Plugged In and Grounded

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, Senior Managing Partner at Sprott Asset Management. Today, I'm excited to welcome Arjun Murti, founder and publisher of Super-Spiked, a Substack newsletter and podcast covering energy transition. Arjun joins us today with over 30 years of Wall Street experience covering global energy. Arjun, thank you for making the time today to join us on Sprott Radio.

Arjun Murti: Ed, I've been a long-time listener and a big-time fan, so thank you for having me.

Ed Coyne: Wonderful. Well, at least you eventually found a way to fall asleep at night, so I appreciate you being a listener. Let's go into your career, being 30 years in global energy. Talk to us about that and your life on Wall Street. Then, I want to dive into your newsletter and podcast as well, but talk a bit about your history and background first.

Arjun Murti: Sure. I consider myself lucky, Ed. I found a job that I loved out of college as an equity research analyst. I've been doing it now for 32 years. Even as my titles and some of the roles have changed, I still identify as an equity research analyst. I think some perspectives and mindsets go with that phrasing that we can get into. The first 20 years of my career were in various Wall Street jobs. I started at a boutique investment bank in Denver.

I was on the buy-side of JP Morgan, and then the bulk of my career, some folks might still remember, was at Goldman Sachs as the major oils analyst and led the energy business unit and, in the end, ran the Research Department. I had the good fortune to retire as a partner from Goldman in 2014, got to see my children through middle and high school, and was doing board and advisory work. I joined the board of ConocoPhillips about ten years ago as a senior advisor at Warburg Pincus, and two public policy think tanks at Columbia and ClearPath. It was sometime around COVID and negative oil prices, but I got sucked into Twitter and started re-engaging and enjoyed it.

I made friends with Twitter, which led to me creating Super-Spiked, my Substack, in November of 2021, primarily because the world had started to ramp up this idea that we would have an energy transition. We have to have it on, and it has to be fast. It has to eliminate oil and gas and go entirely into renewables and all these perspectives, some reasonable but a lot unreasonable. I thought, "You know what? I may not know a lot about many things, but I do know something about energy. I do know something about energy systems. Let me start writing this Substack.”

It has elements of being an equity analyst, being macro, and the policy work and the board work I've done." I've enjoyed re-engaging on it. In the past year, it led me to "unretiring." I joined my former colleagues from Goldman and Tudor, Pickering, and Holt at a firm called Veriten, where there are about 15 people in total, including five partners. We help energy companies think through strategy transition, investor questions, etc. We also have a little bit of a fund that focuses on new energies.

Ed Coyne: Let's talk about defining energy transition because I think some people see it differently than others. It's one versus the other versus all in. Talk a bit about that. What does energy transition mean to you and your group?

Arjun Murti: Maybe we need to retire the term energy transition because it's taken on a little bit of a life on its own. The common definition, I think, for most people would be, "We're transitioning out of something presumably oil, gas, natural gas, and coal and into something else, which is overwhelmingly considered to be renewables." Then some folks will say, "Well, it's nuclear and some new technologies and other things." We will all do this by some round number: the year 2050 in this case. There are all aspects that I think are quite challenging. I'll start, and I'll try to keep this short.

I'll phrase it that there's the lucky 1 billion of us folks like me and you, Ed, that live in the U.S. or Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan. They use a disproportionate amount of the world's energy—five times the amount per capita than the other 7 billion people on earth use. Those other 7 billion people, like us in these lucky 1 billion countries, will aspire to better lifestyles and better economies, and ultimately, that means more energy use. We can debate how quickly that can happen. For some places, it's going to happen quickly, and unfortunately, for some places, it will take a long time.

Ramping up their energy use and thinking we're only going to do that with renewables or electric vehicles or any singular solution is where I think this notion of energy transition has gone off the rails. Whether it should be energy evolution or diversification, or frankly just energy growth, hopefully in a lower carbon, less environmentally impactful manner. That's what I think we're headed toward versus this; I will call it an ideologically driven version of transition, which means going out of something into something else in a short time frame.

Ed Coyne: Yes, the 2050 seems aspirational at best. I applaud that goal, but I was talking to someone recently. I said, "Over 80% of our energy consumption is still oil and gas," which will be a very long transition. Talk about the 7 billion for a second. That's a number I don't think I fully appreciated. What if half or a quarter of them decide to buy some lamps, light bulbs, and maybe a dishwasher for their house? What is that going to do to the energy demand?

