 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Okay, we're back. We're live with two very handsome young men who join us together for Energy in America from Washington. They are at the level of attire that we like to see. And that's Lou Plurici at the left, and Jeff Kissel at the right. And they've come from a party, so they're in the right mood for a discussion of the natural gas boom in America. That's great. Welcome to the show, Lou and Jeff. It's so nice to see you guys. It's good to be here. Great to see you, Jay, and we've come from opposite parties. Of course, one of us is a Republican. Actually, that very nice woman sitting next to Jeff tonight is a UH graduate. I just want to point out that. So what parties have you come from and what has it got to do with natural gas? So tomorrow, and you can put the slide up if you like, we are holding a workshop on the kind of the future of the natural gas production platform, which has a lot of interesting opportunities, but also a lot of interesting challenges. And tomorrow, we're going to explore those opportunities and challenges. And Jeff, one of our trustees at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, kindly hosted a dinner this evening for many of the participants at a local restaurant right on the Potomac River called Pio Lomate. It was a pleasure to do that and reconnect with so many people who've had a connection to Hawaii, Jay. I want to make a comment to kind of set the tone for what we're going to discuss tomorrow and how it might affect the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian Islands, of course, are surrounded by an ocean of saltwater. But what's happening now, driven largely by investment from Japan and other Asian countries, is Hawaii is being surrounded by an ocean of natural gas. And unfortunately, it has decided with current policy not to take advantage of that to diversify its energy base. But there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars being invested around the Pacific Rim to distribute, to transport, and to use this incredibly important natural resource in the world today. Just to get definition straight on, is natural gas, for the purposes of this discussion, the same thing as LNG? Is LNG the same thing as natural gas? Yes, LNG is when you take natural gas and cool it so much that it turns into a liquid. And when you do that, it becomes compressed and you can put it in a tanker and move it around the world to literally hundreds of locations that are now capable of warming that gas up, called regas, and using it in local city distribution systems or power plants. And it's significantly cheaper than other similar forms of fossil fuel, no? So it's probably not cheaper than coal, but if you have a lot of air pollution in particulates, like in China and Beijing or Mumbai and India or parts of Thailand and Bangladesh, it's very attractive and cost effective. And it's also effective from a carbon footprint standpoint, as both a transportation fuel and a power generating fuel. It's not perfect, nothing is. I'm living proof of that, Jay. But the fact is that if you look at the carbon footprint well to wheel of natural gas versus petroleum, certainly your way ahead with natural gas, even if you look at the cost of building and maintaining some of the renewables, you have a lower carbon footprint with natural gas, especially because we can sequester a lot of CO2 in some of the formations we use to extract natural gas. So we have an enormous amount of natural gas in this country, in this continent, right? And we have the great prospect of selling it in other continents, right? Yes, actually it's a great point. I don't know if you have the first slide yet. If you look at the first slide, it shows what the issues we're going to talk about at the workshop. Yeah, let's see that again. Let's put it up again and you can go through those. Okay, let's put up a second. If you think about it, our real problem is that we have too much gas. And we have too much gas because, one, we don't have a home for all of this gas. We've got to find demand centers. And two, if we can't find a place for this gas, in some parts of the United States, particularly Texas, this gas will back up. And because it's associated with the production of oil, we might have to curtail our oil production. So several of the themes in tomorrow's workshop will be how much gas do we have? What do we do about the so-called associated gas? How do we get this gas to market? And finally, how do we deal with trade disputes which might make our gas a little expensive? It sounds, from this discussion and from other discussions we've had in the past, that the United States is on the brink of a huge economic activity here. And this is a big deal to develop our resources in natural gas. Am I right? It's for prompt. It's investment and return on capital. It's American jobs. It's transportation and renewing the U.S. transportation infrastructure. Pipeline is a huge part of the U.S. transportation infrastructure. And finally, it is, in fact, an enabler of more renewable technology. What's the point? You do need the gas to deal with the intermittency of a lot of renewables, particularly solar and wind. One footnote point, and this goes to a conversation I had with Lou a couple of weeks ago, and that is if there's a tariff on steel from, say, China, that affects our ability to build long pipelines. What kind of effect does the tariff have on our prospects in building out infrastructure for natural gas? So I would take two points there. One is, you don't really know how much of a, we do have tariffs on steel and aluminum, but the pro-administration has exempted a lot of countries from that tariff. It's slowly merging, slowly moving to a tariff only on China. The Japanese are in intensive discussions now. But it's not good. It's not a good outcome. But one of the things I want to do if you go to the next slide, Jay, you can see what's happened to gas production in the U.S. Okay, let's go to the next slide, and that would be, it's called, total dry gas production year-to-year growth. Right. And you can see it's quite remarkable, and much of it is in the unconventional area. What we call shale gas, unconventional. Okay, what is that telling us? What is that telling us, though? That's telling us that in the absence of the shale gas revolution, we would be in a really poor position. But because of our ability to drill and produce oil from source lock, from the basic mother of all oil and gas, we are now the world's largest natural gas producer in the world. Not only that, Jay, the people of Hawaii are benefiting from this in areas that they don't really know about. The fact that the gas comes up with oil is keeping oil prices at a moderate level. You recall during the worst of the oil price spike, we were paying $800 to $1,000 in fuel charges