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Rejecting the overtures of liars and scammers is easy. For years the wind and solar industries have made an art form of both. Now, slowly but surely, communities have learned to spot the lies and community defenders are driving the scammers out of town.

STT recently reported on the growing number of landholders who are rejecting deals to host wind turbines or solar panels on their properties and landholders who are ripping up their contracts even after they’ve signed them.

The most recent event, involved 9 farmers from Armidale in NSW, who had signed up to host some 55, 7MW turbines between them, pulling out of their contracts, on the basis that they had been lied to about the very substantial decommissioning costs they face when these things give up the ghost, after 12 to 15 years or so.

That post – No Deal: More Panicked Farmers Join Rush to Rip-up Contracts to Host Wind Turbines – had over 3,000 hits in a week and helped send the wind and sun cult into an outrage about their inability to dictate how property owners use their own land. How dare they reject the Great Leap Forward!

In the aftermath of what is clearly a disaster for wind and solar rent-seekers, Professor Ian Plimer – one of Australia’s leading advocates for reliable and affordable energy – gave this interview on Sky News.

‘About bloody time’: Armidale wind farm project shelved after landholders change their minds
Sky News
Danica De Giorgio an Prof Ian Plimer
13 August 2024

A wind farm proposal for north-west New South Wales has been scrapped following a change of mind from some of the nine landowners whose properties took in the project’s boundaries.

Ark Energy was behind the bid to build a 55-turbine Doughboy Wind Farm, 50 kilometres east of Armidale.

Geologist Ian Plimer joined Sky News host Danica De Giorgio to discuss why it is becoming more and more common for landowners to change their minds about wind farms.

“It’s getting more and more common for landowners to change their minds on this because they are getting more informed and they realise that when a wind turbine industrial facility closes, the bill is theirs to clean up,” Mr Plimer said.

“It’s not cheaper and there’s billions being sent overseas, and I think finally the farm community is waking up saying, ‘this is not good for me. This is not good for the nation. This is not good for my local community and we’re not going to sign up’.”

Transcript

Danica De Giorgio: The green energy back flipping in this country has claimed yet another victim. A wind farm proposal for Northwest New South Wales has been scrapped following a change of mind from some of the nine landowners whose properties took in the project’s boundaries.

Ark Energy was behind the bid to build a 55 turbine Doughboy wind Farm monstrosity. Joining me now is esteemed geologist, Professor Ian Plimer. Thank you very much for joining us on the show. Look, firstly, how unusual is it for landowners to change their minds, and why do you think that they are indeed backing out of these projects?

Prof Ian Plimer: Well, it’s getting more and more common for landowners to change their minds on this because they’re getting more informed and they realise that when a wind turbine industrial facility closes, the bill is theirs to clean up, that’s not going to help them very much. And some of the early wind developments got farmers in during a drought, and farmers viewed this as drought-proofing.

This Eastern fall country, east of Armidale is prized agricultural land. It’s land where foreign corporations with the assistance of city-based governments are trying to override the wishes of farm people so they can make electricity. Now, that electricity is not reliable, it’s not cheaper, and there’s billions being sent overseas. And I think finally the farm community is waking up saying, “This is not good for me. This is not good for the nation. This is not good for my local community, and we are not going to sign up.” This is happening country-wide. I’m talking to a farmer’s group next week. They are starting to get their political voice and it’s taken a long time. And all I can say is it’s about bloody time.

Danica De Giorgio: Yeah, it is about time. And yeah, I’m not surprised either. In the end, they don’t want these monstrosities being dug up on their land. It’s just bizarre. Now look, Labor has granted planning approval for New South Wales’s Central-West Orana renewable energy zone. And this is apparently an Australian first. Professor, firstly, one on earth is a renewable energy zone?

Prof Ian Plimer: Well, the name Orana rings bells. Now, we once had governments who wanted to build a super city between Bathurst and Orange, Orana it was going to be called, and that was about half a century ago. Now that failed. There’s been not one street put in, not one building put in.

And the sceptic on me says, “Well, I wonder if this is the same thing,” because here we’ve got state and federal governments want to harvest perfectly good farmlands for low-grade energy. And the area where they want to put this is prime agricultural land to the east and west of Gulgong.

And here we grow grapes, run sheep, there’s forests, there’s crops, and there’s a lot of national parks in that area. So they’re wanting to, again, override the interest of the local people, put in a harebrained scheme to actually build a renewable energy zone where they can basically destroy for a very long period of time, prime agricultural and forest land.

Now, we have to remember that wind turbines shed a very, very poisonous chemical called bisphenol. That bisphenol stays in the soils, it gets into the waterways, it destroys the land. We know that with solar facilities, they leak out cadmium, they leak out lead, and these stay in the soils and they’re there for a very long period of time, if not forever. So if we want to have this to boost the economy, it’s got to be low cost, it’s got to lower the electricity bill.

