The Irish Independent reports that the price of a house has now fallen by almost €76,000 on average nationally since the peak of the bubble in February 2007.
The plunge in the price of houses has been confirmed in new figures that show house prices fell by 1.5pc in August, to take the average price of a house down by 13pc in the past year.
The rate of decline picked up in the summer months as confidence in the housing market continued to ebb away, new figures from the Permanent TSB/ESRI house price index show.
Since the beginning of the year, national house prices have fallen by 10.1pc. This compares with a fall of 6pc over the same period in 2008.
In August, the average price for a house was €235,260.
This represents a fall of 24.4pc from the house price peak of €311,078 in February 2007.
The collapse in the house market has been so dramatic that house prices are now back at the level they were in January 2004, Niall O'Grady of Permanent TSB said.
"The rate of decline has been more dramatic during the summer due to low activity in the market and no confidence in any recovery this side of 2010."
He said price falls in Dublin were particularly severe.
"Recently, prices have started to fall faster in the Dublin region due to the high level of surplus stock available."
In Dublin, house prices fell 1.9pc in August, and have now fallen by 18pc in the past year alone. The average price for a house in the capital was €306,795 in August, down by €44,300 since last December.
Outside Dublin
Outside Dublin, house prices fell by 2.4pc in August, and were down by 12pc in the previous 12 months. Average house prices have fallen €20,000 since last December, from €204,524 in August.
The survey is based on the agreed sale price and is calculated using figures from mortgage drawdowns, Permanent TSB said.
The index is a three-month average. The compilers point out that there may be a time lag between the time a sale price is agreed and when the mortgage is drawn down.
Other figures show that the number of new homes registered in August fell by almost 52pc compared with the same month last year.
The Irish Independent also reports that building society Irish Nationwide yesterday announced a new demand deposit account paying 3.75pc on amounts up to €20,000.
The instant access account can be opened with as little as €1. For amounts over €20,000 the rate falls to 2.5pc.
There is no limit to the amount that can be withdrawn.
The next best rate is offered by Halifax which also has a rate of 3.75pc, but this is only for amounts up to €10,000. For amounts over this, the rate falls back to 2pc.
British building society Nationwide UK offers 3.55pc with a minimum deposit of €2,000.
High rate
A spokesman for Irish Nationwide said no other demand deposit account on the market offered such a high rate on savings up to €20,000.
"Historically, Irish Nationwide has been dedicated to providing outstanding value to savers by consistently offering market-leading interest rates, and we are continuing that with this new product," a spokesman for the building society said.
The best fixed rate is available from Anglo Irish Bank, which has a rate of 3.8pc fixed for a year. Irish Nationwide also has a rate of 3.8pc for a year, but there is a minimum of €20,000 to avail of it.
For those who can save every month, Anglo has a 5pc rate with a monthly maximum of €1,000. EBS offers 4.5pc with the same monthly maximum, while Irish Nationwide has a 4.35pc rate.
The Irish Times reports that Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan has reserved ultimate control over dealings between the nationalised Anglo Irish Bank and its former chairman Seán FitzPatrick, and reserved control over its engagement with the legal inquiries into its affairs.
As Garda and regulatory investigations into the scandals that beset Anglo continue, a confidential agreement governing its relationship with the State essentially means that the bank’s board must defer to the Minister when dealing with the fallout from the controversies and when recruiting or removing any senior executive.
Sweeping in its scope, the agreement also reserves Mr Lenihan’s implicit power over Anglo’s dealings with the National Asset Management Agency (Nama). With €28 billion in property-related loans moving into the “bad bank”, Anglo will be the biggest participant in the Nama project.
The framework agreement between the Minister and Anglo, agreed in July, was released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information Act. Citing commercial sensitivity and the financial interests of the State, the Department of Finance blanked out a large volume of other material dealing with the bank’s €4 billion recapitalisation by the Government, its preparation of a new business plan and the recruitment of Australian banker Mike Aynsley as its new chief executive.
“Certain key issues (‘Reserved Matters’) will be reserved to the Minister and the board shall only engage in them on the instructions or with the prior consent of the Minister,” says the “relationship framework” pact between Anglo and Mr Lenihan.
