- Exxon Mobil Corporation - Chairman and CEO

Yes, Doug, that's a good question. And as David highlighted for you in the slides, and as you all have noted we have been securing a portfolio of unconventional opportunities globally. And he highlighted those in the slides. And we are very -- we like the position we've got. There are some very large areas that now require appraisal and ultimately require an organization to develop those the most efficiently and profitable way possible. And obviously we could have, over time, built an organization, piece by piece, to do that. And that would have taken us some time to do.

What this opportunity provides us is both access of course first to what we believe to be a very high-quality resource base that XTO currently holds within their -- within the United States; but also a ready-built, purpose-built organization that we can now take our team of experts who have been working on the portfolio that we have been building for some time, quietly, and moving into these areas outside of the United States, and put those two organizations together. And now, do what ExxonMobil has a history of doing so well, and that is managing assets in a certain priority; sifting through those, selecting the best; applying our technology, applying, in some cases, some of our project management approaches, particularly to new developing plays; and that's what really generates the long-term shareholder value. I think your observation, and as David has pointed out, near-term-- this is not a near-term decision, obviously. This is about the next 10 to 20 to 30 years of what we believe has now emerged as a very important part of the global resource portfolio that is going to be material. It's going to be important to meeting energy supply, and that's the real value creation that we see. And so I think, over time, as you observe what we do in this combination, it will look very similar to what you have seen us do in other large portfolio areas.