Why Should We Care About Asia’s Growing Energy Needs?
47:01 Share

Well, welcome everyone to Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific, brought to you by IEJ Media, our producer, and Bauer Group Asia, our sponsor. I'm Ray Powell, the former military officer here in California, and Jim Caruso, the former diplomat, I hear it is very warm now in Arizona. March 25th, it's 95 degrees outside, global warming, what's that? Yeah.

Well, I'm sure that our guest today knows nothing about hot temperatures. He is Paul Everingham coming to us from Singapore, I believe, although he spent recently some time in Western Australia. He is the inaugural chief executive of the Asian Natural Gas and Energy Association. And prior to that, in 2022, he served previously as the CEO of the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia.

And so, Paul, we want to welcome you from Singapore and ask you our first question, which is that according to a study commissioned by Angia, Asia's LNG demand is forecast to nearly double by 2050. Why is this happening, Paul Everham, and why should we care about it? Well, thanks, Ryan, Jim. Thanks for having me on your podcast. I'm excited to be here.

um yes our research over the last three years um on a few different occasions in different pieces of work highlights that lng demand will pretty much double between now and 2050. firstly the sort of next 10 years will largely be north asia dominated by china we see

China requiring 70 to 80 million tons more of LNG than they already have. Japan, Korea and Taiwan will take a little bit more each, but then sort of plateau. And then beyond 2035, we really think LNG growth is a...

a South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Southeast Asia, ASEAN story. So it's an exciting time to be in LNG, particularly in the Asia Pacific Basin. Why should you care? Well, I think for a few reasons and the reasons that I care, well, 50% of the world's growth

is likely to come from the Asia region over the next sort of 40 to 50 years. So if you're interested in economic growth, Asia is the place to be. It's why so many non-Asian countries are investing into Asia and you're seeing foreign direct investment at record levels in countries in Asia excluding China.

The other reason people should care is if you do care about climate change. Asia will be a lot more than 50% of the world's emissions by 2050. It's 40% now and growing.

And if you're serious about doing something on reducing emissions, Asia's the place you've got to do it. It's heavily dependent on coal, oil and diesel at the moment. And part of the reason our organisation was set up three or four years ago was to help with the transition. And then the other reason is more of a probably a diplomatic or humanitarian reason. Do you want our Asian neighbours to have the same standard

and quality of life that we do. Air quality, clean cooking fuel, clean transport fuel, air conditioning, all those sorts of things don't exist in a lot of emerging nations. So there's no reason for the West to deny those advances of modernity for those countries in Asia. So if you care about your Asian neighbours, you should be interested in energy in Asia.

So, Paul, maybe you can explain to us this idea of LNG as a transition fuel. Transitioning to what and why is it needed given that the price of solar especially has come down so far?

Yeah, look, good question. And thanks, Jim. I think, look, a lot of people have spoken about LNG and gas as a transition fuel for a few decades. I see it more than a transition fuel. I think it's like an economic and national security fuel personally. But the story behind it as a transition fuel was the world was heavily reliant on coal and oil for their energy systems and energy needs.

And gas is between 50% and 60% cleaner when you use it for electricity purposes than coal and oil, coal in particular. So it was deemed that moving away from coal and oil baseload capacity electricity, you needed a cleaner version that produced baseload because most of it, other than hydro, was

most of the newer forms of renewable electricity have low generation capacity. So wind is about 35% capacity, solar is about 30. That means for the time of day, you can expect them to be 30% efficient. The...

The rollout of solar in Asia has been largely dependent on having gas as a standby or backup or peaking fuel, as people say. Yeah, let's just define terms. So baseload is sort of continuous supply for a normal demand for electricity. Peaking is when it's very hot outside, people are running the air conditioning, and the additional supply at rapid order, right? Exactly. Okay. Okay.

So gas, you control the turbines really quick, so it's really good for peaking. Yeah, with coal and nuclear, you tend to run them 24-7. Their capacity to run up and down is...

quite stressful on the relevant equipment and machinery. With gas, it's called a flexible fuel. It's baseload, it's clean, but you can also pretty much turn it up and down as you need without really any impact on your assets or your maintenance.

