In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, Stu Turley dives deep with Trisha Curtis, CEO of PetroNerds, in a no-holds-barred conversation on the myths of peak Permian, U.S. shale resilience, OPEC’s bluff, China’s global energy influence, rising electricity costs, the EU’s energy collapse, and the urgent need for pragmatic U.S. energy policy. From oilfield boots-on-the-ground insights to the geopolitical chessboard, this is a masterclass in energy dominance, national security, and market realities. Don’t miss it.
I had an absolute blast visiting with Trisha, and she is truly a national treasure. Very much like Meredith Angwin is to nuclear, Trisha is to oil and gas. I really appreciate her taking the time to stop by the podcast.
I also think that this week’s President Trump speech will be a huge topic over the next few weeks, as it will highlight the bifurcation in global markets. Those following economic freedom and using energy that can pay for itself without subsidies, or those following Net Zero and fiscal collapse. As for me and my house, we will continue to evaluate oil and gas deals that make sense for investments and watch for new and emerging technologies that will reduce emissions while improving human lives. There is a balance that needs to be achieved, and we must deliver the lowest kWh to everyone on the planet with the least impact on the environment, all while doing so without subsidies.
Topics Covered:
- Is the Permian peaking or just getting started?
- Why U.S. oil & gas output keeps defying forecasts
- OPEC’s spare capacity myth and Saudi strategy
- How China weaponizes energy and manufacturing
- The U.S. refining edge (and why it’s at risk)
- Colorado, California, and the cost of bad energy policy
- Europe’s energy collapse & reindustrialization threats
- Why power generation = national security
- The truth about LNG, coal, and blackout risks
- Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-curtis-petronerds/Or her website: https://petronerds.com/
Watch, share, and subscribe to stay informed on the real energy stories behind the headlines.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:00 – Intro
01:07 – Topics: Peak Oil & OPEC
01:50 – Peak Permian? Not Yet
05:47 – Permian Gas & Decline Curves
07:02 – U.S. Refining & Exports
09:43 – Alaska, Gulf, California
12:04 – China’s Global Energy Push
15:43 – OPEC Capacity Reality Check
20:11 – Saudi Break-Even & Output
24:06 – CO Energy Policy Fails
27:53 – Utilities & Electricity Costs
31:16 – Net Zero vs. Reality
35:51 – France & EU Energy Collapse
39:07 – Nuclear, LNG & China Risk
42:13 – Blackouts & Coal Comeback
44:29 – Gillette Coal Power Tour
47:19 – Pipelines & NY Policy
50:14 – Iran, Hamas, Middle East Risk
51:58 – Dark Tankers & Sanctions
55:21 – Russia’s Oil Gameplan
01:01:40 – Ukraine Ceasefire Risks
01:03:36 – Exxon, Ruble & Russia Tax
01:05:28 – U.S. Energy Dominance
01:07:13 – Connect with Trisha Curtis
Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisha-curtis-petronerds/
Or her website: https://petronerds.com/
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:00:07] Hello everybody, welcome to the Energy Newsbeat Podcast, my name’s Stu Turley, President and CEO of the Sandstone Group. Today is an absolute treat today. I’ve got Trisha Curtis. She is the CEO of the PetroNerds. And I mean, they are real intelligence rooted in real experience. And I’ll tell you what, if you have not heard her before, you will enjoy listening to her today.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:00:28] How are you? I’m doing great. How are you? And thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:00:33] I tell you what, this is going to go out on your channel. I hope as well too, because this is absolutely a honor for you to be on my podcast and share you with all of our listeners. And I hope that they all jump over and start subscribing to your channel as well too because you are truly a great energy leader out there.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:00:54] Thank you. Well, I appreciate that. I really do. And I appreciate being invited and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I know we have some fun stuff to talk about. It’s not like there’s anything happening in the oil market. Nothing going on.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:01:07] No, there’s about three things and we have OPEC saying that the oil markets are now, wait a minute, we’re going to put more production on. It was 127,000 barrels or whatever it was, which is minor. And we have that discussion. We have is peak Permian going to happen and or is peak oil going to happened? So we got a three full house discussion going on here.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:01:28] I like that. I like the track, you know, I try to add like eight more things. So like this keeping this we got three Those are really good topics
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:01:36] And for our podcast listeners, both Trish and I both sidetrack a lot and we run a fast. So get ready to play this back and so get ready to rumble. Okay. Peak Permian. What are your thoughts on peak Permian?
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:01:50] Well, you know, I think this is, it’s so funny. I coined this in my last keynote I gave, and I was in Midland, Texas. And I said, let’s talk about peak shale. And I, said, you, know, we, you it’s a sexy term, you know, and it’s everyone wants to talk about Pete, the word peak. And so I reminded them where we started talking about peak and it was actually demand, right. And the first time I had actually ever discussed it in a big setting was actually peak demand and it was in Saudi Arabia in 2017. And I was speaking with the international energy forum. And it was OPEC and IEF and a bunch of different groups and they brought people together and they were talking about peak demand. And I literally looked at all of them and I said, you know, EOG does not have in their slides like a peak demand slide if that’s what you’re concerned about. And that’s when it started talking about. And so the problem that I have with peak is literally think about it. You think, we all think about in your head, you think about peak, you think of mountain peak, like top and coming down. So when people think peak, they don’t think plateau. So we should We should be calling it like plateau shale or Butte shale or flat top or something, but that’s not sexy. That’s not appealing. And like that’s what we should be discussing. And we’re not even there yet. We’re at 13.6 million barrels per day. And it’s kind of amazing because if you talk to industry leaders and even CEOs in this space, they’re having trouble wrapping their arms around with how we got to 13. 6 million barrels a day when everyone is slowing down. And so I think peak Permian, I mean, let alone just peak shale. Peak Permian is a good kind of narrow topic to talk about is that, no, I don’t think we’re at peak Permien. I mean we’ve got two counties, Lee and Eddie County in New Mexico that are producing every month. They keep climbing a little bit higher. And seven months ago, eight months ago people said they had peaked. Right. So I mean they’re like, oh, they can’t go to two million barrels per day. Well, lo and behold, they’re they’re nearly at two point three million barrels a day. So I mean, and that’s two counties. So obviously this is incredible rock, right? Some of the best rock in the entire world is in Southern New Mexico and in Texas as well. And so I think, you know, we have to be mindful and I’m very fortunate, right, that I cut my teeth on you a shale. So what I see right now is something I’ve been seeing since I started in really 2010 looking at the business and I’ve actually grown up. I grew up around the oil business, and so I know Booms and Bus, and I feel like we just don’t have a long view. People are not taking a long of shale, and they’re also not taking appreciation of Booms and Bus. But when we think about peak shale and we think of peak Permian, Chevron almost sold off their Permian recently because they didn’t think there was anything there. And so now we’re talking about peak, come on, folks. We really need to wrestle, get to grips with this, and that if we were at peak, we would already see refracting, and we’re not. So that means that there’s still a lot of runway in terms of existing wells left to drill and then at that point If we really are running out and we’re then then people are really concerned You would start to see that impact on price a little bit, right? We would start being concerned that that the us isn’t going to be there and that’s what you continually hear on tv I mean with all the opec talk today, that’s everything shale’s rolling over well 13.6 million barrels per day That’s 3.6. Million barrels a day more than saudi arabia right now. So, you know, let’s a far cry from rolling over And so I think we, we have to be just very conscious of that, what people hear and what they think and what is different from boots on the ground. And absolutely companies have drilled, you know, they’re looking for inventory. But what I see is them when they’re looking for a inventory, you see a lot of private equity, still very active in the Permian. You see a a lot private equity that’s looking to go elsewhere. That means they’re starting to say, okay, let’s look at Wyoming. Let’s look North Dakota. Let’s Look at Utah. Let’s get you into, I mean, if you look at you into if you look at, I’m in Ohio, these look at Eagleford, these are places that People. Didn’t find sexy that are now becoming quite appealing. And so I, but I, I by no means think that we have one drill up all the wells in the Permian. I think we, we still have quite a bit of ways. The longer laterals are doing a lot. The efficiencies are doing lot and we’re really holding up production. And so there’s about 80 different ways you can talk about that in terms of, are we talking about wells to drill up? Have we already hit our lateral length? Have we talked about maximizing everything from the rock to start with? I mean, and the answer is no.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:05:47] Or the molecule change with the getting gas here, which is actually a great thing because we do need more natural gas.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:05:54] Yeah. And, and you still have so much of this, you know, if you actually look at like the metrics, right, look at decline curves, look at lateral links in the pervian particularly like in New Mexico. It’s, it’s very deep in New Mexico. It’s very thermally mature. It over pressure. And so you get, you do get a lot of gas, but you also get a creptin oil and that gas is that oil driver, right? It helps drive it up. And so we haven’t pushed the envelope, I think in terms of everything there, right. Super long laterals. And really tinkering with it because it’s really deep, it’s real hot, and people are still tinkered with it. So I still think as much as we hear of we’ve maxed out on efficiencies, it almost feels like, especially when I go to the field or I’m talking to clients, it almost feel like every time I speak with them, there’s a little bit more. And I’m not saying a lot, it’s not like, oh, we cut 10 days off drilling times, but it’s a bit. And so these little bits incrementally start adding up and I think that’s what we’re seeing with that 13.6 million barrels per day. And, and I absolutely don’t think we’re. Were at peak Permian in terms of production or in terms activity. I think there’s, if we were absolutely at peak, I would say, well, let’s have fun with this because you give me another $5 swing on oil prices and I can guarantee you we can get more out of the rock.