Natural Gas Now Best Picks – March 18, 2023

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy. This week; freeing Texas from capture by climate corporatists, a Biden double-cross and a forgotten useful idiot.

Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!

Will Texas Be Freed from Capture by Climate Corporatists?

Remember the Texas freeze of February, 2021?

Some Texas politicians captured by climate corporatists are trying for more while others, smarter than the average amarillo, are looking to free markets to decide again:

“The answer to ensuring a reliable and affordable supply of electricity in Texas is not more subsidies, it is less subsidies. It is getting politicians out of the electricity business. Despite what many of our elected officials believe, markets work. Even electricity markets. The path to prosperity in Texas is to let markets —all of them—work. SB 1752 will move Texas in that direction.”

Remember the Alamo! Free Texas from the climate corporatists!

The mainstream media (Houston Chronicle) and official studies will deflect blame from wind and solar because of this or that–and even argue for more of the same with battery storage to expense-up the grid. But those in the industry know what is really going on. It is just energy addition, not energy transition. as Leen Wijers put it
The more honest media will make the same point. A recent Financial Times piece, Renewables: The More You Have, the More You Pay for Backups, (March 9, 2023) stated:
“Cold, still weather in the UK this week triggered high demand for electricity at a time when wind turbines were idling. That forced National Grid to use a back-up coal-generation plant for the first time this winter. Depending on Mother Nature for electricity means accepting her inconsistencies. Back-up is required, and keeping it available has a cost….
Consumers end up paying to build little-used firm power capacity. The conundrum is that the greater the overall share of renewables in the energy mix, the more customers will have to spend on these largely redundant backups.”
Texas is grappling in a second-best world. Wind and solar politically have won, time and again, and wounded Texas. It began with Ken Lay and Enron–and continued with Texas leaders George W. Bush and Rick Perry, who fell prey to the special interests with all the money (see here).

How about a big Amen! And, may Texas become free of climate corporatists and stick to what it does best —produce oil and natural gas.

Hat Tip: S. H.

CNG, LNG and Now SNG?

Innovation is the story of natural gas, yesterday, today and tomorrow!

Researchers worldwide are actively investigating safer alternatives for the storage of natural gas—solidified natural gas (SNG), or natural gas hydrates, may just be the answer.
In these hydrates, gases such as methane are trapped inside cages formed by water molecules. Additives and defined pressure-temperature conditions yield a stable, solid material that is suitable for long-term storage and can be transported without the dangers inherent to pressurized flammable liquids.
These gas hydrates, however, are currently limited to the small scale of bench-top laboratory experiments. To that end, Professor Praveen Linga from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, is working on advancing SNG technology for industrial viability.

“We need to identify strategies that would increase methane storage capacity, speed up the process of converting the natural gas into solid form, and alleviate the conditions required to ensure long-term stability,” says Prof Linga. “One missing piece of the puzzle for natural gas to become a solidified wonder material suited for scale-up is promoters—chemicals that reduce the amount of energy required for gas to be captured, and thereafter, stored as hydrates.”
Prof Linga, an expert in the field with more than 150 published research articles and 100 invited talks and seminars, aims to use gas hydrates to meet the critical needs of clean and safe energy.
“SNG technology carves a niche for safe and long-term storage of natural gases under moderate temperature and pressure conditions,” explains Prof Linga whom, together with his team members Dr. Ye Zhang, Dr. Gaurav Bhattacharjee and Mr Huanzhi Xu, and collaborators from the Dalian University of Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, recently presented a breakthrough discovery on methane hydrate storage in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

And, Joe Biden’s puppeteers imagine they’re going to stop us by banning natural gas appliances? Forget it, man! Natural gas is here to stay and you’ll have no choice but to use it…no joke.

Hat Tip: I.G.

A Forced Necessity, An Act of Political Cover or A Double-Cross?

You be the judge:

President Biden pledged during the election campaign: “I guarantee you we’re going to end fossil fuels.”
The same President Biden today has – much to the angst of conservationists – authorized a giant ConocoPhillips oil project in northwest Alaska.
The $8 billion Willow oil field development project was initially proposed in 2018. It is set within the 23 million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA), the largest expanse of federal public lands in the country, located on Alaska’s North Slope.

ConocoPhillips had initially proposed five pads as part of the project. In the oil industry, a pad refers to a temporary drilling site. Under the Trump administration, the Department of the Interior (DOI) had approved the proposal in October 2020.
But a lawsuit by multiple groups, including Earthjustice, forced the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to recommend scaling down the number of pads from five to three.
Biden’s Willow plan would allow three drill sites initially, the sources said, which project developer ConocoPhillips has said would include about 219 total wells.
A fourth drill site proposed for the project would be denied. The company has said it considers the three-site option workable…
As we detailed previously, environmental activists have vehemently opposed the project, citing pollution concerns. A petition at Change.org asking the Biden administration to not allow the Willow project has garnered more than three million signatures…
Christy Goldfuss, a former Obama White House official who now is a policy chief at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said she was “deeply disappointed” at Biden’s decision to approve Willow, which NRDC estimates would generate planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to more than 1 million homes…
However, lawmakers and trade unions from Alaska are pushing for the Biden administration to approve the project that is expected to hire 2,500 construction workers in the state. Willow is projected to output 180,000 barrels of oil per day, or around 1.5 percent of total American oil production…

However, in a clear appeasement of his ‘green’ base, even as Willow gets a green light, the Biden administration is moving to limit future oil development across the 23 million-acre (93,000 square-kilometer) NPR-A, which was set aside for energy supply needs roughly a century ago. The Interior Department said it soon will propose a rule that could prevent future oil and gas leasing across more than 13 million acres of the Indiana-sized reserve.

Personally, it seems obvious to me this action represents all three of the options I suggested in my title question, but this is mostly a double-cross. The Biden pussycat hasn’t changed its stripes and the last paragraph says it all. Some 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve—an extremely valuable oil and natural gas asset—will be sacrificed. Moreover, the Biden puppeteers know full well their friends in the NRDC will tie this up in court years and long after the buffoon is gone and with him some of our energy security, but in the meantime it will falsely appear he gave his trade union allies something and was genuinely looking out for the nation a bit. It’s a total head fake, in other words, and a double-cross of the precise type the Biden crime family has mastered over the years. Don’t be fooled!

Hat Tip: D.S.

And, from the Forgotten Useful Idiot Corner of the World

Readers of this blog may be among the last people on Earth to remember Josh Fox but we have his number and can’t forget as much as we’d like to do so. He’s desperately seeking renewed attention by transitioning from a natural gas foe to a climate change warrior to promote his own work with this:

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing our planet today. Polluted air and steadily rising temperatures are linked to health issues ranging from increased heart attacks and heat strokes to the spread of infectious diseases and psychological trauma.
One of the many struggles with communicating climate change is its complexity. It both exacerbates naturally occurring events — like floods, droughts, hurricanes, disease spread, and more — and forces those who contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions to suffer the most. When these kinds of forces — that seemingly feel out of our control — are blended together it can feel quite hopeless.
However, there’s so much being done across the globe that’s creating meaningful, incremental change.

Documentaries are a powerful tool for bringing important environmental issues to the forefront of our minds, inspiring us to engage with the topic and inspiring us to take practical and immediate action.
From the devastating effects of plastic pollution, to innovative approaches to regenerative agriculture, these films offer a glimpse into the state of the planet and the work that is being done to address the challenges we face.
Whether you’re already an environmentalist or simply looking to gain a deeper understanding of the issues facing our planet, these documentaries provide a thought-provoking and inspiring look at the world around us.

He’s simply promoting his own demagoguery, of course, but, interestingly, in putting it it up there with other supposed worthy “documentaries” he doesn’t mention Al Gore’s incredibly bad movie. Wonder why? Well, consider this, which is just spectacularly excellent: