energy analyst, because you just never know what's going to happen from one five-year period to the next. But I think this is one of the most surprising twists that we've seen in global energy in the last 20 years.

Daniel Raimi: Listeners probably have a sense of what happened between 2004 and 2024 to make my prophetic prediction come true and make me win $1,000 from you. And, in 2004 dollars, $1,000 would probably be worth $2,000 today.

Give us a sense of what happened—what happened between then and now?

Ben Cahill: The shale revolution happened. There was this enormous boom in oil and gas production that was really a byproduct of the advances that we saw throughout shale oil and gas extraction through the use of hydraulic fracturing, lateral drilling, and all those learnings that have taken place ever since. I think 2005 was the period of peak oil imports in the United States. Since then, the situation has changed pretty dramatically.

What that meant for the LNG sector is that the companies that owned LNG import terminals actually converted several of them to become export terminals. Cheniere was really the pioneer in this regard. It was the first company to envision that the United States would soon have a surplus of natural gas. It put in one of the first applications, I believe, to convert it to an export facility. I believe six LNG receiving terminals now have been transitioned to become export terminals.

As production has grown and grown in the United States, the scale of LNG exports has grown, as well. Last year, the United States officially became the world's largest LNG exporter—even more than Australia and Qatar. The United States is also in the midst of a huge capacity expansion. Export capacity is going to grow by something like 85 percent in the United States between now and 2028. It's possible that some of these projects might be delayed. But, by the end of this decade, we're going to see a huge capacity expansion. Again, we're already the world's largest exporter, so it's a pretty dramatic shift in a short period of time. It's worth noting that Gulf Coast LNG exports only started in 2016, so it's really quite a recent phenomenon.

Daniel Raimi: I remember I was actually in Houston at CERAWeek, the big energy event, when the first cargo left the Gulf Coast. It was toasted by many on that day in Houston. But, of course, as listeners know, LNG experts are not toasted by everybody. There are, I would say, a large number of environmental advocates who have become more and more opposed to LNG exports. Those critiques have, at least in part, resulted in a major policy announcement from the Biden administration, pausing the issuance of new approvals for new projects. We're going to come back to that pause in a couple of minutes. First, can you give us a sense of the arguments that environmental advocates make against LNG? As much as you can in a short period of time, give us a sense of the merits of their case.

Ben Cahill: Sure. I think, on a macro level, this is a story about the United States emerging as a huge fossil fuel exporter in recent years—not just of LNG, but also of crude oil and petroleum products. This is, again, something that really just touched off with LNG in 2016 with crude oil after the lifting of the crude oil export ban. So, in many ways, the country is grappling with what it means that we are this big fossil fuel exporter. For a lot of environmental groups, it just seems incoherent for the United States to make net zero on climate commitments while it has the status of exporting a huge amount of fossil fuels to the rest of the world.

There are concerns that LNG exports are going to lock in fossil fuel consumption, because, of course, these are 20-year-plus time horizon projects. There are arguments that LNG exports and natural gas more broadly are worse than coal on a life-cycle emissions basis, especially if you count for methane emissions across the value chain from production through transportation and through liquefaction and shipping. A lot of environmental groups also believe that LNG exports primarily compete with renewable energy and not with coal. Therefore, locking in gas is a bad idea, because it's going to disadvantage renewables.

In some of these arguments, there are really strong merits; in others, not so much. First—I say this over and over again, but I really believe it's true—you don't kill fossil fuel demand by killing individual supply projects. I just don't see the evidence for this. I think the Keystone XL Pipeline is a good illustration of this. That project was killed off; Canadian oil sands production rose anyway. Where fossil fuel demand exists, companies and countries tend to rise up to meet that demand. To me, it's much more meaningful to focus on cutting demand through electric vehicle adoption, support for renewable energy and infrastructure permitting reform, and all the rest.

On the emissions side, a lot of the current case against LNG really rests on a couple studies, which are mostly pre-publication papers. If you make really aggressive assumptions on methane leakage throughout the supply chain—especially in the upstream and midstream segment, but in shipping, as well—that leads to pretty dire outcomes. Gas is worse than coal on a life-cycle basis. I would just note there's a lot of serious work that has been done on life-cycle analysis, or LCA. Many studies have been published on this. Many are ongoing. I think that finding about gas being worse than coal really doesn't square with the literature, but it's a robust area of debate. It really has to do with what happens with gas consumption and how durable it is.

Daniel Raimi: One quick clarification. I totally agree with you. It's a complex topic and lots to learn there. You just use the term “LCA.” And for the non-nerds among us, “LCA” stands for “life-cycle analysis,” which accounts for emissions across the entire value chain of the given product. Sorry to interrupt, Ben. Keep going.

Ben Cahill: Very good clarification. Thank you. There's this idea, as well, that gas doesn't compete with coal. I think that's misplaced. It definitely does compete with coal, especially in Asia. Phasing down coal consumption in Asia is really a critical goal for climate outcomes. But, I would say, there is this notion that you often hear from the LNG industry and supporters of the industry that cheap US LNG is going to displace coal in Asia, and, therefore, it's a good weapon in the fight against climate change. I think that is really unsupported by the data. It's really a question that involves a lot of assumptions about what happens with pathways for energy demand in different countries, what fuel choices they make, how fuels compete with each other based on costs, and what kind of infrastructure gets built. It's really simplistic to just say that this boom in US LNG is going to help displace coal in Asia, and, therefore, it's a big win for climate. I think we need to question that assumption.

Daniel Raimi: So, there are definitely some perhaps unsupported arguments on both sides. You've given us a good sense of the environmental side of the case, and where it's strong, and where it may be weaker. Take us over to the industry side.

You just mentioned the climate argument that some members of industry make in favor of LNG. What are some of the other arguments that LNG proponents make? Can you help us understand the merits of the case?

Ben Cahill: I think LNG project promoters look around the world and see pretty robust gas demand for decades to come. The fact is a lot of these US LNG projects have signed numerous supply deals in the last couple of years, especially after the Russian war on Ukraine, when there almost was this panic about energy security. That suggests to me that plenty of buyers, as well as banks, believe that gas demand is not going to be a 10-year phenomenon or a 15-year phenomenon, but will continue over the long term.

There is an argument that supply and gas, especially to Asia, will displace coal and drive down emissions, and, therefore, we want to discourage coal consumption as fast as possible. All things being equal, scarcer gas with less supply from the United States makes it harder to switch.

One of the critical arguments for US LNG has to do with global energy security. I think it's uncontroversial; it's obviously true that US LNG really played a big role in global energy security in 2022 and again last year. Europe was scrambling for alternative supplies to Russian pipeline gas after we saw that steep drop. US LNG played a really critical role. In fact, two-thirds of US LNG in the last two years have ended up in Europe. Companies are depending on US gas—especially buyers in Europe, as they seek an energy divorce from Russia. There's a sense that it will be needed over the long term.

I think that some of the climate considerations here really merit a lot more detailed examination. Coal-to-gas switching led to a huge emissions reduction in the United States. That story continues to unfold today. I don't think it's going to play out that way in many other countries around the world for various reasons, which we could discuss, but it's about availability of gas infrastructure and the availability of cheap gas. Not all countries, especially in Asia, have the same conditions as the United States. But I think the energy security and the geopolitical argument for US LNG is a serious one, and it has to be balanced against the climate concerns.

Daniel Raimi: That makes a lot of sense. With the events in Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, I think that the energy-security argument has just gotten stronger over time.

Now, let's get to more recent developments to help us understand the policy part of this story. So, as some listeners might know, to build an LNG export facility in the United States, the US Department of Energy has to determine that a given project is in the “national interest.” That's a really broad term. I'm curious how that term has been defined in the past and how much leeway it gives the Department of Energy. Help us understand what this means. What does it mean for something to be in the national interest?