And our electricity bills, a large proportion of that is from transmission and distribution costs. And if you’re going to put electricity generating well away from the existing grids, that can only lead to electricity prices going up. And that we’ve seen with the renewables.

And I take it a slightly different view, the view of the farmers actually, and this is in essence a war on food. It’s a war conducted by those who live in cities against the low population areas, which are food producers.

And this war on food has the stamp of state government, it has a stamp of the federal government and they have created a false problem. And the false problem is that too many emissions of carbon dioxide drive climate change. Now, that’s never been shown. And if it could be shown, then we’d celebrate because emitting carbon dioxide makes plants grow. And we’ve got satellite information over the last 30 years saying we’ve had a greening of the planet due to the slight increase in carbon dioxide. So they’re wanting it both ways.

And I hope, again, the farming communities in those areas, especially the areas north of Mudgee, the wine growing areas, have enough muscle to say, “No, this is madness. We want to go back to what we had, which was cheap, reliable energy.”

Danica De Giorgio: Absolutely. And fair enough. Absolutely fair enough. Now, the WA government has ruled out any change to its longstanding policy on uranium mining, insisting that the future is indeed renewables. Professor, we can hardly be surprised that Labor states like Western Australia are really ideologically opposed to uranium mining and all because Labor won’t accept nuclear energy.

Prof Ian Plimer: Well, I’m not surprised at all, but they seem to accept nuclear energy if they get cancer and use some of the products that come out of the nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. So again, they want to bet each way on this.

Now, Western Australia is geologically an area where we do find uranium, especially in some of the Salt Lakes, but the really big uranium deposits are here in South Australia and also the Northern Territory. So in terms of the global scene, it doesn’t matter very much.

In terms of Western Australia, it doesn’t matter very much for them either because they are getting massive royalties out of iron ore and out of gas. If Western Australia was a little bit more impoverished, they may well have a different view, but the ideological basis of their decision really does need to be questioned.

For example, if they’re doing this to lower carbon dioxide emissions, then you have to look at the renewables of Germany and they produce 400 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour.

France, which is nuclear, produces 40 grams per kilowatt-hour. If you look at the Australian example, AEMO tell us that gas releases 59 grams per kilowatt-hour. And the CSIRO tells us that any future nuclear in Australia will release 31 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. So Western Australia is blessed with having cheap energy, massive royalties from the Pilbara and from the gas and from gold, and they have the luxury of not being able to think into the future.

And the future will always be nuclear power generated cheaply. Long-term nuclear power and Western Australia is basically taken ideological decision unrelated to reality. But the royalties keep rolling in.

Danica De Giorgio: Yeah, the royalties do certainly keep rolling in for Western Australia. But yeah, as you said, not when it comes to renewable energy. Professor Ian Plimer, great to have you on. Thanks for joining us.
Sky News

From the BOE REPORT

Terry Etam

With all due respect to Ozzy Osbourne, a guy that lived the rockstar life; who drank enough alcohol to float an aircraft carrier; who took enough drugs to stun a small nation; who survived all that, raised a family, survived to age 76/counting, and is worth $200 million…that’s not a madman. That’s genius. Well played, sir.

The story of natural gas markets and producers, on the other hand, can righteously lay claim to the title.

Don’t take my word for it. Have a look at this chart that depicts US natural gas production (black line) and Henry Hub prices (orange) for the last quarter century or so:

In what industry, you might wonder, would producers accelerate production at such a rapid clip, while simultaneously driving prices into the toilet. You would not be crazy in asking that. Over the period of the arrows above, the industry gave a whole new meaning to the term “value destruction”. Investors did not care for the strategy much at all, surprise surprise.

The two arrows, in isolation, do make the market look crazier than 8^th Avenue at 7 pm (Calgary’s up and coming East Hastings proxy), and it is pretty bad, but, to be fair to the beleaguered participants, there is a bit of context that needs explaining.

First, the gradual increase in production from about 2006 onwards was the result of the high prices of 2002-2006, which spurred development and led to the unlocking of the US’ vast shale gas resource. High prices footed the bill for shale exploration and experimentation, which set the stage for future growth.

One of the biggest reasons for these wild trajectories is that the industry just keeps getting better and better at getting gas out of tough formations. (While there are many ways drilling and completions are improving, these advancements should not be confused with the simple act of drilling longer horizontals which is often viewed as an efficiency gain – it is a capital efficiency gain, no doubt, but not like an improved frac is – a longer lateral simply chews up the reservoir faster. One day in a decade or two we will look back and go, oh yeah, maybe that was significant…).

Those technological/fracking improvements drove the first waves of growth, but don’t completely explain the steepest part of the curve. Note in particular the pinkish shaded box, corresponding to roughly April 2017 to April 2021. Over that four-year period, the US added about 27 bcf/d, which is about 1.5 times Canada’s entire output, while prices fell from about $3.00/mmbtu to $2.00. That’s the sort of antics a guy like Warren Buffett really frowns on.

It’s true, those trajectories do look like the product of madness, but as with pretty much everything that has ever happened in history, we have to go back to the context of the times. In that period, an enormous amount of new natural gas pipeline infrastructure came into service, projects that had been kicked off some years before, in the 2014-15 timeframe, when it became clear that there was a market for all the new gas. Pipeline and gas plant builders needed volume commitments from producers to build the infrastructure, so once completed, producers did what they were obligated to do – fill up the pipe.

From a macro perspective, that kind of worked – the pipes did indeed fill up, but on the other hand the enthusiasm led to some pretty spectacular bankruptcies (hello, Chesapeake). Producers burned through vast piles of cash to flood a market that couldn’t handle the output.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html

The significance of this (over) development can hardly be overstated, in energy terms; in 2006 the US produced about 50 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d); 18 years later it produces over 100 bcf/d. Early this century, some 20 years ago, the US was looking to construct LNG import terminals; 20 years later, the US is the world’s largest natural gas exporter. Now that truly is crazy.

Today, here in mid 2024, the future is murky. We know a few things: that the US (and Canada) are both capable of a lot more natural gas production. We know that demand is going to go up over the next half decade at a minimum, possibly by as much as 30 percent, due to new LNG export terminals and data center/AI demand.

What we don’t know is how easy it will be to build any new infrastructure to enable new volumes to get to where they need to be. We’re well used to this problem in Canada, of course, which is a basket case; it is a miracle that Coastal GasLink was built at all, and it is hard to imagine any entity having the intestinal fortitude to attempt any new greenfield interprovincial infrastructure, which is federally regulated, which means the ruling alliance would laugh you off Parliament Hill for even showing up with your briefcase.

The US is not far behind; the only significant interstate gas pipeline to go into service in the past few years has been the Mountain Valley Pipeline which was many years delayed by swarming activist attacks, and was completed at double the initial cost estimate (MVP was first proposed in 2014, and was scheduled to come onstream in 2018; it finally started flowing gas in 2024). A more realistic reading of the current US natural gas interstate pipeline system is this: In July 2020 the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a large and critical new pipe that would have taken excess Appalachia gas to a thirsty US east coast, which was six years in planning, was shelved despite receiving a 7-2 vote of approval from the United States Supreme Court (from the project cancellation news release: “A series of legal challenges to the project’s federal and state permits has caused significant project cost increases and timing delays. These lawsuits and decisions have sought to dramatically rewrite decades of permitting and legal precedent including as implemented by presidential administrations of both political parties. As a result, recent public guidance of project cost has increased to $8 billion from the original estimate of $4.5 to $5.0 billion… This new information and litigation risk, among other continuing execution risks, make the project too uncertain to justify investing more shareholder capital.”)

To emphasize just how tough it is to actually build a new pipeline, Dominion Energy, one of the Atlantic Coast partners, took a $2.8 billion charge to earnings in cancelling the project. Think about that. A public company chose to eat a $2.8 billion loss rather than attempt to build a new, approved pipeline.

Of course, things are much more complicated than that oversimplification. Texas, for example, has no problems building pipelines within the state. A lot of gas is produced in Texas, and many LNG terminals are or will be located there too. So perhaps that aligns as a path for gas production growth. Similarly, AI data center owners are figuring out that they can build their data centers right alongside gas fields, bypassing a whole bucket of headaches – no interstate gas pipeline requirements, avoid grid transmission/distribution power charges, get the things built in months rather than years. So there’s another clear path between producers and consumers that might facilitate added production and consumption.

But it won’t be all that smooth. Big fields over time become smaller fields, and new developments may well be in other states. The inability to build gas infrastructure will haunt the economy in one way or another. Associated gas may or may not continue to flood the market, the amount of which available is as much a function of oil prices as anything else.

And then on top of this complicated business, layer in politics. One presidential candidate loathes hydrocarbons, and in past has supported a ban on fracking. The other candidate has sworn to cut energy prices in half, a promise which boggles the mind at the best of times, and causes cranial explosions if he’s including natural gas prices. He wants to cut those in half? See: chart above…not sure that is a well-thought-out proposal, not when it comes to natural gas anyway.

Add it all together and it is a market like no other, and it is mighty hard on the head. A wise colleague offered his own version of the above chart, a Rorschach-type interpretation that is probably a better fit for anyone involved in the natural gas business these days. The beast is obvious, if you play in this sandbox:

Whatever. Something will come up out of the blue to send the gas market into more spasms, and in a year gas prices will be fifty cents or twelve dollars or maybe both in one day. Don’t look behind the curtain please. We’re not well.

What the world desperately needs – energy clarity. And a few laughs. Pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity,  available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.