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:07:02] Oh, absolutely. I like the way you say that. And when we sit back and take a look also, I don’t think one play makes the definition of, I love your coffee mug, by the way, for our podcast listener. Hold that back up. Cause that is absolutely a wonderful. See mine, mine says no taxes for me because I like absolutely investing in good investments, but I love you’re Petro nerd logo. That logo is cool.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:07:28] Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. I’m really I’m really happy with my logo. I have some great website people and they did an awesome job.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:07:35] Um, and, and so we sit back and we take a look peak Permian. I don’t think you can’t just say that the United States is going to go, go away because the Permian falls down because I don’t think you can define a country’s output by a single play. And, you know, we take a look at the Marcellus, Hainesville, Alaska, Alaska. My granddad, my book is that holding up my camera right here, but my granddad discovered the North slope. And so you said, I love all my trips to Alaska and everything else. We got a lot of growing to do up in Alaska and a ton, a ton. And if we get governor Newsom out, we can get rid of the California problem and Kern County can become king again. I mean, it is actually possible.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:08:21] Well, you know, actually, so I think we should circle up a little bit back on Permian in just a second. But I will say that I was in D.C. Last week and I can tell you, I have never heard as many questions and folks as interested in Alaska and Gulf of Mexico, I mean, everybody, that’s what they want to talk about from the Congressional Budget Office to API to everyone. And it was because there was so much within the reconciliation or the big, beautiful bill on Alaska. And so absolutely, I cannot emphasize or underscore this enough, folks, like where you find oil, you find it again. I mean, it wasn’t news to people in North Dakota when we had the Bakken shale, right? I mean look at Julie LaFever, look at the geologists, look at, I think it was Lee Price, who had that 70s geology report that I actually still have and talking about billions of barrels in the Bakkens, and this was in the 70s, right, everyone knew it was there. And so, I mean, we also know that we are nowhere near extracting everything from this rock as it is, um, we’re, we’ll probably not at 5%, we’re probably maybe closer to 10% recovery, but I mean when you’re talking with the guys that are actually fracking, you know, if you’re with Liberty or talking with others, I mean, it’s really like, can we get more of the rock and can we get more out of so-called lesser tiered acreage? Absolutely. It is a matter of price and it’s a matter where we’re at, but in terms of like, have we peaked output? 100% not. And start talking about Alaska. Holy crap. I mean, there’s a lot left to give. These are on like a terminal decline and that’s not because it doesn’t have the production potential. It’s because the regulations are terrible.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:09:43] Right. The regulatory problems. And California, Governor Newsom has absolutely destroyed with the 20% of California. That one is horrible. I hope to get you in and have you talk with Mike Umbro as well too when we get that one rolling. Because imagine California, if their gasoline prices are high enough now, take away 20% percent of their downstream capacity, a rut row. They’re going to start at $10 gasoline.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:10:13] Yeah. And I think, I think that’s, you know, we, we have to appreciate that, you know we have a whole value chain in oil and gas in the U S and I actually don’t think we appreciate it as an industry, as a sector, or even the, the government doesn’t appreciate fully that, you know, as an advanced industrial nation where, you know, in the US you can’t build anything, right? It’s very hard to build things with a very lawyerly society. Yet the U.S. Is the largest oil and gas producer. And so we have, we’ve dominated like the oil and gas production space and, and actually the refining space. So we now export. 11 million barrels a day of crude and product, more than any nation in the world. And so not just the largest oil and gas producer, but the largest exporter of crude in product. So four million barrels of oil, you know, two million barrels, a diesel, a million barrels a day, a gasoline, you, know, a billion barrels of propane, which were a ton of this product. And so that refining sector, you that California like, they will know how important it is when it goes away and they’ve declined over time, but like We’ve got to really pay attention to the refining base because I actually just was looking at Chinese data and for the first time China has more refining capacity than we do and you know We have more refinery capacity than any nation in the world 18 million barrels a day and it’s super important because it doesn’t Matter if you have the crude oil and you don’t have the refinery capacity and everyone’s learning this the hard way with rare earths and critical minerals is that yeah You can have some but then you got to go to china to root to refine and process it We have our own production and we have our refining and that is so important to make sure we maintain
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:11:35] Oh, it is. And I don’t know how to handle this one. But when you take back and look at China’s encroachment into, they’ve just invested, I believe it was, it was billions of dollars in Brazil. And they’ve also started drilling in Venezuela as well. That’s right in our backyard. And if we’re going to be doing energy export as a service in order to be energy dominant, you’re going to need to have a little more control over your backyard. And boy, that one ought to wake up the White House.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:12:04] It’s a, it’s a tough one because, you know, I think throughout all administrations, the, excuse me, the encroachment of China, well, China’s not taken seriously enough as it should be, but also developing nations. It’s really tricky, right? It’s you know Latin America, Africa. Yes, we need to be involved, but the extent to how you, how you are involved and how you get things done, it it’s always been tricky. And I’m not like understanding that the fact that it’s in your backyard is really, really important. But even Africa, the influence of China is huge. For Latin America, it is in our backyard. And it is that, you know, China absolutely wants to have an outsized presence like with every other country so that they can push back on the U.S. And so, God forbid there’s ever kinetic war, China will absolutely use their relationships within South America and Latin America. It’s also just important from from a resource base is that early on, China went over there so that in Venezuela and lots of South American nations, Brazil to get oil and then that evolved, obviously, to say, oh, my gosh, and you have rare earth minerals and you have all this other stuff and you need us because you guys are poor countries and we have no issues about, you know, we have No strings attached to our money and we don’t care about human rights or rule of law. We’ll give you the money and you just give us resources. And so that’s sort of how it works with China and particularly in Africa, you know, that’s also how it But. Also, these nations are also feeling something, and that is dumping of Chinese products on their shores. And, you know, what’s really sad is these nations, and this is important for us too, is that if you wanna diversify from the manufacturing base of China, you need the developing world to be a part of it, right? And so it would be nice that if we could get, you know countries in Africa to process some of this, these rare earth minerals or metals and materials, but you know they’re never gonna get the chance because China controls the whole value chain. But importantly now, China’s dumping when we’re not buying this cheap stuff. China’s dumping on the developing world, which means they will never get off the map in terms of growing, you know, actually going up the value chain. And that’s a really serious thing is that it’s basically just going to stay in China.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:13:58] That is really sad to think about because I had the pleasure of interviewing the head of the African energy chamber and he is absolutely a cool cat and he was all about getting jobs. He doesn’t want handouts. He wants jobs and oil field and everything else. And he is about, don’t give me a handout. That doesn’t do me any good. Right. Get me a job.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:14:25] Yeah, I think that’s exceptionally serious. And so, yeah, I think that the role of China in our backyard is one thing just from a pure president standpoint. I mean, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. We dealt with this in the 60s. I mean we know what this is like. This is these are not none. These are not trivial things. And I think folks, obviously in Latin America, you know, in Argentina, you know Chevrons in Argentina Chevrons and we’ve got companies in Venezuela. We you know there’s a lot of oil down there. But we also have to realize like we want these guys on our, you know, we want a good relationship with these countries. And we also to have to be honest about China’s relationship with them. And China has a very outsized influence in a lot of these countries and like Brazil. I always use that as a great example is that, you know they are very close with Brazil. However, Brazil has a 25% steel tariff in place because they didn’t want China dumping all of their steel into their country and decimating their manufacturing and their steel sector. You know, just for a news flash for all people thinking about tariffs is that we are one of the few countries in the entire world that didn’t have them. And so as you know, so it’s not it feels uncomfortable for the world right now. But it’s just it’s it’s everybody else has them because they don’t want their competition or what their base is decimated. And so we just haven’t had them in place. And that’s why it’s hard for a lot of folks to wrangle with them right now, and not saying they’re not painful and it’s the perfect way to do it. But it’s the reality.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:15:43] As we sit here and we talk about the peak oil and the oil thing, we have the prices going on right now, everyone’s worried about OPEC and their spare capacity as they come back online. I’ve got two things for you on here and I really want your opinion, and that is I’m hearing about the glut that is out there and I have a mixed emotion. I don’t think there’s as much glut. I have muffin top and I’m trying to lose it. I don’t think there is as much as my muffin top. I don think there much owl out there. So I think that the pricing is going on is because they’re saying they’re bringing more OPEC oil onto the market, but I don’t know that they have the capacity. Only one country’s really got spare capacity. I’m kind of, I’m missing both of these numbers. Can you tell me what you’re thinking on that?
