Category Archives: energy

No, It Isn’t

Posted on by
Reply

Clean Energy Is Under Attack Even Where It’s Booming goes the Wall Street Journal headline. There’s a hint regarding that buried in the middle of the article:

The hit to the power sector could prove significant. More than three-fourths of the proposed solar projects and more than one-third of the wind farms in long queues to connect to the power grid needed tax incentives to be economically viable as of January, said Corianna Mah, analyst at Enverus Intelligence Research.

No, clean energy is not under attack. Market-distorting, vote-buying subsidies and tax credits are under attack—as they should be. Clean energy will do fine when the market—us consumers—want it. If clean energy projects cannot succeed without those handouts, they aren’t economically—or technologically—viable.

See, for instance, natural gas. Oil, even cleaned-up coal, too, once the costs of regulatory impediments designed as actual attacks on hydrocarbon energy are subtracted off. But wait—oil subsidies…. Those are a tiny fraction of all those clean energy subsidies and tax credits. But yes, oil subsidies need to go away, also.

Two Responses

Posted on by
Reply

The headline tells the tale.

California is winning the war on ‘Big Oil,’ but experts say victory will bring higher gas prices

California’s “victory” has resulted in this:

Valero Energy Corporation has announced it will idle or close its Benicia Refinery in California—just the latest in the exodus of fossil fuel companies from the state.
Six months ago, Phillips 66 announced the closure of its Los Angeles-area refinery by the end of this year—it’s since bumped the date up to October—and a few months before that, Chevron announced it would be moving its headquarters from San Ramon, California, to Houston.
After the two refineries close, it’s not clear exactly where California will find more gasoline and other finished petroleum products, such as jet fuel, to satisfy demand.

And this:

Newsom blamed oil companies for high gasoline prices and promised further regulation of the industry would solve the problem for residents.

Here are two responses, should the management teams of the companies involved (finally) find the backbone to implement them. One is for oil and natural gas companies outside California decline to sell any of their products into California. They easily can make the case that it’s not sound economically or business-wise to produce products that meet California’s enormously stringent requirements and still be able to sell into the rest of our nation at market prices.

The other is for car and truck companies to decline to sell their vehicles into California. They easily can make the same economic and business argument: it’s not feasible to produce vehicles solely for the California market, and making those California-compliant vehicles for nation-wide sales only drives the costs of those vehicles far above the market prices that otherwise would obtain.

Those moves also would satisfactorily answer Newsom’s problem. With no further oil and gas flowing into California from outside, there would be no gasoline for which to abuse gasoline prices. With no further vehicles being sold into California, there would be reduced demand for gasoline at any price, a demand that would fall to zero as existing ICE vehicles age out.

Winners all around.

Mistaken Emphasis

Posted on by
2

Oil and gas companies are worried that, in the process of reducing the Federal employee work force, too many regulators who issue the permits these companies need to begin work on a project are being fired, and so the permits are being delayed.

Some companies are asking the administration not to lay off key personnel who deliver permits at federal agencies….
[C]ompanies receive permits to drill on US lands from Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, licenses to export liquefied natural gas from the Energy Department, and permits to build interstate natural gas pipelines from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

This isn’t the problem the executives make it out to be. The regulators in those entities are not independent satraps who act entirely on their own recognizance. They do not issue the permits or reject them in their own name; they act in the name of their respective Department or agency heads, and those agency heads are not independent satraps, either; they act in the name of their respective Department Secretaries. As such, the agency heads are fully capable of issuing/rejecting permits, and ultimately the Secretaries are fully capable of overruling their subordinate agency heads and issuing/rejecting the permits themselves.

Of course the Leftists and a large collection of fee-seeking lawyers will jump on this with litigation, but ultimately the agency and Secretary actions should be upheld.

Still, they can’t act entirely alone. Matt Schatzman, NextDecade CEO wants those agencies to hire more workers and cut red tape so the industry can start more projects as quickly as possible. It’s not necessary to have both of those. More hires is not necessary in any event; legislation is: require permits to be issued or rejected withing 30 days of the initial application, or the permits are deemed issued. Require the regulators to defend in concrete, measurable, publicly accessible terms their rejection within two weeks of their rejection, or the permit is deemed issued.

Blame Ducking

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not blame shifting or blame casting, even though it might seem so. Those are just tools, though, employed in the cause of ducking blame. Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Josh Shapiro, has provided the latest version.

Electricity rates are spiking in the State over which he rules. PJM Interconnection, the State’s largest power provider, has approved 38 GW of new generation, but the generators are not being built: high interest rates and inflation, not Shapiro’s fault but demonstratively that of his party’s actions at the Federal level, have made the building too costly, even with the plethora of green subsidies.

Shapiro has, though,

pitched an energy plan to fast-track the construction of renewables and a cap-and-trade program that would effectively subsidize them by punishing fossil fuels. Such policies would likely lead to the retirement of more base-load fossil fuel generators….

And that restriction on energy supply can only further drive up energy prices for Pennsylvanians. This sort of thing already has done so, in fact, hence the present spike for the State’s citizens.

Now Shapiro is blaming PJM for those rising prices while ducking away from his own green policies, and his party’s national-level policies, that are the actual cause of the straits in which Pennsylvania’s citizens find themselves.

This is the Progressive-Democrat mantra: it’s not their fault; it’s never their policies. It’s always and everywhere someone else’s fault.

One More Reason…

Posted on by
Reply

…to stop doing business in New York. This time, it’s the State’s move to tax energy producers who sell their fossil fuel products in the State on the risible basis of those producers’ (global) CO2 production over the years 2000 through 2018. Never mind that, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

It’s impossible to determine a company’s contribution to climate change since the effects of CO2 emissions on temperature and natural disasters are mediated by myriad variables.

New York’s bureaucrats will make their assessments anyway, and those assessments will be, of necessity, wholly arbitrary. Then there’s this, too, which New York’s government personages consider irrelevant:

Most fossil-fuel emissions stem from their combustion rather than production….

The fossil fuel energy producers shouldn’t waste time litigating this in court, even though they’d likely win given the plethora of court decisions that hold moves like New York’s illegal.

These folks should simply stop selling their products in New York, and that should include no longer selling their products to utilities that provide electricity- and natural gas-related energy in New York. They’ll save more money that way, money that could be used for innovation and better fossil-fuel-related products for their other customers.

Nor will New Yorkers be harmed by the withdrawal. They have plenty of energy flowing from all those “green” and “renewable” energy sources. And those nuclear reactors on the horizon. The State government’s personages assure us so.