So, Paul, of course, not everybody agrees that with the assessment that gas is clean. Right. And, you know, last year, the Biden administration initiated something called a pause on American LNG export facilities, something that wasn't lifted until the Trump administration came in.

So presumably the Biden administration believed that there was a problem with LNG and that perhaps its role as a transition fuel was maybe being oversold and that we would benefit from going more quickly to fully renewable sources. Why was that not correct?

Yeah, look, I think we were heavily sort of involved in that pause, the resulting outcomes from that pause, because LNG exports from the US really need to make their way ultimately. I know they predominantly go to Europe now, but ultimately for Asia to make that transition away from coal and oil, it will need large volumes of US gas in the Asia basin.

for that transition to happen. Now, yes, gas is a hydrocarbon. Yes, it emits more CO2, obviously, than solar and wind and hydro and nuclear. So it's not carbon neutral. But a few things. I think perfection is the enemy of the good. So this idea that you can go from

coal immediately to solar in any Asian country is physically impossible and scientifically ludicrous because simply we don't have, A, the battery capacity for solar and wind to store sufficient amounts of energy to power Asia, but also the other thing about emerging Asia in particular is there's massive energy

investment upgrades required for their power transmission infrastructure. So when there is that uptake of solar and wind through South and Southeast Asia, they'll also need to be in parallel billions or trillions of dollars worth of solar. So

The decision was made, we felt, for largely political reasons. Gas would help almost all Asian countries reach their nationally determined contributions for their Paris commitments. Gas also can utilise and does utilise in Asia. In fact, the largest carbon capture and storage project is in Asia and Australia.

So gas does use significant abatement mechanisms, including carbon capture and storage. So we felt like it was more political than sort of scientific as a reason. We understood the politics, but we're pleased that the decision has been lifted because the reality is it's not coal or gas versus solar energy.

In Asia, it's coal versus, if you're not going to change from coal, you're going to keep burning coal. Because at the moment, solar and renewable aren't by slight energy. All right. So again, to the geoeconomics a second, you mentioned that demand from China will, I think you said double.

Despite the fact their population is actually a loving walk to declining, their economy is growing much more slowly. They've invested hugely in renewables and nuclear. So where's the demand coming from? We think that gas plays a role in China as they, from between now and 2035, as they largely...

Stop building new coal-fired power generation. I know that, you know, a lot of the West doesn't think new coal-fired power generation is being built. But, you know, new large coal-fired power generation is being built every week in China. One new power station every week, coal-fired. One new coal-fired power station every month in India.

We think that gas will help slow that uptake of coal. So China's plan has been self-sustainability. So they control about 95% of the solar supply chain, which is great for them, can be tricky for other countries, and they are self-sustainable from building out like coal

oem coal-fired power plants so by reading oem original equipment manufacturer okay well just like a computer yeah okay yeah so um so their their self-reliance is hinged upon they're building their own coal-fired power stations and they're building their own utility scale solar and wind

power stations to make themselves self-reliant. It's like a professed commitment by the Chinese Communist Party. And so, yes, they've got the biggest solar portfolio in the world by far, but they've also got the world's largest coal fleet and they're 35% of the world's emissions already, China alone. So we think...

for a range of geostrategic reasons. One, they've committed to not, I think by 2030, not build any new coal-fired power stations. That's when they're going to need more gas power. Plus, they're heavily reliant on one source of gas being Russia. Now, look, at the moment, you'd say, okay, well, who cares? They can just keep buying Russian gas. But

People like yourselves who've probably followed Russia-China relations for more than five minutes know that in the last 50 years, there's been conflict between Russia and China, particularly territorial disputes. So China never really wants to be reliant on one country too much. So we think they'll diversify. And you've seen that in the last six months. They've

bought LNG. They've renewed LNG contracts with Shell. Just last week, they announced a new LNG contract with Woodside. So they're diversing their gas supplies, so they're not too reliant on just Russia. So what we observe is we observe a rapidly developing global south demanding more and more energy as developing nations do as they industrialize.

We also see that the developed world is also needing more energy as things like AI and these kinds of things come online.

