Before I get going, I'd like to introduce a couple of my colleagues, Anthony Ashley, our Treasurer and our Head of Investor Relations and Peter Staples, our Director of Investor Relations. We've got an intimate group here, so I can go quickly and we can open up for Q and A here towards the end. And as Christine said, I'm David Michaels. I'm CFO of Kinder Morgan. All right.
So on the first page here, this illustrates our footprint across The U. S. And across North America pretty well. We are an energy infrastructure company. We own pipelines and storage facilities to move products from supply centers to demand regions.
And in fact, we're one of the largest energy infrastructure companies in North America. Our primary product that we move is natural gas. We own 70,000 miles of natural gas pipelines across the country. We touch 40% of all the natural gas supply that is consumed in America on a daily basis. And over 60% of our cash flows are generated from our natural gas storage and transportation assets.
However, as Christine mentioned, natural gas is just one of the products products that we manage, handle, store and transport. We're a leader in multiple other areas. One of those is refined products. So gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. We're one of the largest independent transporter of refined products in North America.
We also own 157 terminals, which handle many different types of products, but one of their largest ones is also refined products. And we're a transporter of carbon dioxide as well, one of the largest in North America. So the map on the right illustrates that pretty well and I think gives you a nice demographic of where our pipelines reach. And as you can see, we really stretch to every corner of The United States, a little bit into Canada, a little bit into Mexico, but primarily in The United States and across it. The red lines are natural gas assets.
The black lines are refined product assets. And so you can see just how extensive our footprint is. And that's one of our key competitive strengths is a very extensive footprint and that allows us to offer flexibility and optionality to our consumers to our customers. That's a very valuable, very unique set of characteristics that we offer our customers. So I'm going to start and end with some of the key characteristics that we think make us a very unique investment opportunity for investors.
Admittedly, we're a little bit biased, but nonetheless, I'll go ahead and walk through these. We think we're a great core energy infrastructure company to put in your portfolio, greater than $40,000,000,000 in market cap, so a large scale investment grade rated. We recently upgraded to mid BBB by S and P and by Moody's. We've got a 5% current dividend yield with growth coming. We've declared that we expect to increase our dividend from 2019 to 2020 by 25%, moving from $1 per share to 1.25 per share.
And that's on top of the 5% current dividend, which is more than 2x the S and P average today. We also have a $2,000,000,000 share buyback program. So we're large, investment grade and we have a bias to returning value to our shareholders. Our strategy is pretty simple. It's been pretty consistent over the two decades since inception.
We focus on assets that are stable and have fee based characteristics with contractual backstopping. Core energy infrastructure, we look to operate our assets safe and efficiently. And as I said, we look for assets that have multiyear contracts that protect our investments. Currently, our cash flows are comprised of 90% take or pay or fee based cash flows. We'll go into that in a little bit more detail upcoming.
We looked at maintaining financial flexibility. So we've got a low cost of capital with the recent upgrades that's becoming even lower. We have ample liquidity and we're a simple C Corp structure, easy to invest in and significant liquidity in our name. We've got a disciplined capital allocation perceptive. We have conservative assumptions that go into the models that we use when we're evaluating new commitments and new projects to invest in.
We have high return thresholds well above our cost of capital, again, a way to help us protect the investments, protect the shareholders' money that we're putting to work. We're self funding most of our capital program and that is might be a unique thing to say in this environment. But in our sector, that's pretty unique. Many of our colleagues in our sector and our peer companies rely on the capital markets to help invest and grow their business. We use our organic cash flow primarily to fund our growth capital projects.
And as I mentioned before, we're focused on enhancing shareholder value. We've got attractive projects that we invest in. We are growing our dividend. We have a healthy dividend yield already. We are looking to repurchase shares.
We have repurchased about $525,000,000 worth of shares. We're looking to do some more. And importantly, we're highly aligned with our investors. Our management team owns 14% of the company. And so a company with a greater than $40,000,000,000 market cap, that's saying a lot.
So this strategy has been pretty consistent since inception of the company, and it's been very successful. But we think with this strategy, the best is yet to come. All right. So environmental, social and governance. ESG matters have become more and more important to our investor base and it's become more and
more of a
focus. And in many ways, we think we do we already do and have done a very nice job in this area. But in a couple of other ways, we've adapted and we are implementing best practices in some areas. And one of those areas is disclosure, disclosure of some of the policies that we currently follow and have, but haven't done a great job disclosing those and communicating those to our investor base. So we're doing that and we acknowledge that, that's an area that is best practice and we should continue to keep that practice up.
