Daily Energy Standup Episode #299 – Global Shifts, Green Crime Waves, and Strategic Moves in the Energy Landscape

Daily Standup Top Stories

Stuart Turley: [00:00:14] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president of the sandstone Group. And today is February 1st, 2024. And I mean we’ve got some stories. Let’s go through them. First story coming around a corner is America. Enemies are hoping we go green. That’s a we can have some seriously high priced energy. Let’s go to the next story with green crime and electric car wind. Solar crime wave. I mean, this is nuts are AI surges catches the US grid off guard. Keeps coal plants in business. There’s a lot to this story. Hey, let’s come around the corner and go over to Ponda, Saudi Arabia. And it orders Aramco to lower the capacity target. I talked to David Blackman about this story. Let’s also go over to Norway. Norway defends deep sea mining, says it may help break China and Russia as rare earth strongholds. I tell you, this story brings up a lot of, ESG questions. And, I want to give a shout out some of our Substack folks. So, with that, let me get started here. As always, go ahead and please subscribe, like and subscribe to our newsletter, Substack. We want you and I’m telling you what our website is going nuts. EnergyNewsBeat.co Yesterday we had 35,000 people on the site from all over the world. And today I think we’re going to go over to 40,000 today. So people love our new stories there. So reach out and if you want on the podcast we will be at late next week. [00:02:05][111.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:02:06] Here’s a great story in this one is America’s enemies are hoping we go green. And let’s see. This one is from M.S in, BC. So, when we sit here and take a look, the white House holds enormous natural gas project in victory for environmental issues. That is a gigantic mistake. Based on this, administration, the world is unbelievably tied to Russia natural gas. And we stood up and told our natural gas folks, our allies around the world, Biden said, we will support you and supply all the natural gas. And then, they go and do this so that they can win back their green gas and winning out of our ban, on the natural gas delays and other things that they’re considering right now. They’re banned for any new, contracts or any other LNG. And that is China, Qatar And you’re taking a look at several others as well, too. And Russia couldn’t be happier. So the world is leaving the United States because of our current administration’s global economic policies. In order to pacify their global Green New Deal. Folks, you have to remember that the EIA put out the reason the U.S lowered their emissions by 20%. Remember, China in last year raised theirs by 220% because of their coal plants going in. And we lowered ours because of natural gas. So we gotta think about this here guys. [00:04:14][127.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:04:15] Let’s go ahead and go over the next one here. This is pretty crazy. Just when you thought it was safe to go to an EV, a green crime, an electric car, wind and solar crime wave. This article is really pretty. Pretty sad. The Inflation Reduction Act, intends to spend 7.5 billion taxpayer money to build charging stations for electric car owners. Two years later, no EV chargers were built, and that’s good. And part of the problem is Seattle began installing dozens of Eevee chargers and only to have thieves show up and raid at least eight of the charging cables for copper, requiring thousands of dollars worth of repairs. They’re also going over. Copper is toppling. Radio tower in Oklahoma and it is just nuts. So you take a look at the copper and rare earth minerals that are being needed to help go into the grid. Thieves. And the price for. You know, copper is just going nuts. So, buckle up. And if you are driving an RV, more power to you. In Fresno, there was $100,000 in copper wire stolen from a solar farm. So, they’re the top of the food chain for theft because they’re usually away from folks. So copper thieves cut into a turbine and hauled out cables and then drive away, causing millions of dollars in theft. So in the UK, there’s a 48% increase in solar and cable green copper theft and 5000 major solar thefts around, Europe. Got to give a shout out to Tammy Nemeth on this. She found this story, and, she is a very much a worldwide industry thought leader. [00:06:28][132.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:29] Okay, let’s roll over to eye on this one. AI surge catches us grid off guard and keeps coal plants in business. You know, it’s kind of sad that the thieves are keeping, you know, every the poor grid folks from trying to keep it going, but I and the number of data centers that are going on had a great interview, about AI and the increase of security that we needed. And, it is just crazy. Bloomberg reports that a patch of Northern Virginia, which is called the data center alley, which has seen explosive growth. Well, that happens to also be coal country. And so, the power problem is not limited to Virginia has been seen going across the United States. And so you take a look at Amazon and you take a look at Google, and you take a look at the other folks that are looking to put in, big, data farms. They need low cost energy and they need to put them actually in the geothermal areas of the country. So geothermal is about the cheapest that you’re going to get in many ways. And I would put my I would park my data center right next to a nuclear facility. Love me some nuclear. [00:07:55][86.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:07:57] Let’s go over the pond here to Saudi Arabia. Orders Aramco to a lower capacity target. You know, I thought that this was a way, when I first heard this, that it was going to be a way to manipulate oil prices. But when we take a look at this article, I talked to David Blackman about this earlier today, and he brought out some fantastic points. And it was because, they in its latest report, OPEC forecast that demand for oil would grow about 1.3 million barrels per day by the end of 2025. The producer, group would only be able to unwind a third of the current OPEC cuts of close to 4 million, barrels per day. So this reduction in cap X really is a smart move by the Saudi Arabia government. And Saudi Aramco shares closed up. Looks like .02 percent and or $8 and 35 cent, 3130 rials. And so this is an absolute wonderful thing for them to protect their cash flow, protect their CapEx. They are doing what’s right. Saudi Arabia is doing Saudi first. They’re also investing in renewables technology using the profits. I call this good management good numbers. So, Aramco in the last two quarters paid its shareholders nearly $10 billion in performance linked dividends. [00:09:39][102.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:09:40] My first thought was this was not necessarily good talking to David Blackman. He really helped turn my corner on how I thought about this Norway defense. Deep sea mining, which says it may break China and Russia’s rare earth, stronghold. This one might be also a either Tammy Nimitz or Irene, slam email that had this one in it. And, no. Norway. I love Norway. From the standpoint that they have a lot of natural gas, they. Several years ago, they had slowed down and were turning off their natural gas fields. They have a lot of hydro that they sell to other countries. But let’s go through the top bullet points in this. In a vote earlier this month that attracted cross-party support in Norway, parliament voted 80 to 20 to approve the government proposal to a vast ocean area for commercial deep sea mining. I honestly do not know the ESG impact of deep sea mining. I’m going to be studying this, and the environmental campaign group say that the approval of, extremely destructive process sends a terrible signal to the rest of the world. The problem that Norway is trying to solve is that they turn back on their natural gas fields. They are now a major supplier through the, their gas pipelines to the UK and the EU. And then when you sit back and take a look, we have China and we have, it’s crushing, it’s crushing blow to the, critical minerals. And so you couldn’t even think about building EVs or the, energy transition. However, I want to give a shout out to Pomerleau Hill on the Crude Truth Substack he put out there in his comment, Was China on book? This was on a different one. I just want to give him out a shout out. This was on actually the China on the, book oil, Pablo Hill on the Crude Truth Substack. I’m not. I had an interview with Captain Current, Kelly, who is such an ocean, defender of the ocean. And I’m going to reach out to him and some of the, issues that were out there were that in the deep, deep coal, like the North Sea, deep sea mining may not have as big of a environmental impact, I don’t know, but on the other hand, we’ve got to figure out ways of not harming the children in the Congo and taking advantage of Africa, and then also getting away from the stranglehold on, China. None of this is easy. And if you have solutions, give me a call. [00:12:57][196.6]

Stuart Turley: [00:12:58] Thank you again to all of our wonderful subscribers. Our team, David, myself and Jay Young will be at Nate. We will be doing live podcast. We’ll have 3 or 4. We have four booths, but we may have 3 or 4 different total sections. We have great guest lined. And we’re going to have a lot of fun. Stay tuned. Buckle up and enjoy the ride, guys. Stay safe out there. [00:12:58][0.0][757.0]

– Get in Contact With The Show –