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:16:31] Yeah, so, you know, I think there’s a lot of folks in the industry that are with you, right? They don’t believe we have the spare capacity, and we can caveat that and get into the weeds a little bit. And we certainly have some folks in OPEC that at the moment aren’t producing as much as they say, and some countries are overproducing, actually. So let’s just square the circle right now, and right now we’re like $62 a barrel right now. Okay? Bye! We are absolutely oversold on prices. For the moment, right now, between supply and demand, you know, the demand side isn’t, you know cratering we’re not in the 1929 Great Depression, okay? You know, we’re no there yet. But we are also not in a rip-roaring economy, so we have some softness on the demand-side. And we have a lot of oil production. If nothing else, we should know by our oil production, we have crap ton of oil on the global market. So we have very well-supplied market, and we have an okay demand economy. So we’re in this position now, a lot of people keep saying a million barrels a day. I hear this. And then I hear the flip side is where they’re oversupplied or we don’t have the spare capacity. And I hear more in the industry that we don’t have the spirit capacity. And I, I, I’m a little concerned with that because I think it’s, it kind of reinforces a narrative of we’re eternables. And we’re bullish on them. You know, we have to go to 85 and we’re going to go there and we are going to go to a hundred and that’s where we’re gone. Well, every time we go close to there, we come back down because it’s too high. And guess what happens? Everybody produces. And so look at Canadian production, look at Brazil production. Everything’s up outside of OPEC. All production is up and up significantly. OPEC, what they did two years ago is Saudi Arabia took a million barrels a day off the market as a voluntary cut. It was a lollipop, it was a gift to the market. And essentially, they gave this, they made it look like and made it feel like OPEX Plus had market cohesion. And they really didn’t. It would just Saudi doing this. Now Saudi, and if I was advising them, I’d say do it, you know, take back market share. It’s not that bad of a global demand market, yes, we have a lot of supply, but you’re getting your lunch eaten by Russia. You’re getting your shares eroded into China and India by Russian crude, so absolutely, put some more supply back on the market, make it more competitive, and by the way, Iran’s killing you, Iraq’s killing, and some of the Iraqi crude is actually Iranian, and hello, we’re going to have to sanction everybody at some point, so get the barrels out there and start doing that. So there’s a lot of, I think, intelligent moves that the Saudis are making. But they look on paper right now, they’re just under 10 million barrels per day for the latest OPEC figures. We are not, we’re not undersupplied. So that thing I think we have to be careful with is that where it’s a muffin top or not is that we’re under supplied. And could, I think this question of spare capacities, could OPECs produce more? Well, 100% absolutely Saudi could produce more. The question is, what’s the timeframe, right? Could the UAE produce more, could Kazakhstan produce more could all these countries produce more Yeah, they could. Absolutely. They can. And I think, again, we have to appreciate that for us, we’re thinking about, you know, whether it is a cost and we got to put the drill bit in the ground and we get a drill three mile long lateral and this cost, you have several tens of millions of dollars, you now, and we work really hard and we sure as hell don’t plug a 700 barrel a day well. You know, that’s actually a really good well here in the DJ basin. In Saudi Arabia, they do plug 700 barrel day wells. That’s a bad well. So you have to realize that it’s so much easier to produce from this rock. And so when they put a straw on the ground, oil comes up. And not quite like that, but pretty damn close. I mean, their break evens for oil are easily under $10 a barrel. So that’s so much different than we’re talking about. Under $10, a barrel, $10. That’s insane. Bring that all the way high to 25. That’s such a low break even price.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:20:11] And to me, Drew, you and I sit there and look at it. No wonder they burn oil for power plants.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:20:17] Yeah. Absolutely. So your power and you burn, you know, the Saudis burn a million or over a million barrels a day in the summer. And so they’re very good at producing oil. And so could the Saudies, there was only one point and you know that was a couple of years ago where obviously COVID when they were as a price war and Russia and Saudi Arabia were both producing 12 million barrels per day. Now everyone says, well, they can’t do it. Well, we’ve also never asked them to. The global market has never said, we need U.S. To be producing 14 million barrels a day. We need Saudi to be producing 13 million barrels today. We need Russia. It’s never been there because we are incrementally growing demand. And again, that’s not cratering, but we’re not at 120 million barrels a day of demand. So the market’s never called for it. And so I’m very careful. I just I feel like there’s so much skepticism always there’s skepticism on its peak shale. It’s it’s Saudi can’t produce that these guys can’t reduce. And I have to be careful. I think that’s a little bit of wishful linking on the oil industry’s part. So I just want to caveat that we’re very, very good at producing oil. And as you see through history and you look at through all forecasts, we actually produce way more than every forecast says. And we produce more under much lower price scenarios than we projected throughout history.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:21:24] With the least amount of impact on the environment in the United States. I’m so proud of our rolling gas folks. I mean, they do such a great job.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:21:33] No, it’s incredible. I mean, to think of that 13.6% of global production is coming from the US and is coming from, you know, a developed nation with rule of law, you know, that can’t build anything, but we have this major industrial menu, you know, of, of oil and gas and that we do it so well and so efficiently. It’s really something we cannot afford to let, you know, let loose.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:21:52] When you’re wondering around in the halls of Congress and stuff, when you take a look at the Democrat run states like Colorado, your beloved Colorado, you take a look at New Jersey. It’s definitely not my beloved. Do what?
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:22:07] It’s definitely not my beloved.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:22:09] Uh, well, I love, I loved Colorado before the Californians moved in. My boat, my, both my kids were there and I planned on retiring there until the things changed. So, but when we sit back and take a look at the Democrat, the highest cost for electricity or energy is Hawaii, Alaska, and I can understand Alaska, but you can sit back in kind of go New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, and a few others. And you take a look, New Jersey got me Trisha and we, and it was, uh, they have nuclear and natural gas for 80% of their electricity. You would think that they would not be in that expensive list, but they’re in that expense of list because of energy policies, how do we get past this because we are seeing a whole electric thing coming around the corner here that’s going to be shocking for folks.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:23:05] Oh, well, so it’s really difficult. And this is why I say Colorado is not beloved to me. You know, fortunately, I was born in Wyoming and I claim it. I am not a fan of, I am NOT a fan of the politics here. I don’t smoke pot and I don’t ski. So, you know, I, you know, Colorado and I are, I love, you know, I live in Denver. I love. You know it was I’m, I’m happy that, you know. I got to know people like Chris right. And, you know, we do have an oil base in Denver and it’s thinning over time, but it’s. It is the hub and actually there might be a bet that it could be a hub again, because we are going to have more people step outside the Permian and come back into the Rockies. Um, but all that being said is like, we have atrocious policies in Colorado. A third of my power to power all this is coming from coal. And yet this state is going to get rid of all coal fired power generation by 2031. So there’s seven, seven power plants and all of it’s all that’s getting decommissioned with zero plans on what to replace it with. And so we have, you know, my, my utility bills are double what they were pre-COVID. And so it’s, and my, tax bills on this house are a third of my mortgage now. I mean, they’ve, they just quadrupled.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:24:08] Texas would love to have you.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:24:09] Well, it’s just an insane it’s an it’s insanity in Colorado and people can’t people can live. I mean, this is not and I just look at it and think of You know, I’m here because of the airport, but I’m very, very frustrated with Colorado and electricity prices. I mean, this is such a really important topic. You know in Alaska, we’ve seen Doug Burgum and we’ve seen secretary Chris right there. And they’re, they were talking about the Alaskan pipeline and twinning the pipeline to have natural gas, like, you know, or sorry, natural gas and actually LNG exports. Well, that’s huge because Alaska, the Alaskins actually need natural gas. Right. They need the power. Think about Hawaii. If you’ve ever visited Hawaii, I’ve been extremely blessed to visit. They run on diesel power. I mean, holy crap, they’re one of the richest states like the tourism.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:24:51] 60% of their power is oil.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:24:54] Yeah, diesel, you’re running on oil. So we could change that. Like absolutely make sense to have, and they could get the LNG from Alaska, but they could the LNG from us. Like they should be powered by natural gas, right? Easily, we should not be powering Hawaii with oil. That makes no sense.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:25:11] LNG to power plant in Hawaii would cut emissions dramatically.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:25:16] And for me, the mission thing, it’s not just a lost cause. It is just not an important topic anymore. I mean, we are at, we’re 0.2% of global CO2 emissions here in Colorado. And Colorado is killing themselves to get rid of the CO2 missions. And there’s so many bigger factors going on right now in the world, including actual wars. And China’s producing 14 million. Gigatons of CO2 emissions and we’re producing five and declining, the war is over, right? We are not going to win this battle unless you’re going to curb China’s emissions. And guess what? News flash to everyone. You’re not going too. So you know what? Put your dollars into dealing with, you know, if you believe in the extreme temperatures, you believe them, put the dollars into that. But you know it had your bets and also EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, they’re about the crappiest forms of power to combat extreme temperatures that I’ve ever heard of. So we really need to be getting intelligent, but we also need to be dealing with the issues, which is that people don’t have affordable power anymore. And we’re increasingly looking like Europe and Europe can’t make anything, let alone AI. They can’t build bullets and ammunition. And so power generation is just so, so important for this. So to answer your question, this is a state, so it’s state by state on their own regulations for power. It’s these power purchase agreements that have to be changed, including in Texas, where you still have a lot of wind and solar coming into the grid. Where we have wind and solar, everywhere you put wind and solar, you increase electricity prices, like it’s guaranteed. But that’s largely because and you look at the data, the latest data for the US, we have we now have more wind and solar in our grid than we have coal fired power generation. And our nuclear has been flat and nuclear is great. But our base load power is being decommissioned. We have natural gas, we don’t have as much of it, we’re not adding. And so we’ve got this problem with these costs. And that’s what you’re seeing on the East Coast is taxes and all kinds of things. Same thing you see in the UK. So I think in, in the U S you know, we have to have pragmatic energy policy. And really, and I say this a lot, but it’s so important is that I want to see this administration get as serious about electricity prices as they are about oil prices, oil cannot do the heavy lifting for inflation for everything. Electricity prices go after the utility companies and let’s start seeing the natural gas costs get passed along to consumers. You know, I want it spot on. I mean, yeah, if we if you and I and everyone and utility were paying $3 an MCF for gas, and that was passed along to the consumer, that is a tax break. That is a boon to this economy that’s a boond to the consumer. That’s a stimulus check. That is a let’s go build. Let’s go, you know, let’s go to town on business. That would be huge. And the only thing holding that up is utility companies taking in that money raking it charging us a lot more for residential natural gas prices, and then using that money to pay for renewables.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:27:53] You are spot on. And especially when you take a look at ERCOT, ERCot is about what 90, 98, 92 megawatts on max capacity, but yet they have 180 megawattes of nameplate capacity because whenever you have, as soon as you put a wind farm on or a wind turbine for our listeners, they know that you got to magnify it up there because they’re not always on. So you’ve paid for 180 megawatts of power, but you only need 92 megawattes of power.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:28:27] I think that’s the one of the biggest things people have a hard time understanding is that and we don’t have good transparent data on this. You need to have every state, you need to know their power generation, what they’re actually generating power from, and then their power capacity. And when you see those, you see a very clear trend is that states like Colorado and California built out a crap ton of wind and solar, and they still have this coal and natural gas, but they only pull on it a little bit and they pull on and it takes all the efficiencies and actually Colorado’s plan is to get rid of all the existing stuff including natural gas and then build small little natural gas facilities. Well, the problem is when you have all these signals from the market from AI and otherwise, the answer is to just build a bunch of combined cycle natural gas. And that’s what everyone thinks is going to happen. But not if you have these power purchase agreements, which subsidize the crap out of wind and solar. And then you build those and then the consumer gets absolutely screwed with these very high electricity bills. And so this stuff is breaking down as we speak, it’s breaking down in front of our eyes. And the answer is to hello, publicly traded utility company and utilities commission, get on board, stop representing Excel and start representing the consumer.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:29:35] Wow. I’ll tell you what, this is an exciting time. I don’t think I have ever lived through a news cycle. Like we’ve been in the last two years, you know, I’m writing about four or five articles a day and I’m wiped out at the end of the day, this is terrible, but when we sit back, we also take a look at not only the OPEC taking a look, whether or not they have supply we have. Peak oil. I don’t think peak demand, and I love the way that you have said this, I think that we are also facing a bifurcation of forward of how the world is going to go forward. And I think we’re going to see a bification of markets. And the bifurgation is those that have net zero energy policies will deindustrialize and have a fiscal collapse. And then those that go to regular energy policies will thrive and have a very good financial future. And I think that bifurcation is really putting the UK and the EU in the failure spot. France government just collapsed as we were, I just right before we started recording this, I was like, oh, there’s a goodbye. There goes another one. So I think bifurgation is up for grabs because I had felt that President Trump. If he could have gotten a peace deal, we might have seen Russia, India, the United States being with Saudi Arabia and all that and having that as a trading block. But now that the trading block is kind of dissolved and President Trump says he’s going to be bringing more sanctions on Russia to get him to the table, I don’t even know how any of this is going to fold out anymore.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:31:17] Okay. So you’ve got a couple of big topics here, which are great because it lets us get into geopolitics and Russia a little bit. But I think starting off your point about this bifurcation and of the kind of global economy with energy and, you know, this is stuff I’ve been telling the Pentagon for a while is that and, and, you know, leaders and folks is that we actually have, we do have a clear bifurtation economy where it is literally just Europe and the US that’s saying we’re going to go net zero and the rest of the world could give it could give a rats behind. I mean, they really don’t care and they’re not going And so actually, we have 165 exajoules of coal consumption, all time record highs. China is 92 of the 165. So they’re more than half of that. That’s all time, record highs for coal consumption. So no, no, we’re not gonna decline CO2 emissions because China and India keep rising in. And two is that energy demand is growing, it’s not falling. And so people talk about energy additions and wind and solar. Actually, you would probably use less coal and probably less natural gas if you stopped adding the really crappy wind and so on. So I could nearly guarantee, I could guarantee you global CO2 emissions would fall because China wouldn’t be making it from coal fired power generation, but more importantly from forced labor. So there’s all kinds of issues with that, but we are seeing, so we have a real problem in Europe and it’s so incredibly serious. Because Germany is, their price for electricity is about 44 cents a kilowatt hour right now. So we’re going like this, but we’re about 20 cents a kilo hour and much higher in cities. But it’s, it’s and it’s really hurting starting to really hurt businesses and consumers and economic ability that the things that differentiate us as a country. Well, Germany can’t build anything. And so it’s killing their manufacturing sector and they are an industrialized country that makes cars and everything. They’re super exposed to China. So this is a problem, but they also have these really expensive electricity prices. And, you know, we’ll talk about the France collapsing in just a second, because they’re second largest economy in Europe. So you’ve got the UK, France, Germany, all going crazy on net zero, but all realizing, hey, we have very expensive electricity prices. And guess what they also did? They all just said, okay, Trump, and we’re gonna spend 5% of our budget on defense. Well, you can’t, and the stock market’s ripping, and everybody’s like, oh my gosh, this is so awesome. Invest in Germany in the DAX, and this is great. I mean, the German stock market is smaller than Apple, like the market share of Apple. So talk about diversification, I’m sorry, but like, it’s just not that depth, you don’t have the depth and liquidity that we have sort of in the US. And so we have to put this into perspective, these are smaller economies, but they’re absolutely industrializing and rapidly on the back of these green policies. And I really think, and this is why I say this is so serious, is I’m not going to fight the game. I’m going to fight to fight on CO2 emissions anymore because we have serious issues like actually making sure we have enough ammunition, one, to make sure if we have to fight a war, God forbid, but two, to makes sure we don’t have to. And we have supplied Ukraine with all of our ammunition and now we’re out and we have them make it and you need power to make it. And if you pay attention to all the stuff that Russia, if you war game or you pay attention to military stuff, which I do, and you also look at what Russia has hit during this whole war in Ukraine, it’s power. You go after power generation because you hurt their ability to manufacture things. And so it’s so important to realize that power generation equals manufacturing. You know what China has? They have one-third of the world’s power generation capacity. One-third. Over 10,000 TWh. And they are the world´s manufacturing power horse. They are not just making t-shirts and iPhones and batteries and wind turbines. They are also making bullets and ammunition and tanks for Russia. And they’re able to do that for themselves. And so when we think about Europe, Europe has a real problem now on just defense, right? They have to be able to. Defend themselves, and they need power generation to do that. So they’re going to have to get their electricity side in order to just, just, just even get close to their defense spending, let alone, I mean, even 2%, let alone 5%. So these are really serious. And then, you know, France collapses their fourth, this is their fourth prime minister in 12 months. And so they had a no confidence vote and they collapsed and this was all based on the budget. So they have run actually this, they’ve run a budget deficit now for they’ve never been in 50 is 51 years now. And they are 115% of GDP. Now, we have a lot of spending and we have a lot a debt, but we’re all still way, way less than China. So, I mean, these are just super serious issues and the one thing you have to realize is that when you’re competing with China, like Europe and like we are, we’re thinking on dollars and we’re think on profitability and they’re thinking of winning and that’s it. There’s no profitability, there’s no anything. So they’ll throw everything in the kitchen sink at it. And we’ll sit here and talk about CO2 emissions and we will lose. So it’s time we, you know.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:35:51] Get get back in the game. I’ll tell you that is amazing. I’m sitting here going and going You sit back and take a look. They’ve got a 54 reactors of their 54 reactors their parties Over the last 10 years have wasted the maintenance dollars and they were only running about 24% of capacity because of failure to do this. They had a gold mine. Yeah, they had a flat gold mine They let rot
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:36:16] Absolutely. And, you know, and I know you and Doug Sandridge are really big on the nuclear side and it’s fantastic. I think nuclear power is, is an, would be an answer, silver bolt for many, many things. And just for just cheap, reliable baseload power. The problem is, it’s not cheap, at least not right now, because we can’t build anything. But also it’s, it also is, not cheap. But also we do have a problem in other countries where it’s just power. And let’s be honest with ourselves. If it’s in the Middle East or if it’s in China, it’s not power. It’s also a weapon. And so we have to be very, very honest with ourselves is that nothing in China is ever clear cut, right? It’s never, oh, well, we’ll just use it for nuclear power. No, China’s thinking that we will have a baseload nuclear power, we will reduce our exposure on oil, we’ll have a very electricity-dense sector with coal, with nuclear, with everything. And then if we have conflict, that they’re banking that we won’t hit their nuclear power right? And they’re definitely using, they’re defiantly cross pollinating everything they can for nuclear ambitions for weapons and everything. And so, I mean, I think it’s just a reality how energy works, but you can talk about Russia and this. I mean nuclear power is fantastic. It’s just, you have to maintain it in the places like France. And Germany and you have to like, you know, you have to give the maintenance to it and then you have to build on top of it. And that would be a great thing for Europe. And then we just have to get around ourselves and build the damn things. And as Doug’s been on the podcast, we need to, we knew to expand it where we have it and we need to just, you know, get over ourselves and start building it. We also have to realize that the military has been using this for decades and they’ve done it, you know, they’ve done it very reliably, very, very safely. It’s you are able to do that in a country like the USA. We are able to do that and we should just lean into it.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:37:59] You know, the great and wonderful Chris Wright, his team put out a great thing. If you can’t tell I’m a Chris Wright fan, I’m over here going, yay Chris, yay. It is nice having a department of energy that is actually run by somebody that knows what they’re doing. And did I say that out loud? I didn’t mean that about the person behind me. Anyway. That chris is such a fantastic guy there report kinda scared me a little bit when i went through their report may said that they he is really is right when he said he inherited a real problem and they need a hundred gigawatts of power coming online we only have twenty two gigawatte of nuclear and the works and natural gas i believe it’s hunday head either honda heavy or some. A Japanese firm has committed to doubling their production on the natural gas turbines. I have to fact check myself on that, but they were buying 150 natural gas turbines from China and the world is all going, yay, we’re going to see some more natural gas turbine from China. I’m like, all right, is there going to be something in there to stop them? You know, some electronics, oops.