In other areas, we've already been a strong performer and we're just doing a better job now communicating that to the investment base. Disclosure of our safety performance here on the bottom right hand chart. This is something that we've been disclosing to our shareholders. We've been tracking and disclosing to our shareholders for almost two decades now. It's a long time.
We track our safety performance on a monthly basis and update that safety performance posted to our website so that everyone can see how we've done and how we do relative to the industry on those 31 metrics and have done that for a long time. We just by chance it happens that we end up it turns out that we've done a very nice job and typically outperform our industry average on the majority of those metrics. Importantly, another area that we've done a nice job on is methane emissions reductions. Now this one, I'd love to say that we're just good people or doing that out of the goodness of our heart to protect the environment. But in reality, that's in a large part driven by the economic reality of methane is the primary product that we move through our pipes and through our storage facilities.
And when we release or lose some of that product, we lose value and our customers lose value. So it's in our best interest economically as well as environmentally to reduce methane emissions. And we've done that and we've been a leader in this category for a long period of time. Okay, moving on to cash flow generation. We generate a lot of cash flow and that's what we focus on at Kinder Morgan.
That's the primary performance metric we look at is something called distributable cash flow. It's really kind of like a cash earnings equivalent. We replace depreciation with maintenance capital and cash taxes with book taxes excuse me, take out book taxes, replace it with cash taxes. So we get more close to a cash earnings proxy. We generated between 4,500,000,000.0 and $4,700,000,000 from 2016 through 2018 on that distributable cash flow metric and or that's almost $14,000,000,000 in three years.
And we're also generating or expect to generate about $5,000,000,000 on that DCF metric in 2019. After funding our dividend, which is the red portion of the bars, from 2016 to 2018, we generated $10,000,000,000 of cash in excess of our dividend. So $10,000,000,000 that we were able to put to good use funding growth projects. We put some of that to use on our balance sheet and we also put some of that to use buying back shares. So we generate a lot of cash flow.
We're able to sustain our dividend, even the growing dividend that we have projected here and still have enough remaining to substantially fund our growth capital programs. So we generate a lot of cash and how and you may ask how stable is that cash flow. And I think this page illustrates a good gives you a good sense for just how stable the cash flow is. 66% or two thirds of our cash flow for 2019 budget is take or pay. And that concept means it's revenue that we get that we receive from our customers regardless of whether or not they actually even use our facilities.
They're paying us for the right to use whether or not they actually use it. It's irrelevant. They're contractually obligated to pay us. So a very high set of high quality form of cash flow for us. And that's been consistent.
We have had a significant amount of take or pay cash flows in our revenue stream for a long period of time. The next an incremental 25% of our cash flow is from fee based services, fee based contractual arrangements with our customers. And that means it's not contractually obligated if they don't use it, but if they do use it, they pay us a fee. So very much like a toll road concept here. And then we have some component of our very small component, the very small little slurs down at the zero point four and zero point four of commodity exposed revenues that we generate.
And we hedge those in where we can in order to mitigate the short term volatility in commodity prices that may impact our business. But overall, 91% of our cash flows are generated from take or pay or fee based business. So very stable set of cash flows. And what do we do with the cash? We touched on this a little bit before, but our first priority is the balance sheet.
We've spent a lot of time bringing our leverage down to our target level and that's 4.5 times net debt to EBITDA. Our investment grade rating is very important. We worked hard to bring our leverage down and we were rewarded by S and P and Moody's by being upgraded from low BBB to mid BBB. And that very strong balance sheet is very important to us as well as liquidity. We have a $4,500,000,000 credit facility that's largely goes largely undrawn throughout the course of the year.
So we've got a lot of liquidity available to us as well. Our dividend, we've discussed that a little bit in our 2020 incremental dividend that we expect growing from $1 to 1.25 Bottom line is we have an institutional bias to pay out cash flow to our shareholders in a responsible way, and we think that we've struck that right balance with our recent bumps in the dividend. Next, we fund attractive return on growth projects. Those growth projects return have returns well in excess of our cost of capital. And we think we do a nice job protecting our investor shareholder capital in that way.
