California’s Energy Crisis: National Security Risks and The Future of Oil Production

 

Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the energy newsbeat podcast. This is a joint podcast with the energy impacts with David Blackman. My name’s Stu Turley, president and CEO of the sandstone group. We’ve got a panel today of just unbelievable magnitude. We have Doomberg. I mean, not just a Doomberg, we had the Doomberg here. How are you today? Mr. Doomberg.

 

Doomberg [00:00:29] Steve, doing great. Great to be here with this distinguished panel.

 

Stuart Turley [00:00:32] I’ll tell you what, we’ve got a great panel and I’ve got one of my great friends out of California. He is a EMP operator and he’s been a great friend of the show and all of his podcasts are right up there. I’ll tell you what, Mike Umbro, welcome to the podcast. How are you today, sir?

 

Mike Umbro [00:00:50] I’m doing well. I’m excited to show this to my kids that I’m on a podcast with the green chicken when we’re done recording this. It’s exciting.

 

Stuart Turley [00:00:57] And then we have David Blackmon. This, this podcast is going out on both of our podcast channels. Cause this is very, very important. David, thank you for your time today.

 

David Blackmon [00:01:08] Hey, happy to be here, man. Just a beautiful day in Texas and always a wonderful day to be with Mike and Doomberg and, uh, talking about insanity in California.

 

Stuart Turley [00:01:19] Hey, our topic today is not an oil slick. If Gavin Newsom were to go swimming, how big of an oil slick would it be? Would it solve the world’s oil demand issue with plenty of supply in the oil? No. This is a national security risk. I wrote six articles last week alone on Gavin Newsom’s energy policies. And, uh, Doomberg, I’m going to go ahead and open this up to you first because your article on June 20th permission slips our migration out of California imperils us oil and gas production is wonderful. And I just want to let you kind of tee us out and then we’ll start rolling through here.

 

Doomberg [00:02:02] Yeah. So thanks for the compliment. We wrote that article in late June. Permission slips. So what’s happened is California’s mismanagement of its energy bounty and mismanage of its economy has caused an outflow of, you know, a domestic outflow, of U.S. Residents leaving California and setting up shops in various sort of liberal ecosystems, like Boulder, Colorado is a big one, Austin, Texas is another. And you might think- that having experienced the consequences of the policies they voted for, that they would have a bit of a change of heart. But in fact, they’re repeating the same experiments, especially in Colorado. And in that piece, we showed a chart of the composition of the Colorado Senate, which is now basically two to one Democrat. And all this would be interesting in its own right as a psychological study. But, in reality, California, of course, is home to a significant oil producing basin. And our industry context had been flagging for some time that it’s become all but impossible to get new drilling permits. And this is a direct consequence of the outflow of the failed state of California into an energy producing state like Colorado. And we showed some numbers in the piece. It’s the DJ Basin, of course, and some of the tricks they’re using. So Colorado passed a new setback law, which means that drillers have to go further and further and further away. From oil rigs and then the home builders go ahead and build homes in the attractive drilling areas which makes it impossible for oil and gas companies to operate and as we said in the piece, this is the first example of urban sprawl that the professional environmental left is all for and it really truly is impacting US oil output and so it’s a half a million barrels a day. In a fully unconstrained world it could be a lot more. And it’s not going to stay at a half a million barrels a day for very long. And so when people talk about peak oil and geology, we always make the point that it’s always politics. How much oil the U.S. Produces is a political choice, and the exporting of bad California politics not only has stunted California’s oil and gas development, California could be a Texas. They have roughly the same. Energy bounty resource base. They don’t have near the reserves because nobody’s investing the money it takes to upgrade resources to reserves in California, because there’s no hope that they will ever develop them. California is a giant shale. There’s no reason why Texas is a global energy giga power and California is that flaccid energy vassal, except it’s politics. That’s sort of the highlight of the piece. We could write about California every week. Ironically, California is the number one state for. I’d wave, but you know, this gift is not California is, is, is the number one state for Doomberg subscribers. We call them stranded conservatives. Um, you know? And so, um, we write about them a fair bit, but it’s just an endless source. And then, you will talk, of course, about suddenly as Newsom gears up for a promotion, he’s worried about refining capacity in California again, you know, endless examples of things that we’ve written about from that state.