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:39:07] Um, so, you know, everything, everything with China comes with an attachment. So I mean, whether that’s, uh, you know, whether they can put a bug into the system, but also I think you have to rose that they’re really good at surveillance and control. So they, because of that, they’ve actually been really good about keeping, keeping bugs out of their system and bugging ours. And so there’s actually some articles in the, in foreign affairs this month that foreign affairs isn’t, isn’t great all the time, but there’s a decent article talking about China’s ability to just because they’re so good at their surveillance and control, it’s made them quite good at defending themselves with bugs and quite good bugging us. And so when it comes to power, it’s a really serious one. So if you’re getting anything from China for a power generation side or Lenovo laptops for that matter, I mean, it is problematic in terms of what they can do. But when it come to thinking about the power generation side and a separate piece and we’re thinking about nuclear and we’re thinking about natural gas. I mean, I think we have to, you know, I mean Japan actually, they just lost their prime minister too. He just bowed out and there’s stuff going on in Singapore as well. But I mean in Japan, they have, it took us almost a decade to convince the Japanese that we had the natural gas we said we had because no one believed us. And so, you now, I, I I think it’s really important to realize that we spent a decade, you know a decade plus… Making them believe that we had the geology, that we had so much natural gas. They finally believed it. And then Biden comes into town and then Biden forces all of our Asian allies to start poopooing energy and natural gas and anything to do with domestic crude oil, natural gas, and so I wish we had more people criticizing secretary Granholm and saying that Chris Wright is the first energy secretary ever in history in the U S that had energy experience. Secretary Granholm was a disgrace to this country and to the energy sector. And, you know, she laughed in her very similar to, you know, Harris in many ways, when she was asked questions, she cackled, and she didn’t take things seriously. She didn’t even know how much oil and gas we consumed. And you can like or lump our industry, but you better know the facts of how energy actually works if you’re gonna be the secretary of energy. And so, you can, knowing how it actually works is really important. And so what they did as a strategy, their strategy was basically to say, We are going to force everyone, the world and us, and we’re going to go green, and we’re gonna force climate on everyone, climate policies, and we’re to declare this a national emergency, and we’re trying to quell our domestic sector, and then we’re just going to buy crude from Iran and all these other unsavory countries, and we’ll push down our sector and we’ll force ourselves to go green. And obviously that doesn’t work, but it also didn’t acknowledge the realities of energy and the realities of geopolitics. And I think they found themselves in that big, big problem. And what they ended up doing was just selling off the SPR to try to lower oil prices and to just kind of muddle through. And that muddling through and that lack of leadership, Chris and I and a lot of people say, energy is everything. It’s everything. Full stop period, it underscores everything we do. And so it’s the one thing we have to get right. And, you know, we’re doing a great job on the production side. We’re not doing a great job on getting that production into the economy and using it, particularly on the power generation side.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:42:13] Wow, I just liked the way you think this is such a great conversation. I sit back and think that when Chris Wright also said the number of blackouts were going to be increasing by a hundred fold, holy, we dodged a bullet. If we had a different president.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:42:31] Yep. Yep. I mean, I really, I think on the basics of that stuff, basics of just that, of blackouts and things like that, we did dodge a bullet. And I, you know, people could say, oh, that’s not true. And I’m sure there’ll be pushback on that. But actually, literally, the Bloomberg ticker on the day after the election, I flew down to Dallas the morning after the the election and gave a talk to a royalty company or mineral company. And the next morning I see on the Bloomberg ticker that Duke Energy has said, if they if the administration tells them they don’t have to shut down their coal that they’re not going to. And the seriousness of that, again, you could hate emissions, you can hate coal, but the impact of that to people’s utility bills and to baseload power and dispatchable power, and actually even to the viability of renewables is massive. That means that these people are no longer, the companies are no longer beholden to policies they can actually use reliable energy and cheap energy. The one thing we have with coal is it’s extremely and I keep here because it’s so damn important. It’s a rock. It’s a solid form. It is extremely energy secure. I don’t have to put it in a pipeline. I don’t t have to compress it as much as I love natural gas. And I can use it when I want to and not. And so I think if we were to get real about energy and say, use every damn drop of natural gas we have for power, back it up with coal and nuclear as well if we can get it built, we would have the lowest cost. We have no excuse not to be the lowest-cost energy provider in the world. You know, and that would mean that everyone can do business here. This is why I say the policymakers is that start looking at the utilities and start passing on those net gas prices. Because if you want to re-industrialize America and you want to get Intel to invest here and Taiwan Semiconductor and all these companies, give them the lowest utility, give them the low electricity prices in the world. No compete with China on that front directly.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:44:17] I did not realize how versatile coal was. I just visiting with some folks. I’ve got some podcasts coming around the corner with some pretty cool coal updates. I didn’t realize it was that cool of a power source.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:44:30] Um, have you been to a coal mine?
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:44:31] Uh, no.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:44:32] Okay, well, I would encourage you to do this because it’s just a nerd, it is very cool. And I think what’s impressive is how beaten down it’s been in our country for 30 years. We basically, effectively had a moratorium on mining any more coal. And if you go to outside of Gillette, Wyoming, you have two of the largest surface coal mines in the world outside of Jillette. The third is in Indonesia, and then I think four and five are also outside of Gillette. So tons of coal outside of Jalat, Wyoming. And these these companies have been so beaten down that if you go visit them They run so lean, they’ve got so few people. I mean, you could literally, the floor of where they’re mining is so damn clean, you could almost eat off of it. It just, they’re, and they’re so proud of what they do. You know, and in Gillette, you know, they’re directly powering the dry fork power plant and powering, and, they are very proud. They understand it really well. And so, it’s just something worth, I think we need, as the oil and gas industry, we would learn a lot from talking to the coal industry and understanding that they’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. And that there’s a lot of lessons they could give us and also they’re just a really reliable form of power generation that really Can and it does enhance natural gas and nuclear for that matter. So it’s just it’s a it’s it’s simple It’s nerdy its energy security and it’s what the basically the entire grid of China is built on and the economy of China’s built on
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:45:49] And it’s amazing. And I really am thrilled for our time today. And especially when you sit back and think you are truly one of those that whenever I see your LinkedIn post go by, I stop it and I have to play it back to OSU slow speed and I will slow it down so that I can understand it and then replay it a few times.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:46:12] Well, thank you, I really appreciate that. Yeah, I noticed I put a picture out there and that as long as you put some content with something and have something that people want to click on, people read the content. And I was really excited that you asked me to come on the podcast and talk about this stuff because you have great questions, super hot issues. And the one thing I’ll just say is our industry is not, you talk about the news flow and you’re writing papers and reports and just op-eds, it’s really difficult. We have so much information to take in. And you have to streamline it into what matters for executives. And I do feel like we are struggling on the intelligence front of getting the real drivers of what’s happening to our industry leaders. And I think that, and we need a better job. We need better leaders. We need more Chris Wrights. And we need more honesty in the space and we still don’t have it. There’s some really good people. You have like Matt Gallagher and Bud Brigham and some awesome people. But I think that we need a little more honesty out of out of Mike Worth and Darren Woods, and, you know, a little more reality check that a lot of big companies, their pay is still tied to issue metrics. And you know that’s not going to work if we’re going to drill for oil and gas.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:47:19] No, and we need more states to just actually pick up the slack and realize that New York State could be a once, I grew up in high school and I went to high school in upstate New York. Oh, that’s awesome. And New York was a wonderful place to grow up. It’s not that way anymore, but the New York governor is destroying the state because of her awful policies.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:47:48] Um, I mean, I think you’d probably agree with me that it’s probably a long shot for, you know, to drill in New York, but I think pipelines, any kind of infrastructure in terms of energy would be really huge.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:47:59] Pipelines from the Marcellus is an eight hour drive. This is not rocket science.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:48:05] No, it’s not rocket science. So how do you feel about the mayor race?
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:48:08] Oh my goodness. I have, I have a problem with anybody that is alien Omar and Rashid Tlaib and the Somalian pirate. I mean, mayor need to not be in elected positions. They need to be American first.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:48:26] Yeah, well, Madami just as fascinating to me because people are like, Oh, well you resonates with young people. And I’m like, he’s also anti-Semitic and, you know, is not, you know, and won’t, and has had multiple times to say that he’s not and won’t and is like, you know, says globalized the Intifada and his father was. And I was just like, how is this okay? In New York where you have, it’s not okay. And you have 1 million Jews. And I thought, hello, what is going on here?
