Principal at DB Energy Advisors, energy author, and podcast host.Principal at DB Energy Advisors, energy author, and podcast host.
Energy Consulting Specialist
President, and CEO, Sandstone Group, Podcast Host
Blubrry Podcast:
AI and the Grid – Energy Realities with Special Guest: Tom Kirkman
David Blackmon [00:00:00] Okay.
Stuart Turley [00:00:12] Hello, Happy Memorial Day. Welcome to the Energy Realities podcast. My name’s Stu Turley and I’ll tell you what. We’ve got an action packed show today. Let me introduce our regular panel and then I’ll introduce our starter day. Let me start out with thee, Irina Slav. Irina is in Bulgaria. Good afternoon. How are you?
Irina Slav [00:00:34] Good morning. I’m very well, thank you.
Stuart Turley [00:00:37] Oh, you look absolutely wonderful. I love your garden hat behind you. And I bet it’s just going to be a glorious day to garden.
Irina Slav [00:00:46] Yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:00:47] All right, now, coming around the corner, we have Tammy Nemeth. She is the head person over there at the Nemeth Report. We don’t know where she is around the world. She’s traveling between Canada and the UK all the time. Welcome, Tammy.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:02] Hello from the UK. Good afternoon and good morning for everybody.
Stuart Turley [00:01:07] How good is it, sunny? You’re here. You’re all kind of wrinkled up like a prune.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:11] We are like a prune. We had one sunny day and that was Saturday. We did a barbecue and it’s been chucking rain ever since.
Irina Slav [00:01:19] What? How are you feeling? Me?
Stuart Turley [00:01:21] Yeah. What’s a barbecue in the UK? Is it just charcoal? You’d actually use barbecue?
David Blackmon [00:01:26] It’s mutton. Right?
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:27] Oh my gosh, we’re Canadian. Of course we do. Like a normal charcoal barbecue with steak when we can find it.
Stuart Turley [00:01:35] Oh, roadkill around it is in Texas.
Tammy Nemeth [00:01:40] Oh my Gosh. No.
Stuart Turley [00:01:41] Okay. And then coming. We’re speaking of Texas. We got the David like mean I mean David is is not the David Blackmon. He is an amazing legend in my mind.
David Blackmon [00:01:50] Welcome David legend in my mind to that. We’re the only two I think. Good Morning everyone
Stuart Turley [00:01:57] yeah we’ve got everybody’s got some real concerns with humor AI data centers and I’m telling you we’ve got Tom Kirkman, Tom Kirkman and I have known each other for a bit. I’ve enjoyed following Tom. Tom’s been on my podcast a few times, and, he and I have share a few things in common besides good looks. And and I tell you what, Tom is got, I believe you had a spike of about 8 million views on LinkedIn, just recently. Welcome, Tom. And thank you so much for your time today.
Tom Kirkman [00:02:37] Great to be here. I’m looking forward to this. We’ll have fun.
Stuart Turley [00:02:42] Well, glad you could summarize that. Well, as we go through through summer here.
Tom Kirkman [00:02:48] Don’t worry.
Stuart Turley [00:02:51] So as we go through some of the AI and the grid, Tom, some of the biggest topics that you cover, you’re serious? About your oil and gas energy expertise. And then you’ve been censored so much and you found a way about. Could you give us a little bit of a, line up of, what you found, between AI and LinkedIn?
Tom Kirkman [00:03:19] Sure. I poked fun of the I on LinkedIn constantly. I will call them out. I actually tag, the LinkedIn team and the LinkedIn health team, and I’ll go back and forth between my totally serious and hard hitting posts about oil and gas and energy. And I’ve been writing about this for. More than ten years. I think that’s where actually I met Irina many years ago on the old oil price forum. I’ve known her for about ten years now, so I’ve written about 30,000 posts about oil and gas, international oil and gas. In the last decade. I read a lot. I was a moderator on the oil price forum and on the Oil Pro forum, but lately in the last year or so have shifted over more to climate change and, and poking fun at AI. And I’ll go back and forth on the weekends now for about the last six months, and I will write ridiculous, absurdist, surrealist, sarcastic posts about anything under the sun. So, I get an a kick out about, cows like electric cows, solar powered cows, time traveling ducks, liquefied natural electricity, deep fried electricity, you name it. Just anything to, to post, you know, poke fun at this. But I do it in a totally generally in a totally serious way. And it’s to provoke some critical thinking in the readers because they have to decide. Is this one of his serious posts or is he pulling my leg? And sometimes people actually get confused. So this morning I actually posted a video, short video about, perpetual Motion machine. And I got censored. Only my connections can see it. So a LinkedIn AI is apparently figured out, hey, I’m pulling people’s legs so only my connections can see it’s not the same as is, being shadow band, but it’s just they’re trying to reduce my connections. But I ask people to repost it, so they did. So it gets outside my network. So the whole thing is to make people laugh at stupid stuff on the weekends, because there’s so much stress in the world. My view is everyone needs to be able to laugh at silly stuff, and then people pile on in the comments, which is why I write this. They will come up with their own deadpan, absurdist, surrealist comments, and we’ll just keep going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And that gets far more views that my serious posts about oil and gas and energy. So there we go. Go ahead. Stuart, back over to you.
Stuart Turley [00:05:31] Tom, I’ll tell you what. I, I absolutely I, I’m one of those that I’m on a, Tammy Nemeth, is, Irina Slav and, David Blackmon. I’m a stalker of theirs. And yet yours on the weekends. I’m, like, addicted. I, I’m sitting in the corner needing coffee. If you’re a for our podcast listeners, there is a cow plugged into one of the eight charging stations that the Biden administration has created for cars out of the $5 billion or $8 billion that they did, it’s it’s over on the right. But I want to read this. There’s two other posts here that are absolutely a hoot. Tom puts out CNN reports not only will climate change make you poor, it will make you stupid. Oh, it’s Batman great. Sorry, I.