What is your projection of just meeting, forget LNG for a second, just everyone's energy needs? You know, just, and again, we're overgeneralizing, but everyone's energy, is there going to be sufficient energy to meet energy needs as the global south industrializes and the developed world, you know, turns into this new generation of computing? Yeah, look, and that's why I call it the energy expansion.

Ray rather than and Jim rather than the energy transition.

Coal use is surging. The last four years, coal use has risen largely on the back of China and India, but also Southeast Asia. So you've had record coal use for the last three years. There's no decline in coal use globally. So there's not a transition even happening at the moment. It's an expansion. There's more gas being used. You know, the US has had a revolution because of gas in terms of an energy revolution the last 10 or 15 years or so.

The US is going through perhaps their third iteration, you know, after the PC of the 1980s and 90s, the internet of the 2000s. Now the hyperscalers are going through this AI revolution that looks like doubling or tripling their energy requirements. You know, I think, you know, 90% or some ridiculous figure of people

percentage of data centers are US located so an enormous more larger amount of energy is going to be required domestically for the US so a few years ago I might have said to you yes there'll definitely be enough energy are there enough energy sources yes there are as long as everything stays on the table and nothing is ruled in or out you're seeing you know a lot of countries take the step to

renewing their commitment to nuclear. I think that's very wise. Everything should be on the table. We're going to need an all-portfolio approach because demand, even in Western economies for energy, is growing. And so I think if we keep everything on the table, we should have enough molecules and electrons

But if we start ruling stuff out like nuclear or we start saying, no, gas isn't a worthwhile fuel, we're definitely not going to have enough electrons and molecules. And you're going to keep a lot of that emerging Asia and Africa in suboptimal economic and living conditions. Now, you know, that's not a world I really want to be part of. So the LNG trade is you take...

natural gas, you put a hole in the ground, out comes the gas, then you freeze it, that shrinks. As you know, when something gets cold, it shrinks in volume. You put it into a tanker,

That's refrigerated and you ship it off to a country where then it's heated up again and goes into the pipelines in the domestic economy. So, A, that uses a lot of energy to freeze and unfreeze. But even more so, if I'm Japan or Taiwan or Korea, I'm dependent on these lengthy supply lines for my energy needs. Isn't that risky, especially in the current environment?

Yeah, you could look at it that way, Jim. I would say if you're Germany and Western Europe, you'd look at having a single pipeline to Russia as much more dangerous than having multiple LNG shippers coming to different ports in your country. So I would say LNG is a lot more flexible than pipeline gas, a lot more, because you can buy from multiple sellers and

You can have it land at multiple different ports like it does in Japan, China, Korea, not so much Singapore and Taiwan. They're small, obviously. Whereas if you're reliant on pipeline gas, ask Germany why they've just built a whole bunch of new LNG import terminals and stuff.

and never want to be reliant on a pipeline from a third party ever again. So yes, there are supply chain risks and yes, building out that supply chain takes time, effort and investment and that's part of the reason we were established nearly four years ago is we're working with developing countries on building out those sustainable supply chains

You know, investment, knowledge, infrastructure, they're all really required in large amounts to build out a complex, lengthy LNG supply chain. Took a long time to build it out with Japan, who were the pioneers. And, you know, we're starting now because we think in the 2030s, it's going to be the time for South and Southeast Asia to have their LNG revolution.

Well, speaking of pipelines, I noticed in the news last week that Taiwan's state energy firm invested in Alaska's new North Slope LNG project, which involves something like a 1,300-kilometer pipeline.

At least in the United States, the history of pipelines or the recent history of pipelines has been kind of dramatic, right? There have been showdowns. There have been reversals. Isn't investing in pipelines, isn't that its own kind of risk because you don't know who will be in charge in four years and whether you'll be able to see your pipeline all the way through? Exactly. Would Germany have ever invested in pipelines?

in Nord Stream if they knew Vladimir Putin was going to sort of be a Russian imperialist. And on the Alaska question, look, there definitely needs to be gas coming from the US into the Asia-Pacific Basin.

And it will, whether that's through the Panama Canal, whether it comes out of the Gulf of Mexico, goes down south through the Cape. That does add expense going that long way through the Cape. There are capacity constraints in the Panama Canal. There are terminals, export terminals being built in Mexico that would use US gas piped down from Texas and Louisiana.

In terms of Alaska, that 1300 kilometre pipeline, look, that adds an enormous expense and potential hurdle to the project. I'm not sort of going to throw into doubt whether it questions the viability because with time, everything is possible. But a 1300 kilometre pipeline is challenging and it's very expensive.

but West Coast US gas is definitely, we will need West Coast access gas into the Pacific Basin. And it might be that Mexico, Canada and Alaska are the three sort of terminals through which the US sends a lot of its molecules into the Asia Pacific along with the Panama Canal. So given the expected increase in demand for LNG,

And there seem to be constraints in production in Asia. Certainly, Eastern Australia is having an energy shortage now, and they're talking about restricting LNG exports. I believe all the other facilities in Asia are fully committed to right now. So you're saying the only possibility is U.S. gas to fill this gap?

Look, there will be other players, Jim. So they'll come deeper into Asia, in my opinion, Qatar. They've got a lot of gas. You're going to see new entrants, countries like Mozambique, I think other Middle Eastern entrants, Bahrain, potentially bringing LNG. But the big three players that you've mentioned, Australia, United States and Qatar,

Australia's sort of working really hard just to maintain its existing contractual commitments for LNG. So the new fields like Scarborough and northwest of WA, they're backfilling Pluto, existing contractual LNG commitments. So there's no expansion going on in Australia. A lot of it's for existing commitments. A bunch of Qatar's gas is for existing commitments to existing industries.

The swing player that by sort of 2040 will be 35% of the world's LNG is the US. That's sort of pretty well known that they'll dominate by 2040 in volumes. Now, a lot of US gas is going to Europe at the moment, but as it expands and more and more is produced, if we want Asia to move off coal,

because it's easily 50% of power production in Asia. In some countries, it's a lot more, 70 plus percent. We're going to need those extra volumes from the US. The trick is it will need to be affordable because we're talking about emerging Asia, not North Asia, like China and Korea and Japan have blue chip balance sheets available.

in South Asia they're emerging their their um finances aren't as strong counterparty risk is higher um so it will need to be in large volumes so to meet the demand and also affordable

Okay, so you mentioned these three players, Qatar, Australia, and the United States. I have, interestingly, lived in all three. And I can tell you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Qatar is much smaller than those other two. I know that'll be news for a lot of people tuning in today. But what is it that makes Qatar such a huge player in the liquid natural gas marketplace? Is it they just... Do they just...

happen to be sitting on an inordinate amount of it or is it that they're just very, very good at going to get it? I'd say both. Like you've seen the Middle East from an oil perspective historically, they've been very clever and productive at getting the best value out of their resource. So yeah, Qatar is sitting on a massive, massive gas resource, bigger than anything individually that I know.

like the us has a bunch of basins which collectively are bigger but qatar's got a single basin which is enormous much bigger than anything australia's got um and they've developed it sequentially cleverly and they haven't flooded the market they've done it very conservatively which is what they're continuing to do um and so you know

Japan and India and other players cleverly use Qatar as part of their portfolio strategy. So they'll get gas from all three or more. You must remember the early movers as producers in LNG were Indonesia and Malaysia. So they were the producers that sold the early cargos to the sort of technologists in Japan during the oil crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Now, the thing with Indonesia and Malaysia's fields is they're fully contracted and in decline, whereas you've got big fields still in Australia, Qatar and the US. Now, Australia's and Qatar's are committed, Qatar's expanding, so they'll have new contracts. And the US has such, well, they've got not only the Permian, the Eagleford,

um the north dakota fields but also that marcellus basin i mean that's like 100 years worth of gas for the whole world um it's in texas marcellus is pennsylvania um yeah so that that

Coming to market changes the global gas market. So Permian and Eaglefoot have changed domestic US energy and you've gone from being a coal economy to being a gas economy in the US over the last 10 years and your emissions have come down significantly, 50% of which are because you use gas now instead of coal.

