Best Energy Picks - November 2, 2024
Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
This week’s best energy picks:
Biden-Harris Squandering Our LNG Advantage — Fracking and Pennsylvania: Why it Matters — Green Rot Spreading Rapidly in the Net Zero Greenhouse — Proposed EV Battery Factory Loses Government Subsidy and Drops Dead — and much more.
Biden-Harris Squandering Our LNG Advantage
The U.S. is king of the world when it comes to LNG, but the Biden-Harris administration has been determined to squander everything this means:
Breaking into the global LNG market has been a generational endeavor—and an outstanding success—for the American economy. The technical sophistication required to master the liquefaction, transportation, and regasification of this vital hydrocarbon is not trivial. Each LNG cargo represents the fruits of years of permitting and construction, the investment of billions of dollars, and negotiations of contracts (also known as “off-take agreements”) that will be in force for decades. Long-term operations, long-term relationships, long-term impact.
The arrival of carriers laden with American LNG to Europe in the months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was celebrated by the Biden-Harris administration. These ships, metaphorically speaking, set sail a decade earlier, as LNG export terminals navigated the dilapidated federal regulatory process. These liquefaction facilities, in turn, rely on natural gas supplied from fields that themselves had to be explored and developed over many years.
But now the White House incumbents are playing with fire. Their decision in January 2024 to pause most export approvals until the completion of duplicative economic and environmental studies has already damaged the trustworthiness of American natural gas supplies. Japan, one of our closest allies and most important customers for LNG, was the first to sound the alarm. That damage will be compounded if these studies provide an excuse for the federal government to extract concessions from the U.S. natural gas industry before approvals resume.
Hat Tip: D.S.
Fracking and Pennsylvania: Why it Matters
Greg Wrightstone nails it with this post at the CO2 Coalition:
To frack or not to frack has been a hot topic in the United States for several years. That discussion has been most intense in the state of Pennsylvania.
That is because the Keystone State is home to the Marcellus Shale, the largest natural gas accumulation in the world. According to Bill Zagorski, who was given the honorary moniker of "Father of the Marcellus," the Marcellus contains 3,698 trillion cubic feet of gas (TCF). That size qualifies it as a mega-giant field.
To put that in perspective, the bubble map included here shows the top fifteen conventional natural gas fields in the world. The combined Gas-in-Place for all 15 is only slightly more than that for the Marcellus by itself.
In addition to this incredibly huge reservoir, two more reservoirs are being exploited in Pennsylvania. The Burket Shale is above the Marcellus and is a super-giant field, while the deeper Utica Shale may have reserves approaching that of the Marcellus.
Only by using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are these reserves made viable.
Pennsylvania and America can fuel the world’s needs for clean-burning natural gas for many generations and have plenty left over for our own domestic requirements. That is, if politicians and government would just get out of the way.
Well said!
Hat Tip: R.N.
Green Rot Spreading Rapidly in the Net Zero Greenhouse
Irina Slav dispenses with net zero investments using her cutting cynicism and humor:
Investments in wind and solar, and hydrogen, and batteries, and EVs are rising. They’re rising fast and that’s a really great thing because the planet’s warming and the only way to stop this warming is by investing even more in wind and solar, and hydrogen, and batteries, and EVs.
That’s the messaging that’s been pouring out of every corporate media outlet, every NGO, and every bank with transition ambitions. The trajectory of those investments was assumed to remain uninterrupted and upward — anything else went against dogma, which is an offence punishable by media death in this day and age. Alas, there is rot in the message, and that rot is fast becoming unmanageable because even corporate media is talking about it increasingly often. I guess the stink became impossible to ignore.
It was Bloomberg of all media that recently reported some truly horrible news. Hedge funds were growing sour on the transition, it said last week. Of 500 funds surveyed, more were betting against transition technology than were betting on it. Also, more funds were betting on oil and gas than were betting against them. Weird, right? Also, absolutely unexpected.
Here’s a quote: “Despite the promises, clean energy and green technology stocks have lagged far behind the broader market. Deep-pocketed institutions are concluding that many climate investments won’t pay off as quickly, or as lucratively, as they’d hoped,” Bloomberg wrote, citing hedge fund executives.
The outlet also cited the chief executive of one Swiss-based hedge fund as saying, adorably, that his team and he “have been looking for an inflection point for years” but “we don’t see the inflection as yet.” Wanted: Inflection point for transition technologies that forego the paws of physics and I am not correcting this typo because it is so fitting.
Rot is setting deeper in the greenhouse of the transition and it is spreading faster. Because not only are hedge funds growing cold towards the inflection-pointless transition exercise, but coal demand of all things horrible is about to keep rising instead of playing along and dying already. Oh, and Big Oil just returned to Libya of all places. Must be masochism. Either that, or the transition is doomed.
Hat Tip: S.H.
Proposed EV Battery Factory Loses Government Subsidy and Drops Dead
One more sign the EV bubble is bursting:
A massive Swedish battery factory for electric cars is shutting down before even breaking ground, as Texel Energy has decided to withdraw its major investment.
Texel Energy’s planned battery factory in Malmö, which had promised up to 6,000 jobs, has been scrapped due to a lack of funding—especially without support from the Swedish government.
In 2021, Gothenburg-based Texel Energy announced plans to build a battery factory in Malmö, introducing a new battery technology that would be cheaper to produce and have a longer lifespan than traditional lithium batteries.
Malmö’s city council even set aside a 50,000-square-meter plot for the factory, which Texel Energy hoped would initially create 2,000 jobs, eventually rising to 6,000.
But the project never made it past the planning stages.
In October last year, the deadline for the pre-emption rights on the plot expired, effectively putting an end to the project.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Hat Tip: T.Z.
And, Briefly:
Oil and Gas Poised to See Multitude of Benefits if Trump is Elected, from J.S.
Climate Cash Grab: The Truth Behind Big Oil Lawsuits. from S.H.
Solar Costs Jump, Wind Woes, Cancellations, from R.B.
The Green New Scam Is Dying, from D.S.
The Biden/Harris LNG Export Policies Are Losing Credibility, from D.B.
Answers to Questions about Fracking, Keystone, Hurricanes, from A.E.
Green Farming Budget Freeze, from J.C.
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