A spokesman for the Minister said “he hasn’t invoked any of those powers yet”, adding that the document was drawn up to ensure there was no doubt over the respective roles of each party. “The Minister as shareholder has to represent the interests of the Irish people. He holds these powers to ensure political responsibility,” he said.
While not naming any individuals, the reserved matters give the Minister ultimate power whenever the bank is “entering into or varying any transaction or arrangement between a director or former director” on terms other than normal commercial arm’s-length terms agreed in the ordinary course of business.
The pact also gives the Minister ultimate power over all of Anglo’s material actions in respect of commencing, defending, conducting or settling legal actions “to which a director or former director or any connected persons of a director is a party”.
He has the same power over any legal proceedings relating to Anglo’s “legacy issues”, which are:
- the secretive placing in 2008 of a 10 per cent stake in Anglo to a group of investors when businessman Seán Quinn reduced his shareholding;
- the lodgement of multibillion-euro deposits at the end of Anglo’s last fiscal year by Irish Life Permanent.
- the concealment of the true extent of directors’ loans for up to €122 million to Mr FitzPatrick;
Although informed sources believe there may be no significant development in the various inquiries until late this year or next year, Director of Corporate Enforcement Paul Appleby has said in private correspondence with an Oireachtas committee that the circumstances surrounding the concealment of directors’ loans suggest “illegality”.
While not specifying Anglo’s participation in Nama, the Minister’s power is also reserved whenever Anglo enters into “any material acquisitions, disposals, investments, realisations or other transactions” other than in the ordinary course of its business.
The agreement, which says one of its purposes is to ensure Anglo remains separate from the Minister, gives him scope to amend the list of reserved matters from time to time.
The Irish Times also reports that some €300 billion is set to be invested in European offshore windfarms over the next 20 years, according to a new report from wind turbine manufacturer Siemens.
The company, which recently signed contracts to supply up to 500 wind turbines for Dong Energy’s offshore windfarms in northern Europe, said there were existing commitments from investors for about 100 gigawatts (100,000 mega watts) across the continent.
At an installation cost cost of about €3 million per mega watt, Siemens said the total potential investment was in the order of €300 billion.
The company warned however that Ireland’s system of queuing projects for “gate” connections to the national grid meant Ireland would not be quick to achieve a significant share of the potential.
Currently the Republic has five offshore windfarms in the pipeline with a potential generating capacity of 2,655 mega watts, representing potential investment of almost €7 billion.
The next allocation of grid connections, known as Gate III, is due by next year. According to the Irish Wind Energy Association, though, Gate III is likely to give permissions for grid connections timed for about 2016.
Association chief executive Michael Walsh said some of the projects which might be approved under Gate III had been in the pipeline since 2004. To be in the pipeline since 2004 with a possible offer next year, and a potential connection in 2016, represented too much uncertainty over too long a time, he said.
Mr Walsh said, taking onshore and offshore wind proposals together, “there is about eight gigawatts in development, with a potential investment value of €16 billion to €18 billion”. About 3.9 giga watts were expected to be sanctioned by Gate III, he said.
A Department of Energy source acknowledged the difficulty but referred to plans by EirGrid to double the grid capacity under a €4 billion investment, by 2025.
The source also said it was planned to transfer control of the foreshore from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Environment in a bid to expedite the planning process for off-shore installations.
“We must upgrade the grid,” the source added. “There are parts of the country, usually where the wind is, where the network would not support the connection. Also we want to streamline planning and control so connections are ready and licences can be awarded like those for oil and gas.”
The Irish Examiner reports that Irish house-building group McInerney Holdings, has said that it has seen signs of stabilisation in its British operations in the last couple of months, but that conditions in the Irish market remain extremely uncertain.
The group’s management met with shareholders to update on the measures it is taking to steady its finances following the posting of a heavy first-half pre-tax loss, earlier this month, the announcement of a €156m impairment charge and the halving in value of its Irish land bank (the value of its British land bank was reduced by 40%).