Arjun Murti: Being historically a legacy oil analyst. I'm going to do this in oil terms. The world uses about 103 or 104 million barrels a day of oil. About half are rich countries; the other half are 7 billion people. In the rich countries, we use about 13 barrels per person. Here in the U.S., we use over 20 a person. South Korea's 20, and it varies. Europe's ten and other countries are somewhere in between. In the developing world, the other 7 billion people use just three barrels per person. In India, it's barely one-and-a-half barrels per person for 1.4 billion people. Africa is barely one barrel per person for about 1.3 or 1.4 billion people.

If you just said, "What is social justice? What is economic or environmental justice?" To me, as someone who's pro-capitalism, it is that we are all similarly rich. As opposed to what I'm going to call socialism, we're all similarly poor. I'm smiling as I'm saying that. We take the optimistic capitalist view of the world. I'll say 10 barrels per person would be an equitable split if we want to use that type of language. That would correspond to a 250 million barrel-a-day oil market. Now, that could be 100 years from now if it takes some countries and regions a long time to develop.

I also think we won't ever have a 250 million barrel-a-day oil market because it will imply a level of oil imports in places like India and China, and they will be highly motivated not to go down that road. I think there's a huge motivation from the perspective of geopolitical security and economic development to figure out new technologies, what we might call transition. From this perspective, the lens is how you make your country and people rich and how you do it in a geopolitically secure manner, and the cost and reliability of these things are also important metrics.

We can start shaving from the 250 downwards. I push back on the term energy transition because we somehow know today what technologies will ramp at scale, affordable, and reliable; we don't have the answer. We have partial solutions. Electric vehicles will solve a part of the problem, especially for affluent people, but we don't know how we will get there for huge aspects of our energy usage. I think we're going to figure it out over the next 20 to 30 years, but the idea that we know that today and therefore can declare some goal by 2050 of net zero, that's where I think there are a lot of issues with both the objective and how it's portrayed.

Ed Coyne: You mentioned something that I think few people, including myself, don't spend as much time thinking about, which is security. I'm in New York today. You're in LA today. We live on the coast and think that's the world. There's a big wide world out there that has a lot of issues, and security is certainly one of them. Maybe spend a little more time on that. What does that look like, from both traditional energy sources like oil, gas, and even coal to some of the more alternative energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear, which are getting a new renewed fan base?

Arjun Murti: My starting point is that energy is essentially a hierarchy of needs. We all need it. It has to be abundant and available, and that's all we all care about. When there's a storm and some outage, no one cares what they pay for it. No one cares what country it comes from. No one cares, "Oh, is it coal? Is it nuclear? Is it renewables?" No one cares. They care that when you want to start your car, it turns on. When you turn on your light switch, the lights come on whether it's electric or internal combustion. That's all anyone cares about. After that, you would prefer it to be affordable. No one wants a perpetually high cost of energy.

Typically, the most successful economies have a very low cost of energy. That's been a huge competitive advantage for the U.S., for example. You'd like it to be from geopolitically secure countries. I say this, Ed, the worst day of my career, it's not even a close call, was 9/11 when the hijackers took down the towers. The next day, I was filling my car with gasoline that defacto came from Saudi Arabia, where a disproportionate amount of the hijackers came from. The point was simply that even geopolitical security will take a backseat to whether it is available, is abundant, and can get it today. From a country standpoint, we are really lucky in the U.S.

We were importing 11 or 12 million barrels a day of oil. Thanks to the shale oil revolution and growth in Canadian oil sands, we're basically balanced when you add up the U.S. and Canada. Our geopolitical position is significantly good. We're still subject to volatile prices. From a dependency standpoint, the U.S. and Canadian economies can no longer be held hostage by producers in other countries. I think other areas are going to look at it the same way. If you're China and you've replaced the U.S. as the one importing 11 or 12 million barrels a day, China, Ed, barely uses four barrels per capita, and the U.S., we're 20.

Yes, China is richer than it once was, but no one would say it is rich like the U.S. or Europe, at least in terms of the totality of its population. If you're in China and you're importing 11 million barrels a day, and your consumption is four barrels per capita, and you want to be rich, maybe you won't; that's a separate podcast. We can debate the trajectory of China, but they're going to try to be rich. That, to me, is their motivation to do electric vehicles. They're doing it with a lot of coal-fired power generation and renewables. The point here is that I don't view that as China's climate objective. I view it as a geopolitical security objective.