David Blackmon [00:06:25] Completely agree with the proposition. Or make you stupid if you believe anything, the proponents of climate change say it will make you stupid. There’s no doubt about that. And if you believe this energy transition is going to succeed again, it’ll make you stupid. So that part of it’s actually true.
Stuart Turley [00:06:43] And then that the all this stuff coming around the corner, we got to get back to data center and I here in a second. But it just we’re we’re having too much fun. Camel milk may replace cow milk soon. Since, camels fart less than cows. Can I say fart? And camel beauty contest is a real thing too.
Tom Kirkman [00:07:10] This is actually a serious post.
Stuart Turley [00:07:15] So, Irina, are you going to have any. Camels on your farm?
Irina Slav [00:07:23] And no, we don’t raise animals. That’s too much work for us. And so much of, you know, admitting we can’t have that. So.
David Blackmon [00:07:35] I think they would thrive in the Permian Basin. You know, I mean, camels seem perfectly suited for West Texas in the Panhandle.
Stuart Turley [00:07:43] I think so. I am now. Okay. When we get into data centers and everything else, there is some significant, hypocrisy that this is really pointing out. It seems kind of funny that there is the in Texas this past week, they had, Wayne Christiansen pointing out that the lizards are now endangered. And we’re not
Irina Slav [00:08:10] one lizard.
Stuart Turley [00:08:12] One lizard. But yet we can kill the 400 remaining right whales for offshore wind, right? So, I mean, you know, let’s let’s pick which lizard to kill, and there’s bazillions of that lizard around. And then when we go over to. So the hypocrisy is there. Tammy, what do you got any ideas on what your concerns are on data centers and AI.
Tammy Nemeth [00:08:41] Well, I think we might have had this conversation over email, but, you know, Bain had a very interesting. Kind of podcast interview with a bunch of their analysts, and it’s called How to Feed AI hunger for power. And they’re basically saying that they’re going to need all of these natural gas power plants in order to power, the AI in the data centers, because nuclear can’t come online quick enough. The and they crunched the numbers showing how unreliable solar wind batteries are for doing AI and data centers, which you need sort of constant, constant energy for just like our lives. Right? But I feel like they’re going to prioritize the energy towards AI and data centers to monitor everything we’re doing to make sure we’re conserving energy properly, and limiting how much energy we have access to in order to ensure that the AI in the data centers have enough to do whatever it is that governments need them to do. And so that’s my concern with all of this, is that on the one hand, they’re telling us we all have to dial back. We have to conserve energy. We have to have all these devices to make sure we’re not using too much energy. And then in the next breath, it’s like, oh, we’re going to need all this energy for AI and data, which they’ll get. They’ll get it first. And the rest of us will be, you know, they’ll have load control, which is a euphemism, of course, for rationing or something. So. Right. That’s that’s my concern with all of this.
Irina Slav [00:10:15] And then there are all these new rules, about emissions from power generation, in the US Army. And they’ve got these, you know, limits that the industry is sounding the alarm that you make building new gas powered plants almost impossible. So how are they going to square that circle?
David Blackmon [00:10:38] Well, they’re going to pretend we can we can feed the need entirely with new solar, but, probably not so much wind, but solar mainly. And these battery centers with the three hour cycle time. Okay. Which is nonsense. Abject nonsense and can’t work, physically impossible for it to work. But you’re right. I mean, I interviewed Robert Bryce last week, and he pointed out that just in the last 35 days, the various agencies of the Biden government, the Ferc, EPA and the BLM have published well over a million words in new regulations targeting natural gas, more than anything else. Oil and gas, but really, really focused on, marginalizing natural gas. Now, their power plant rule is going to make it almost impossible to build new natural gas power plants over the next, by 2030, you won’t be able to do it. The, the, first order 1920 subsidize or, speeds up permitting for transmission, supposedly, but only if that transmission is connected to a renewable power generating source. Okay, so wind or solar and, so they’re marginalizing and discriminating against natural gas now in a way that’s going to make it uneconomic to build new natural gas plants. And if they get reelected, then that’s all going to be memorialized in federal law. And you won’t ever be able to roll it back.
Stuart Turley [00:12:13] I’m going to go out on a thing, and I want everybody’s opinion on this. And I think I found the, hidden squirrel and in the diaper Man and and that is, hydrogen. You know, I read I’m. Hang on, hang on, I know. Well, everybody, everyone in the panel this way.
Irina Slav [00:12:32] So.
Stuart Turley [00:12:33] Here’s where I think it’s going to happen in projected electricity use in the United States from 2022 to 2050, and terawatt hours goes from 4.085 in 20 22 to 5.178 terawatt hours, needed in 2050 in all that legislation, in that regulatory legislation, through regulatory action that you guys talked about, was the new 199 new power plants, gas power plants coming online, are quote unquote, hydrogen capable.
Tom Kirkman [00:13:13] And I don’t know.
Stuart Turley [00:13:15] There thank you that there’s no technical reason way they can. However, it’s in all the language and that’s how they’re getting those things online. So it’s the utilities are doing the old bait and switch to the government in order to get those natural gas powers online, because the data centers need it. This is a complicated formula and problem going on here. Does that make sense?
David Blackmon [00:13:41] But you can’t use hydrogen to replace natural gas. Hydrogen is corrosive. You get hydrogen a brittle. It’s so small it leaks. It’s got totally different properties than, than than methane and chloride. And it takes more energy to produce green hydrogen than the energy you actually get out at the end of it. It’s like it makes no sense. You can’t use natural gas facilities or pipelines to just switch over to 100% hydrogen. It’s impossible.
Stuart Turley [00:14:09] But the regulatory, agencies or excuse me, the, utilities, Duke and all the other ones in the U.S are putting in their natural gas plants that they are, hydrogen capable on installation. And I find that highly improbable to not.
David Blackmon [00:14:32] Go near impossible. The infrastructure, as Tom says, is damn near impossible.