Group chairman Ned Sullivan said that house sales in Britain have remained stable during September, "albeit at a very low level". He said the previously announced write-down in the value of its main two land banks was "a very conservative view", but a realistic view given the current market conditions.
Regarding the impairment charge, Mr Sullivan added: "It is fair to say that a recovery in our housing markets would open up the opportunity to earn back a significant proportion of the impairment charge that the company has taken.
"However, it is not possible to forecast when this will happen. This is the situation which has led to the substantial deterioration in the group’s reported net assets today."
Mr Sullivan said that the board had no plans for a rights issue, but said it expected the group’s loans to end up in the hands of the proposed National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). This, he said, wouldn’t have too much significance for McInerney but if NAMA improves liquidity and lending from the banks and results in more people getting mortgages, it would benefit the company in the long-term.
At the beginning of this month, McInerney reported a pre-tax loss of €12.8m (before exceptional items) for the first half of this year on the back of lowering mortgage availability and falling consumer sentiment.
Shareholders were told, yesterday, that negotiations with the group’s discussions with its lenders to revise its banking and funding terms were ongoing and "proceeding constructively".
"While we don’t anticipate an early conclusion to these funding negotiations... we do anticipate an overall positive conclusion being achieved prior to the release of the 2009 results next March," he added.
The Financial Times reports that a Chinese state-owned oil company is in talks with Nigeria to buy large stakes in some of the world’s richest oil blocks in a deal that would eclipse Beijing’s previous efforts to secure crude overseas.
The attempt could pitch the Chinese into competition with western oil groups, including Shell, Chevron, Total and ExxonMobil, which partly or wholly control and operate the 23 blocks under discussion. Sixteen licences are up for renewal.
CNOOC, one of China’s three energy majors, is trying to buy 6bn barrels of oil, equivalent to one in every six barrels of the proven reserves in Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest crude producer and a major supplier to the US.
Details of the talks were revealed in a letter from the office of Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s president, to Sunrise, CNOOC’s representative, a copy of which was obtained by the Financial Times. The overall value of the Chinese offer is not disclosed, although some details suggest a figure of about $30bn. Some oil sector executives said the total on the table was $50bn.
A spokesman for Mr Yar’Adua said: “Negotiations are ongoing not only with Sunrise/CNOOC but also with all other stakeholders in the industry. The federal government has not taken any final position on the issue.”
Large deals run aground
The fate of NigComSat-1 has been emblematic of China’s recent dealings with Nigeria
Last November, 18 months after its launch, the controllers of Nigeria’s $257m Chinese-built satellite switched it off after a faulty power supply meant it risked colliding with other objects in orbit.
It was a public relations disaster for China at a time when it seemed to be stumbling in its efforts to gain a strategic foothold in Africa’s biggest energy producer.
In 2006, towards the end of the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, Chinese companies won four oil-drilling licences in exchange for pledges to build a hydroelectric power plant, a railway and a refinery.
Oil-for-infrastructure deals have flourished elsewhere for China, notably in Angola. In Nigeria they faltered, as Umaru Yar’Adua, the new president, ordered investigations into the pacts. The projects stopped before they had started.
There are 20,000 Chinese expatriates living in Nigeria, according to official estimates, and Chinese products have made inroads into the country’s teeming markets. But until now the big state-to-state deals that have typically paved the way for China’s entry into other resource rich African markets have mostly run aground.
The letter, dated August 13, said an initial offer was “unacceptable” but added: “Your interest in all the listed blocks will be considered if your revised offer is favourable.”
Details of how the Nigerian government would allocate equity in the blocks to CNOOC have yet to emerge and it is unclear whether this would involve forcing western groups to relinquish stakes.
“There are serious legal implications. You don’t want to go to court but if it gets to this then you have little choice,” an oil industry insider said.
China’s push to gain a significant foothold in Nigeria underlines the scale of its long-term ambitions to secure access to energy resources across the globe. Much of its investment has been for exploration, in contrast with the Nigerian blocks which are already producing or due to start pumping soon.
Tanimu Yakubu, the Nigerian president’s economic adviser, said China might not secure “anything close” to 6bn barrels from the negotiations, adding: “We want to retain our traditional friends.”