We have a $2,000,000,000 buyback program. We've used about a quarter of it, but we still have a long way to go before it's fully depleted. And if we have cash in excess of our dividend and in excess of the growth capital program that we're funding, some of that could go to the share buyback program that we have in place. As I mentioned, we've achieved our balance sheet goal, our target leverage level of 4.5 times or around 4.5 times. And I think it's important to note that our stability, our scale, our size, our customer base, our business profile, the low risk nature of our cash flows allow us to maintain a good level of leverage here, a little bit above some of the other industries that you might hear at this conference.
But we think it's appropriate and our rating agencies think it's appropriate as well and we're very comfortable with this level. As you can see, we've reduced our leverage from twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen from 5.3 to 4.5 times. We think that's a good target to have. Now moving on to the fundamentals behind our business. It might surprise some of you and we've heard a little bit of surprise talking to some investors that the energy demand globally is expected to grow for decades to come.
This is an IEA forecast. And you can see through 02/1940, there's good growth in energy demand for as this has renewables, natural gas, petroleum and liquids, coal and nuclear. And if you cut off at the natural gas, the red bar there, you can see good increasing growth for those products over time. And that was globally. That was a global demand page.
So you should see that globally demand is increasing. Where is the supply going to come from? Increasingly, the expectation is that, that supply is going come from The United States. And here you could see the projections also from IEA showing United States production of oil and gas almost doubling from 2010 to 2025 to become the primary supporter of supplier of oil and gas globally. And in fact, by 2025, the IEA projects that The U.
S. Will produce one out of every five barrels of oil and one out of every four cubic meters of gas produced worldwide. So quite significant growth and a lot of that going to emerging markets and emerging economies. Drilling down to The U. S.
Natural gas market because that is our primary product and the product that we're most focused on with regards to growth in the future. Here, you can see multiple categories of growth. It's not just the exports and the exports of liquefied natural gas, but it's also our domestic demand for power industrial, which is really petrochemical growth exports to Mexico, who is increasingly looking for exports from The U. S. To achieve or to meet their demand for natural gas and others, green across the page here.
So while the main driver is LNG, we feel comfortable that there's going to be growth across the board. And we touched so many of these different plays that we feel like we're going to benefit nicely filling up our existing systems that aren't completely full today and achieving additional growth projects to meet that additional demand. And to illustrate just how significant though the LNG export growth is expected to be, you can see there the Bcf per day growth is 14 Bcf a day. 14 Bcf a day, that's off of a twenty eighteen total of 19. So you can see just how substantial that market is expected to be.
And most of that's going to come out of the Gulf Coast of The U. S. And we have a significant footprint on the Gulf Coast to help support that. Let's see. One other point on this page is probably worth making is on the power demand side.
It might also be a little surprising to see power growth power generation growth for natural gas increasing here. So I think it's important to note that there are still a substantial amount of coal plants that are operating that will be environmentally and economically phased out as we've seen occur over the past in the recent past. There's still much more of that to happen. And also renewable sources. As renewable sources come on to the grid, system operators are incentivized to have natural gas backstops to support them should the wind not blow and the sun not shine during peak load demand hours.
So after covering the natural gas demand slide, it's not too surprising to see that the majority of our projects are focused on natural gas. So $4,300,000,000 out of our $6,100,000,000 project backlog. These are projects that are that we're committed to, that we will develop. In many cases, they're under construction currently. We have contractual backstops and commitments from customers to support these projects.
So 70% of that is in the natural gas space. Most of the backlog is generated from extensions off of our expansions of our existing footprint, which makes us much more competitive to meet the demand for supplying natural gas off of our network. And accordingly, the capital efficiency of those projects is very high. And that's why we have such a favorable build multiple on this page. You can see 5.5 times capital versus the EBITDA expected to be provided by those growth projects.
So very attractive set of returns, a very strong build multiple. And recently that's proved out. We've been able to achieve those build multiples. They haven't just been our initial estimates and we haven't achieved them. But looking historically, this is if you look at the two bars on the left, the 6.1 and the 5.9, those are investment multiples.
The gray is the initial estimate. And then the red was the actual occurred or actual experienced build multiple of 5.9. So we actually did a little bit better than we expected, and that's where all of our projects completed in 2015 through 2018. The green boxed bars represent just the natural gas component of that. And we thought that was important for folks to see because that's where most of our growth is going to come from.