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:48:51] The Crusades were fought after a couple hundred years of encroachment and people finally getting fed up. The Crusade were not a Christian starting first. They were trying to survive. So, you know, you sit back and take a look. This could get ugly after a while.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:49:11] Yeah, you know, this is one thing I always think we have, we talk about, and I just have to say this and get your thoughts on it, but we always talk, everybody talks about Russia and Ukraine. And, and you know I think there’s some upside to oil prices for that. I definitely think we’re way oversold at $62 barrel, but we’re not talking enough about Iran and Israel and the ongoing thing with Israel. And I was listening to a podcast over the weekend and somebody said really well from the Israeli perspective and they said, look, we’d like to be Luxembourg, but our neighbors are not France and Belgium. And I thought. You know, that’s such a great characterization of where Israel’s at. And so all I see, you know, I turn on the I turn on the stock market at five p.m. On Sunday and I’m watching it, watching the Asian open. And then really at 10 p. M., that’s when the Middle East opens and you get all, you know Middle East talking and OPEC and everything. But that’s also when they go to town on ripping on Israel and how horrible it is and how many deaths, you Hamas has reported. And I’m like, you it’s just the whole terrorist organization thing and the skewness of the information on this is really serious. But that to me is the, it’s one thing that’s just not really appreciated as a, as a serious ongoing geopolitical war and geopolitical risk in the market.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:50:15] Oh, it is, especially when you have the Houthis still bombing the Red Sea and, and still controlling that. Here’s one of the things that I have with Iraq. Iran and Iraq interchange their tankers because Iraq was the number one supplier for oil to California. And so some of that was actually from Russia and some of it was actually from Iran, tracking those tankers as they did. There are about 14, 1500, 1480 somewhere in that range. Of Dark Fleet tankers. Of those Dark Fleet Tankers, about 720 of those are Russian. Russia Dark Fleet has now got also LNG tankers, and China has now gotten its third shipment of sanctioned Arctic II LNG shipment. So when you take a look at Iran, Iraq, and that area, and Russia, they use oil as their Fed. When they need more money, they print it. They print it by burning it out and you’ve got China and India buying them. I want to ask you this because I believe that is, I know President Trump is going to get him a deal. I know. President Trump is such a great president that he will eventually get the war stopped, but when the war stopped and you have the sanctions that don’t work, Irena Slav has always said it great sanctions don’t work as intended when those sanctions come off, you know, the price caps. I think we’re going to see a price increase. Because all of a sudden you’re going to see some things. I think it’s counterintuitive that there will be a price increase. I don’t know that Russia has spare capacity, but I think just the pricing mechanisms may call for a price.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:51:59] It’s a really good topic and a really good question. So there’s a few things with that. And that’s that so Iran has had like a disproportionate amount of increased influence over the past several years into Iraq. So when we’re getting Iraqi barrels and we’re finally starting to see our government recognize this is that they may be Iranian barrels. And so that’s a big problem. And so Iraq is very heavily influenced by Iran now. And we let this kind of all go by the wayside. The Biden administration didn’t help. With any of this by leaving the way they left Afghanistan. So that’s a real big problem. When we think about that, so, and that’s kind of a separate little thing, it’s not a little thing separate thing going on, the way we hurt Iran and the way we kept them from funding all these nefarious extracurricular activities that they like to do with Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthis is bankrupt them and take them back to the stone ages. And that’s what we need to do. And the only way you do that, and I’m sorry for the Iranian people, because I think the Iranian and people are not the problem, but the government is, and the government doesn’t care about the people, just like Hamas does not care about the people they absolutely do not, or they wouldn’t build their damn, you know, their damn tunnels right under these places and use their people. Um, so we have a problem with this and we have to recognize this. So with Iran, the Trump administration did do a very good job the first time around in terms of reducing, actually enforcing these sanctions and reducing their exports and curbing the money that they were getting. But China purchases two million barrels a day from Iran. Almost all of their oil purchases that Iran sends out go to China, they get it at a discount. So you gotta curb this. And so you have to be willing to enforce this and you have be willing to have slightly higher oil prices. And this is where the industry, we do need a better relationship with the Trump administration. I don’t hear the oil and gas industry the way I hear the auto industry saying, hey, we have a good relationship. I don’t hear that. Now, I heard the Wall Street Journal, a terrible article that dropped last night, talking about pay to play and how close the administration is with Ham and Chris Wright and how dirty this is. And I thought, look, these people actually care about this industry. And there’s a reason they donated and voted them in. It was not because they all wanted jobs. It was because they wanted oil and gas to be around because they know we actually have to turn on our lights. But all that being, setting aside is that, so we have to probably deal with the Iran thing. We have to deal with higher. Probably have a little higher oil prices, which is not bad, because it enables US production and strength, right? And so we need that. And this, I think the economic role of US oil and gas needs to also be addressed and emphasized. And we need to be doing a better job as trade associations and lobbying in talking in Washington about how $70 oil would be amazing for the industry. And it would be pretty, and it would it be okay for the consumer as well. Then when it comes to Russia, this is a, do they have more spare capacity? They actually probably do. And I say this because war in Ukraine, you know, most of us who were pretty nerdy on the subject or a new experts and stuff on the ground, you Russia could probably have grown production to 12 million barrels today, which you saw that, you saw the ability for them to do that in that price war or in 2020. They were able to do without without lifting sanctions and getting us knowledge right to grow that more than that. They would really need our help on US shale. They wouldn’t need on Arctic. But the Russians are very, very good at oil production. Not dissimilar to what we are. Like, they are gritty. They pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You might die on a location because it’s not up to stuff on specs, but they can produce damn oil and they’re really good at it, okay? Like, this is one thing, like they are tough, okay. It’s cold, it’s snowy. I mean-
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:55:21] I mean, anybody that has a bear for a pet, you know, we have Rottweilers, they have bears.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:55:27] And I’m not condoning, like Putin is very bad, okay. And so also the other problem is, is that even if Trump gets a deal and he might get a deal, he is not gonna end the, he’s not gonna, this will not be Russia’s end, right? So you have to bankrupt Russia. You have to really hurt them. And the ability to hurt them is again, take away those oil shipments and LNG. You’re still getting oil and natural gas from Russia. That should have ended a long time ago. And so nobody was willing to take the pain, inclusive of the Biden administration. Nobody want to hire or prices or anything. You have to be willing to suffer a little pain to really end this. And so that’s the only way it’s going to end is if you really hurt, you know, Putin and you take away his money. And that means that then you got to throttle China. And that mean, hey, China and hey, India and hey everyone, that’s an Iran and North Korea, all you bad guys who are supporting this. And it’s gonna be really difficult because there’s nothing China wants more than this war to keep going because it is draining our ammunition severely. And I just want to add one more thing. I heard this in a warfare podcast this weekend and you’ll get a kick out of this because I was I think it was irregular warfare And um, they were talking about why you know just this little thing about and they mentioned energy and I love this piece because So we we started attacking the houthis which was just phenomenal like we did this incredible execution Everybody said we couldn’t do it and we did it and with plinked them off and like All of a sudden ships start getting attacked well The reason we did It was uh probably because we need to do it but also because france couldn’t because they didn’t have the ammo because they Didn’t have The power to make the ammo and they ran out Yeah, and I thought, you know, so power generation, when I say energy is everything, folks, it’s damn everything, like it’s full stop.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:57:04] Wow, I did not know that.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:57:06] Yep, I didn’t know that either.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [00:57:08] I’ve got about 19 other questions that just popped in my head after your last question. I’m sorry. I really enjoy this conversation. This is absolutely one of my better conversations with you are fantastic. And I do appreciate that. We take a look at this is a critical part for ending this war, Zelensky, who was installed as a government. Installed by MI6 and or the US, and it has been very fairly obvious by that. Now he is trying to go get those guarantees and Russia has now put out on their TV that Ukraine will be divided by three different things, by three, different groups. There’ll be the middle group, which is the area of no man’s land, and then the Ukrainian controlled and then the Russian controlled. And now they’re trying to say that the guarantees to end this are going to be needed. The bank of London is broke. You have the bank of Paris is broke, you have Germany failing. They cannot rearm themselves. This is a gigantic thing. So when president Trump goes in and tries to bankrupt Russia, he’s going to trigger a complete collapse of the EU and the UK. This is a complicated full stop.