But you'll change the world when you develop that Marcellus Basin and surrounds. Like that amount of gas coming to market will really, it'll be an energy dominance play. And I'm hearing those sorts of terms used by the new Trump administration. So they know what they're talking about. And they've got a very clever new energy secretary who I heard speak a couple of weeks ago in Houston.

And the U.S. knows what it's got, and it's extremely powerful as a result, and it will have positive affirming impacts throughout Asia as a result. And just to show how quickly things changed, in the early 2000s, they took a bunch of State Department officers to see the LNG receiving terminal that was being built in Maryland because the U.S. had an LNG shortage.

And lo and behold, it's now an exporting terminal. So you never know. When I look ahead and the question I have about your outlook is if these small nuclear reactors really are working or effective, are they going to be the alternative to your outlook for LNG? I think like I'm bullish on gas and LNG, whether it's domestically produced or shipped in,

I'm bullish regardless, but as an individual and also as an organisation, everything's got to be on the table to solve this energy expansion because there's just so much demand and projected demand. If you don't, you're going to really restrict and retard people's personal wellbeing and economies and countries' wellbeing.

Nuclear is very exciting. I think it's very sensible to be investigating not only small modular reactors but modern fusion technology versus fission. And I think nuclear will play a significant role in the clean, emission-free baseload power industry.

sources for a lot of countries, albeit my view is it'll be a lot of Western countries. So European, American, Canadian, hopefully Australia, but there's a debate going on at the moment. I don't think they will dominate South and Southeast Asia. There's geographic and geological issues in parts of Asia because of the stability of the geology.

Japan's already got a large nuclear fleet. Korea's got one. Taiwan's got one. Singapore, I doubt, will. Very small island nation. But I think you'll see in Western nations and North Asia, nuclear plays a massive role. Will it impact LNG volumes? It might. But like I said, everything's got to be on the table.

And the more solutions there are to a cleaner future, the better. I want to come back to something that Jim asked about earlier because I'm really interested in this, in part because one of our previous guests was from Taiwan and he talked about the concern that he had that a blockade of Taiwan might start with simply China going out and starting to turn around LNG ships.

So, you know, trying to stay below that threshold of open war, trying to sort of keep everything, you know, for the U.S. from getting involved. China just decides, you know what, we should start turning around those ships and see what happens, see how everybody responds. So if I'm Taiwan, I think

If I can't keep LNG ships coming in, what do I have? I mean, if you're Taiwan, don't you have to find something that's not dependent on delivery by sea? Yeah, and look, they're a LNG-dependent country, but it's not their only source. They still use coal oil and nuclear, and they've got a little bit of renewables. But yeah, like 40% of their electricity is gas. Yeah.

And look, three years ago, we had a close look at Taiwan, predominantly from a storage point of view, the sort of stuff you're talking about, how self-sufficient are they? You can be very self-sufficient with LNG. It just requires investment in storage infrastructure. And back then, three or four years ago, we sort of felt that they could have more storage

And as a result, I think, not just because of what we said or did, but through their own sort of approval processes, our understanding is Taiwan's been building a lot more storage capacity. So I think their storage capacity plus the fact that they have coal, oil, diesel, nuclear and some renewable energy sources gives me some optimism, but...

you know, a blockade of Taiwan is going to do a lot more than just block energy. Like it'll block food and they'll probably, you know, there'll be cyber attacks galore. So there'll be a lot going on at once. And hopefully that Taiwan in their preparations is able to make sure that they've got sufficient molecules and electrons in store should that happen, which I hope doesn't.

Well, keeping with Ray's catastrophic view of the world, the South China Sea obviously is a difficult issue for who controls it. And some say that one reason China is so interested in controlling it is because it has a lot of gas. Do you know if that's the case? And if so, is there an estimate how much gas it might have?