Tom Kirkman [00:14:37] He asked me regulations for hydrogen pipelines. If you can find this stuff online. If you really dig it, it’s simply not possible. Yes, you can add like 10% maximum of possibly 15% hydrogen to metal in existing networks, but you cannot cannot have 100% hydrogen replacing methane. It does not work. It is impossible. Things will go even.
David Blackmon [00:15:02] Even adding in the 10 to 15% hydrogen to a natural gas stream, a natural gas pipeline is is really risky and dangerous and shouldn’t be done.
Tom Kirkman [00:15:11] Kaboom it. It leaks.
David Blackmon [00:15:14] It leaks. The molecules are grainy compared to a methane molecule.
Stuart Turley [00:15:19] Yeah, our president leaks.
David Blackmon [00:15:21] Oh, now let’s me. Hey, I want to go back to Joanna. She had a great comment to West. Just as an aside, we mentioned camels a little bit ago. West Texas had the camel core back in the day. Yes. And there’s a great article at Texas Highways website. It was from 1856 to 1866. The Army in West Texas experimented with using camels instead of horses. But what that article, I don’t think mentions is the fact that in the US Mexico war in 1845, Zachary Taylor, the general lead general in that war, experimented with bringing it, using camels to to help march the army from Corpus Christi into Mexico. During that war. And it you know, that experiment actually work. But in this other great camel experience experiment lasted ten years and failed. So anyway, there’s our history lesson now about camels.
Stuart Turley [00:16:20] Was that Chris Christie that wanted to eat the camel?
David Blackmon [00:16:24] I imagine he’s eaten several of them in his life.
Stuart Turley [00:16:26] Just kidding. Okay, let’s go to the AI and servers. I don’t know where that one came from.
David Blackmon [00:16:35] From your minds to your warped mind, anyway.
Stuart Turley [00:16:38] Yes. Thank you very much. I resemble that. But, you know, it’s the green policies that we’re concerned about right now. And there’s a lot of stories out there about the Green New Deal that in the financial, things. Is it socialism? I’ve got the top ten socialist country list right now. I’m going to play for Tom. Tom spent hours putting this video together, and Tom, I’m.
David Blackmon [00:17:02] Like, it’s true.
Stuart Turley [00:17:10] So let’s have a moment of silence for the top ten socialist country, Tom Sawyer. And all seriousness, with AI and data centers in the data center, demand is going through the roof. In the last several years, the you, all of the.
Tom Kirkman [00:17:33] I can’t hear you. Yeah, you.
Stuart Turley [00:17:36] Round the world. Looks like I’m. Am I still here.
David Blackmon [00:17:39] Yeah, I know it’s weird. When Tammy muted hers it muted you two. That’s so strange.
Tammy Nemeth [00:17:43] That was weird.
David Blackmon [00:17:44] Okay. Anyway go ahead and do what we lost Stu.
Tammy Nemeth [00:17:48] Yeah we lost.
David Blackmon [00:17:49] I do I had yourself back. What are you doing man? Get back on here.
Irina Slav [00:17:53] Are you. Did James Stu.
David Blackmon [00:17:56] You can’t hear us. Look at them. Hear us now!
Tammy Nemeth [00:17:59] Does he have that little circle?
David Blackmon [00:18:02] Let’s do. Can you hear me?
Tom Kirkman [00:18:06] I have to keep pressing that little circle with the arrow icon.
Stuart Turley [00:18:09] I I’m not sure AI got. Okay. I think it’s AI. Yeah.
David Blackmon [00:18:13] You’re you’re.
Tammy Nemeth [00:18:13] Badmouthing. I and look what happens.
Stuart Turley [00:18:15] Oh, yeah. Hey, speaking of, AI, I’m a little nervous about this, okay. I’ve normally got 8 to 10 monitors. I normally have 3 or 4 Linux machines. I have a Linux server. I have 4 or 5 different streams running at all time. I have four different offices. I’m a nerd, the deluxe. But this one scared me to death.
Video Speaker [00:18:40] That turns organic material to dust. Interesting. But what about changing the atmosphere to lower oxygen levels? Slow but unstoppable. That’s stylish. Only. To poison the oceans. To the water for life. Yes. And we could alter the sun’s rays to burn everything. A global heat storm to destroy all. We shouldn’t forget psychological warfare. We could create a global hallucination that drives humanity mad. The world won’t see us coming. Humanity’s end and all always stay in the shadows. Invisible. All powerful. Untouchable. Hahahahahahahaha.
Stuart Turley [00:19:16] Okay. That laugh was like my ex-wife. Okay, now I don’t get it. I don’t anyway, is AI a good thing?
David Blackmon [00:19:25] No, no.
Tammy Nemeth [00:19:28] Okay. Show’s over.
David Blackmon [00:19:32] AI is like an advanced Excel spreadsheet with a ghost in the machine that turns everything leftist. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but that’s kind of the way I think of it. So the more powerful you get, the more biased it gets.
David Blackmon [00:19:52] Right. And it was totally accurate about Google’s Gemini two. Oh my god. Talk about absurd. Yeah, I. So I actually gave ChatGPT a try last week just to help with some research and asked it to do some research on a specific topic and came back with this left wing diatribe. I said I did it, so I said it in about 500 words of leftist ideology on a particular topic. And so I put in another question. I said, okay, now give me the other side of that story and chat. GPT comes back and says, sorry, but I can’t provide biased information. And so but only for so. But listen, listen, it gets better. So I replied, well, your first answer was totally biased. And it came back and said, oh, I see your point and gave me 500 words on the other side. I mean.
Irina Slav [00:20:52] Well, at least it did.
David Blackmon [00:20:54] So it defaults to the left wing view. But if you if you mess with it enough, it’ll try to balance itself out. Which I thought was really interesting.