 

Stuart Turley [00:05:11] What a national security risk. And then, uh, Mike Umbro has been on the podcast many times and I, I truly love what you’re doing out there, Mike. And you have highlighted that the number of, you know, it used to be California enter energy independent, and now you can’t, as an, as a entrepreneur and an oil man, you can get a permit. We went from thousands of permits a year to dozens. Tell us about that.

 

Mike Umbro [00:05:37] Yeah, what Doomberg is touching on, just a few to tie in with his comments, I believe California is losing not only solid workers. So as we shut down these rigs, as we shutdown any industry, the people that are leaving California largely I believe are hardworking people, blue collar, white collar, people that are earners that are saying I need to go to another state to earn. Or they’re those people that everybody likes to say, why are you bringing your politics with you? And they’re simply not learning their lesson. So there’s some of those folks as well. But California was energy independent with the help of Alaska. So what I like to talk about is over the last 30 to 40 years, we’ve transitioned from 95% of California’s oil production or oil demand, I should say, being produced by Alaska and California together. And just 5% was imported. Just three decades later, we now import 65% from foreign countries, about 10% of our oil from Alaska, 10 to 15%. The rest from California, it’s a tragedy because as Doomberg points out, we are resource rich. And the only reason our reserves are at the state of which they are is because we cannot get permits. So Stu, you mentioned permits, we used to drill 3000 drill. This is drill. So we like to look at actual drilling activity, not just the high, high number of the permits issued, but we used to drill about 3000 wells every year in the state of California, right before Governor Newsom took command of the situation. Actually, we drilled about 2800 wells his first year in office before he fully started really shutting everything down to the point where the dozens of wells that were drilled in 2024, they’re hardly even new oil and gas wells. Some of those are gas storage wells to maintain because we import 90% of the natural gas we consume and we store it in storage reservoirs or depleted oil and gas reservoirs. So some of those wells that we’re drilled were just to replace inventory at the storage facilities. And then there’s relief wells for fields that, you know, these fields are 130 years old. So some of those wells are just relief wells and just kind of more maintenance wells than actual new drills looking for new resources, which my company is doing. So to put this all in perspective, I started our, we started our company in 2017. I had a newborn son. I now have three children, my son is going into third grade, and we haven’t received our first drilling permits, and it’s been eight years. So that’s what’s happening in California. Innovation has been shut down by executive order.

 

Stuart Turley [00:08:30] That is terrible. And, and David, you and I, uh, we’re talking about the refineries, excuse me, 20% are shutting down, uh because Gavin Newsom has, uh declared war on the refinerys and with 20% going down. There are what? 34 military bases in California demand. And, uh, Ronald Stein has made very clear, uh. He has not stopped demand for oil and gas. Our military is in a national security risk and we will not be energy dominant with, uh California importing. I didn’t, David, I did not have this on my bingo card last week. Uh, California imported in Russian oil that was shipped to, uh Iran. It turned into gasoline and diesel and then shipped to California. Go figure that out!

 

David Blackmon [00:09:20] Well, I mean, that doesn’t surprise me at all. There was a time when something like that would have come as a surprise. But under Gavin Newsom, you know, it’s just like you’re kind of immune to being surprised by anything anymore. And Doomberg mentioned the fact that Newsom is suddenly making noises. Now after creating this problem with the state’s refining industry out of whole cloth because of his own stupid regulatory policies, and then complaining about a couple of refineries that have been burned, they’re up. One of them is still in business, but two refineries have announced shutdowns coming very quickly. And now, so he, Newsom’s been complaining about that. Now he’s commissioned a study to figure out, well, how are we going to stabilize a refining sector? It’s such a classic left-wing politician deal where you create a problem, complain about the impacts of the problem you created, and then commission a study, to study how to solve the problem, you created in the first place. Say bye. I mean, how can we, can we take for either Doomberg or Mike, can we take that seriously? I mean is he really serious about wanting to stabilize the situation? Or is it just another classic Gavin Newsom political.