When I look at India, which is just getting going, they're barely at one and a half barrels per capita oil consumption. They have very little indigenous oil supply. China has some more than India, but they both have very little relative to what would be a fully developed economy. They will be motivated to figure out, "What else can we do?" Maybe what else they can do is also avoid things like SUVs and vehicle weights.

There are lots of different ways to look at this. Still, I think the geopolitical imperative, if you're a developing country, especially in Asia, where you're generally not blessed with lots of oil or natural gas, is going to motivate new technologies, which almost, by definition, are going to be low carbon in nature—abundance, affordability, reliability, geoportal security, and, after that, environmental and climate conditions. I'll wrap up with just a short point here. There's almost a perfect correlation between societal wealth, which is also perfectly correlated with energy usage, and how clean your air and water are. Look at a map of clean air. It perfectly correlates with fossil fuel usage.

It's not that fossil fuels clean up the air; they don't, but they are synonymous with your country being rich. Therefore, you can enact strict clean air standards or clean water standards. In trying to get to lower carbon intensity, I think geopolitics will be the motivator as opposed to trying to starve people of energy or forcing them only to use societally approved forms of energy. It will be a geopolitical motivator, and we will get there, but I think the timing's uncertain. That's where I push back on the 2050 objective, the idea that we know by 2050 we will get there.

Ed Coyne: It's certainly an aspirational date, no question about it. Even if we get 10% of the way there, I have to believe that the general price and supply demand of all these critical materials to get us to some objective will be much higher and much more volatile. Let's talk about it from a business standpoint. What do you see from a business transition standpoint? Do you see partnerships, mergers, and oil & gas companies changing their operations? What is changing? What do you see on the business side of things?

Arjun Murti: It was a tough last decade for the shale producers, especially for energy. The returns on capital, which were good into the 2000s, were terrible in the 2010s. That's a little bit of its nature. The cycles tend to be long-term, and I've always focused on the long-term profitability cycle. We might call that return on capital employed or cash return on cash invested. There are a few different corporate-level metrics to look at. Those cycles tend to be 10 to 15 years up and 10 to 15 years down. We're coming off one of those long down periods. Maybe we're now in year three of a new upcycle. We've also got this uncertainty about what energy transition means.

I believe that oil and natural gas demand will grow for the foreseeable future and that there is no round number year, let alone decade, where anyone can know when it will peak, but others have questions. The portfolio managers will say, "Well, you may be right, Arjun, but others think it's going to go away. Maybe it's something between," but I know these companies did poorly last decade. I'm going to demand they give all the cash back to me. I think I understand that perspective.

Cash return to shareholders should be a component of every company's business strategy. Still, no one's acting like this business will have a future, including oil and gas companies. They are all acting like maybe not this year, but oil demand could plateau within ten years. I'd say, "What if that doesn't happen?" The risk is skewed towards moving up that energy and economic S-curve for the developing world and continued growth in oil and gas demand. Right now, we have sufficient supply to meet demand, but these companies, for the first time in my 30 years, are all acting like the business is going away. You can see it in all the mergers.

These mergers are generally consolidations, coring up acreage positions, cost cutting, and efficiency gains, with rare exceptions “is anyone talking about growth, here's expiration, or other things we should be doing. Now, whether that motivates new technology development is an angle. I respect companies saying, "We're going to study the new stuff and see if any of it makes sense." We've not had it yet. We've not had investors return to this sector and say, "We trust you to spend money, and some reasonable growth is required." We're not there yet. I think we will get there in the coming years.

Ed Coyne: It sounds a lot like the nuclear or, better put, the uranium market. Everyone forgot about it, gave up on it, reactors were shutting down, all these things. There was no new supply coming to market. We saw it go from $30 to over $100 a pound in a very short period, and that seems to continue to grow. You can see the same thing happening in the oil and gas industry. I think it goes full circle back to: "We need everything. We need it all."

The greatest risk is that I think there will be a winner. If we bring it all to market, the winner will probably be us as consumers. What other risks are out there, then? From a business and consumer standpoint, what aren't we paying attention to that we should be looking out for?

Arjun Murti: Before I answer that, I want to expound upon one comment you said, which I think is very insightful and accurate in that there are a lot of parallels between what's going on with oil and gas and what's going on in the nuclear space and the metals and mining space more broadly. I know you all are experts on it and have done some great work and some great podcasts on it. There's a lot of common ground here where the world needs all this stuff.