Ben Cahill: If you want to build a big LNG-export project in the United States, there are two key permits that you have to get. One is from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. That's to build the facility itself. The second is an authorization from the Department of Energy to export natural gas to non-free-trade-agreement countries. Those are countries that the United States doesn't have a free trade agreement with. Both of those things are table stakes. You need them to build a big LNG export facility.

The current debate and discussion is really about how the Department of Energy evaluates proposed LNG projects and, especially, whether or not those projects are in the public interest. (I think the term is “public interest” rather than “national interest.”) That's the statutory requirement under the Natural Gas Act. It's not that closely defined. I think this is an area where a lot of critics are focusing on this issue.

Basically, the way it's worked is that it's a pretty permissive process. Companies come to the Department of Energy with an export application, they look at the merits of this application, essentially look at the business plan, and say “yes” or “no.” The Natural Gas Act requires the Department of Energy to authorize these exports, unless it finds that doing so would not be in the public interest.

What does the “public interest” mean? It's never been all that closely defined, but there was a clarification that came from the Department of Energy last April. It basically said, “The Department of Energy is required to look at the economy, the natural gas supply, energy-security implications, and other public-interest considerations of looking at these facilities.” The argument is that the Department of Energy has taken too lax an approach. It's essentially permitted every export application that comes across its desk. It needs to consider the cumulative impact of all these LNG exports that have now been authorized.

In other words, I think many people believe that it's not enough to just look at the merits of one project. Now that we've approved so many LNG-export projects, and we have so much that exists today and is coming, maybe the bar should be higher in terms of the impact on domestic gas prices, environmental justice and impact on local communities, and, of course, the climate impacts. That is really what the current discussion and debate is about. Last Friday, on January 26, the Biden administration said, "Basically, we're going to take a pause until we consider how to do this better."

Daniel Raimi: I should just note for listeners, we're recording this on January 29, just a few days after the announcement. It's in all the headlines today and all the energy trade press.

As you just mentioned, the administration announced this pause in approving new facilities. That announcement does not affect projects that are in operation or under construction, to my understanding—please correct me if I'm wrong. But it does affect proposed projects that have not yet received approvals. I'm curious how the news has been received among various stakeholders. Particularly, I'm interested in how the news has been received among US LNG trading partners who obviously have a vested interest here.

Ben Cahill: You are correct that this announcement does not affect current export projects or those that are already under construction. As I mentioned, there's a pretty significant wave of US LNG that's coming. We have four major projects that are still under construction and one that is completing construction now. There's a big expansion underway. This is really about what happens after that. Essentially, it means, What happens with US LNG exports after 2030? Will we continue to build out LNG-export capacity?

Reactions to this have been really divided. Many environmental groups, not surprisingly, see this as a big win—a moment of reckoning where the Biden administration got serious about the climate implications of US LNG and wants to reign it in until the country takes a good hard look at what the climate impacts are.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have LNG exporters and political leaders in states like Texas and Louisiana, which is really the heartland of the LNG industry. They're furious about it. They see it as a big problem for global energy security. The reaction is very divided.

I think a critical issue is, How do gas-importing countries, including those that have supply contracts for these projects, which will now be on hold for a while— how are they reacting? The reaction, so far, has been muted. I expect that the Biden administration has done a lot of outreach in Europe, Japan, and South Korea to explain this decision to reiterate to these countries that the United States isn't going to stop LNG exports. But still, many countries, especially Japan, have real concerns that we might have supply constraints on US LNG in the future.

I think a big question is, How do they seek to influence the Biden administration's approach on this if a second term happens? On the commercial side, do companies now feel compelled to look for alternative suppliers from other countries like Qatar?

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. You mentioned one thing that I think might be worth expanding on for a second. You mentioned that for some of these projects that have not yet begun construction, they actually have contracts in place with importing countries. Did I hear that right? Can you help us understand just how that works? If you're building an LNG project, you set up the contract with buyers before you get the permits? That's a little surprising. But, again, I've never worked in the private sector, so I probably got it all mixed up.