However, Mr Yakubu told the FT the Chinese “are really offering multiples of what existing producers are pledging [for licences] . . . we love to see this kind of competition”.
The talks come with oil groups and the government at loggerheads over a planned overhaul of the energy sector, where underinvestment and unrest in the oil-producing Niger Delta have drastically curbed production.
Basil Omiyi, Shell’s country chair in Nigeria, said: “The blocks referred to are under active exploration, development and production, mostly by the majority government-owned joint venture operated by Shell.” CNOOC declined to comment.
Total, Chevron and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation did not respond to requests for comment.
The FT also reports that when the Christian Democratic Union and the smaller Free Democratic party sit down for their first coalition talks in more than a decade, they will face considerable work to turn what are markedly different electoral manifestos into a single policy agenda for the next four years.
Angela Merkel, the chancellor, made clear on Monday she was not going to reverse four years of middle-of-the-road policies adopted by her grand coalition with her rival Social Democrats or renege on her centrist electoral manifesto.
“We do not write manifestos so that we can forget about them the minute the election is over,” she told journalists in Berlin. “I have no intention of rewriting mine.”
The CDU is mindful of alienating the trade unions before next May’s regional election in North Rhine-Westphalia, now ruled by a weakening CDU-FDP government. Ms Merkel must retain control of Germany’s largest state if she is to keep her thin majority in the Bundesrat, parliament’s upper house.
Though the chancellor has squashed suggestions of a fundamental change in economic policy, the CDU and FDP are likely to agree on sizeable income tax cuts, though their value – the CDU is calling for €15bn ($21.9bn, £13.8bn) over four years, the FDP €50bn – and timing is open.
“We have to achieve substantial relief for taxpayers while making sure the public deficit does not get out of control,” Michael Fuchs, a CDU MP, said.
The chancellor said she would welcome a reform of corporate tax after changes introduced under the grand coalition proved misguided once the country slid into recession in 2008.
The two parties should have little problem finding common ground on giving nuclear power a new lease of life. Both agree on the need to reverse the nuclear phase-out enacted in 2000 and extend the lives of the country’s 17 plants.
Yet they will face opposition from the left-of-centre parties, several of which said on Monday they would make the new government’s nuclear policy their chief target in coming months.
To the chagrin of pro-business lobbies, Ms Merkel said she would stick to the grand coalition policies of minimum wages on services sectors, where pay has been spiralling downwards. “I am not taking this back,” she said. Her party, she added, would resist FDP calls to dismantle the centralised health insurance fund.
The list of contentious issues extends to defence, security, family policy and civil rights. The FDP stands for more libertarian positions than the CDU in areas ranging from video surveillance to internet regulation and gay rights.
Financial market regulation will be another thorny subject, according to Lars-Hendrik Röller, president of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin: “In the grand coalition, the CDU has campaigned for stricter rules and the FDP will find itself on the opposite side of the argument.”
While the CDU has embraced an active industry policy, the FDP is more free-market oriented and may turn into an ally of the European Commission in its investigation of state aid to Opel, the carmaker.
Mr Westerwelle will also meet fierce resistance when he brings up his proposals to reduce workers’ representation on the supervisory boards of large companies and relax the employment laws that make it difficult and expensive to fire workers
The New York Times reports that Exelon, one of the country’s largest utilities, said Monday that it would quit the United States Chamber of Commerce because of that group’s stance on climate change. It was the latest in a string of companies to do so, perhaps a harbinger of how intense the fight over global warming legislation could become.
“The carbon-based free lunch is over,” said John W. Rowe, Exelon’s chief executive. “Breakthroughs on climate change and improving our society’s energy efficiency are within reach.”
A wave of departures from the chamber has been building for weeks. It was heralded Monday by some Congressional Democrats and environmentalists as a sign that the business community’s opposition to global warming legislation is weakening. In their view, that improves the chances that a global warming bill that narrowly passed the House in June might also pass the Senate.
But others said the resignations were just a sign that businesses will have varied positions depending on whether they will be winners or losers from the legislation. Exelon, a Chicago company that sells electricity and gas in four states, is also the country’s largest operator of nuclear power plants. That type of electrical generation emits no greenhouse gases and would gain a financial advantage under the pending bills.