These are the basic materials; in literal terms, this energy runs the economy, but it was such a bad decade. Software has understandably been exciting and hot, and AI has been exciting and hot. That is where the nexus of the New World and Old World is coming together. It is going to be this artificial intelligence revolution. I apologize that that is a buzzword today, but when people like Marc Andreessen said, "Software's going to eat the world," I agree, "Software is eating the world," but all software requires hardware, and all hardware requires energy. The tech companies are getting that today, and they're starting to recognize that power and energy don't just magically bubble out of the ground.

When we have this ideology that it all has to be solar and wind, there's nothing wrong with solar and wind. What I like about solar and wind is that they become domestic resources once they are up and running. You don't import solar from another country. The issue, as we all know, is it's intermittent. In the absence of long-duration storage or natural gas backup, you will have to deal with that intermittency. Your data center does not run only on some cycle. You're going to want to run it 24/7. These are huge power needs.

I think big tech is going to be one of the enablers to moving towards a healthier discussion about energy, where we get out of this; climate's all that matters, and fossil fuels are evil or vice versa if you're on the other side of the aisle in a political sense of it. I think big tech can bridge the gap because, at the end of the day, people want to plug in their iPhones and have them work. People want to pull up their Copilot or ChatGPT and have the answer spit out anytime they do it, not just when the sun is shining.

There's a lot of opportunity to have a healthy discussion on this. I think tech is going to be one of the big enablers. The big risks are that in the absence of a healthy discussion on this, in the spirit of where people are now trying to divide groups, you're either pro-climate or against climate. You either support net zero, or you're a "climate denier." If you say anything good about fossil fuels, that sort of demonization or rhetoric.Or the opposite:I don't support the anti-ESG anti-climate efforts either, which I think are equally challenged; they're just a little smaller in scale relative to the pro-climate stuff.

We could do without both extremes. The world needs energy. The world would like a clean environment. The world will want to ultimately move to lower carbon forms of energy if for no other reason than geopolitical security. The risks are that by demonizing this and making it a political event, you will result in the worst of all worlds where you don't have cheap energy. It's not any cleaner than it ever was. We all face brownouts and blackouts. We've all known that's a risk in the developing world. It's a risk in the developed world.

Ed Coyne: That's a great point. Let's stay on the theme of tech for a second, both from a production standpoint. What technologies are you seeing coming online that will make extraction potentially easier, more profitable, or cheaper for the consumer? Then, what do you see from a tech standpoint on how to consume energy in acleaner, safer, and less expensive way? Let's start with the production side first as it relates to tech.

Arjun Murti: On the production side, a lot of traditional energy is legacy companies that have been around for 100 years. They're just now all in the process of moving to modern data architecture. They're cleaning up their data. If you've been around for 80 years and done 52 acquisitions, you've got a whole bunch of not clean data on a bunch of different systems. This digital transformation is going to revolutionize efficiency gains in something like shale.

When you think about U.S. shale, which has had massive growth, people wonder, "Is it mature? Is it going to plateau and possibly decline?" There's a lot of running room to go in or at least get more out of the existing shale reservoirs. There are a lot of wells. There's a lot of zones. There's a lot of different ways to crack. There are a lot of different ways to optimize water and gas handling, all these things. I think big data and AI will be helpful in that, and that will ultimately lead to more oil supply.

It's still going to be cyclical and volatile. We're still going to need new exploration and so forth, but it's an example where I think there is an AI argument in the positive sense of enabling additional oil supply out of U.S. shale as an example. I think where there's more uncertainty is on the demand side of the equation. I mentioned electric vehicles before. There's no question that electric vehicles are attractive to a subset of the population. I have driven a Tesla for eight years now. I also mentioned that I'm a retired Goldman Sachs partner who can afford it. I live in a nice house where you can have the charger in your garage. That is not everyone's situation.

The idea that you will force everyone to buy an electric vehicle doesn't make sense. I think if it wins in the marketplace, there will be a subset of people who prefer driving an EV. If you're China, you're doing it for geopolitical reasons. I think beyond that, it's hard to name the technologies that you can say with high confidence, "This is going to work." An example is sustainable aviation fuel. Are we sure we can take the cost from seven times the price of jet fuel to something more parity? Renewable diesel takes a whole bunch of subsidies and tax credits to have these projects go forward.

The inherent cost is double, with crude oil-based diesel as an example. I think we're still working through what the new technologies are going to be. I believe nuclear is going to be part of the answer. It poses the question: do we need different business models? Is there something that the UAE and China have done well, whereas, in the U.S., it's an individual utility doing a project? Then, a different utility is doing a different project, so you may not get the cost savings or earnings.