That's where most of our investment is going to go into in the coming years. And so to see that we've actually done quite well building out our natural gas pipelines and storage facilities in the last three years. So we're confident we're going to be able to do that going forward. A couple of those projects that we have in our backlog, the Gulf Coast Express and Permian Highway projects, It's a little bit small, but I think we can touch the high points. Gulf Coast Express is a two Bcf a day pipeline connecting the Permian Basin with the Gulf Coast, and it connects down to the southern portion of our natural gas system that runs up and down the Gulf Coast Of Texas.
The Permian Highway Pipeline and the Gulf Coast Express Pipeline is expected to be in service in October later this year. It's a $1,750,000,000 project. The Permian Highway project is another Permian natural gas takeaway project connecting the Permian to the Gulf Coast. This one connects further north, and that's that green dotted line a little bit north of the blue one. It's expected to be in service in October of twenty twenty.
So coming a year later than Gulf Coast Express. Both of these are serving as a critical takeaway path for Permian gas production, which currently is really stranded gas. And those of you who watch the market, this is really demonstrated by the negative Waha basis that we're seeing that we've seen over the last few months. So natural gas in the Waha basis basin in the Permian is actually trading at a native. They'll pay you to take it away.
And so our pipelines are critically needed and couldn't get in service fast enough. Currently, the Gulf Coast Express pipeline is on budget and on target for an in service in October 2019. Touching again on the LNG export markets. This just further illustrates the growing need for LNG. We're not necessarily interested in owning incremental liquefaction facilities directly, but instead supplying third party liquefaction facilities so others will build them, operate their facilities and will support their facilities by producing by providing gas transportation and storage services to them.
We've got contractual commitments already in hand to supply 5.7 Bcf of a number of the projects that are in service, under construction and FID today. Those have an average term associated with them of nineteen years. So we've got nice long term contractual commitments on a take or pay basis on those contracts. And we think we're very well positioned to take advantage of the next wave of projects that are coming to the market that have yet to commit themselves to supply services. Outside of natural gas, we're also well positioned to take advantage of the LNG excuse me, NGL and refined product export fundamentals that are facing the country.
Here, you can see for the whole world, demand of liquids per day growing. And there you can see most of that is generated from is coming from emerging markets, China, India, 2,200,000 barrels a day of incremental growth of these liquids. And we're going to play we expect we'll play a part on the refined product side of that, not so much on the crude oil side, but on the refined product side. We have a great footprint on the Gulf Coast with export capabilities. And here you can see on the bottom right hand side of the chart what we've done, what we've experienced on our docks since the beginning of 2016, an 18% compound annual growth rate of volumes moving across our docks.
So we're already participating in that growing export need and we expect we'll have additional opportunities as that need continues or as that trend continues to emerge. And here's how. This is that blue strip right there represents the Houston Ship Channel, which is a very industrial part of East Houston. We have multiple facilities across it. But I think most importantly, to speak to the export capabilities, we have 12 barge docks and 11 ship docks on that channel that will allow us to participate in that growing export market.
And we and that wasn't by accident. We've spent a lot of money invested in our facilities over the years, over $2,000,000,000 or nearly $2,000,000,000 invested in the Houston Ship Channel hub since 2010. And incremental to the actual docks and the export capabilities that we have there, we actually have one of the largest terminals in all of The United States in that area in terms of storage capacity with 43,000,000 barrels of total capacity. So we have the docks to accommodate exports and the storage facility capacity to accommodate a lot of demand. All right.
So we didn't have time to touch on all of these opportunities. We touched on LNG and Permian Basin, a couple of our LNG footprint opportunities. Think it's probably worthwhile to touch on the storage opportunity, which is top row, second to the left. As the LNG market continues to play out and additional gas comes to the Houston to the Gulf Coast Of America to be exported. As you saw on the slide earlier, by 2025, that could be up to close to 15 Bcf a day.
As that gas reaches those markets, if those facilities are unavailable, whether they're they have unforeseen outages because of extreme temperatures in the summertime or LNG tankers can't reach the docks because of weather or storms or go through unscheduled maintenance themselves, we think that the opportunity for us to provide high deliverability, high withdrawal capability storage might be an interesting and quite significant opportunity for us to supply additional services to these LNG facilities. I think that will play out over time as these facilities really come into play. Right now, we've only seen about four Bcf a day get exported on a daily basis. So as that continues to ramp up and continues to increase, we'll see some of those operational capabilities and some of the limitations around them potentially play out. So wrapping up here in the last couple of slides, once again, we think this is a compelling investment opportunity, pretty set pretty attractive set of investment characteristics.
