Right. The year 2040 is 18 years away. When we talk about long-term contracts in natural gas, we are usually talking about 25 years in longer-term contracts, but, to your point, the Germans are saying, “We don't want a 25-year contract.”
As some German colleagues have said to me, there's also a concept of the—I apologize for my German pronunciation—Ringstrasse, the idea of a ring road. The point is to move gas into the market, and maybe for the next 18 years the Germans will use that gas, and maybe to your point, the Germans will use a declining amount of that gas over the next 18 years.
If you look at any forecasts—including UN forecasts, including IEA forecasts—you see that the world is going to be using gas well into this century, well beyond that target that the Germans have set for themselves. Many other countries will still be using gas, and Canada should be, as many have said, the last molecule. Our gas could be meeting that global need. Moreover, our gas is already performing better than much of the supply that's out there, so it could make a significant environmental contribution now.
The other point I'd make about hydrogen is that you can make hydrogen from a variety of sources, and, as this government has noted, the colour shouldn't matter at this point. What we should be about is making hydrogen. If we're making hydrogen in probably the most likely way around much of the world, it will be made from natural gas, so why wouldn't Canadian natural gas be the source for the German hydrogen? Why wouldn't Canadian natural gas be the source for hydrogen in many other markets of the world?
My point is, again, why wouldn't we, as we have done with a host of our resources over the course of our history, see that we produce those resources in an extraordinarily efficient way, in an environmentally preferable way, in an affordable way? Why wouldn't we try to get those to the global market to help the world?