“There will be significant vibrations from this,” said Representative Jay Inslee, a Democrat of Washington State on the Energy and Commerce Committee. “It’s a bit of an earthquake.”
Pacific Gas & Electric, the dominant utility in Northern California, and PNM Resources, a holding company that includes the largest utility in New Mexico, said recently that they would withdraw from the national chamber. Mr. Rowe said Exelon would not renew its membership because of the chamber’s “stridency against carbon legislation.”
The United States Chamber of Commerce is one of the main business lobbies in Washington, with more than three million members. It says it not opposed in principle to tackling global warming, but is worried about any approach that would raise costs for businesses.
The chamber has been especially vocal recently in opposing a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to use an existing law, the Clean Air Act, to set limits on greenhouse gases. The proposal would most likely take effect only if Congress failed to pass climate legislation.
The utilities and other companies that are supporting climate change legislation tend to be those based in more liberal parts of the country and believe that being viewed as environmentally responsible is a good marketing strategy, energy and business analysts said. The utilities tend to be dependent on sources like nuclear power that emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their competitors.
Before, “voicing their good fortune among higher-carbon colleagues was seen as impolite,” said Paul Bledsoe, director of communications and strategy at the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research organization. “Now that legislation seems imminent, these companies are stepping up to support legislation because it helps their bottom lines.”
What appears to have touched off the utilities’ withdrawals from the chamber was a recent article in The Los Angeles Times that cited chamber officials who called for a “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” about the science of climate change. The Scopes trial was a clash of creationists and evolutionists in the 1920s.
Both PG&E and PNM cited the possibility of such a trial as a major concern.
Don Brown, a PNM spokesman, said in a statement that his company felt compelled to “particularly reject” the chamber’s “recent theatrics calling for a ‘Scopes monkey trial’ to put the science of climate change on trial.”
However, David C. Chavern, the chamber’s chief operating officer, said there had been a misunderstanding. Chamber officials do not question the overall science of climate change, but rather, the group questions whether that science is enough to support the E.P.A.’s rulemaking under the specific legal requirements of the Clean Air Act.
“We’re not looking at the next Scopes monkey trial,” he said. “We just think the E.P.A. is the wrong venue to be dealing with climate change issues that will impact the whole country and whole world.”
He said another chamber official’s reference to the Scopes trial “was wrong, inaccurate and obscured what the chamber is really doing.”
Other companies have also expressed differences with the chamber recently. Nike has said in a statement that it “fundamentally disagrees with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s position on climate change and is concerned and deeply disappointed with the U.S. Chamber’s recently filed petition challenging the E.P.A.’s administrative authority and action on this critically important issue.”
Johnson & Johnson, the big consumer products company, urged in a letter this spring that the chamber’s statements on climate change “reflect the full range of views, especially those of chamber members advocating for Congressional action” on global warming.
Duke Energy, a large Southern utility that supports action against global warming, has so far stayed in the national chamber, but it withdrew from of the National Association of Manufacturers in December, citing climate as a partial factor. The manufacturers’ group has also been wary of action by the E.P.A.
In August, Duke Energy also left the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, citing climate policy. “It was clear that many influential members would never support climate legislation in 2009 or 2010 no matter how it was written,” Tom Williams, a Duke Energy spokesman, said in an e-mail message. Alcoa, the aluminum company, also pulled out of the coal coalition this summer, with climate policy being one factor, a spokesman said.
“This is an issue that will cleave a lot of companies more than other business policy issues because there are sharper differences in strategies,” said Matthew J. Slaughter, associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He noted that a utility that primarily used coal would logically have a different view from one dependent on nuclear power.
Climate change legislation still faces a tough battle in the Senate, where legislators from coal states will seek to protect the coal industry, and where many Republicans are opposed to any action they believe would put American businesses at a disadvantage.
Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he did not know what impact the recent corporate policy announcements would have on individual senators. “But I do think it’s a sign at least some in the business community are anxious to see us provide some leadership on climate change,” he added.