Ben Cahill: These are huge projects. They have a 20-year-plus life span. They're enormously expensive, and they're risky. In order to reduce that risk and attract financing for an LNG project, typically, you've had to sign up a series of long-term supply contracts to reduce the risk associated with the project and to be able to attract the finance not just to build a facility, but in some cases to build pipelines, upstream developments, and help supply the gas. That's traditionally how it's worked. Over time, the traditional share was 70 percent debt finance and 30 percent equity finance to construct a big LNG export project.

Before you can reach a final investment decision or pull the trigger on the investment, typically, companies have had to sign up a lot of buyers in advance. By doing that, they prove to the banks that it's okay to invest in this project. Traditionally, a big LNG export project might've wanted to lock up 75 to 80 percent of its capacity in long-term supply contracts. Even these projects that have not gotten approval yet from the Department of Energy and from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, they've been working on getting those supply deals in place for many years, and they're all competing against each other. There are a lot of things you have to set up and line up all of your ducks in a row before you can make a final investment decision and go ahead.

Daniel Raimi: That makes a lot of sense. One more question on this topic of what's in the public interest. As the Biden administration looks to define that term and update how it interprets that part of the statute, I'm curious if you can just reflect on the malleability of this over time with administrations. Is the definition of the “public interest” for the purpose of LNG exports one of those things that's going to rock back and forth between administrations the way that the value of the social cost of carbon has?

I ask that partly because we're talking about two things here that are famously difficult to quantify, one of which is the climate implications of LNG exports. You've already helped us understand why that's so complex to calculate and why it's hard to pin a simple number on it. Then, geopolitical concerns, which are also hugely important but very difficult to quantify. Do you think that the fact that those things are hard to quantify subjects it to lots of political variability over time? Or do you think it might be somewhat stable?

Ben Cahill: It's a great question. To be honest, I don't know. I think this is one of the big uncertainties that's been opened up with this Biden administration review. As I mentioned, over time, it's been a pretty permissive approach. Look at the merits of a certain business plan, consider the public interest associated with it—again, fairly ill defined. So far, it's been a thumbs up to most of the proposals.

It's worth noting here that one particular concern over time has been, What will be the impact on domestic gas prices of exporting all this gas? In the early days of the US LNG-export boom, there was a lot of concern about this. Industrial gas consumers were very worried about this. People were worried that it would drive up costs for industry and for households. So, between 2012 and 2018, the Department of Energy did a series of studies that looked at exactly this question: “What would be the domestic market and price impact of exporting all this gas?”

Generally, it found that LNG exports would be a net benefit for the public. They ran a whole bunch of different scenarios on volumes of gas exported and on the nature of domestic economic growth and gas demand over time, and they essentially concluded that, on net, it would be a benefit to the country. There's now a lot of calls to revisit those studies and take stock of the fact that we've had such a big expansion in a short period of time and maybe refresh some of those assumptions.

I looked back at some of them recently from my own research, and I found that, actually, the biggest variable, at least for the 2018 study that the Department of Energy did, was really about the nature of natural gas exploration and production in the United States. There were some scenarios they ran that said there could be a higher domestic price, but that mostly had to do with the cost of extracting gas in the United States and resource availability.

Since 2018, US gas output has only grown and grown. It actually reached an all-time high in December of 2023. I don't think that part will change. But it is definitely possible that local community issues and environmental justice will get more sustained attention. When we think about the public interest, maybe there's a need to take those issues into account. That's a significant issue.

In Louisiana, which is one of the heartlands of the LNG-export sector, it's not especially densely populated. But, in Texas, where some of these facilities are and where others are being proposed—those are more densely populated. They're in areas that are home to refineries and a lot of industrial developments. There are serious issues around air quality and carcinogens. There's a lot of resistance to building more and more big fossil fuel projects. So, I think many people believe it's necessary to hit pause and take a look at those issues and determine whether or not the Department of Energy should get more serious about incorporating them as it moves forward.

Daniel Raimi: Those are great points—super fascinating and lots of fodder for more analysis. One last question, Ben, before we go to our Top of the Stack segment, which is about other countries that are potential receivers of US LNG or that just play a role in these markets.

