Category Archives: energy

Stop Worrying about Drilling Bans on Federal Land

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The United States actually had the right idea—several of them, in fact—years ago. Today, the Federal government “owns” around 640 million acres of land—28% of the land area of our nation. That’s way too much, and it’s the largest source of leverage the Feds have over oil and natural gas production by our private economy.

There are a couple of things Congress can do to reduce to irrelevance Executive Branch volatility regarding Executive Orders and access to Federal land for mineral extraction; both of them involve reduction of American land that the Federal government presumes to own.

One is to transfer the vast majority of those acres back to the States from which the acres were seized. Examples of this excessive “ownership” include

State Federal Land Acreage Total State Acreage Per Centage of Federal Land
Nevada 59,681,502 70,264,320 84.90%
Utah 34,202,920 52,696,960 64.90%
Idaho 32,621,631 52,933,120 61.60%
Alaska 223,803,098 365,481,600 61.20%
Oregon 32,614,185 61,598,720 52.90%
Wyoming 30,013,219 62,343,040 48.10%
California 45,864,800 100,206,720 45.80%
Arizona 28,064,307 72,688,000 38.60%
Colorado 23,870,652 66,485,760 35.90%
New Mexico 26,981,490 77,766,400 34.70%

Notice that: the Feds “own” over 50% of each of the top five States, and we have get below the top 10 before the Feds possess less than a third of a State.

The Federal government legitimately controls land important for protecting monumental land like the core of Yosemite, land holding military facilities, and the like. The Feds don’t need all those hundreds of millions of acres of land for that, though. Instead, the bulk of the currently possessed land should be restored to the States within whose boundaries the land sits. The States in our federal republic should be the ones managing their domestic affairs of mineral access.

Then there are moves for transfers to individual ownership—moves of those several years ago.

The Bounty-Land Acts of 1776 awarded tracts of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War (assuming, of course, that we won the war, which we did).

The Public Land Act of 1796 authorized the sale of Federal land in 640-acre blocks for $2/acre, or roughly $1,600/acre today (more or less, given the heroic assumptions regarding inflation over so long an interval).

The Preemption Act of 1841 gave squatters living on Federal land first call to buy up to 160 acres at $1.25/acre, or roughly $1,000/acre.

The Homestead Act of 1862 granted outright 160 acres to squatters who had lived on the land for at least five years and improved it (along with a couple of other requirements that amounted to filing intent, proof of improvement, and filing for ownership).

These and similar Acts, or some combination of them, could be modernized and used to transfer vast tracts of Federal lands to private ownership. Once there, the owners could sell/lease their mineral extraction rights to those evil drillers and earn income while the oil and gas companies could extract and continue to provide cheap energy to our nation and export cheap energy to the world.

‘Course all of that, or any of it, will be more likely with a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican President, or veto-proof Republican majorities in each of the House and Senate.

A Proposed Response

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Texas State Congressman Matt Shaheen (R, Dist 66 [which includes my county]) has tweeted access to a Request for Comment regarding last week’s snow and cold storm with various utilities’ associated failures to keep supplies of electricity, natural gas, and potable water flowing in major areas of the State.

Kudos to Shaheen for publicizing this RFP.

Below are my inputs.

