A new survey conducted by Bain & Co. finds a rising percentage of energy executives willing to recognize the reality that the world will fail to achieve the “net zero by 2050” drop-dead goal pushed by the globalist community.
Bain & Co. surveyed more than 600 executives in oil and gas, utilities, chemicals, mining, and agribusiness during last November’s COP28 conference in Dubai and over the weeks following that event.
2050, of course, is the alarm-driven drop-dead date given to us by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the year we must achieve global net zero carbon emissions to prevent disastrous levels of global warming. But everyone knows that such alarmist projections have always been quite malleable and tend to shift to later dates in time once it becomes clear that the predicted disasters by certain dates aren’t actually coming about. You know, like all those alarms about the end of snow, the melting of the polar ice caps, Greenland’s ice shelf sliding off into the ocean, and Manhattan being inundated by rising sea levels. Al Gore kind of stuff.
Similarly, Bain & Co. finds that a rising percentage of energy executives now expect the ballyhooed “net zero” date to be pushed well past 2050, with fully 62% now anticipating it won’t be reached before 2060 or even later. That number is up from just 54% expressing the same opinion a year ago, and we can be sure it will keep rising in every subsequent year as the impossibility of reaching that 2050 goal becomes increasingly obvious to even the truest of true believers.
Here is how Bain puts it in its press release: “Clearly, the longer that executives on the front lines of the energy transition grapple with the challenges of putting decarbonization plans into action, the more sober they’re getting about the transition’s practical realities.”
Yes, pesky practical realities do have a way of intruding on the fantasy thinking that underlies so much of the energy transition’s prevailing narratives. In its next paragraph, Bain cites factors like rising interest rates and growing concerns about lack of “policy stability” in the US and other western democracies, i.e., democratic elections, as factors causing more and more of these executives to become skeptical about achieving the alarmist goals.
But weren’t those and other factors completely foreseeable to anyone who understands how the world really works? Of course, they were, but we must recognize that the key decisions related to this heavily subsidized transition are not being made by such people, but by politicians and bureaucrats. And therein lies the real trouble. Politicians look at impractical “solutions” like wind, solar, and electric vehicles and see shiny objects that they might be able to leverage with voters. Whether or not the solutions have any practical value is a secondary thought if they consider it at all.
We see this survey’s findings now reflected in remarks by industry executives at this week’s CERAWeek conference in Houston. CEOs from companies like Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Shell, and others stated their views that the world will require more and more oil, natural gas, and coal for decades to come, and discussed their plans to rededicate more of their capital budgets to their core businesses and less to pleasing ESG investors by throwing away money at unprofitable green ventures.
Reality is setting in, slowly but surely. When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tells an interviewer from E&E News that the Biden administration is trying to bring about “a managed transition,” as she did this week, more and more smart people in the energy space are coming to realize the threat that really represents.
Speaking to the CERAWeek audience Monday, Granholm claimed strong public support for the Biden Green New Deal agenda, saying, “Consumers are calling for change. Communities are calling for change. Investors are calling for change.” Again, Bain finds a rising percentage of executives actually in the business increasingly skeptical any of that is accurate.
What we are seeing here is a return to energy realism in the business community. That’s good news for everyone, whether the Biden administration and its alarmist supporters approve of it or not.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ-02) says that President Joe Biden’s energy policies are to blame for the burgeoning energy and national security crises.
Crane linked the crises to “idiotic” actions by the Biden administration, citing the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, ban on drilling on federal lands, and the resulting depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
“The Biden Admin has sabotaged American energy & compromised our national security,” said Crane. “Not to mention, these idiotic moves impose crippling costs on Americans.”
👉🏻 Canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. 👉🏻 Banned drilling on federal lands. 👉🏻 Depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
The Biden Admin has sabotaged American energy & compromised our national security.
Not to mention, these idiotic moves impose crippling costs on Americans.
Gas prices in Arizona average about $3.40, a decline from last year’s average of $3.90. The national average was lower as of the latest federal data, at about $3.20. Arizona’s average gas price reached a record high last March, surpassing the previous high set in June 2008.
Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office by revoking the permit necessary for the pipeline’s completion through executive order. About a week later, Biden issued another executive order paving the way for a ban on new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters. That ban has not come to fruition, though the administration has added other burdens to the oil industry.
In July, the Biden administration announced new rules that would increase the cost that oil companies must pay to drill on public lands by over 16 percent — ending a century-long rate of about 12 percent — and end the renewal of unused permits.
When the Russo-Ukrainian conflict escalated last year with Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, the Biden administration began tapping into the SPR to mitigate the resulting rise in oil prices.
The strategy resulted in a 40-year record depletion of the reserve, at 180 million barrels. Last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) reported that it bought back nearly nine million barrels.
Today, I'm authorizing the release of 1 million barrels of oil per day for the next six months—over 180 million barrels—from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) monthly data, domestic crude oil production increased at a greater rate under Trump than the past two years under Biden.
Under Trump (thousand barrels):
2017 produced 3.4 million; by September produced 2.5 million
2018 produced 3.9 million; by September produced 2.9 million
2019 produced 4.4 million; by September produced 3.3 million
2020 produced 4.1 million; by September produced 3.1 million
From 2017 to 2018, there were over 581,000 more barrels produced. From 2018 to 2019, there were over 496,000 more barrels produced. 2020 marked a decline, with about 351,000 less barrels produced. The first three months of 2020, prior to the pandemic’s likely impact, reflected record productions of crude oil that were higher than the first three months of this year’s production levels.
Under Biden (thousand barrels):
2021 produced 4.1 million; by September produced 3 million
2022 produced 4.3 million; by September produced 3.2 million
Amount in 2023 produced so far (as of September): nearly 3.5 million
From 2021 to 2022, there were 234,000 more barrels produced. So far this year, there have been about 281,000 more barrels produced.
The Biden administration has made clear its commitment to swapping oil for total electrification. Their goal aligns with a globalist commitment to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Over the weekend, the Biden administration announced a new rule to reduce methane emissions from oil producers.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
It seems that any meeting between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping inevitably presents another opportunity to render the U.S. increasingly reliant on China for its energy security.
This week’s meetings at the APEC conference in a suddenly cleaned-up San Francisco were no exception.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the bilateral meetings between the U.S. and China was the looming presence of John Kerry at the table. Kerry serves as Biden’s “climate envoy,” a made-up job that is not even a confirmed position and does not merit a seat at such meetings. But there he was, making sure the President and other U.S. officials toe the line on climate commitments.
Fox News reports that Kerry’s efforts resulted in more security compromising fruit, as State Department officials agreed with their Chinese counterparts to triple down on commitments to further inhibit American energy and national security in the name of climate change. The two governments agreed to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation” with renewables and electric vehicles in the coming years, a pledge that China has already undermined with its implementation of a new round of subsidies for the acceleration of its already-massive expansion of coal-fired power plants in the coming years.
It is the sort of deal China has routinely violated in recent years as it continues to prioritize its own energy security at the expense of stated climate goals. It is also the sort of deal that Kerry, Biden and other Democrats have systematically used over recent decades to render the U.S. increasingly reliant on China for its own energy future.
“The agreement speaks heavily about advancing — doubling down and tripling down on renewables, wind and solar. The majority of them are made in China,” Daniel Turner, the founder and executive director of Power The Future, told Fox News Digital. “It is basically guaranteeing China decades of wealth, guaranteeing America is going to buy their products.”
Turner isn’t wrong, and the effects on climate change from the latest Kerry-led deal will be negligible, if not actually negative given China’s far lower environmental regulations and standards. Even worse, China’s control of the supply chains for most of the parts and metals that go into the making and deployment of renewables and EVs leaves the U.S. and other western nations with a steadily diminishing sphere of geopolitical leverage.
But Americans did receive a bit of positive news in the green energy realm this past week from a seemingly unlikely source: Oil major ExxonMobil. The biggest U.S.-based oil company announced the kickoff of a new project to produce lithium from a deep underground saltwater formation in southern Arkansas called the Smackover.