Is there a better way to do that? With public-private partnerships, I would wonder about what kind of regulatory reform we need. Then there are all the other technologies—we're spending lots of money on them. At Veriten and Super-Spiked, we take it seriously. We think there's a motivation. What I think is we don't know what is going to scale. We know the shale scale. Shale went from nothing to making the U.S. the largest producer within a decade.

We don't know what other hockey sticks are going to happen. Still, the world is pretending that they do know, that they do know all these other technologies, like hydrogen or sustainable aviation fuels or whatever, that they're going to hockey stick up over the next ten years. That is far from certain. You can go from a science project to a lab to a pilot project and scale within some short, arbitrary time frame. It could all happen; we don't know when.

Ed Coyne: Let's shift to the investor's lens for a second, their point of view. To be super blunt, how do we make money off of all this? All these things are happening, and all these transitions are going on. How, from an investor's perspective, should they consider investing in this space? What should they be looking for? How do you allocate capital? How do I participate?

Arjun Murti: There are many different types of investors out there. I'll give you my personal style: I've always taken a longer-term approach to the sector, given the nature of the commodity cycles. They're 10 to 15 years up, 10 to 15 years down. At Goldman, I dealt with some of the hedge funds and clients who are more trading-oriented. Some did an excellent job of figuring out the shorter-term inflections or getting in and out of this stock or subsector into another. It has never been quite my thing.

I focus on who will generate excellent long-term returns on capital, who might not be doing as well today on return on capital but has a restructuring plan to get better, and who is committed to dividends and stock buybacks. Where I think we are today is that improvement in the sector from having poor returns to having at least improved returns was the 2021 to 2023 rallying the sector. I think it's about the stuff we've just been discussing, Ed. Who has a vision for the future?

Who is not simply trying to run out the clock on their remaining tenure as an executive or management team before "peak demand happens?" Who is going to figure out how do you work with technology companies? Should you be trying to do something different? If you weren't in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) business as an example, how can you play in that if it will be a source of future growth? I think the answers aren't always obvious. Right now, there's a lot of consolidation in the shale space. I understand it.

The cost-cutting, the synergies, and the bigger acreage positions make sense, but where will the deals for more exploration in Africa or other parts of the world need oil and gas? Or, as you suggested earlier, who will crack their code, and how can nuclear work with technology? Which companies can articulate a positive vision for the future, and how will they participate in that? There are very few who do that.

Ed Coyne: I suspect mergers, acquisitions and partnerships will be part of the environment in the coming decade as this continues to evolve. Is that something you're already starting to see, or is it down the road?

Arjun Murti: We've already seen a lot of M&A in the traditional energy sector. What we haven't seen is new capital formation. If you look at the number of energy names in the S&P 500, the major index, it peaked at, I want to say 43 names in that 2010 to 2012 time frame. It generally ranged from low- 20s to mid-40s. After the recent bout of mergers, if Hess gets acquired by Chevron and there are other mergers recently announced, you'll be down to 20 or 21 names in the S&P 500. We've seen a real shrinkage and consolidation in the sector.

Some think this trend can continue so we may have even fewer names. What I'm wondering is when people feel positive about the sector. It goes into this idea of believing in how you will participate in future energy growth while generating good returns on capital and having IPOs and new companies added. We've not gotten to that portion of the cycle, which tells me, from a long-term standpoint, that the sector is still under-owned and under-respected. People still have this idea that it's all going away.

If you share my view that it isn't all going away and we're going to need these companies, I think the question I'll ask is, "When are we going to get new IPOs? When are we going to get new companies formed with new ideas?" We probably don't need another Permian company at this point. That's going in the other direction. Is it the Montneys in Canada? Is it an oil sands name? Is it an offshore expiration name? Where are the new ideas? Who is funding these? A lot of capital has left the sector. Where are the management teams that have a positive vision? That's what we're looking for at this point. That is, to me, where there will be the greatest opportunity.

The sector has a value element, but when does the glass become half full again? You can see it in the merchant power stocks. If you look at a basket of merchant power companies in the U.S., they've done as well as NVIDIA over the last year. Everyone knows NVIDIA has been a home-run AI stock. Look at Talen, look at Constellation, and look at Vistra as a basket. They have done as well as a leading AI company because people say, "We're going to need merchant power." When will the merchant power moment come to the rest of traditional energy?

Ed Coyne: Talk a little about that for a second because most people, including myself, don't hear that term very much.