  1. All, without exception, ERCOT board members and senior executives (C-suite equivalents and their deputies) must reside within Texas. Half of the board members, a separate half of the C-suite, and a separate half of their deputies must reside in separate rural regions of Texas. Within that last, a C-suite executive and his deputy must not reside in the same region.
  2. Each of these board members, senior executives, and their deputies must have demonstrated expertise and empirical experience in energy and potable water supply—e., they must be energy and water engineers. Personnel with legal expertise can serve as board consultants and as assistants to the senior executives’ deputies.
  3. The State government must encourage—but not mandate—all utility providers to amortize their bills that result from the sort of event the storm of 15-19 Feb 21 represents over the succeeding 12 months. Single bills of $9,000-$17,000 (to the extent these numbers aren’t just press hype) shouldn’t occur; they should be spread over the succeeding year.
  4. Exceptionally high single-month bills like those suggested in 3) above should be investigated for their legitimacy—but from the going-in assumption that they are legitimate free-market, high demand/limited supply prices. “Price gouging” is what must be proven.
  5. All utility providers and their suppliers must winterize their systems against worst-case scenarios, with the minimum threshold being a 100-year temperature excursion, sustained for more than “a few” hours. The current winterizing was against only “bad” case scenarios. This winterizing must come solely at the expense of the individual utility, that utility’s customers, and each utility’s supplier(s). The costs should be amortizable over a reasonable period of time, and PUCT should allow the rate increases needed for cost recovery within that amortization schedule for those utilities within its jurisdiction. Other regulators must be required to do the same. The amortization schedules should be those initially proposed by the utilities/suppliers, and the regulators should be spring-loaded to accept them, rejecting a particular schedule only for concrete, measurable cause(s).
  6. Utilities with out-of-state suppliers that can’t or won’t comply with 5) above should be encouraged to find Texas-domiciled suppliers with which to replace them. Failure to find substitutes should not absolve the impacted utility of its responsibilities or liabilities related to energy/water supply so long as they are making concrete, measurable, publicly viewable ongoing efforts to find Texas-domiciled replacements. The Texas government should support the search efforts with its own research facilities, but not with taxpayer funds.
  7. Eliminate energy subsidies—both renewable and hydrocarbon

What’re You Going to Do, Joe?

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Iran has begun accumulating the immediate precursor to weapons grade uranium metal.

…report was given by UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to its members and states Iran had on Monday produced a small amount of uranium metal, after importing new equipment into a nuclear facility that is under IAEA inspection[.]

To be sure,

The material produced was a small amount of natural uranium metal…meaning it wasn’t enriched. To use uranium metal for a nuclear weapon’s core, Iran would need around half a kilogram, or slightly more than one pound, of highly enriched uranium metal….

However. There’s always a however.

This is the big step, in difficulty right below getting uranium out of the yellow cake in the first place. Now it’s a simple, if tedious, matter of combining the uranium metal with fluorine to get a gaseous salt, and passing the gas through several centrifuge cycles to get to a weapons grade level of enrichment.

It’s your move, President Biden. Israel’s existence is in the balance. As are those of cities across Europe and the US. We’re waiting.

People Like Me

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President Joe Biden’s Climate MFWIC, John Kerry, traveled to Iceland to accept an Arctic Circle award for his climate “leadership.” Of course, Kerry traveled by flying in his private jet (which has a much larger per-passenger carbon footprint than a commercial jet, but we won’t mention that).

An Icelandic journalist, Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson, asked him how that works. Kerry said,

If you offset your carbon—it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.
I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States.
I’ve been involved with this fight for years. I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris.

Of course. “I’m so special. I negotiated all this cool, yet vapid, stuff. I even got Xi to think about doing something decades into the future so we could get to the emptiness of Paris.

“Did I mention that I’m also rich enough to afford the carbon indulgences, unlike the little people—don’t they look like ants from my jet’s altitude?”

He’s so self-importantly oblivious, too, that he can’t conceive of spending his precious time in a commercial passenger jet. ‘Course, he’d be cooped up with so many of those ants.

I wonder if he invited James Taylor along on any of his private jet travels.

Good Union Jobs

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But not good enough for President Joe Biden (D).  Recall that Biden ran on “good union jobs,” among other causes, and that phrase—”good union jobs”—became so ubiquitous in his speeches as to resemble a tic.

But not all union jobs—labor is another area where Progressive-Democrats choose winners and losers. When Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, he killed roughly 11,000 good union construction, construction-related, and ancillary jobs. No matter: Progressive-Democrats, led by Biden, don’t approve of those jobs.

And that doesn’t begin to address the job losses in Canada, jobs that depended on both the pipeline construction and on the subsequent flow of oil.