The NYT also reports that three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.
Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them, are entering milking herds across the country — and the timing could hardly be worse.
The dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into a market that does not need it.
“It’s real simple,” said Tony De Groot, an early adopter of the new breeding technology, who milks 4,200 cows on a farm here in the heart of this state’s struggling dairy region. “We’ve just got too many cattle on hand and too many heifers on hand, and the supply just keeps on coming and coming.”
The average price farmers received for their milk in July was $11.30 for 100 pounds, down from $19.30 in July 2008. The retail price of milk has not dropped as much, but it is down 24 percent in a year, to an average of $2.91 a gallon for milk with 2 percent fat.
Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Since January the program has culled about 230,000 cows nationwide.
But the sorting technique, known as sexed semen, is expected to put 63,000 extra heifers into milk production this year, compared with the number that would be available if only conventional semen had been used, researchers estimate.
That number will jump to 161,000 next year, and farmers fear it could double again in 2011. While that is a fraction of the 9.2 million milk cows nationwide, the extra cows this year and next could roughly equal those removed from production by the industry’s culling program.
Economists expect milk prices to recover only gradually, which has farmers worried about the impact of so many extra heifers and the milk they could produce.
“Just as the industry starts to recover from these difficult times, we’re going to see these heifers enter the marketplace,” said Ray Souza, president of Western United Dairymen, which represents farmers who produce about 60 percent of the milk in California. “At the very worst it could certainly stop the recovery altogether and send us into another price recession.”
The sorting technology relies on slight size differences between the Y chromosome, which produces male offspring, and the X chromosome, which produces female offspring and has a slightly larger amount of genetic material, or DNA.
After it is collected from a bull at a stud farm, semen is mixed with a dye that sticks to DNA. A machine detects the extra dye sticking to X chromosomes and sorts the sperm. The sorted semen is frozen and sold to farmers who use it to inseminate their livestock.
(A fertility institute outside Washington is studying whether the same technique can be used safely in people. If it won approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the technology would let parents choose their baby’s sex.)
When the technology was first marketed widely to farmers in 2006, it represented a long-awaited breakthrough, and was embraced because global milk demand was outstripping supply.
A typical Holstein herd using conventional breeding methods will produce 48 percent female offspring and 52 percent male. The male calves are usually sold for little money to be raised as meat, and the females are raised as milk producers. But the sorted sperm produces 90 percent or more female offspring, allowing farmers to expand their herds more efficiently.
At Mr. De Groot’s farm on a recent afternoon, a worker removed a slender pink tube of sexed semen from a liquid nitrogen canister, where it was kept frozen. He passed it to a colleague who inserted it into a heifer’s body. The cow munched on feed, seemingly oblivious. If the insemination took, her calf would almost certainly be female.
The technology’s impact is being felt now, at the depths of the dairy industry’s hard times, because of the long lag time in raising cows born of sexed semen to the point that they have calves of their own and thus enter milk production.
Mr. De Groot, 74, first turned to sexed semen during the long economic boom because he wanted to expand his herd.
“When the world was short of milk we were all told, ‘We need more milk!’ Everybody was crying for more milk,” he said in his farm office, decorated with trophies for the high quality of his milk.
But his plans were interrupted by the economic crisis, which caused booming dairy exports to dry up and curbed demand at home, sending prices tumbling. At the same time, feed costs remained high, squeezing farmers from both sides.
Mr. De Groot, who has used the technology with only a portion of his livestock, estimated that he would get up to 350 additional heifers a year by using sexed semen. But he cannot expand his herd because dairy processors will not buy the extra milk.
So for the time being, as the sexed semen offspring come of age, he will put them into the herd in place of lower-producing animals. That will drive up output too, though not as much as expanding the total number of cows.
Scott Bentley, dairy product manager at ABS Global, in DeForest, Wis., a major producer of sexed semen, said that in the long run, the technology should be a boon. But first, the industry has to get through its worst economic crisis in decades.
“This is a really exciting thing,” Mr. Bentley said of the technology. “And this is very difficult times. And you combine the two and realize it didn’t work as well as we hoped.”