I'm thinking back 10 years ago or so, when I was doing a lot of research on fracking in the shale boom. One of the things I remember is that a television station that was then called Russia Today, and is now called RT, started running all of these news stories about the environmental harms of fracking. It wasn't hard to figure out that this state-backed television program was basically trying to sow fears about US natural gas supply, because Russia was concerned about it potentially eating into Russia's market, which is, of course, exactly what's happened over the last decade or so. I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit more about other examples of countries that have been seeking to influence the trajectory of US LNG?

Ben Cahill: There are a lot of climate concerns about US natural gas production and exports. Most of this has to do with methane emissions. It is really important to note here that the Biden administration has made some important moves to drive down emissions from domestic oil and gas production. We had the final rule on methane emissions from oil and gas that the US Environmental Protection Agency passed in December. There was a methane waste emissions charge, or methane fee, in the Inflation Reduction Act. There are new reporting requirements for oil and gas companies that are required by the Inflation Reduction Act and the changes to the Clean Air Act that happened then. Also, the Department of Energy, the State Department, the European Commission, and something like 15 countries around the world are collaborating on ways to try to track and reduce emissions across gas and LNG supply chains—in other words, to move toward a world where we have more clarity on the emissions intensity of a single LNG cargo, or a producing basin, or a country's emissions, and can compare them against each other.

The reason for this is that there's a lot of interest in getting a better handle on the emissions story. There is market interest in this, but it's definitely driven by policy, too. In the European Union, policymakers are close to finalizing EU methane legislation; it should be finalized by April or May of this year. That will include a requirement to collect information on the methane intensity of all the gas that Europe buys. Any supplier to the European Union will have to provide data about what kind of measurement, reporting, and verification they're doing, what kind of technology they're using, and how they're reducing flaring and venting. It's all part of this effort to try to get a better handle on emissions intensity.

By 2027 and by 2030, in separate stages, suppliers will have to provide all this data. There are early signs that maybe Japan and Korean companies will start to look at the emissions intensity of the gas they buy. We're moving to a world where, in a couple years, there will be much more clarity on emissions associated with gas production and exports and a lot more market demand for so-called “cleaner” or less “emissions-intensive” gas.

I think that this is going to have a real impact. Personally, I believe that all these efforts to drive down emissions really matter more than killing a future supply project, because this is about the gas that we produce today and the projects that we know are coming. It's much more impactful to me to drive down emissions from that gas rather than just delaying or even killing off a future supply project. It's a multidimensional problem, but things are moving quickly on the methane front, and I think it's going to affect the US LNG sector in a big way.

Daniel Raimi: That's all really interesting and really nicely summarized.

Ben, this has been a fantastic discussion. We've covered a ton of ground in a short amount of time, and I really appreciate your expertise. Now, I'd like to ask you the question that we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack. It can be related to LNG, or not at all related to LNG. We're definitely open to all sorts of recommendations. What would you recommend to our listeners?

Ben Cahill: Daniel, this is my favorite part of your podcast. What's at the top of my stack is a book by Amitav Ghosh. It's called The Nutmeg's Curse. Amitav Ghosh is a fiction writer. He's a great novelist. He wrote The Glass Palace and the Ibis trilogy and a whole bunch of other novels that I've really enjoyed over the years. He's done a lot more work on climate in recent years.

This book, The Nutmeg's Curse, is basically about the history of colonialism and natural-resource extraction and about what's lost with native cultures and traditions around the world when they think about natural resources, volcanoes, landscapes, and things that became part of the capitalist machine over hundreds of years. I saw Amitav Ghosh give a lecture at Georgetown University last fall, and it was fantastic. It was one of the best lectures I've ever seen. This book really pulls together a lot of disparate issues, and it's just great. I love it.

Daniel Raimi: That sounds so fascinating and a really great recommendation.

Well, Ben Cahill from CSIS and UT Austin, one more time, thank you so much for coming onto Resources Radio today, helping us understand this interesting and complex topic. We really appreciate it.

Ben Cahill: Thanks so much, Daniel.

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