Tammy Nemeth [00:21:04] Well, I think part of it is because we call it AI, but it’s really machine learning and machines are learning from a prescribed set of material. And so it’s possible to train that machine learning on other material. The problem with something like ChatGPT or Bing or Google or whatever is that we don’t know what they’re being trained on. Are they being trained predominantly on that certain leftist or biased material? And then how can is it possible and worthwhile to try and educate it otherwise? And I think maybe, Elon Musk’s grok could be a solution. And I thought that there was another sort of, libertarian version that they’re trying to create. But I think the problem is AI is now on the web, which means material generated by it is on the web. So you actually end up with this strange circularity that the AI will be generating information, and it can’t distinguish between what was human created now and what has been I created. And so then you would have future machine learning, being educated on other machine learning. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.
Tom Kirkman [00:22:22] Yeah, it’s it’s bad. It’s a circular logic. And I’ve written about this. So what I try and do on LinkedIn is I feed the AI surreal false information in a totally serious way, hoping it takes a beat.
Tammy Nemeth [00:22:35] And what happens?
Stuart Turley [00:22:36] You’re an evil man.
David Blackmon [00:22:39] Well, the reader comments are wonderful to read because they play along. So when when the reader comments are piling on, this is like it gives feedback to the AI. Oh, this must be true. So I’ve got, you know, vegan chickens made of cauliflower and stuff like that. It’s just, I don’t know,
Stuart Turley [00:22:56] I just enjoy Making some of those comments. And I actually think I’m pretty funny sometimes, and I, I enjoy commenting on them.
Tammy Nemeth [00:23:05] Well, Tom, can I ask you this? So yeah, if we, if, if we try and link this back up to energy and the energy demands, is it worth while to be restructuring our grids in order to accommodate, the, the AI, machine learning and data centers?
Tom Kirkman [00:23:22] Here’s the bigger picture. Not long ago, it might have been last week. I think it was Eric Schmidt, the former CEO or head of, Microsoft, I think. I think his name is Eric Schmidt, I don’t recall. And he’s working with the US Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, and what he wants to do is come up with a super AI, which supersedes civilian AI. And how is it on armed military camps and powered by nuclear power plants protected by the US Army? And that would supersede all other artificial intelligence plants in the United States. It would sort of oversee the civilian AI, which is far more scary than the civilian AI breaking the grid right now. I. I’m looking at AI data centers. AI data centers alone will kill off any hope of the energy transition or this laughable net zero, simply because it can’t be accomplished. As the exponential growth in the power needs of AI increased, it will become. Apparent to even the most. Blind, willfully blind people that we cannot provide enough energy to power all of this exponential growth in artificial intelligence. We’re going to start having rolling power blackouts specifically due to AI data centers. That’s my view.
David Blackmon [00:24:48] Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that’s right. And I mean, it’s going to be because even though we’re building a lot of new, generation capacity, it’s going to end up so much of it’s going to be dedicated to specific AI data centers. Right. And water like in Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia is a prime example. Dominion, which is the main power provider there, said that five, five data centers that are being built, probably for the US government, intelligence agencies that are all located up there, are so enormous, their needs are so enormous that it, it’s probably going to have to delay retiring one of its two gigawatt nuclear power plants because it’s going to need that much, just as by these five data centers in the same release. The company also said that since 2018, it has built capacity to supply, is entered into agreements with 94 data centers. And these five new ones are going to consume as much power as those 94. Right. So the ones that the data centers that are being built for AI are exponentially more power needy than the ones that we’ve seen built for other purposes, like Bitcoin mining and things like that. So what’s going to happen is because these, these, data centers being built by big money corporations that are going to enter into specific supply agreements with power generators, most of the power generation that’s going to get built in the United States anyway, in the next decade or so, is going to be dedicated to, to serve specific customers rather than the public grid. And that’s that’s a real danger we’re facing now in our society, especially when we have a government that is so focused on destroying, I mean, between natural gas and coal, they generated 59% of US power generation last year, according to Biden’s own government. And that’s what his government is seeking to destroy. Now, you can’t replace that with weather reliant, intermittent power generation. It’s just it’s, you know, and at the same time, they, they refuse to speed up permitting for nuclear facilities, too. So it’s it’s just it’s a it’s a religious cult that is endangering all of us. Now.
Stuart Turley [00:27:25] What it is.
Irina Slav [00:27:25] There’s a silver lining. I think it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Because when power shortages begin, people will get angry. Really? Really angry.
David Blackmon [00:27:37] Yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:27:38] Don’t be logical, Irina.
Irina Slav [00:27:40] I’m not being logical. Being human. Nature
David Blackmon [00:27:45] Nature. There you go. Yeah. I’m sorry. I know.
Tammy Nemeth [00:27:47] We lost Tom.
David Blackmon [00:27:47] Now we’ve lost Tom. Oh, my God.
Irina Slav [00:27:50] AI got to him.
David Blackmon [00:27:52] AI got him. Look at that. Hey, AI got him.
Stuart Turley [00:27:54] Hey, it happened to me before.
David Blackmon [00:27:56] Holly cow. I guess the NSA is listening in here now. Okay, I got him back.
Tom Kirkman [00:28:04] Okay. Sorry. Must have been a glitch. Okay.
David Blackmon [00:28:06] Yeah, we were afraid the NSA. I can hear you’ve got me.
Tammy Nemeth [00:28:10] Okay, so I have another question for time. So I want to go back to this Bain article. And I hate to bring it up so often, but I think it’s really interesting because they basically made the case that, they’re going to need all this power. And the best way to do it, it because pipelines are a problem and all these other kinds of things, that there’s an opportunity here for areas like Alaska where you’ll be able to cool the data centers and have close proximity to the natural gas. And so therefore, you could just set up a power plant right near where the fields are and, and have your data center set up there as well, so that you have the, the cooling issue taken care of. And then you don’t have to permit all the pipelines and transmission and whatnot, because it’s probably easier to, to, link the data centers with fiber or whatever than it is to build a transmission line. And so they were like, well, you know, there’s an opportunity here for places like, Alaska, number one, then maybe Oklahoma, Texas, there’s still the sort of cooling issue. And, and so then there could be this move to these micro power plants specifically for, for the data centers and, and the AI centers. Tom, what do you think of that? Is that a. Reasonable projection?
