Blog

Florida made the right decision on the high-speed rail project proposed during the Obama administration. Floridians can thank then-Governor Rick Scott for nixing the project. California, however, is in the opposite situation. The bullet train project that was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco is a $1 trillion  fiasco, if it should ever get completed. The ambitious project has become encumbered by political horse-trading, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a...

At the Ministerial Meeting on October 5, OPEC Plus decided to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day (2 percent of world oil demand) in November from “current baselines.” For October, the OPEC 10 production target is 26.689 million barrels per day, while the non-OPEC members of OPEC+ had a collective target of 17.165 million barrels per day . Because the group has failed to meet those targets, the actual realized production cut will be less than the 2 million barrel per day...

President Biden must be living a life of luxury and seclusion because he has no concept of how gasoline prices are set, what the demand is, and how much oil production and refinery capacity are needed to meet it.  He is back to accusing oil companies of price gouging should gasoline prices go up. Biden said  that the hurricane “provides no excuse for price increases at the pump” and if it happens, he will ask federal officials to determine ”whether price gouging is going on.”   The...

Solar power is to be the savior of President Biden’s climate agenda, being the “green” resource of choice. However, solar power has a number of unfavorable issues that limits its ability to become the savior that the Biden Administration wants. They include:

• Solar is an intermittent technology that provides no power when the sun does not shine, meaning it must be backed up by another generating source or by a battery that was supplied with electricity if and when excess power is...

Despite Biden saying he is doing all he can to increase domestic oil production, his numerous actions beginning on his first day in office show the opposite. Clearly, his climate/tax bill (the so-called Inflation Reduction Act) hits the domestic oil industry in the back with massive fees and royalty increases. Even production on non-federal lands gets hit with a methane tax of up to $1500 per ton.

His latest move is to finalize a rule banning oil and gas leasing near a Native American...

Power prices are expected to increase as the price of natural gas—the swing fuel for electric generation—increases to meet domestic and international demand. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects the natural gas price at the Henry Hub to average $9 per million Btu in the 4th quarter of 2022 and the residential electricity price to average 14.75 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2022, up 7.5 percent from 2021 and 12.2 percent from 2020. The  U.S. consumer-price index for...

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act contains new, very favorable incentives to attract additional investments in wind and solar power of over $270 billion in the next eight years for 155 gigawatts  of new wind and solar capacity. The new law is expected to trigger 85 gigawatts of new onshore wind capacity by 2030, with total onshore wind capacity reaching nearly 280 gigawatts by the end of the decade from about 140 gigawatts expected by the end of this year. The additional investment in...

Under a settlement agreement with environmentalists, Federal regulators will review oil and gas leases going back to 2019 to see whether their impact on climate change was properly addressed and to consider the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the analysis. The Biden administration agreed to review 56,000 acres  of oil and gas leases in Montana and North Dakota issued by the Trump administration in 2019 and 2020. Federal law requires agencies to consider climate change in their...

Politicians and environmentalists claim an urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in reality, world coal demand for power generation continues to increase and carbon dioxide emissions from the electric sector continue to grow. In 2021, those emissions were 5.9 percent higher than  in 2020. Over half the growth in electricity demand in 2021 was generated by coal, with non-hydro renewable energy providing just 32 percent. So, overall growth in global electricity demand in 2021 was...

Last week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), an unelected regulatory body, announced a plan to try to force the state’s car fleet to change over to electric vehicles. The plan seeks to ban the sale of new purely hydrocarbon-fueled cars in California by the year 2035. The plan will be very expensive, is completely impractical, and is certain to fail, as even CARB seems to acknowledge by reserving the right to amend the targets if the market fails to respond to their diktat. The...