Tag Archives: energy

Nord Stream 2 and Joe Biden

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President Joe Biden (D) likes to present himself as talking big. Unfortunately for the rest of us, and for our nation, he acts small. In the latest example, he said that he

lifted sanctions on the Russia-to-Germany pipeline Nord Stream 2 “because it’s almost completely finished.”

He also said, after having agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin to lift sanctions on and stop blocking Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline,

I’ve been opposed to Nord Stream from the beginning…they know how I feel[.]

And “they” don’t care. “They” showed how little they care when Putin allowed Russian hackers to shut down a critical part of our own fuel distribution infrastructure.

Here’s Biden again, on the same pipeline:

It’s not like I can allow Germany to do something or not….

It’s not like Biden would have been allowing Germany to do anything or not. Our government was denying Russia’s ability to increase Germany’s—a European economic powerhouse and key NATO member—dependency on Russia. Until Biden gave up.

“Almost completely finished” means not done and no natural gas flowing and no benefit—or money—flowing to Russia. “Almost finished” were the easy parts of the pipeline; the most difficult 90 miles were what was left.

No, Biden “opposed” the pipeline until it became inconvenient to him to do so.

Now, with his meek…acquiescence…Russia gains firmer hold on the economies (and so the nations) of central Europe, most especially the erstwhile strongest economy, Germany’s. And it comes promptly after Putin ran his demonstration of what would happen to our own energy infrastructure if we continued our interference with Russian extraterritorial activities.

In the Land of YGTBSM

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Some of you may recall that a few weeks ago, Texas had several days of electricity (and associated natural gas) blackouts, some of those areas lost water for a number of days, and some areas lost Internet connectivity—and Internet-based communications—for some time.

A Wall Street Journal ran an article last week that looked into the sources of the electricity failures; it’s well worth the read in its own right.

A couple of items jumped out at me, though, concerning ERCOT, a State-level regulator about which I’ve written before.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas activated a program that pays large industrial power users to reduce their consumption during emergencies. But the grid operator, known as Ercot, didn’t know who was being paid to participate in this program and what type of facilities were getting shut off, it has since acknowledged.

How is that possible? How can an entity that bills itself as a reliability facility not know who its members are or what types of facilities it might affect?

It gets better, though, regarding ERCOT’s member facilities.

“We do not know what type of facility it is,” said Kenan Ögelman, Ercot’s Vice Ppresident of Commercial Operations. “We do know [a facility] has qualified and performed to the requirement because we test them, but we don’t know what it is they do.”

How anything be tested if the testing personnel don’t know what [a facility] does?

ERCOT really has to go.

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.