It definitely has gas and that nine dash line sort of impedes particularly the Philippines and Vietnam's capacity to develop deep water fields. So the Philippines is a gas economy and Malampai, the field you guys alluded to earlier, has been a prosperity project for the entire Philippines and

They have a vibrant growing economy as a result of that energy resource. It's in decline, but they are doing exploration in deeper water. If they go beyond that nine-dash line, they have encountered difficulty from China. For me, that would suggest, yes, the Chinese are interested in restricting the Philippines' capacity to become energy self-sufficient.

and B, they might want it for themselves. Albeit, you know, there's naval and strategic shipping lane politics overlaying all of that, Jim. So I'm not saying energy is the only reason, but it's probably one of the reasons. Same as Vietnam. Off their east coast, though, in deep water, they've got gas resources. I think, look,

you know if you found another malampaya somewhere of deep water off philippines or vietnam yeah would china want that if they thought it was within the nine dash line absolutely um uh and you know vietnam hasn't been able to develop their offshore fields for the same reason china's nine dash line so um we think absolutely part of it is sort of energy security

But also if you control those shipping lines, you know, you control Asia. And that's what, you know, 400 years ago China sort of thought it did. And it might be they think that again. But I think there are a whole bunch of other Asian countries that have different ideas.

All right. Well, we're going to throw you an exit question here. And for that, I'm going to go back to my time in Australia. You, as we mentioned, were most recently came from Western Australia. And while I was in Australia, I, as the U.S. defense attache, I was invited to come to commemorations of many of Australia's historic battles. Hamel, Gallipoli, Coral Sea,

I was never once invited to a commemoration of the Great Emu War of 1932. So, Paul, as a longtime Western Australian, do you share my sense of indignation over this slight? Look, I don't even know what the Great Emu War of 1932 is, to be embarrassed on your podcast. But look, the US and Australia share an enormously rich history.

that includes fighting alongside each other in multiple wars, both great wars and many since. And my poppy, my grandfather, served in the Middle East in the Second World War and then in Asia alongside Americans

My father first tasted Coca-Cola as a little boy in Brisbane when General MacArthur had his Indo-Pacific headquarters there and a serviceman was selling Coca-Cola bottles and my grandma bought my dad a bottle and he tasted it and has been addicted to Coke ever since. Wow. Wow.

You're welcome. So we like to call Coke the freedom drink. Everywhere it goes, there's freedom. But as to the EMU wars, I'm not familiar with them, but you can certainly educate me.

Well, that's your homework assignment then, sir. I am disappointed. I'm sorry. We may have to bump this a little back further in the rotation. But no, it's one of the great Western Australia novelty stories. Not just a story. It's true. I can guarantee you it's true because it's on Wikipedia. It must be true. Drop bears.

All right. Well, Paul Everingham, we thank you for helping us understand how this extremely important looming issue and current issue for Asia is unfolding. We thank you for letting our audience understand. And we hope that we'll have you back again, sir. Thank you.

And of course, we want to thank our sponsor, Bauer Group Asia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific and applies unmatched expertise and experience to help clients navigate the world's most complex and dynamic markets, including Asia's energy market. Jim Caruso, of course, is a senior advisor with Bauer Group, and you can visit them at bauergroupasia.com. And Jim, thank you so much for joining us.

I am not an Asia energy expert, but the more I look at it, the more I think this could really be a source of a lot of geopolitical tension and a lot of country by country, a lot of local dramatics or even crisis going forward because the energy needs are really climbing. That's right. And when you think about even what we're seeing in Australia right now, so the east coast of Australia, where all the people live,

as an energy shortage brewing because they have not invested in additional energy supply. And yet they export huge amounts of LNG to North Asia. At some point, the politics is going to kick in that they say, we don't want exporting anymore. And what does that do? First of all. Second of all, as we sort of discussed, these LNG tankers are enormous floating companies.

I don't want to say bombs, but they're highly volatile. And one shipment is a huge amount of energy. So it doesn't take a lot of turning around of these tankers, LNG carriers, to create an energy crisis in Japan or South Korea or Taiwan, which depends on them. So to me, that's a huge...

stranglehold if a country chooses to use it. Yeah. And I mean, again, as Victor Chin told us in our session with him,

I think this is something that Taiwan has to worry about a lot. And I think that Paul may have undersold the potential that China could gradually move toward a blockade and that energy could be like that first step. Because if you hit them with cyber and food and everything else all at the same time, then that looks like a real act of war.