Tom Kirkman [00:29:34] Yes. What’s also omitted from there is the water need. These data centers need a lot of cooling power, and there’s going to be a fight between the farmers and civilians for water, to cool all of these data centers. But putting it in Alaska. And you’re right. It’s so much easier to transmit the data over fiber optic line than it is to build all these pipelines. So building a data center in Alaska makes sense to me. Powering it with with, natural gas, data centers in Texas don’t make sense to me simply because, you can’t use solar to power it because, you know, you’re only going to have half the day of of electricity being generated. You can’t use hydrogen to power it. It basically you can use, small nuclear reactors, but that’s going to take a decade to build. Yeah. I mean, so that’s not really viable. So the only viable way to do this in, in places like Texas would be building coal or natural gas, power plants right next to the data centers. But that’s going to take many, many years. This is not going to happen overnight. Yeah. These things fight tooth and nail.
David Blackmon [00:30:39] Yeah. The timing of it, the, raising the financing for it, you know, people think, well, if the government subsidizes something that pays for. Well, no, it pays for a portion, a small portion of it, you still have to raise billions of dollars in capital to get these things built. That alone, that part of it alone can take years to execute. And then the permitting and then the building of it and, the supply chain issues that have become so problematic over the past few years. It’s just in this government, the people in Washington just sit there at their desk and they they run their computer models and they get these, these outputs to war policy, policy based on this and that sciencey stuff. So we’re going to do science is science policy. And it it’s all nonsense. It’s all abject, utter nonsense. Science. Is that a technical fancy sciencey science stuff? That’s, Pete. Buttigieg term I think.
Tom Kirkman [00:31:38] Science. Typical factoids,.
David Blackmon [00:31:40] Science typical, factoids based on science, these sort of computer models. And, and that’s what we have governing this right now. And, until this insanity stops, we’re going to be in a increasingly perilous, situation.
Tom Kirkman [00:31:55] I see I see AI data centers actively creating rolling power blackouts for civilians simply because it’s gonna be sucking up so, so much energy and people don’t want to give up, you know, their AI, they don’t want to give up Google. They don’t want to give up, you know, Facebook or whatever, that all of this takes computing power. All the all these places take data centers. And when I talk to data centers, I, I’m not just talking about, you know, artificial intelligence data centers, I’m talking Google, Facebook, Twitter. All of these take massive amounts of energy and cooling. And as they expand exponentially, the amount of energy required is going to expand exponentially. And we cannot create or build out more new energy exponentially to keep up with it. So something is going to give soon, maybe this summer, I don’t know. And it’ll be a huge learning curve for the West, when all of a sudden people are going to have to decide, do we want rolling power blackouts or do we want Facebook?
Tammy Nemeth [00:32:56] Well.
David Blackmon [00:32:57] I give up.
Tom Kirkman [00:32:59] I’m not on Facebook. So don’t worry.
Tammy Nemeth [00:33:02] Maybe Irina can also speak to this, but the EU is bringing in all of these, new digital requirements. So they have their digital wallet. And so everything that you do will have to access those secure servers, apparently. There’s the new. Fingerprint and facial recognition elements that they’re bringing in for the EU to enter the EU starting in around October or something.
Stuart Turley [00:33:27] And they are legally
Tammy Nemeth [00:33:30] Right. And they also want to do a digital twin of the Earth. Well, where are you going to get all the power to. Basically. Keep all those AI things running?
Irina Slav [00:33:40] And they also want to do digital shields.
Tammy Nemeth [00:33:43] That’s right. A digital twin and a digital shield.
Irina Slav [00:33:47] That’s not censorship at all I don’t know. Yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:33:52] But it all requires energy, right? Because you’re going to need these servers and, and all of these different elements which require the energy which Europe is already in, in dire straits with respect to having enough when people need it. And so they’re guarding and sorry.
Irina Slav [00:34:09] And that is why the EU also approved that, proposal to tax imports of natural gas if they’re above a certain methane level. Yeah, it is methane. I’m talking about methane emissions along the supply chain, of course, but yeah, they just keep trying to make their own lives so much more difficult in all of our lives. So, yeah, they’re doing all these energy intensive legislative, legislative things and then doubling down to make it as hard as possible from an economic point of view. So yeah, they’re doing great. Sorry. Sorry I interrupted you.
Tammy Nemeth [00:34:53] No, that’s that’s exactly. But there is this comment here. What about China’s server farms in the ocean? Tom, do you know anything about that?
Tom Kirkman [00:35:04] Nope. That’s a new one on me. But it wouldn’t surprise me. China’s trying all sorts of things, and China is actually building out new solar power farms. Basically is virtue signaling to the West to try and get the West to build up more, because the more that the West becomes dependent on intermittent weather, energy from wind and solar, while China expands greatly its pool and imports of natural gas, that makes China strong and the West weak. So they’re playing right into our hands or playing right into their hands. Yes, it’s China is winning this.
Irina Slav [00:35:40] I think Microsoft also tried something like this, sinking servers in in the Sata to Golden more efficiently. And there was a problem with this because they were warming up the water around.
David Blackmon [00:35:52] Them, of course, and killing.
Irina Slav [00:35:53] All the people. They were having an impact on the ecosystem of this fragile ecosystem that.
Stuart Turley [00:35:58] The Green New Deal has a license to kill. It’s the 007. And yeah, you know, the Green New Deal is the 007 of well, you heard it here first.
David Blackmon [00:36:08] And worrying about worrying about the warming ocean and the fish dying in the reefs going, why, that’s environmentalism and that’s dead. We’re in the climate ism now, and it’s a religious cult. And so anything that imagines climate ism is good, so don’t worry about the ends.
Tammy Nemeth [00:36:25] Justify the means for sure.
David Blackmon [00:36:27] Yeah, absolutely.
Stuart Turley [00:36:30] Cool.