to get a plane from Japan to Honolulu. Those charges have essentially gone away, and so those people, more people can come to Hawaii, more people can spend their dollars in Hawaii or yen or yuan, and more people can effectively help the Hawaiian economy. The Hawaiian economy, if I can get on my political bandwagon for a moment, owes it to those visitors to make their visiting experiences cost-effective as possible. They're not doing that by driving up the price of energy. I should mention, we're not going to take a break, but I do want to mention that Lou Plurici is the president and CEO of E-Princk, and Jeff Kissel is associated with E-Princk, and he is the former CEO of Hawaii Gas right here in Hawaii. That's why he can speak about Hawaii in such terms. Actually, Jeff Kissel is our most valuable trustee at the moment on the broadcast. By the way, I should ask, when this show is over, and it will be in a few minutes, are you guys going to go back to the party? I plan to go back because they didn't seem to be ready to stop. I think Jeff is pretty tired. Tell us more about this discussion. Did you organize the discussion? Is this an E-Princk conference? How did this get organized? Yes, it works up tomorrow. Why don't you go to the next slide? I think it shows total dry gas production year-to-year growth with associated production. Is this the right one? New infrastructure required? Okay, we can go to that one. One of the interesting issues is if we are going to become a major player in the world natural gas market, we don't only have to build the facilities close to the ports to liquefy the gas. We're going to have to move the gas from where it's produced to the ports where it can be liquefied and center-broad. And the big problem we have in the U.S. is we don't have a very effective system for permitting, building, and financing of the infrastructure. We have a lot of conflict on this issue because many stakeholders believe that it's a mistake to rely upon fossil fuels. Much like the Hawaiian government, I think we should go 100% for note. That's the target, yeah. So when you have this conference and you raise these points and show these demographics and data, what is the point you want people to take home from this conference? Tonight's dinner and I guess tomorrow's workshop. How do you want to affect their thinking? I think that for us, we want people, we want policymakers who will be in the room to make decisions based on the reality of what's happening on the ground, not on unrealistic aspirational views of the world. And I think our view is not to tell policymakers what to do, but to let them understand what the conditions are on the ground so that at least they're making these decisions on the reality of what's happening and not what a lot of people tell them they wish were happening. And to translate that into what's going on in Hawaii, you have to look at the goals. If the goal is renewable energy, the price is grid instability. The price is high cost and a sacrifice of social services and other things that we want in society. So the Energy Policy Research Foundation is in no way advocating one over another. They're advocating a realistic valuation of the alternatives. Well, in an optimal way, how do you see this unfolding? I suppose this is going to be in discussing some detail at the conference. Ideally, how do you see this initiative, this new opportunity to develop unfolding? So I think they're in the U.S. that are a lot of problems at the ground level. So tomorrow we're going to have the President of the International, I mean of the Interstate National Gas Association. We're going to have somebody from the Interior Department. We're going to have folks extremely knowledgeable about all the problems having to do with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, before you get projects approved, how you engage with local communities and stakeholders. So there's no magic bullet for this. It's a lot of hard work at the ground level and engagement. They sort of try to hope that an intelligent conversation will give us a more rational answer. Would you say the development of natural gas is inevitable? And from your point of view, Jeff, would you say that Hawaii has to follow this because it's going to be a big picture in the energy landscape in the country and likely the world? Well, Hawaii has a choice of following it or continuing on the path of using, as I've said to you in past programs, continuing to use fuel oil. Fuel oil is going to become more and more expensive because the demand for the low sulfur fuel oil that Hawaii uses today is growing. Hawaii cannot. And it's demonstrated that now, time and time again, Hawaii cannot convert overnight to renewables. It needs a path to renewables. And so natural gas is one good path to renewables. To me, based on the economics, is a much more cost-effective path than fuel oil. Those are the two main choices unless you decide you want to use coal again. Thank you for that. And I might add that, Jeff is on to a very interesting point here because in 2020, all the fuel oil used by the marine, you know, the tankers, the cargo tankers, will be moving to a lower sulfur standard. And this means, at least for the interim, we think fuel oil prices are likely to go up considerably. Let me ask one last question. Go ahead. Sorry, Jeff. You've got the worst of the situations facing Hawaii. It's a Hobson's choice. You've got a rising price for fuel oil and you're being drained of the capital it takes to convert the infrastructure to utilize the lower cost fuel. So you've got the worst of both worlds facing it. I just want to ask one other question. That is, what role, in the discussion and the implementation of the ideas that come out at this workshop tomorrow, does the government play? What do you need, what do we need from the federal government in order to properly develop this resource? So we need policies which are robust under uncertainty that are flexible enough to allow for market forces to emerge and to address a wide range of outcomes for which we cannot predict. And we don't need a government policy in which they have a locked in vision of the future, which might be correct, but is often not correct. Yeah. Well, great to talk to you guys. I'm sorry we don't have more time. I hope we can do this again. I really like the two of you together, especially in that beautiful room. Well, you're going to make us buy new ties next time. Yeah, right. Okay, I'll be sending you a note about what kind of design for the ties. Okay, well, Lou, you have to go back to the party now and, Jeff, you have to get rest because tomorrow is a big day. And I wish you well on your conference and I hope we can get together again in two weeks hence to talk about how it went, among other things. Absolutely. Aloha, Jeff. Thank you, Lou. Thank you, Jeff Kissel. Aloha.