And in fact, if you just took some of the investment characteristics of our stock and our security and compared those to the S and P 500, very few would compete. So we took a crack at drilling down on some of them. If you took our net debt to EBITDA of less than five times, we were 4.5 times. Then narrowed it further to investment grade companies only. The 500 S and P companies get narrowed down to two ninety four.
And then if you narrow it further by companies only with a market cap greater than 35, an EPS growth rate of greater than 10 and a dividend yield of greater than 4%, you're down to four companies. And then if you look at those with just a dividend growth rate of greater than 20% from 2018 to 2020, we are one of one. So statistics can tell you anything, but still it's a pretty, I think, compelling set of characteristics at our company. All right. And then the final slide here, bottom line, we've got stable cash flow.
We have a lot of it. We have an attractive dividend, which is growing, an aligned management team and an attractive stock or excuse me, an active stock buyback program. So we're proud of our accomplishments and we think we're poised for success over the long term. And as I mentioned earlier, we think the best is yet to come. And so with that, I'll open it up to any questions you all might have.
Go ahead.
Could you help us understand the economics of pipeline? When you say the build ratio six times or five times, does that mean the implied return is 5% and then you lever it up? And could you give us a sense of what's the ROE of a mature pipeline, please?
Sure, sure. So for those pipelines, those are enterprise value multiples. And so the equivalent returns for something like that would be more in the high teens on an unlevered basis. And if you look at that on a levered basis, it would be well into the 20% area. And that's on a new pipeline project where we are not subject to max tariff rate that under the regulatory regime.
But I think it illustrates just how attractive some of those projects are. And that's also why we look to secure long term contracts. So a couple of those pipelines we talked about were ten year contracts on the Permian pipelines we talked about. That protects our investment over that ten year period. It basically allows us to return the majority of our return on and return of capital during that contractual phase.
Can I ask also on the cash flow on Page eight, did you have more commodity exposures five, six, seven years ago? Like was it different? I'm referring to Page eight. So 96% of the cash flow is basically contract or
stable? How long ago?
Clearly, it's five,
six years Okay. So we the reason I asked is we combined a number of our entities back in the end of twenty fourteen. From that point forward, we've been relatively consistent. Our commodity exposure has reduced during that time. It's now about 6%.
Probably back then, it was, I don't know, closer to 10%. So we have seen it reduce. Prior to then, one of entities that we had publicly traded had a larger exposure. But after rolling them all together, it's been 10% or less ever since.
Okay. Maybe one last one for me, if you don't Sure. In terms of the distributable cash flow, because you compare it to EBITDA, but you don't have much maintenance CapEx. And then from EBITDA to distributable cash flow, yes, how do you think about that? Because you seem to be doing everything at the same time.
Are you paying dividend, having a lot of projects, buying back stocks? Is the answer the leverage? Or is it how come you can do all of that together?
I'm sorry, is your question what is the difference between EBITDA and So think 24,000,000
maybe that will help. EBITDA, 7,800,000,000.0. Distributable cash was €5,000,000,000 And yet you have to pay taxes, you have maintenance CapEx, you spend between 1,000,000,000 and €3,000,000,000 CapEx every year. So that seems almost like too big a number. Do see what I mean?
Yes. Let me walk through it. I see where you're going now. Okay. So to get from EBITDA to distributable cash flow, you're right, you've got our interest and maintenance capital and cash taxes.
When we rolled our assets together back in 2014, it was taxable transaction and that allowed us to increase our taxable depreciable base. And so we have a number of tax assets that are generating a taxable loss for us and have for some years. So we're not paying any material amount of federal income taxes, cash taxes on an annual basis and don't expect to for many years to come. So that's one component of it. We do have maintenance CapEx for 2019.
That estimate is $715,000,000 worth. But distributable cash flow is before funding our growth capital projects. So I think those are the two pieces that might help bridge you. Does that get you what you're looking for?
Yes, I think it does. So is it you were an MLP before, right? Were. And you C Corp, but you don't pay tax because of your tax assets.
That's right.
And like I said, $750,000,000 okay, I think I get it.
Yes, that's right. That's I think the biggest disconnect there is the cash taxes because of our tax assets that we have. There's one right back here.
Thanks. Yes. Just another one on returns actually. If you could just compare the incremental returns on capital for the new projects versus the sort of the base returns.