Arjun Murti: Most people think that power is being done by regulated big utilities, and they have a set rate of return on the investment project. That has been the bulk of the business, but it's certainly been the case for most of my career. There's always been a group of companies that develop power projects on their own. Historically, this was natural gas. Today, it could also be renewables. They're more nimble often than the regulated utility. They don't necessarily have the full spectrum of transmission lines and all that goes with providing power to customers, either businesses or consumers. They tend to have not that part of it. They have just the power plant part of it.

It tends to be able to stay in a free market or at least a non-regulated market, where it generates power and receives the power price that is prevailing at that hour or that day. It can be a very volatile business. It has a decent amount of risk to it. Now, you might contract out some of this power, that's with the business. That is what you're starting to see with some of these technology companies: we are willing to buy this power at XYZ power price for the next 20 years so that you'll develop the power plant and sell us the power.

Maybe we're buying that power at a higher-than-average price so that you can have confidence in developing the project, or at least we're taking out the volatility of the peaks and the troughs, which the troughs you might prefer to get rid of as a company. These stocks have been like any unregulated industry, cyclical and volatile and so forth. What I think the market is seeing today is that there is going to be a lot of power needed.

As the grid has become more intermittent and more solar, and as in the U.S., we've had flat power demand for the last 20 years, it's now starting to grow again. It's growing again at the time we've added all these intermittent resources to the grid. We're going to need more power, full stop. We're going to get more renewables. We will also need more baseload power like natural gas, and nuclear is going to be part of this solution.

Ed Coyne: Are there any questions that I haven't asked, points, or topics you want to get across before we shut it down?

Arjun Murti: The final point I would make that we haven't talked about is there's this odd thing where in the U.S. and Canada, we have a large population that uniquely tries to attack U.S. and Canadian oil and gas companies. That is something I don't understand. If you don't like oil and gas, I don't have a problem with it. If you don't like oil and gas executives, I don't have a problem with that either. As an investor and an analyst, we don't like all these companies or these management teams. I get it. I don't understand that if you're an environmentalist, I respect your right to advocate for the environment.

We need people like that to ensure we have cleaner air and water and meet other goals. Why are you starting with U.S. and Canadian oil and gas companies? It's against our national interests. It's against geopolitical security. It's against the safety, health, and environmental protections. It's against the environment to attack our own companies. Go after Russian oils. Go after the National Iranian Oil Company. Come on, how is this even a question? Go after PDVSA in Venezuela. Why are you attacking U.S. and Canadian oil and gas companies? I honestly do not get it at all.

The answer I get, because I am friendly with some folks in the environmental community, believe it or not, is that "Well, they're the ones we can go after, and we have to start somewhere." I find that to be a ridiculous answer. They'll say, "Arjun, well, you don't care enough about carbon emissions or this or that or appreciate the urgency." I was like, "Whether I appreciate it or not, why would you start with our own companies?"

We get into a circle on this. It is better for our countries, better for the U.S. and Canada, better for our consumers, better for clean air, and better for clean water to have oil and gas and metals and mining produced in the U.S. and Canada, and I cannot understand the perspective that tries to keep it in the ground here. Keep it in the ground elsewhere if that's your worldview.

Ed Coyne: It feels like a slow change in some narratives, but we have a long way to go. Arjun, this was awesome. This was some great intel today. I would love to have you back in six months or so and see where we are with all this stuff. As you mentioned, these 10 to 15-year cycles seem like we're in the first couple of years of it; there is a lot of opportunity and volatility there. Thank you again for being on here. For anyone who would love to get access to Super-Spiked, how can someone find you?

Arjun Murti: Part of my mission with Super-Spiked is public education. This whole narrative needs a range of voices, not just one set. It's at Arjunmurti, A-R-J-U-N-M-U-R-T-I.substack.com. It is for free. It's also on the Veriten website, V-E-R-I-T-E-N.com, where at Veriten, we provide a slightly differently formatted version of Super-Spiked and our flagship close of business Tuesday weekly video interview that my colleague Maynard Holt hosts. Either way, you can subscribe to Veriten and get both things or subscribe to the Substack to get my thing. All of that is for free. We have the mission of improving the dialogue around energy, and we're trying to do our small part in it.

Ed Coyne: Thank you for helping us do our small part. We're trying to educate people and keep them informed. Again, Arjun, thank you for being on Sprott Radio today.

Arjun Murti: The pleasure's been mine, Ed. Thank you so much for having me on.

Ed Coyne: You're welcome. Once again, my name's Ed Coyne. Thank you all for listening to Sprott Radio.