And that might change the West's and the United States' calculus. Whereas if you just go out and start saying, you know what, we should inspect all of those LNG ships, and we might decide that some of them just don't pass our inspection. And all of a sudden, those just don't arrive. And that turns up the pressure there on Taiwan. I think it's also worth pointing out that NGIA, the organization that Paul's the head of,

is a membership organization of natural gas producers, explorers, and users. So it's... Of course, right. So yes, in case it's not obvious, Paul Everingham has a particular viewpoint, which is going to be informed by the fact that they represent natural gas, liquid natural gas specifically. Right. Just so that's clear.

All right. Let me tell you my natural gas story. You have one. Oh, sure. Look at me. Look how gassy I am. So I was the economic counselor at Embassy Jakarta. And Atlantic Richfield had spent years developing a huge gas field in West Papua, the other end of the country. And then the company was sold to British Petroleum, BP. So I thought, I'd better go see what they bought. So I get on a plane.

to land at this tiny airport on the edge of West Papua, where the end of the runway is a cliff. So if the brakes fail, yeah, it's not good. Then we get off of that. We drive for two hours to a huge bay. We get on an outboard motored craft, and we sail for another two hours, and we reach...

a huge modern LNG plant in the middle of nowhere. But then they want to take me to the village they built for the local people. So we land on the dock and there I'm met by, must be 50, 100 children who are all there. And as I land, they start crying. All on cue, they start crying. Oh, Mr. and Mr. Oh, we're so sad, Mr. I don't know what's going on. Then we walk up the road towards the village and then it's trial by women.

And there are all these women by the side of the road crawling on their hands and the Mr. Mr. Mr. We're so sad. We're so sad. Please help us, Mr. Wow. Still don't know what's going on. And then as we approach the village, which, by the way, has new houses and looks very nice.

All the women hold hands with me and we go singing into the village to the meeting room. Wow. And at the meeting room, it's explained to me that while they have these beautiful houses, they don't get free electricity and they've all given motorbikes, but they weren't given money to buy gas and they're not given jobs at the LNG plant.

And I asked the BP minder, I said, why don't you give them jobs? He said, because they all want to be managers and they're not really literate. But it was really interesting, the culture class. Oh, and they said they took away our best fishing ground. Where is it? It's at the pier where the LNG is loaded into the tanker.

And they said, is that true? Well, it became the best fishing ground when they built the pier and piers attract fish. Okay. So it was just the most amazing culture clash that you give us all this free stuff, but we can't really afford it. And a 21st century LNG plant with people who a few years ago were subsistence fishermen. So I blame you. And that's the important thing, really.

You're a cold hearted man, Mr. Caruso. All right. Well, we are our producer. Ian Ellis Jones is not a cold hearted man. In fact, he is graciously continuing to produce our podcast and bring it to all of you through his company, IEJ Media, which continues to get more and more attention. Please follow him on X at Ian Ellis Jones. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe.

Did I say that loud enough? Please subscribe and follow us. If you're on YouTube, you can do it at youtube.com at IT podcast. Of course, we are on all the audio streaming services. You can subscribe on those too. Then you don't even have to think about it. You like, for example, if you came in today, you would have found our latest episode already on your phone. You wouldn't have even had to think about it.

You can go back and listen to some of our old podcasts. We talked about the one that we did with Victor Chin from the Kuomintang, which was episode 42. Why should we care about the Kuomintang, Taiwan's opposition party? You can go back and listen to episode 58 if you want to learn about critical minerals, which we did with Mel Sanderson. Why should we care about critical minerals?

If you just want to keep up with what we're doing, then you can go out to your social media. We're on X, we're on Blue Sky, we're on LinkedIn. And if you want to email us because you have something important to tell us, indopacificpodcast at gmail.com. We do look at all of those and we actually do what they say in many cases. Many of our guests have come from suggestions that came from that email.

Finally, we want to once again thank our sponsors, Bauer Group Asia. You can go visit them at bauergroupasia.com. In the meantime, I'm Ray, and that's Jim. For Ian, we say thanks for joining us on Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific.