Tristan Abbey exposes the feds war on NatGas in his Real Energy article Joe Biden’s Dangerous Natural Gas Game.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. Though terrain familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.

Witness the debacle over liquefied natural gas exports, wherein the White House, by “pausing” most new approvals, has catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies straight into the buzzsaw of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be authorized is tiny.) The Department of Energy claims that a multifactor impact study due in early 2025 is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.

Under a certain conception of executive power, it should be simple enough for a second-term Trump administration to end this national embarrassment by pressing “resume” on the authorization process. But as analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have suggested, merely setting aside the study could provide a basis, however tenuous, for future litigation. In the modern administrative state, it is easier to open than shut the procedural door to delays.

Previous administrations have already published macroeconomic impact studies on the question of LNG exports from the U.S. The Obama administration paused its authorizations until its first study was released in December 2012, for example—curious timing, considering the election the previous month and the study’s actual completion in July of that year. Virtually every scenario in every study, including additional analysis in 2015 and 2018, has found net benefits to accrue.

It’s possible reopening the Obama playbook was the Biden team’s plan all along. After all, Secretary Granholm didn’t commission a new study in 2021, or in 2022, or in 2023. By waiting so long, the DOE can now claim that the cumulative volume of its authorizations is approaching the upper limit of the range that the 2018 study examined. Under the duplicity theory, approvals resume under a second Biden term as soon as the study is released and the election fades away.

But maybe the administration doesn’t even have a plan. It could be sheer incompetence. Gas exports offend the sensibilities of the Democratic base, but Appalachian swing states reap the economic rewards and European allies are desperate to detach themselves from Russian energy. Political operators will try in vain to triangulate even if it is impossible. We can imagine them now, hunched over the asphalt between the West Wing and the Eisenhower building, desperately chalking angles with a compass and ruler.

More ominously, Energy Secretary Granholm may be laying the groundwork for a Kafkaesque application process designed to punish an industry this administration has only ever pretended to tolerate. The fact that DOE’s approving authority is now housed in the Office of Resource Sustainability is suggestive, as is the Fiscal Year 2025 budget request to triple programmatic funding for export authorizations, primarily in the form of “anticipated studies and environmental reviews.”

In any event, undoing what the Biden team has done will take careful work by a putative second-term Trump administration. Putting the matter to rest on a more permanent basis will require legislative action, chiefly amending the Natural Gas Act signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. In the meantime, “death by study” works both ways.

 

The Bigger Picture from Master Resource

The Fossil-fuel Era: Still Young

“Oil, gas, and coal are ascending despite determined government efforts to reverse energy progress. With criteria air pollutants on the wane and carbon dioxide (CO2) benefits laboratory-proven, the increasing sustainability of fossil fuels is evident.”

Each year brings record production of the three fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. Peak demand is not in sight–nor should it be in a world of rising population, the aspiring poor, and new ways to employ inanimate energy to improve living. But what about future supply to meet growing demand?

In most nations of the world, free-market energy
plenty is held back by government intervention.

Government ownership and operation of fossil fuels and related infrastructure impedes supply and demand. But fossil fuel plenty is very hard to hold back, and enough is produced to reasonably meet demand. Such is true in the United States despite two hundred impediments from the Biden Administration. “The U.S. now has 227 years of oil supply, 130 years of natural gas supply, and 485 years of coal supply,” the study below reports.

Canadian oil soldiers on despite the anti-energy
policies of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) has just released an update to its 2011 study, 2024 North American Energy Inventory. As more oil, gas, and coal is produced, more is discovered to be produced, the amazing (but not biblical) story of resource expansion from free-market resourceship. 

The fossil fuel era is very young in human history, having eclipsed the renewable energy era just several centuries ago. IER’s recent inventory study confirms the benefits of even a quasi-free market can do. Resourceship forever!

via Science Matters

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May 31, 2024 at 11:16AM

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

 

 

Sir Patrick Vallance has thrown his support behind Labour’s green energy proposals, warning that the race to net zero should be treated with the same immediacy as the search for a Covid vaccine.

Sir Patrick, who became a household name during the pandemic as Britain’s chief scientific adviser, backed Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to decarbonise Britain’s electricity supplies by 2030.

“I am often asked which of Britain’s many pressing public policy challenges need a vaccine-style approach,” he said.

“I believe that one such priority is the urgent need to end the era of excessive carbon emissions, high energy bills and energy insecurity by accelerating the net zero transition to clean, homegrown energy.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/31/sir-patrick-vallance-net-zero-covid-vaccine-labour-party/

I’ll leave it to the commenters!

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May 31, 2024 at 10:48AM

By Paul Homewood

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It sounds like it is the SNP who have really rumbled Starmer’s Great British Energy sham:

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LABOUR’S plans for a “home-grown energy company” have unravelled spectacularly after Keir Starmer was forced to admit Great British Energy was “not an energy company”.

The SNP have branded the flagship pledge a “sham” after Starmer dramatically scaled back Labour’s plans during a visit to Scotland on Friday.

Speaking to BBC Good Morning Scotland, Starmer admitted the publicly-owned company would be an “investment vehicle” to pump money into the private sector.

He said: “It’d be an investment vehicle, not an energy company, it’s an investment vehicle in the energy of the future.

“The money going into it would be public money but used to trigger private investment alongside it.”

The Labour leader said he expected it to be profitable and that it would create jobs.

Challenged on whether Labour’s plans to issue no new oil and gas licences and extend the windfall tax on energy giants could lead to job losses, Starmer said: “No, I do reject that analysis, in fact I’m absolutely convinced that the transition can bring more jobs to Scotland and those will last for decades.”

He insisted that oil and gas would “be part of the mix for decades to come” and that would not be “turning off the pipes”.

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said: “This interview showed Keir Starmer is utterly clueless about the Scottish energy industry and his only Scottish policy has completely unravelled.

"His damaging plans for so-called ‘GB Energy’ are a sham.

"Starmer has been forced to admit it isn’t an energy company, it won’t produce or sell energy – and it will rely on the same private investment that his policies are putting at risk.”

Flynn , who is the SNP candidate in Aberdeen South, said that industry experts had predicted Labour’s plans could “destroy 100,000 Scottish jobs and deter billions of pounds in investment”.

The Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce is among industry leaders who have warned against Labour’s plans to increase the windfall tax on energy firms – who posted record profits due to the war in Ukraine.

Earlier this year, the body said Labour’s plans to hike the tax up to 78% and extend it until 2029 would result in “redundancies on a scale not seen in this country since the pit closures of the 1980s”.

Flynn added: “It’s no wonder Starmer has given up campaigning in the north east of Scotland when he knows his plans are so damaging and unpopular.”

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/labours-gb-energy-plan-branded-103314068.html

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GBE will initially be capitalised at just £8.3 billion, and the extra revenue available from the North Sea windfall tax will be minimal, as Labour only plan to raise it from 75% to 78%, given that global oil prices have been fallen significantly since their 2022 peak. Even assuming Labour’s levy does no reduce investment and output, the proposed increase in the Energy Profits Levy from 75% to 78% will only yield an extra hundred million or so a year. (OBR currently forecasts £9 billion total revenue from the EPL over the next five years.

The SNP are therefore perfectly correct in describing Starmer’s farce as a sham. If it relies just on the extra windfall tax, as he claims, it won’t have enough money to make the slightest difference. And even if Labour borrow more money, which is more than likely, a capitalisation of £8 billion still will barely scratch the surface.

And none of this addresses the real issue – that whether the government or private sector builds wind and solar farms, their electricity is still more expensive than gas, and still needs backing up with dispatchable power.

As for Miliband’s grand hopes of £28 billion a year to spray around on wind farms, insulation, carbon capture and grid infrastructure, they have gone up in smoke. As for his hopes of nationalising the big energy companies, that was always a non-starter.

I think the take home message of all of this is that Starmer’s announcement today is simply a worthless sop to Miliband and the far left greens in the party. Without it, Miliband would probably resigned in a fit of pique.

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May 31, 2024 at 10:35AM

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May 31, 2024 at 09:25AM