Right, right. It's a good question that's come up recently. I think if you look at the base returns today, they're much lower than what our growth capital project returns that I've been talking about are and have been. We've over the last three years, you saw the multiples. The returns have been very good on those projects.
On the base business, we've seen some headwinds and we've got some information in here that have illustrated some of the headwinds that we faced on the base business. So typically, our base business is pretty stable. But in the last since 2014, we've seen some headwinds from our commodity price exposed assets, reduce some of our EBITDA, some maintenance excuse me, some midstream assets that have reduced volumes flowing through them. And that means that now they're underutilized and we can see some uptick in those revenues associated with those projects those assets because they're underutilized. And the other one was we had a number of customers who were coal customers who went bankrupt and we lost some revenue that way.
But I think those items put together meant our base business had some headwinds in it that we don't think are recurring headwinds and actually one of them might turn around now that has really weighed on some of the returns that we're seeing in the overall business today and masking the real returns that we're generating on those growth projects.
Thanks. And the on the new projects, the construction risk, is that borne by you? Or do you subcontract that out?
We have contractors for the majority of our projects. And we look to contract enter into contractual arrangements with our contractors where a number of identifiable risks are shared or are pushed on to the contractors where we can. We've done a nice job here recently of working with our contractors and sharing a reasonable amount of that risk. And I think that's part of the reason why you saw this good performance on our projects in the last three years is because of that arrangement that we're looking to achieve.
And a final one for me. Just on the new contracts, is there a shift towards the take or pay versus the volume fee based? Is there a discernible preference between one versus the other?
Yes. Our preference is definitely to get take or pay arrangements. It's more stable, more predictable. So where we have the ability to secure those, that's what we prefer. The client side?
Yes. What are they asking for?
Yes. I think it depends on the clients. I think we have a number of utility type customers who have mandates to secure to have firm transportation secured by their utility commissions and regulatory bodies. In those cases, I think they just want to have that security. They just want to have that commitment.
And they're a little less concerned about the form of that commitment. So in those cases, it's easy for us to obtain a certain length of take or pay contract. A number of our contracts, it's not optional. They have to take or pay if they're going to have contract with us. Otherwise, their services could be interruptible and that's not desirable by a number of our customers.
So really where you see the volume based and fee based business is less on our long haul pipelines moving across multiple states. It's more on the gathering and processing businesses that are involved with individual basins that are raising that are gathering supply from individual basins. A number of our terminal businesses where just that's the norm for that business, where storing liquids products, refined products, gasoline, diesel and we're doing it for a fee. Those are more some of those are more done on a volume based business versus take or pay. Although we do have a number of significant number of our liquids terminals that are on monthly warehouse charges, which are effectively take or pay contracts.
Sure. Does anyone else have any? Okay, go ahead.
In terms of the balance sheet, 4.5x EBITDA, why do you think it's the right number? And if you were a private company, can you run the business like that with 7x, 8x EBITDA? And then if you could comment on the build versus buy, I. E, is it cheaper to buy a company or to build? How do you think about that in M and A?
If we are a private company, we would still be subject to the rating agencies weighing in on what the appropriate leverage is and that would influence the cost. If we went much higher than our current level, we'd be subject to a downgrade. And that's important to us because of the cost and the accessibility to the debt markets. Well, as I mentioned earlier, we look to the debt markets to fund a number of our growth projects and our uses of cash. We do have maturities coming up on a regular basis.
And so to refinance those, we want to make sure we have ready access and affordable access to the debt markets. So that's one of the criteria that we put into the 4.5%. Our stable cash flow and predictable level of EBITDA is another important trait that we look at to determine what level of debt is right for us to be able to support, and we're very comfortable at the 4.5 times on that front. To go any lower than this, we don't see a significant benefit on our cost of capital or our overall cost of debt. So we think this is a good spot for us.
It's allowed us to achieve that mid BBB level, which is an attractive rating for us, gives us more cushion and more flexibility and better access, we think, more predictable access to the debt markets. On the build versus buy, I think if you at these return levels, with these risk profiles of these projects that we have here, these are going to be economically superior to a buy, unless that buy comes at an unusually low price. And so I think that the trade off is if you're looking to achieve an established portfolio with immediate cash flows, sometimes buying is the only way to do it. Otherwise, build is usually the preferred method to go.
Okay.
All right. Thank you all very much. Really appreciate it.