Biden's War on Oil Threatens Energy Goals

The Biden administration's plan to hold a historically-low number of offshore oil and gas lease sales may indirectly threaten its offshore wind energy goals, thanks to a key provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).  The Department of the Interior (DOI) issued a congressionally-mandated five-year offshore oil lease plan last month that included just three fossil fuel lease sales through 2029. 

However, the IRA, Democrats' climate and tax bill passed in August 2022, prohibits the DOI from issuing an offshore wind development lease unless the agency has offered at least 60 million acres for offshore oil and gas leasing at some point in the previous 12 months.

"It's constructively a time of moratorium on the issuance of offshore wind leases in those gap years. We recognized that as soon as they came out with the leasing program," Erik Milito, the president of the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), told Fox News Digital in an interview. "We were a bit surprised that they wouldn't do oil and gas lease sales annually because annual sales are needed if they want to have uninterrupted wind lease sales in the offshore."  READ MORE...

Decarbonizing Fossil Fuels

FROM CANADA

Philip Cross: De-carbonize production not consumption of fossil fuels

Philip Cross - Friday



On Monday the federal government initiated a consultation on whether to use a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax to reduce emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector by 40 per cent by 2030 — eight years from now. The industry is being asked to slash emissions more than the 30 per cent national target by either paying more than the existing tax on carbon or by lowering its production, which hardly seems what the world needs as it faces a growing energy shortage.

The federal government’s singling-out the oil and gas sector for outsized emissions reductions may have a silver lining, however. There is growing recognition in the business sector, if not yet in government, that decarbonizing our fossil-fuel supplies is a cheaper and more efficient way to lower emissions than decarbonizing their consumption. The latter involves overhauling the trillions of dollars of capital stock invested in our existing “mines, oil and gas fields, thermal power stations, hydroelectric dams, pipeline networks, ports, refineries, iron and steel mills, aluminum smelters, fertilizer plants, railroads, multilane highways, airports, skyscraper-dominated downtowns, and extensive suburbia” in the words of environmental scientist Vaclav Smil.

Moreover, decarbonizing oil and gas will be necessary even in a net-zero future since some uses of fossil fuels cannot reasonably be expected to disappear (notably their widespread use as a raw material in manufacturing everything from clothing to plastics). This is why the International Energy Agency expects fossil fuel production to still be a substantial 24 million barrels a day in its net-zero scenario for 2050.

Lowering emissions from oil and gas production will be costly. Some reductions, such as eliminating methane, are relatively easy, which is why the government expects them to fall 75 per cent by 2030. Other reductions involving carbon capture and sequestration will require billions of dollars of investment to capture emissions and ship them by pipeline to be buried underground. More investment will also be needed if small modular nuclear reactors replace the natural gas currently being used to melt the bitumen of in situ oilsands operations.

The fact that decarbonizing fossil fuels rather than re-tooling our whole society to shift away from using fossil fuels would save trillions of dollars makes it attractive for governments to subsidize these efforts, either through direct grants or tax credits, as both the Alberta and federal governments proposed in their spring budgets.  READ MORE...

Reliance on Fossil Fuels

Modern societies would be impossible without mass-scale production of many man-made materials. We could have an affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to good education and health care without any microchips or personal computers: we had one until the 1970s, and we managed, until the 1990s, to expand economies, build requisite infrastructures and connect the world by jetliners without any smartphones and social media. 

But we could not enjoy our quality of life without the provision of many materials required to embody the myriad of our inventions.  Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. 

The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.

The dependence is even higher in the world’s most populous country: feeding three out of five Chinese depends on the synthesis of this compound. This dependence easily justifies calling ammonia synthesis the most momentous technical advance in history: other inventions provide our comforts, convenience or wealth or prolong our lives—but without the synthesis of ammonia, we could not ensure the very survival of billions of people alive today and yet to be born.  READ MORE...

Cost of Electric Cars

At a time when it costs up to $100 to fill a gas tank, but as little as $10 to charge an electric car, buying an EV may seem like an obvious choice. But EV economics are complicated and you need to be savvy about a lot of unfamiliar factors before you can stick it to the oil companies.

Buying a new car
To drive an EV you have to buy an EV, an often pricey proposition. Even after you sell or trade your current, conventional car you could easily be in the hole $10,000 or more. 

It'll take you several years to just break even, as my CNET Cars colleague Craig Cole calculates here, even assuming a scenario where you buy a very cheap EV, live in a place with cheap electricity and always charge at home. That's a lot of "ifs" to make the purchase of a new EV an economic slam dunk.

This is not a new concern: I can't count the number of people I know who bought a hybrid or other fuel-efficient car at a net cost far higher than they could ever save on fuel with it. 

One friend insisted on trading in their Porsche Cayenne for a Cayenne Hybrid, even after I penciled out that it would take them 111 years to break even.  READ MORE...

Wind and Solar

Wind and solar generated 10% of global electricity for the first time in 2021, a new analysis shows.


Fifty countries get more than a tenth of their power from wind and solar sources, according to research from Ember, a climate and energy think tank.


As the world's economies rebounded from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, demand for energy soared.


Demand for electricity grew at a record pace. This saw a surge in coal power, rising at the fastest rate since 1985.


The research shows the growth in the need for electricity last year was the equivalent of adding a new India to the world's grid.

GETTY IMAGES - Wind turbine blades being made ready for export from China

Solar and wind and other clean sources generated 38% of the world's electricity in 2021. For the first time wind turbines and solar panels generated 10% of the total.



The share coming from wind and sun has doubled since 2015, when the Paris climate agreement was signed.


The fastest switching to wind and solar took place in the Netherlands, Australia, and Vietnam. All three have moved a tenth of their electricity demand from fossil fuels to green sources in the last two years.  READ MORE...

Just a Few More Thoughts

What I don't understand is why we want to spend money buying petroleum crude oil from other countries when we can provide all the oil and gasoline that we need right here at home...

Now...  while I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer...  I am smart enough to realize that this is plain stupid and the people who this hurts the most are the general public who basically live from one paycheck to another...

I also understand that 50% of the American population has the relentless desire to go GREEN and while that is a noble quest, it would seem more reasonable to me to go GREEN gradually rather than all at once.

• I think smoking should stop all at once
• I think wars should stop all at once
• I think child abuse should stop all at once
• I think racism should stop all at once

But, I think our energy consumption should stop gradually...  but it should stop.

And, I am all for going green and buying an electric car to stop my dependence on fossil fuels.  

An electric car has a price tag of anywhere from $60,000 to $80,000 and higher...  the distance that an electric car can travel on a charge averages around 400 miles...  but, the recharging time is HIGH...

From Kelly Blue Book
Use these approximate calculations based on a 240V Level 2 power source and charging capacity, according to the manufacturers’ websites for the following 2021 cars:

• Chevrolet Volt EV: 10 hours
• Nissan Leaf: Up to 11 hours
• Tesla Model S: 12 hours
• Karma GS-6: 4 hours
• Tesla Model 3: 12 hours
• Porsche Taycan: Up to 10.5 hours
• Mini SE Hardtop: 4 hours
• Audi E-Tron: 10 hours
• Polestar 2: 8 hours
• BMW i3: 7 hours

Personally, I think I would be rather pissed off if I had to wait 4-12 hours for my car to charge while I was on vacation unless I was at a motel sleeping at night while the car was charging.  However, my wife and I like to go to Myrtle Beach, SC, and the last time we were down there (2021) the motels did not offer charging stations on their property.

So, an electric car with a driving range of 300-400 miles would be good to drive around the area where you live, so that you can charge it at night while you are doing things around the house...  but, then there is the cost of that vehicle...

I just cannot imagine how the general public is going to respond to being forced to go ELECTRIC...  especially when the power company cannot sustain the increased energy drain on their capabilities...  

THEN WHAT???

Fossil Fuels

24 November 2021
Fossil Fuels: Stranded Assets and Fire Sales
By Gwynne Dyer


An article with the innocuous title ‘Reframing Incentives for Climate Policy Action’ slipped out in the scientific journal ‘Nature Energy’ three weeks ago and got very little attention, presumably because of the hopeless title. But it’s not innocuous at all. It’s explosive.


It explains why about half of the world’s oil and gas industry will die in the next 15 years, while the other half enjoys one last frenzied round of growth. Listen carefully, and you can already hear the smart money starting to move.


As the lead author of the article, Jean-François Mercure of Exeter University, told The Guardian: “People will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise what they own is worthless.” Stranded assets, in other words. But that won’t happen everywhere in fifteen years’ time; just in some places.


The authors of the article took the national pledges of ‘Net Zero by 2050’ that have proliferated across the planet recently, worked out what that implies in terms of declining demand for oil and gas, and identified which oil- and gas-exporting countries will still be in the game by the mid-2030s.


Not all the Net Zero pledges will be kept in full, of course, but there will be still enough cuts in fossil fuel use, soon enough, to create a nightmare of falling global demand for all the fossil-fuel producers of the world. Anybody can see that. It takes a little more work to calculate who goes under and who doesn’t – or at least not right away.


What they foresee is that the lowest-cost producers, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, will go for broke. Nobody can compete with them on price (they can make a profit even when oil costs only $20 a barrel), so they will flood the world market with cheap oil.


They haven’t done that in the past because they could make much more per barrel if the supply stayed tight. But that’s a long-term perspective, and there is no long term for fossil fuels any more.


If it is clear that a lot of oil and gas assets are going to stay in the ground forever, then it is your patriotic duty to make sure that the stranded assets belong to other countries, not to yours.


So drop your price to $20 a barrel, drive all the higher cost competitors out of the market, and sell as much you can before demand collapses entirely.


The authors of the paper calculate that Saudi Arabia, for example, could earn $1.7 trillion before demand completely dries up if it goes the ‘fire sale’ route, compared to only $1.3 trillion if it cooperates with all the non-Arab members of OPEC and tries to hold oil and gas prices up. $400 billion is a big difference, so which way do you think they’ll jump?


Who goes to the wall first in this scenario? High-cost producers working in tar sands, oil shales, deep water and Arctic areas, so Canada, the United States, Latin America (mostly Mexico and Brazil), and Russia. But even the lowest-cost producers go broke by 2050, if all those ‘Net Zero by 2050' pledges come true.


Maybe all these changes can happen without grave impacts on other parts of the global economy, but history suggests otherwise. If too many players realise their assets are stranded at the same time, we could get the mother of all market crashes out of this.


Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘The Shortest History of War’.