 

Doomberg [00:10:32] I think he’s serious about avoiding a gasoline crisis between now and the 2028 election. And that’s what this is primarily about. There’s a letter that I’m looking at that was commissioned by Newsom and the head of the California Energy Commission. Did you hold it up to the camera, Doomer? I’ll send you a PDF of it afterwards. They hear the three recommendations. Let’s see if this rings true to Mike, who’s actually operated in the industry. The first one is quote. Stabilize fuel supply through imports of refined fuels and maintaining in-state refining capacity. The second is provide sufficient confidence to industry to invest in maintaining reliable and safe infrastructure operations to meet demand. And then third, I love this one, develop and execute a holistic transportation fuels transition strategy. We wrote a piece on this, one of the pieces we wrote on this was called Moonwalker, where we predicted that Gavin Newsom would walk back much of this excess. We published that piece in April of this year. Listeners might not be aware that California is actually two separate fuel islands, Northern California and Southern California. And when these closures go through, the two refineries, the Venetia California Valero California, sorry, Benicia, California, Valero refinery and the Wilmington Phillips 56 66 refinery. Northern California will have two large refineries left. And one of them, the Chevron, one of the Chevrons that sits on the Hayward Fault, which we warned about in 2024 in a piece called Baywatch. The Hayward fault is long overdue for a massive earthquake. Its last one was in 1868. And they have found that the last five major earthquakes on that fault have happened every 140 years, but we’re now 160 years since the last major one. So in a world where, and by the way, Chevron, of course, moved its headquarters out of California. If they had their way, they would get out of that refinery. I’m sure they don’t make any money, despite California having by far the most expensive gasoline in the country. It’s a real, well, it’s a joke. It’s irresponsible. And actually, retail gasoline demand hasn’t dropped that much in California, despite all of the hype around electric vehicles. And the last thing I would say is, as we wrote recently, the big, beautiful bill guts California’s green energy transition just when it’s most vulnerable. And so now you’re stuck with a bunch of electric vehicles nobody wants to buy and one of the most critical industries in the state leaving. And suddenly now it’s time to get a letter written about executing holistic strategic visions. When in doubt, write a white paper.

 

David Blackmon [00:13:08] And the other problem with electric vehicles is the people leaving California tend to be the people who can actually afford to buy an electric vehicle, right? And they have the political outlook to actually want to buy electric vehicles. So you’re diminishing the population demand for those cars even as you’re trying to mandate them on the population. Anyway, Mike, you were about to say something.

 

Mike Umbro [00:13:29] I was just going to, the word holistic should be taken seriously, but it makes me laugh because just a few weeks in the assembly energy committee, the chair of the California Air Resources Board was under oath and said, we do not account for the emissions of foreign producers. So while we’re importing from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, Guiana, Brazil, and other areas, not California. They don’t track those emissions in a holistic way. Not only that, they don’t track the tanker emissions when they come into port. And finally, she said they don t track the actual cost to the California consumer. So there has been zero holistic cost benefit analysis conducted by CARB who sets most of these standards. So the fact that Sivagunda at the CEC is saying, well, let’s do a holistic study. It’s like, well you kind of failed to do that because you. CARB puts out these scoping plans every five years and so we’re on like the fifth or sixth iteration of the scoping plan and they still have yet to do the basic math.

 