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [00:58:34] It is complicated. And I think if you if you just look at all the wealthy Russians in London, you would you would see connections why these countries have been have been having our time. I think we we spend a lot of time of, you know, both things can be true, Putin can be really bad. And, and Ukraine can be corrupt, you know, and I’m being honestly that Ukraine was a corrupt country. And it’s a beautiful country, it is a European country, but it’s not Germany, right? And even Germany has, we all have levels of corruption, but it wasn’t Germany, so they weren’t to levels and they border Russia. So now it’s the scary neighborhood. The problem is what Russia wants is they never want a deal, they want a deal because they want destabilization of Ukraine because then they’ll eventually take all of it, they’ll just buy their time. And so what you’ve seen now in the latest stuff out of Russia is that, you know, they’re never going to acknowledge the government of they’re never going acknowledge Zelensky or the government Zelenski because as long as they don’t have to acknowledge it, then any deal they go into isn’t, isn’t really a deal, right? So they can just break it. And so it’s just all, you they’re going to break it anyways, but they just don’t to live by that ceasefire. What they really want is freezing enemy lines with a little bit extra. So that basically, if you look at the maps right now, they have a nice little chunk of Eastern Ukraine. And if they get all of the Donbass region, they get this really high elevation point. The Russians love elevation. Look at their embassy in Washington, D.C. It’s the highest elevation in Washington D. C. So they get to see over everything. The fact that we let them build out there is ridiculous And known for all of its spying operations. But anyways, if they get the Donbass and they get 100% as opposed to 98%, they will, they’ll do a ceasefire if they all this region and say, this is ours. But then Ukraine, Ukraine gets a cease fire and bodies stop dropping for both sides. But then you Ukraine says, okay, well, I’ve given this territory and so what I’ve been fighting for, for all this time, what is that for? And so I think it is tricky internally because Ukraine’s got to sell this too, right? And that could be. That could be a morale booster to say, hey, we get to end this finally, but it could also be a moral killer of saying, well, what are we fighting for? And so the problem right now is that if you actually look and Trump has admitted this Trump, Trump went to that meeting with very low expectations that they were going to get anything. They had a meeting and everybody made a big to do of it, but Trump didn’t, they didn’t make a deal. And that, that meeting, like, like they have this meeting, they just talk. And then what Zelensky has, what’s happened is that they just keep and they’ve increased the bombing and the It’s the missile and drone attacks that if you see, they’ve just escalated like crazy since over the summer. And so what they’re doing is they’re basically sending a lot of dummy drones in, a lot drones and a lot missiles, and it overwhelms their air defenses and then some of them hit. And so they can’t respond. And if they keep doing this and they keep wearing them down, and that’s what war is. It’s wearing down your opponent to where they eventually give in. And so that’s they want. And it’s really horrible. It’s very sad. And there are a lot people dying on both sides. And Putin is horrible. And you know, Ukraine is not a perfect country and they are corrupt and Zelensky might be a puppet, but it’s a situation we’ve got. And you sure as hell don’t want to give any more to Putin because when you give a mouse a cookie, they want a glass of milk. And we should know this with the ESG movement and all the craziness there.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:01:41] It is a complicated mess and I’m glad I’m not trying to solve it.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:01:46] Absolutely. It’s very complicated.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:01:47] The, the one thing I would say is it would make more sense for president Trump the, but when president Putin went to Alaska, he signed a deal on the, I believe it was the Exxon, the, the deal for the Sackland project to a proclamation to get that thing started again, he came with businessmen to go do business that is. That is what Putin wants. Putin wants to do business in the Arctic, and he wants us to help drill and go in that area. That, to him, is more important than getting hammered by sanctions. Hammered by sanctions does not get him to the table hammered by Sanctions gets
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:02:33] Yeah, you’re right. I mean, and the trouble is, we don’t realize this is that they well, when you have support from China, when you when you China’s getting giving them way more support than we realize way more that’s on paper, they’re buying all their stuff and they’re giving them direct support and China wants this war in Ukraine, because then we are preoccupied over there. We’re not focused on them and the Asia Pacific.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:02:53] And they started drilling in Taiwan’s waters. So while we’re busy with this, they’re over there drilling in the ease, E E Z the economic zone of Taiwan.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:03:08] And just pushing the boundaries, right? They’re pushing boundaries on all kinds of fronts. So I think with Russia, you know, they did bring their men. And the fact that it’s, you know, and I don’t know if this is 100% verified, but it seems like it is that the Exxon is starting to talk. They’re thinking about or starting to talk to the Russians about potentially going back in. Not a good move by Exxons part. I think they’ve made a lot of bad choices lately, but that’s not a smart geopolitical move. I wouldn’t touch it right now. You got burned once. I don’t know how many times you need to get burned, but it’s just the timing. It looks horrible if nothing else.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:03:36] I would want guarantees.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:03:38] Yeah, guarantees. No kidding. Well, it’s Russia. And so I think that, yeah, that’s what Putin wants. But the reality is that when we think about sanctions, they were very, very effective. When they lowered, they devalued the ruble. So everybody wants to know why didn’t they lose oil production? Well, they’re not fighting a war in their country. It’s not like we’re bombing oil production facilities. So that’s one. You know, nothing’s really impacting that. And they just have to maintain it. And again, they are very good at this. And so since 2014, when they took Crimea and the world did nothing, absolutely nothing, you know, they basically they devalued the ruble and then they changed the tax code to where they could get essentially all the oil companies made just as much money as they did before with the ruble devaluation and they incentivize them to produce more. And so they had a lot of small companies not dissimilar again to US shale where these small companies just kind of went to town and bootstrapped it and just went nuts. And it was really, and I’m not saying again, not congratulating the Russians or saying they’re good. From an oil industry perspective, it was quite impressive from the production standpoint of what they were able to do. We have not appreciated that they’re very damn good at producing oil, the Russians. And so we’re probably not gonna have an impact on that to really him back sanctions. And this is why I think, you know, you have ongoing negotiations. The thing with India is not going well. You know, this is a, you now seeing India and Narendra Modi with Kim Jong-un and Putin in China. You know, this was not, this wasn’t good. And Trump put out that tweet saying, you know, good luck with your new friends. You know he probably means it, which is not good because that means that 50% tariffs on India, like these, this stuff has huge ramifications. I think that’s a long game. I do think India might come back to the table because, you know, just getting cheap crude from Russia. I don’t know. I think you probably want to trade in the global space, but this is very, very intertwined and complicated. And we are starting to really see clear lines with these blocks of countries that are saying. You know, screw the U.S. And screw the West, we’re going our own way.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:05:28] Well, I’m looking forward to future discussions with you and as a coalition of the podcasters for energy dominance, I think we ought to see about getting that thing kicked off. Because I think the coalition of energy podcaster for energy dominants, it almost has a ring to it, doesn’t it?
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:05:45] Yeah, it does. Yeah, that’s good. I actually think that the market and everyone pays lip service to this energy dominance. But when you think about the role of energy from manufacturing in terms of being this industry in and of itself and what it’s providing and the fact that we’re a developed nation and we can’t build anything and yet we produce more oil and gas than anyone else, the energy dominance has a huge… From energy security to national security, to economic well-being. To just what we can do with it and the ability, we would have much, much higher oil prices and every all prices if we weren’t producing 13.6 million barrels per day, given all the stuff we just talked about.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:06:24] If you want to find out what a third world country is, just wait till 2026 and look at California. Just, just kidding. Anyway, Trisha, tell us how people find you.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:06:33] Yeah, no, that was funny. You can find me on LinkedIn. When I get on, when I’m talking to folks, people always say either they are followers of the podcast. So the Petrenors podcast, it’s on the website at Petrenorts.com. You could reach out to me at Petronorts. Com on the contact us page. You reach out me on Linkedin. I do a lot of posting on Linkedin and for the industry, that’s pretty prolific. I’m on Twitter. I don’t have as much appealing stuff. But I am on Twitter, so you can… It’s TrishaJCoffee. Because I drink a lot of coffee. Yeah, those are the three main platforms. And so I love this stuff. I’m deeply passionate about it. But also it does matter a lot to business. And, you know, you can move the needle if you if you’re the smartest person in the room.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:07:13] Well, thank you very much for your time again and we’ll get this ready and we will have our staff send this over so you can push this out on your channel as well, too, because I truly appreciate everything that you’ve got going on out there, so thank you.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:07:25] Thank you. No, so thank you so much for having me. This is a blast and I love your I love your background and all your cool.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:07:31] Well, this is actually my guest area here, and then that is my view from up here. I hear is just one of my offices with, I’ve got three offices and I normally have nine screens, but this one’s got the best Lake view.
Trisha Curtis – President and CEO, PetroNerds [01:07:46] That’s awesome. Good for you. Very cool.
Stuart Turley – President and CEO, Sandstone Group [01:07:48] All right, we’ll see you soon.
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