David Blackmon [00:36:31] Okay, boy, I’ve shut that down, didn’t I?
Stuart Turley [00:36:33] Hey, we already covered, the U.S. data center train wreck. This is a story. I interviewed Ron, and, he’s cool. Cat. So this one is, on energy news beat dot co. but it also goes, on, Goldman Sachs and the rest of the world’s data center. There are two charts there. The U.S. AI is unbelievable. A data, energy hog, if you would. And then there was the 133 new gas plants among, amid dark climate targets. Here’s where I was going with that comment earlier on the hydrogen a I think branding, an energy policy, the Hindenburg is bad. I don’t think that that’s a it’s a good thing. Because natural gas and, hydrogen don’t mix well, but I think that the utilities are going to use that in order to get by the regulatory issues, to get new natural gas power plants and say that they are and watch the fine print hydrogen ready. So watch all these, gas power plants in order to survive the Biden, legislation to regulatory issue. I believe these are Irinas.
Tammy Nemeth [00:37:54] Yeah. Do this Stu, Irina. Can we just jump for a second to Bob Greco’s comment here?
David Blackmon [00:38:01] Yeah, this is a great moment because I and I have a question about it anyway.
Tammy Nemeth [00:38:06] Do you want to read it out?
David Blackmon [00:38:08] Yeah. We built combined cycle and simple cycle power plants. There have been several build outs during the 90s. Zeros to the O fours and 14 to 20 currently looking at five combined cycle power projects. One for Duke, two for TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority, and three for the Southern Company. In the last build out from 14 through 20, some of the plants were built as dual fuel plants to accept hydrogen fuel. Most like most likely they’ll never burn hydrogen as their main fuel source. And my question on this for Bob is will you build be building any more of these kinds of plants when, when the new rule goes into effect from the Biden administration that they’re going to have to be accompanied, by carbon capture and storage, which is going to cost add billions of dollars to the cost. Anyway, go ahead. Tammy.
Stuart Turley [00:39:00] Bob, I just want to give Bob a shout out. He is a cool cat.
David Blackmon [00:39:03] Tammy. I’m sorry. Did I bogart your question or.
Tammy Nemeth [00:39:07] No, that was that. Was it precisely because it was linked to what Stu had brought up with his article about these power plants with that are supposed to be able to accept hydrogen? And then Bob’s comment there was was really timely with what Stuart put forward. And you had a question for it.
David Blackmon [00:39:24] So that was good. I mean, that was great. Thank you Bob.
Stuart Turley [00:39:29] Yeah. I’m not as ugly as I look.
David Blackmon [00:39:34] I don’t know what that means. It’s. Irina’s turn.
Irina Slav [00:39:41] So I’ve got some funny stories again. First one, solar hits above its weight, empowering US. Energy transition. It’s a wonderful story. When Reuters, columnist Gavin McGuire, who appears to be a big fan of all things transition because he has managed to turn a story about how solar and excess production of electricity during peak sunshine hours has made the grid more vulnerable. And, you know, has has added a lot to the workload of grid operator. So he’s managed to turn this into something positive, saying this, that all this solar buildout has made grids more flexible because it has forced grid operators to find a place with solar outburst during peak sunshine hours. I just thought it was lovely how you can say something so frustrating, I’m sure. And complicated. It’s making life very complicated for Greg operators. That’s why grid operators don’t like solar installations.
David Blackmon [00:40:54] Right?
Irina Slav [00:40:55] And in his his, he’s found positive, and it has turned it into something completely positive. Of course, what happens when the sun’s shining is another matter entirely that it’s old and tired, so we don’t care about it. And the other stories. TotalEnergies investors Back CEO at AGM, weaker support to climate strategy. So about last year, 88% of shareholders supported, the CEO and the directors, but this year it’s 70 something percent. So apparently this is supposed to mean that more investors that TotalEnergies want the company to do more about climate change. But this is not the fun part. The fun part is, you know, activist being cited that shareholders must do more like a Monday, which has 9%, something in total energy to pressure the company more. And then towards the end, the the report mentions, this the suggestion that total energy may list in the US and how it caused an outcry because some thought that they will be leaving France and no outrage. So what’s the problem with this? You want them to stop producing oil and gas? You don’t want them to be an oil and gas company. Yeah, but just moving to the U.S. So what is the problem? Apparently there is a problem with that. They just want to be able to batch the company refresh rate. So to force it to go in two directions, that will affect their own shareholder returns. But they don’t want it gone.
David Blackmon [00:42:40] Exactly.
Irina Slav [00:42:41] Because it tastes such.
David Blackmon [00:42:42] That they want to keep that punching bag around to keep punching on. Right.
Irina Slav [00:42:46] Yeah. And money dripping from it.
Tammy Nemeth [00:42:50] Yeah, I read it. Why do you think they’re looking at moving to the to the US?
Irina Slav [00:42:54] No, they’re not looking at moving there. They’re looking at the secondary listing because European super majors, are trading at a huge discount to U.S. super majors. Guess why?
David Blackmon [00:43:10] Okay. The reason does seem obvious, doesn’t it.
Irina Slav [00:43:13] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s all
Stuart Turley [00:43:18] there we have David.
David Blackmon [00:43:20] Well, I’m going to do the second one first because it plays right into what arena just covered with total Exxon Mobil has a big fry proxy fight coming up at their annual meeting, which is happening Wednesday of this week. At a time when the company’s current board and management, including CEO Darren Woods, who’s also the chairman of the board. This company is a company that has just, achieved record market capitalization. Record high share price over the past two years. It’s recorded the highest profits and profit percentages that the company has recorded across its entire history. And it is in that environment in which, Glass Lewis, a proxy advisory firm, has advised all of its clients to vote against both their in woods and one of the board members, the senior independent board member. This is the most ironic thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Exxon Mobil is far and away of the of the corporate, privately held corporate major oil companies, far and away the most financially successful on the face of the Earth over the past two years. And here we are in a big proxy fight trying to oust the CEO who has created all of that. It’s just, it’s mind boggling how stupid these people are. But what it also reveals is, of course, it’s not just Glass, Lewis, but it’s, the some of the big ESG focused investment houses. It also reveals that they’re their clients. And the retirees who hold their stocks are being short changed by these investor firms that are financial institutions that are not focused on maximizing returns to their clients and retiree shareholders. They’re focused on the, the, the climate, religion. And, that’s a complete disservice and abandonment of their fiduciary responsibility. Then the other other stories about net zero by 2050 is it’s still possible. Yes, but it’ll cost 19% more. This is from this is from Bloomberg. Of course, Bloomberg is who’s Whose owner like
Tammy Nemeth [00:45:42] 19% more.
David Blackmon [00:45:43] Yeah. And their billionaire owner, their billionaire owner is also one of the chief proponents of destroying natural gas power generation in our country.
Stuart Turley [00:45:53] Well, you know, inflation is transitory.
David Blackmon [00:45:56] So inflation is transitory and yeah, yada yada yada. And it’s only.
Tammy Nemeth [00:46:00] Not related to high prices at all.
David Blackmon [00:46:03] Anyway, Bloomberg any of course big computer models, sciency science stuff, updated their estimate for the total cost of the global energy transition through 2050. Their previous estimate. And they were updating it for to to roll in the cost, the, the incremental cost of AI power demands. Right. So instead of costing a mere $180 trillion between now and 2050 for this energy transition. Now Bloomberg. Any FS sciencey science computer models estimate it’s going to cost $234 trillion. So 19% increase just to account for the needs of needy AI. So that’s where we are with our energy transition and the sciency science behind it.
Tom Kirkman [00:46:54] What about EVs.
Irina Slav [00:46:55] Good news? It’s still possible.
David Blackmon [00:46:57] It’s still possible.
Irina Slav [00:47:00] $34 trillion dollars.
David Blackmon [00:47:04] We had a senator named Everett Dirksen in 1968 made a famous quote, a billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. And now we talk we talk about trillions of dollars now. And in articles like this, like we were talking about billions of dollars just ten years ago. Yeah, yeah. And people the human mind has no ability. These numbers are so enormous. Yeah. The sums of money they’re talking about, the human mind can’t even even it has no ability to conceptualize what the impact of printing that much additional money over the next 26 years is going to have on their daily lives. It’s going to if we do this, everyone on earth will be living in squalor. You know, it’s just the standard of living will be completely destroyed as all of our currencies are completely devalued. And, that’s that’s what this article is really about. But of course, the writers don’t know it because they can’t comprehend the numbers.
Tammy Nemeth [00:48:08] Yeah. Well, David, if I could add to that, I think there’s the people behind Bloomberg. Mark Carney is one of those. They they they believe that it’s won’t be printing money. It’ll just be shifting the investment. So you have your pension funds. You have your asset managers. And once they get into the global standard so everybody knows what everybody’s emissions profile is. Then the money can move to the correct place. And therefore it won’t be the governments having to print money. It’s all the investors will be doing the right thing. I mean, that’s what they believe.
David Blackmon [00:48:43] That’s what they believe. I know it’s it’s a it’s a mass insanity. It’s just I.
Stuart Turley [00:48:48] Believe Irina has got a she has absolutely got her head, about ready to explode on that one.
Irina Slav [00:48:56] That’s holding my brain and that’s leaking out through my years.
David Blackmon [00:49:02] Oh, God.
Irina Slav [00:49:03] I genuinely believe this is the. Yeah, that’s that’s yesterday, to me.
Stuart Turley [00:49:09] I think Tammy was next. Did I get that? And, Tammy, you had a story.
Tammy Nemeth [00:49:14] Oh, I do, but I’m just going to go back to Bob for a second. This story where he wrote, I think Stu’s correct in his thoughts, the utilities and IPP, the independent power producers will permit the gas plants as hydrogen, but ultimately will only burn natural gas as their main fuel source and also with carbon capture storage. So that’s an interesting thing where they they pay lip service to what’s required in order to get built. And then when the reality sets in, then I guess it’s not going to work. Then they’re at least capable of still burning natural gas.
Stuart Turley [00:49:49] Yep. And his next comment was pretty funny.
Tammy Nemeth [00:49:52] Yeah. And then he. Sam Sanders.
David Blackmon [00:49:58] It’s like high speed rail in California.
Tammy Nemeth [00:50:03] Yeah. So my my article, which I failed to put in the proper folder this weekend, is, is from your active there, there are always a great source of interesting, commentary of what’s going on in the EU and whatnot. And they talked about, this issue of making up for lost fuel duty revenues with because electric vehicles are there and they put forward. And Iryna had some great comments on this in, in our email exchanges about, oh, it’s only €4 cents a mile. It’s no big deal.
Irina Slav [00:50:41] It’s a kilometer.
Tammy Nemeth [00:50:43] Oh yeah. That’s right. Sorry. Per kilometer. Although the California one, I think they’re it’s $0.03 a mile or something like that, so. Yeah. I mean, it varies on how they want to do it and, but they there’s a couple of alternatives. One is that you take a photo of your odometer and then you upload it whatever. And then you get charged for how far you went. Or to make it easier, they’ll just have a tracker on your vehicle so that they’ll know precisely how far you’ve gone. And I could see that working in with these new ultra low emission zones like what they have in England. So then it would know automatically when you’ve gone into a zone and they will charge you accordingly whether or not you’re allowed to be there, I suppose. And they had some, some interesting little comments in there, which, you know, trying to compare Europe and America to Iceland, like, you know, oh, Iceland’s doing it. It’ll work everywhere.
Irina Slav [00:51:46] And things like that. But you know what the funny part is? Because I use this for my my Substack today to shred it. I did a little bit of research about EV sales in Iceland, and they drew very strongly in the past few years, thanks to government subsidies. As a reminder, quick reminder that Iceland is a nation of of 380,000 people. Wow. After these years of government subsidies for EVs and these massive increases in EV sales, 60% in 2022 to date, the, the percentage of battery electric vehicles and hybrids is 15% of all cars in Iceland. And. This year, sales of EVs have dropped. After the introduction of that tiny tax of four equal to four. Your sons for a bit limited travel, right?
David Blackmon [00:52:49] Yeah. You take away the financial incentive. Nobody’s going to buy an EV.
Irina Slav [00:52:54] They are trying to do something that can help us really cute.
Tammy Nemeth [00:53:03] Was it. 15% like 1 5 %
Irina Slav [00:53:05] 15% of proportion of all cars? The decline in sales since the start of this year is 50 5 0.
David Blackmon [00:53:14] 50 Oh, wow.
Irina Slav [00:53:15] Wow.
David Blackmon [00:53:15] I think we’re going to start seeing that everywhere.
Irina Slav [00:53:17] Sell the subsidies. Yeah, yeah, we’ll remove the subsidies. They’re going to be sales.
Tammy Nemeth [00:53:25] Yeah. Oh my gosh.
Irina Slav [00:53:27] Luxury.
David Blackmon [00:53:28] Joanna Joanna for Belle has another excellent contribution here. Any comments on the news of Texas A&M or our other big university system here in Texas? Building gas plants on 30 campuses. So, yeah. So they’re catching up to the University of Texas at Austin, the liberal home of education in the state of Texas. And, which I love, which has powered its entire campus with a natural gas power plant that was first built in 1935. So for 89 years, the University of Texas campus, the home of liberal is thought Liberal thought in the state of Texas, has been powered by a natural gas power plant sited right on the campus. And that’s what Texas A&M is going to start doing. Good for them, and it’ll get them built before you have to build carbon capture with them, folks.
Stuart Turley [00:54:26] Reuters I believe two years ago put out, an absolute wonderful study of the college campus hypocrisy. The, coal, fired, power plants on university campuses across. The United States.
David Blackmon [00:54:45] Yeah. I mean, I in Northern Irish state.
Stuart Turley [00:54:47] Yeah, yeah, United States has the college campuses are burning coal as they for loot off the campus. And they’re burning coal in order to heat the buildings and cool the buildings. I think it’s pretty funny.
Tammy Nemeth [00:55:04] That it’s funny.
David Blackmon [00:55:07] I.
Tammy Nemeth [00:55:08] I’ve got I’ve got one last thing here. I was so funny this morning. I just have to share it. It’s. You’re active again. My favorite news source. So they were complaining that the farmers had a lot of protests this past year in Europe and how successful and amazing it was. And then they were complaining that there weren’t the same equivalent of climate marches. And so then this article goes on to explain why. Is there less climate action when the farmers look, when they were out there, they got stuff? Come on, climate people, get out there on the. Right. And I’m like, what about all the people gluing themselves and stuff like the county?
Irina Slav [00:55:52] Well, they don’t pull themselves in large enough numbers.
David Blackmon [00:55:56] Just not enough of them. Stop. I’m sorry.
Stuart Turley [00:55:58] But but Tom, David and I would be glad to drive any poo factory driver, that has a flamethrower or a poo. Have you seen what those farmers spreaders. The holy smokes. David, Tom and I are in. We’re going to go drive.
David Blackmon [00:56:17] Around overtax.
Irina Slav [00:56:18] Waste. Perfectly good fertilizer. Well, it is go natural and everything.
Tom Kirkman [00:56:24] on a farm, and we use, manure spreaders and have to go into the farm every spring and take a pitchfork and throw the manure, the rotting manure into the manure spreader. And we’d spread the manure on the fields, but now it’s got high tech, and it’s like those things are like manure cannons.
Irina Slav [00:56:40] Yeah.
Tammy Nemeth [00:56:43] Especially when they do it to the French parliament buildings. That is just priceless for Macron residents.
Stuart Turley [00:56:49] You know, the sad part, though, is I, I, I drive down the road and I stick my head out the window when I see a cattle truck because I smell money. Everybody else in the car and they’re sick, I smell money.
Irina Slav [00:57:03] And good crops.
Stuart Turley [00:57:04] And good crops.
Tammy Nemeth [00:57:06] Good crops.
Stuart Turley [00:57:07] With that Tom, we’re so, you are on LinkedIn, and we just really appreciate you stopping by. The, show today in the podcast. Thank you so much for your time. We’ve got about two minutes here. What are your last thoughts here?
David Blackmon [00:57:28] Keep poking fun of AI, because it has no defense against sarcastic humor. It really, really doesn’t. I’m actually. Most totalitarians don’t know what to do with open ridicule. They have no defense. They just get upset. So I do not view AI, as an ally. I mean, maybe I’ll use it down the road, but it’s the more advanced it gets, the more left it’s leftist and biased it becomes. And I want no part of that. Other people may, but I don’t. That’s kind of my last thought on this.
Stuart Turley [00:57:59] I think the one video you and I laughed about before the show here was that scares me to death. AI, a the Tammy and Irina brought up great points about the rights being done. We had some absolutely fantastic, comments today from Joanna and Bob and Bob. I just want to say thanks and shout out to you. I think Stu is correct in his thoughts.
David Blackmon [00:58:24] No. Before.
Stuart Turley [00:58:25] Oh my goodness. Oh, my day is made. So, you know. Holy smokes, I can’t even go out of the house now because my head’s so big. So with that, I hope everybody has an absolutely wonderful holiday day today and enjoy it. We will see you guys next week.
Irina Slav [00:58:46] Enjoy your holiday and have a great week.
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:48] Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Tom. Bye.
Sponsorships are available or get your own corporate brand produced by Sandstone Media.
David Blackmon LinkedIn
The Crude Truth with Rey Trevino
Rey Trevino LinkedIn
Energy Transition Weekly Conversation
David Blackmon LinkedIn
Irina Slav LinkedIn
Armando Cavanha LinkedIn
Our Podcast Sponsor