Somewhat ironically, ExxonMobil will deploy standard oil and gas drilling, production and reinjection technologies and processes to produce, extract and process the lithium. If successful, the project will turn America’s biggest major oil company into one of the country’s biggest lithium companies, too.
This is probably not exactly the model Biden’s regulators, many of whom are alumni of leftist anti-fossil fuel lobby groups, envisioned when they began launching their myriad efforts to subsidize and regulate this artificial energy transition into being, but they should be glad to take the help where they can get it.
Given that the ExxonMobil project will qualify for the tax incentives contained in the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden officials will even be able to point to it as a success story related to that costly legislation.
Given that the administration’s own efforts to source domestic supplies of critical energy metals and free their supply chains from Chinese dominance have to this point borne little fruit, the project being mounted by ExxonMobil amounts to a great leap forward.
What it all demonstrates is that all the handshake deals between government Mandarins like Kerry in the world cannot match the power of innovation and ingenuity from America’s private sector. It also demonstrates the absolute necessity of maintaining a healthy and robust domestic oil and gas industry, without which none of this is remotely possible.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
It didn’t make a ton of news in the United States media, but a new study published by the International Energy Agency in mid-October emphasizes the enormous potential roadblock to a successful energy transition posed by a projected need to refurbish and double capacity on global electricity grids.
The study, titled, “Electricity Grids and Secure Energy Transitions,” advises governments that investments in expanding and refurbishing power grids must “nearly double by 2030 to over USD 600 billion per year after over a decade of stagnation at the global level, with emphasis on digitalising and modernising distribution grids.” That level of new investment in just this single piece of the overarching plans for a complete re-tooling of the global energy system is not currently a part of existing policies around the world. Given that most developed countries are already saddled with overwhelming public debt and the lack of means in developing countries, the prospect for a doubling of current grid investments seems dubious at best.
But, if anything, the goals laid out in this IEA missive only become more implausible as one reads through the list. Perhaps the most extraordinary among them is the agency’s estimate that reaching the UN’s goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would require the refurbishment, upgrading and build-out of 80 million kilometers of new transmission lines by 2040. For those who struggle with conversion factors, 80 million km is roughly the equivalent of 50 million miles, or 2,000 times the Earth’s circumference.
That is the equivalent of all the transmission capacity built by mankind in history, and the IEA says it must be accomplished in just 17 years for this energy transition to succeed. IEA notes that achieving this extraordinary goal – among other improbable propositions laid out in the report – will require “secure supply chains and a skilled workforce,” neither of which currently exists.
How will this massive expansion in necessary skilled workers be achieved? The report doesn’t really say.
How will those supply chains – almost all of which are currently dominated by a single country, China – be secured? The report says only “Governments can support the expansion of supply chains by creating firm and transparent project pipelines and by standardising procurement and technical installations.” Sounds easy, right? But the U.S. congress has a hard time just agreeing what day of the week it is: The thought that it will suddenly develop the ability to engage in that sort of complex thinking and legislating in a constructive way is absurdly unlikely.
The report then somewhat hilariously points to another elephant residing in the energy transition’s living room, noting that governments all over the world need to streamline their energy permitting processes to accommodate this massive grid expansion. Again, using the U.S. congress as an example, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has spent the last 19 months trying to put together enough votes to approve legislation that would address just a small portion of what is really needed in this realm and had no success, with no real prospects of that changing until, at best, 2025, when the next congress will be sworn into office.
Think about this in the context of a story I wrote in June about the TransWest Express transmission project, which had finally received its final permits from the federal government. This is a line that is about 1300 miles long, designed to carry electricity generated by Wyoming wind farms to customers on the West coast. The punch line on this single transmission project is that the permitting process took 17 years to achieve. Assuming no new litigation arises, it will now take about another 3 years to complete and place into service.
Like so many of the work products published by the IEA in recent years, this report’s findings seem to be motivated mostly to help achieve political goals based mainly on wishful thinking, with little consideration given to long-ingrained dynamics at play in the real world. Even if overwhelming debt burdens and resource and supply chain challenges could be just wished away, the political impediments to achieving these unrealistic goals seem destined to force a day of reckoning for the entire energy transition plan.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