Doomberg [00:14:37] But wait, there’s more. So California, of course, has its own specific refinery grade gasoline. It’s the reformulated blend stocks for oxygenate blending Carbob. And if refiners locally who can sell into a pipeline can’t make money, how will imports that are refined in faraway places and need to be transported on a tanker, make money. Or be cheaper than what Chevron can do locally, anybody with any logistics knowledge knows that every entity that touches specific grades of gasoline, from the driller to the refiner, to the tanker, to the ports on both sides have to earn their cost of capital. And most refiners don’t like to make this grade. And so they tend to have to pay up for it in the market. If you try to design a dumber strategy, I don’t know if you could come up with. And I don’t like to be blunt, but some cases require it, because by the way, when the next earthquake happens, like the refinery sits on the Hayward Fault. Oh, and by the, there’s only six large ones or five or five, six large one’s left when this is all done. Explosions happen at refineries. It’s just that you can’t handle that volume of combustible materials without having significant industrial accidents. So they’re either an earthquake or an accident away from a true crisis. And they only have 11, 12, 13 days of of inventory. Exactly. You know, what happens when panic sets in gas lines form and they drain those 11 days in two and there you go. And then it’ll be blamestorming. Look, the most amazing thing in 2025, not to like switch topics, is that Karen Bass is still the mayor of LA after that fire. Like Gavin Newsom is not gonna he’s gonna find they’re gonna engage in classic blamastorming where they sit around and try to figure out whose fault it is. And they’ll pin it on Trump. In some way, but like this has been on the wall, but we wrote about it in 2024. It’s just not, it’s not hard to see. You don’t need to be a genius to see the risks here. Like you don’t to do a full, you know, failure mode and effects analysis with Six Sigma black belts to understand that, Hey, maybe Northern California should have a pipeline connecting itself to somebody who could make their fuel. You know, the reason they have to import is they refuse to build pipelines. That’s just crazy. Go ahead.

 

Stuart Turley [00:16:49] Mike has brought this up before and that is I’ve been joking for a long time. Let’s just wall put the wall right up the California border and let it go away. But Mike has a very valid point and he has pointed out the inflation that these fuel crises are going to have is going to impact everybody in the United States because how much of the shipping comes in to the United States. From California and then get put on trucks and then shipped across the country. And if the starting point is 10 to $12 diesel and 10 to $12 gasoline starting when this crisis hits very quickly, that is going to be inflation that we just lived through with the Biden administration and, and $10 eggs. I mean, this is going be an issue, don’t you think?

 

Mike Umbro [00:17:46] It’s 40% of the nation’s imports now. I mean, there’s been some Chinese tariffs and shipping volumes are way down at the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. But still, the fact remains, a tremendous amount of our imports of all goods come through California. And we haven’t touched on electricity rates being the highest in the country because you’ve also got to refrigerate. Product that we, you know, we’re growing 14% roughly of the country’s food. We’re the largest dairy producer in the country. There’s a lot of industries left here, although we like to say everybody’s leaving and energy prices and those inputs are impacting the entire country. Not to mention what Doomberg started with, which is the policy contagion that is infecting Colorado. And which is why we started Californians for energy and science, because we have to educate people that California should not be the model of how to craft energy policy, yet under the Biden administration, it was the go-to. And we’re lucky to have President Trump reverse a lot of this, but it’s only four years. So we have to make sure that we educate everybody that we need to reverse 40 years of bad policy in California, not just four.

 

Doomberg [00:19:02] Yeah. And just to just drive from the point home, you can’t really build a wall at the California border because Arizona gets 60% of its gasoline from California as well. And so it’s not just a single state issue. Um, and the, we showed a chart in permission slips, you know, California 40 years ago was producing a million barrels a day and now I think it’s less than 200,000. Right. And so it, it’s a long trend. So, sorry, I’m just.

 

David Blackmon [00:19:25] Well, I’m just going to point out another thing we haven’t touched on yet is the EV mandate, which of course the Trump administration is trying, it’s damned is to kill for California. But you know, if you’re able to continue with that policy, you’re going to force big truckers to run on electric, you know electric trucks, 18 wheelers, and that will have the impact. Tremendously increasing transportation costs, not just in California, but all over the country because so much of our imports, most of our import from China come into those ports in California, into the country and then go all over country. So you know, it’s a national security risk. It’s an inflation risk for the whole country. And I don’t know. I mean, I just think this is just what Newsom’s doing is going to create increasing pressure in the Trump administration. To do everything it can to nationalize what’s happening in California in terms of controlling policy from Washington instead of Sacramento. And you know, these are all kind of the kinds of things that were happening in the United States of America prior to the Civil War, where you have a rogue state like California. Of course, we had 13 rogue states back. Doing all these crazy things and implementing policies that are contrary to national trends that ends up creating more and more conflict with the rest of the country. And it’s very, very troublesome to me. It all is very concerning to me just in terms of societal impacts with all this increased conflict. And then Newsom is the driving force behind so much.

