Jean Ann Salisbury: Hi. Putting aside the denial of the Lake Charles’ extension, I just wanted to get an update on the contracting and EPC environment, it sounds extremely competitive out there?
Tom Long: Yes, we anticipated a question around LNG. So I’m going to make a little broader statement than your question, if you don’t mind, and that may help on some potential other questions. People have asked us how do we feel? What’s our thoughts and what happened 10 days ago? And a lot of adjective and things that we said, I can’t say on this call, but I can’t say things like upset and frustrated and shocked and surprise. But at the end of the day, it was just wrong. It was wrong and it was political. And what also was wrong is what’s happened over in Europe and really in the U.S. And that really came to fruition here this past year when Russia attacked Ukraine and everybody now is not denying the need for natural gas, not for five to 10 years, but for 25, 30, 40 years.
And everybody knows that and thank goodness for a warm winter catastrophic both economically and from a human standpoint. So we jumped to Lake Charles, we’ve been working on Lake Charles for a number of years. We’ve spent over $200 million. We have worked our tails off to try to get this project online. Then the pandemic hit, that slowed us down significantly. And then, of course, as I just mentioned Russia attacked Ukraine. It flipped to $180 million and all of a sudden everybody woke up and the demand has increased astronomically. And we beefed up our team. We began traveling throughout the world throughout Asia and Europe. We’ve done that consistently over the last year. We immediately asked for an extension from FERC. They gave us that extension, May of last year.
We then asked the DOE in June of last year for an extension. We are in negotiations to your question as we speak with over 20 million tons of additional customers on top of what we’ve already signed up. We have significant equity players that we’re in negotiations with. And for months, we’ve been given every indication that the DOE would approve our extension. And then low and behold, here recently, they’ve come out and said that because of a new policy, they are not going to extend our request. And they’ve cited the lack of progress. So here’s the DOE citing the lack of progress. They have not asked us onetime over the last year how we progress it. They don’t know if we’re out there right now of building facilities. We already have four tanks built.
We already have a dock built. It’s a brownfield unlike some of our competitors. And so it needless to say a little frustrated. Additionally, we’ve had one customer come to us after we heard that 10 days ago and said they’ll go another direction at least for now. And we think it’s extremely important to reverse this decision as quickly as possible so it doesn’t harm us more than it already has. And so, we will be asking as Tom mentioned earlier, we will be asking for rehearing and we’re hoping that reasonable and rational minds at the DOE will prevail and they’ll reverse what was an arbitrary and capricious political decision.
Jean Ann Salisbury: Okay. Yes, you really have put a lot of work into it over the last year and before that as well. So thank you for that. Just with a follow-up on something else. Energy Transfer has not been shy about your belief that the sector needs more integration. Can you speak to how you evaluate these opportunities? Looking at Lotus and Enable, is it fair to say that upstream flow into your is kind of a major filter of what you would be looking for?