 

Doomberg [00:21:03] Well, let me give you some numbers that’ll give you even more concern. So in the national popular vote, Trump only beat Harris by a little less than 1.5%. Is Gavin Newsom not two points better than…

 

David Blackmon [00:21:16] I don’t think you

 

Doomberg [00:21:17] Well, I think he would at a vote getter. I think yes, I Politician yeah, that’s what I mean. Is he a better politician your target? He’s pretty slick and he’s very slick He’s a good debater Looks looks good on TV He does and I think has a very good chance of winning in 2028. I I wouldn’t put it, you know

 

David Blackmon [00:21:37] It’s certainly possible and people people need to understand it’s certainly a possibility, which is why he’s so desperate to not have a crisis. Sorry, but

 

Doomberg [00:21:44] You know, right.

 

David Blackmon [00:21:46] And the weird thing to me is he’s not more popular than he is among the Democrat base, um, with his name recognition and public profile. When you see these preference polls that are, you know, it’s early, right. But when Pete Buttigieg is, is at 14% in nuisance at two, you got to think, well, what, what is holding this guy back from a higher degree of possibility among Democrat voters and, and, not possibility, but popularity, excuse me. And so he’s a real mixed bag. He’s a much better retail politician. There’s no question about it. He also has this very long and very public record as an executive, all that Kamala Harris didn’t have. You could try to blame her for everything Biden did, but people knew that she really wasn’t a decision maker. And so I grant you that he’s much more effective politician, but he’s also got a lot of drawbacks that is going to make it hard for him.

 

Stuart Turley [00:22:40] Can I ask this now that it is official that the, uh, 2020 election was, uh borrowed or permanently or stolen, however you want to phrase it without getting us kicked off a YouTube that did it already. Sorry. I’ll have him cut that out maybe. Uh, but when you sit back and take a look that it, it is now official that the D O the DOJ basically said, you know, Hey, wait a minute. Um It really did happen. Are we going to, if we had legitimate California elections, would it turn actually turn Republican outside of my zone of expertise.

 

Mike Umbro [00:23:18] Mike, you live there. Maybe you could… Yeah, that’s a tough one to answer. I think what’s interesting is Doomberg saying the majority or the largest subscriber base is California. And I think that is true that there are millions of Californians that are not okay with the cost of living, the cost of housing, the costs of energy, utilities, gasoline. And Governor Newsom really should be thanking the federal government for canceling the EV mandate. Also, what’s been kind of swept under the rug has been the fact that the major logistics companies were set to leave California if that zero clean fleet mandate hit, which was going to hit in January. The only reason CARB pulled the waivers was because they knew the Trump administration would not grant them. But we were about to have that implemented January one in terms of. Any new fleet vehicle would need to be zero emissions, so hydrogen or electric trucking. It was insanity. And looking at the numbers, the EV mandate, not only is it 100% by 2035, but it was 51% by 2020. In other words, in less than three years, half the new vehicles California would need to be electric vehicles. And today, they’re around 20%. So I think in kind of tying this all back together, I agree with Doomberg on Governor Newsom’s ability. He is solely focused on avoiding a crisis over the next two years. That’s the only reason they care going back to this refinery issue. There’s a plan for Phillips 66 in Los Angeles to convert to an import terminal. In other words, the refinery goes away, they import finished product. There is no such plan for Benicia. So that’s what triggered the alarm bells for Sacramento was saying, wow, that’s going away. And that’s 10% of the whole state’s refining capacity. But it’s a significantly higher percentage for Northern California for jet fuel. And good luck trying to fly in and out of SFO when that Benicia refinery closes down. And potentially PBF and Martinez is right there as that had an explosion this past year. There’s a lot going on and I know I threw a lot out there, but I would not underestimate Governor Newsom’s ability to jujitsu, mentally jujutsu his way into backpedaling on the energy policy and going with it, you know, all of the above energy plan by the time Rolls around.

 

Doomberg [00:25:59] Well, this is all made much worse, of course. And you’ll know that they’re not serious until people start talking about it, but there’s no pipeline connecting Northern California and Southern California. So if, yeah, what do you do? Right. There’s no, right. And so you, you just had, they were going to put that next to the bullet train. Yeah.

 

Stuart Turley [00:26:16] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Doomberg [00:26:18] It’s crazy. It is amazing to watch. I think that’s amazing to watch as you can see it. It’s slow motion train wreck playing out before you. And that’s why we wanted to document all of this piece after piece after piece so that when it does happen.

 

Stuart Turley [00:26:30] But Doomberg and respectfully, I absolutely think that our, uh, president Trump has the best energy team with secretary Zeldin, secretary, right. And secretary, uh Bergham, they get the three horsemen are all in on energy. And that is the strongest part of our administration, but what can be done because the war powers I don’t know if Because those 34 military bases are going to need diesel, they’re going to need jet fuel, they are going need all these things, and this, we’re importing Russian oil from Iraq, there were some tankers that I tracked, they were actually spoofed, they were Russian oil that came in from out of Malaysia, go figure this out, I did not have this on my bingo card that we were importing the 70%, 65% from Russia. From Iraq, from Iran, um, it’s kind of like anybody, but.

 

Doomberg [00:27:32] America. The great thing about America and the challenge specifically for California is that states have exceptional control over pipeline and other infrastructure that never crosses a state border and so this is why the Texas Rail Commission is the final word in most instances for large projects in Texas which is why they get built and California it’d be very difficult for the the three excellent secretaries that you just described to meaningfully change California’s energy trajectory without. Significant involvement from the state and so ultimately, unfortunately, what is needed is a good bad example and a crisis that triggers, oh my god, what do we do now? And until such a point, it’s just theoretical and even then, there will be this blamestorming aftermath where the root causes will be ignored and some politically expedient excuse will be given and cans will be kicked on the road and it’ll just happen all over again.

 

David Blackmon [00:28:28] Wow. Blame storming. I have one last question to pose to these gentlemen. Um, and it has to do with Chevron. Chevron has forever been a California company, you know, the, the king of the industry out there forever. And as, as Doonberg and Mike both noted, they moved their headquarters to Houston last year. What are we hearing about Chevron’s intention? Is there any scuttlebutt, uh, about keeping their refinery open there? I mean, once you move your headquarters out of a state. It means you’re not really happy with the business climate there to begin with. And, um, you know, I, it’s just hard to see a company continuing to operate over your finery there unless there is a change of direction in state policies. So I may, I haven’t heard anything. I’m just curious if you two go ahead, Mike.

 

Mike Umbro [00:29:14] I just, I don’t think there’s any way for them. They can relocate their headquarters, but no one’s going to take those refineries off their hands. And no one is going to take their producing oil fields off their heads. Number one, because they can’t, the way that the new laws have been written in California, you physically, there’s no way a company could come in and buy the asset and get enough bonding and show a financial return to improve these fields. So I think Chevron. Is just going to sit on the assets, operate the refineries, reduce head count in the field operations and just kind of hang on to these assets. There’s really no market for them to get rid of them. So you either close them, you either abandon all the wells, which they’re working towards doing, but they’re still going to own the fields cradle to grave. And so if the policy boomerang happens, they’ll be able to increase production, but many, many years into the future.

 

Doomberg [00:30:12] I mean.

 

Mike Umbro [00:30:13] They could pay some.

 

Doomberg [00:30:14] To take those refineries, but that’s what they would have to do, yeah. And don’t forget, one of the reasons why these refinerys keep running is because then there’s the Cradle to Grave, Brownsfield environmental remediation consequences that come with closing it down and that you can postpone that into the future and every year that you postpone it into the future is sort of one more calculation in the discounted cash flow spreadsheet. And so you’d have to probably pay a firm like PBF Energy, you know, There’s a market clearing price for everything. Sometimes the price is negative.

 

Mike Umbro [00:30:45] It’s not a good outlook.

 

Doomberg [00:30:47] There’s a price Chevron would pay to wash its hands of California for sure.

 

Stuart Turley [00:30:54] Well, uh, let’s go around the horn here in our last closing minute here, Mr. Doomberg, I just really appreciate you. And, uh I am one of your biggest fans out here, you know, promoting you and everything else. Uh, how do people find you and what are your last thoughts on California?

 

Doomberg [00:31:10] Well we’ll be writing more about California soon. People can find all of our work at doomberg.com. Our sort of tagline is we think laterally about energy finance and geopolitics. About seven to eight articles a month and then our pro tier gets an extra webinar a month as well on top of that. Over 300,000 total subscribers now or very close to it, free paid and pro and the work of our lives. A great time to do it and always great to chat with you guys as well.

 

Stuart Turley [00:31:37] Well, thank you. And Mike, how do people find you and what’s going on around your earth? What are your last thoughts here besides getting governor Newsom on a podcast that he would not be totally honest with the people about.

 

Mike Umbro [00:31:48] Well, I want to have Governor Newsom out to my field and I want to have him give a news conference that says we can do geologic thermal energy storage and solve the grid stability issue, solve the renewable energy issue and solve clean fuels all in one. That’s the tremendous thing about California and which is my business case is we have the resources, the reservoirs are not going anywhere. You cannot net zero reservoir, you’re not going to phase these out of existence, they’re in the subsurface. So the potential is always going to be there. And I’m trenched in here. I’m born and raised here. I’m not leaving California. And there’s a group of us that have that Texas mentality that we’re not leaving, and we’re going to save this place. And sadly, I agree with Doomberg that it is going to be the catastrophic failure that has to happen to allow California to be unleashed. And it may just happen by April of 2026 when Benicia closes. So we’ll see. But people can find our website is energy and science.com. I would love to say we have as many subscribers as Doonberg maybe one day, but I’m envious of the amount of content and the quality of the content that Doonburg puts out and very appreciative that the coverage is focusing somewhat on California because it is a $4.1 trillion economy. It is the leader of the the environmental movement in the United States. And I think one thing I’d say. That we need help federally if we can’t change the oil and gas and the permitting regime in California through federal measures, we do need to cut the head off the snake. And by that, I mean eliminate the climate NGOs, the Greenpeace, the Center for Biologic Diversity, the groups that simply file lawsuits to stop projects at all costs when we have the highest environmental standards and laws in the country. So we need to, and I think Doomberg wrote on that recently as well. But it’s these NGOs that are poisoning and capturing every elected official in Sacramento, which is the same super majority happening in Colorado, where the Sierra Club literally has a scorecard that they grade the politicians A, B, C, D, F. And still they have entities related to Sierra Club that are still tax-exempt nonprofit entities. So hopefully President Trump, what he can do. Is eliminate the tax exempt status of every NGO that is contributing to the energy emergency.

 

Stuart Turley [00:34:19] Well, David and your last thoughts and how do people find you?

 

David Blackmon [00:34:23] Just have three things to say first. Thank you both guys for being here. Really appreciate it. Second, Mike, I don’t blame you for being loyal to California. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I’m a lifelong Dodgers fan myself, even though I’m a loyal Texan and third, the day Gavin Newsom believes it is advantageous to his presidential prospects is the day you’re going to get a call to, to accept your invitation to come out to your site. That’s right.

 

Mike Umbro [00:34:49] And maybe maybe Bergham Wright and Zeldin will come out and that’ll that’ll goose him along. Maybe we can do that.

 

Stuart Turley [00:34:56] Well, uh, David and I are working on, uh interviews in DC. And so Mike and, uh Dumberg, we will keep you both on that because we’ve got a lot of traffic in DC and we’re wanting to go interview folks there. So some of those same people that we will be talking to. So anyway, with that, my name’s Stu Turley, president and CEO of the sandstone group, this was truly an honor. Thank you gentlemen. I do appreciate you.