From the BOE REPORT

Terry Etam

LNG Canada to boost and stabilize Canadian natural gas prices? Not so fast…

There was a worthwhile read here last week in the BOE Report entitled “Canadian natural gas firms eager for LNG boom swamp market with excess supply”, which sums up the current situation quite well. It is astonishing that over the summer, the lowest-priced thing I can think of – candy, a stamp, anything – was a gigajoule of natural gas, and ten of those can look after a modest home for a month. What a world.

There was one potential caveat in the article, however – speculation that LNG Canada’s activity is expected to “reduce volatility in the AECO market.” Hmm…not so sure about that.

The premise is that new LNG exports will provide added demand via a brand new outlet for natural gas. LNG Canada will certainly do that, but it will also introduce a wildcard into the equation.

Presently, the existing system is remarkably stable on a day to day basis, with any significant outages generally planned and announced well in advance. But LNG terminals are not like that.

There are many events that can occur in very short order that can shut down an LNG terminal, because these terminals do not have significant (or any) gas storage accompanying them (or LNG Canada doesn’t anyway) that can act as a buffer in the even of a power outage, bad weather, an equipment failure, an accident…the list is lengthy, and each can bring the LNG off take to a standstill, quickly, with significant impacts.

Such speculation is not without precedent. Two years ago, a single US LNG export facility went out of service after a relatively minor explosion, and it had a negative impact on US natural gas prices for 8 months.

Consider also that the US natural gas market is what Nassim Taleb would call “robust” in one sense; the country is laced with major NG pipeline systems, and gas can often flow bidirectionally. Thus, the US market – which is also huge – was able to absorb the 2 bcf/d that was pushed back into the market, with a discernible but not devastating price impact.

The US natural gas system in another sense would earn Taleb’s classification of “antifragile” – that which grows stronger through stresses – because it is continuously strengthened by such stressors, new pipe is built as required to enable new production and connect to new markets – to the extent that regulations and enemies will allow (which, for now, pretty much means “only build in Texas” but that could change depending on which butt lands in the White House).

Canada’s natural gas market, on the other hand, is considerably more fragile in the sense of becoming dysfunctional at even a relatively minor whim or nature or incident. Recall a few years ago when an Enbridge gas line blew up outside of Prince George in northern BC – one of two that brings gas to the lower mainland. The other line was shut down for two days for inspections, and as a result of the reduced flow some schools in Vancouver turned off heat in buildings and reduced temperatures in classrooms.

If a natural gas system is extensive and web-like, it can maintain resilience, stability, and function well even if one part of it suffers a failure of some kind. If a system is constrained and highly dependent on a limited number of access points, both for supply and offtake, the risk of volatility increases significantly, and the risk to consumers grows to unhealthy levels. Everyone should be thankful those chilly gas-deprived Vancouver students in a coastal October were not Winnipeg students in ears-fall-off January.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html

On the other hand, LNG usage is soaring and Canada might catch the wave yet despite our habits

Dan Yergin, the senior oil patch observer and author of the legendary book The Prize, recently wrote an article for S&P Global called “The return of energy security”. It’s chock full of good information about how the world is recognizing that an energy transition may be an admirable goal but that there is no doubt it is going to take a back seat to energy security. Much of the world is not as cavalier as we are, but then much of the world does not have the, ahem, phenomenally skilled oil and gas workforce that we do here in North America.

Yergin notes, “The biggest emphasis on the need for reliable and affordable energy is in the developing world, where 80% of the world’s population lives… Attaining energy security is basic to making progress out of poverty in general and remedying the lack of access to commercial energy and electricity… Natural gas is a particular focus for promoting economic development — and for reducing emissions.”

He’s not whistling Dixie. Much of the world is stampeding to secure LNG supplies. Per the above article, India earlier this year announced a $67 billion investment plan to expand India’s natural gas infrastructure. Colombia, which has vast natural gas reserves of its own, is looking to increase its LNG import capacity. Malaysia, one of the world’s top exporters of LNG, is looking to increase imports of LNG to meet soaring consumption.

Other countries are racing to meet the new demand. The US has, in one measly decade, become the world’s largest LNG exporter, including by using some basic infrastructure developments started 25 years ago when the US was planning to import LNG to meet its needs (the US shale boom was something else, adding about 20 percent to world supplies in 15 years). Even Saudi Arabia announced plans to become a major LNG player, signing a 20 year offtake agreement from a new US LNG terminal.

Overall, the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, a group of guess-what’s comprised of 12 member countries and 7 observer countries (observing gas? The ultimate government job),  expects global natural gas demand to increase from 4,015 billion cubic meters in 2022 to 5,360 bcm by 2050, a 34 percent increase, and with no peak in site. Because the LNG trade is anchored by multi-billion dollar terminals, which often require multi-decade contracts in order to obtain financing, much of this demand/trade is being baked into the system for decades to come, so even if the GECF is talking it’s book, they have very good reason to be believed.

In front of this global steamroller of natural gas development, Canada stands alone, with our leadership turning away an LNG-begging Germany with admonishments to get serious about climate change and just sit back and wait for Canada’s green hydrogen economy to develop (haha) and you’ll get the first boatload (or whatever it arrives in once we determine how in the heck to build such a castle in the sky) (German leaders then flew to Senegal, looking to trump Canada’s leadership’s peculiar stance, encouraging the Senegalese to develop their reserves and ship to Europe; ultimately the Germans simply signed a long term LNG deal with the US, who by some unbelievable skillset found the ‘business case’ that Canada found lacking).

And don’t even get me started on data center demand, which is getting more crazy by the hour it seems. The biggest AI players have now all raced to lock up existing or nearly-existing nuclear power (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) because it is the only emissions-free 24/7 baseload power available. Everyone else will be scrambling for whatever 24/7 baseload they can get, and, as with the newly rediscovered importance of energy security, these firms will place AI development over any qualms about what sort of energy they are sourcing. Natural gas is the best choice because of its availability, speed of development, and relatively clean burning. So look to AI data centers to pop up wherever there are natural gas supplies – it will shave years off the process if the data center developers can build a power source independent of the electrical grid (which is to development plans what quicksand is to humans).

Five years old, and the future painted within is turning out pretty much exactly as expected (ok, I missed the nuclear renaissance, sue me).  Pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, where energy is actually entertaining. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.

From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A recent article at Forbes, “Four Kinds Of Killer Weather Extremes: An Achilles Heel Problem For Climate Predictors,” is a mixed bag of correct and incorrect claims about climate change and the issue of warming impacts. Forbes is right that available data doesn’t show extreme weather is getting worse, but incorrect on a number of other assertions, like that coral reefs are in danger.

To start, writer Ian Palmer describes the so-called Exxon Knew scandal, citing some of the predictions that models built by ExxonMobil back in the 1980s spat out concerning carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. This narrative about the fuel giant ignores the fact that there were other studies being done internally that showed differently, arguing the opposite. Even within the warming theory presented by certain Exxon scientists, they acknowledged a high degree of uncertainty, concerning their findings. The popular scientific consensus just prior to the 80s was that a mini-ice ace was imminent.

Exxon did not “know” or hide anything, and Palmer makes the point that Exxon’s model outputs “were about global warming, not climate change,” and that predicting the downstream effects of climate change on weather and other systems is “another big step, and is fraught with uncertainties.”

He writes [Emphasis mine] :

If the world were sensitive to 0.2C or 0.5C, or even 1.0C global warming, climate change indicators should show up in long-term data trends.

…

There do exist worldwide consequences of global warming. These direct indicators include Arctic and Antarctic ice melting, glaciers retreating, sea levels rising, corals bleaching, and some biodiversity habitats changing. These have been serious, but not generally associated with human lives lost, destroyed infrastructure, famines, mass migrations, or government collapse.

Each of these direct indicators, on a global basis, have worsened in the last 50 years, and long-term data have proven this. For example, coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef has reached an all-time high.”

While it is true that there has been, as should be expected upon exiting a cold period, changes to certain habitats and melting ice, however this is wildly exaggerated in the media. He is also flat wrong that coral reefs are more in danger of bleaching now than if it were colder and with a lower CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. He’s also wrong about the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) being endangered by recent bleaching occurrences, in fact the GBR is thriving.

Regarding coral reefs, it’s important to first note that coral bleaching is not coral death. At the same time as media and Palmer are pushing the line that the Great Barrier Reef has an all-time high for bleaching, data show that, in the aftermath of the bleachings, the living coral cover of the reef set repeated records for the  highest levels ever since records began in 1985. It is in the best shape it has been in recent decades. Bleaching is caused by a variety of factors, including cold snaps and chemicals in sunscreen, and cannot be exclusively contributed to warm waters (in which corals thrive) or dissolved CO2. Also, as discussed in a number of Climate Realism posts, corals are doing well globally, regularly adapting to bleaching, with new coral being discovered all the time, sometimes in unexpected locations.

Concerning metling ice at the poles, while ice melt may appear to be alarming, the truth is more complicated, and the overall ice mass of those locations has hardly budged. There is a long-term melting trend, but this predates the industrial revolution and will continue so long as we do not slide back to the temperatures of the little ice age.

It is certainly true that average global sea level is rising, but this effect is not distributed evenly across coastlines, is not outside the natural range and rate of rise since the Earth began to come out of the last glacial period, and Palmer correctly admits that this is not associated with loss of life, despite what the media often asserts. Sea levels have already risen more than 400 feet since the last ice age, and tide gauge data does not indicate that there is any alarming acceleration in the rate of rise. This is covered succinctly in Climate at a Glance: Sea Level Rise, here. There is no reason to believe, again, that seas will cease to rise if humans stopped burning fossil fuels.

Palmer goes on to describe four “killer weather extremes of droughts, wildfires, floodings, and hurricanes.”

This is where his analysis is spot on. Palmer writes:

But the four killer weather extremes have not worsened in the past 50 years. Long-term data such as hurricanes show numbers of worldwide events that, although fluctuating, reveal no long-term trend. The events were reliably recorded and carefully counted.

It’s the same for global tally of droughts, wildfires, and floodings. On a global basis, none of these four killer weather extremes have worsened over the past 40-50 years — even though global temperature has risen by 1.0 C degrees in this period.

Palmer’s statement is accurate, going on to muse that if these disastrous weather types, which really do pose immediate threats to human health, are not increasing, “why should the world be worried about future worsening?”

He hangs on to the idea that the “urgency” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is “still significant” based on the earlier direct indicators of climate change, but says it “is not as dire as often presented by climate modelers, the media, and the press.”

Most surprising, Palmer ends the article by admitting that the oil and gas industry thus cannot be blamed for worsening weather extremes, though he does assert that they “may be culpable for direct indicators of global warming.”

The debate over the degree to which human emissions of carbon dioxide influence even those direct indicators of warming, however, is still ongoing, especially since human activity accounts for just 3.4 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today. Many of the alleged solutions to the problem, like ceasing the use of fossil fuels for electricity and transportation, would result in far more dire consequences for civilization, human life, and health than the slow rise of the seas or shifting habitat zones, such as widespread famine, the loss of many modern medicines and medical technologies, and reduced availability of lifesaving electric power.

The Forbes article is a mix of truth and nonsense, meriting kudos for the facts it tells and disapprobation for its misleading portions. Forbes should get some credit for running an article, a large portion of which presents facts that buck the prevailing narrative that humans are causing catastrophic climate change. Had it followed normal recent mainstream media practice, it would have stifled any discussion of data which make it clear that extreme weather is not getting worse, and stuck to the speculation that climate change is going to get us if we don’t stop using fossil fuels.

From THE DAILY CALLER

Adam Pack
Contributor

The Biden-Harris administration’s environmental justice advisors are slated to receive or influence the disbursal of nearly half a billion dollars in grant funding from agencies they advise.

These advisors sit on the 36-member White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC), an obscure but influential White House body created by executive fiat in January 2021 to provide policy recommendations to federal agency heads as part of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to environmental justice. The vast majority of the grant awards to environmental justice activist groups with representation on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) fall under the $41.5 billion awarded to the EPA under the Inflation Reduction Act, according to records examined by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Six environmental justice organizations represented on the WHEJAC have been awarded or are slated to receive more than $230 million in EPA grant funding, according to the DCNF review. The EPA has also selected four organizations represented on the WHEJAC to serve as award partners to $200 million in grant awards under the EPA’s $600 million Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking (EJTCG) program.

In December 2023, the EPA named Texas Southern University’s (TSU) Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, represented by Robert Bullard on the WHEJAC, as a recipient of a $50 million award under the agency’s EJTCG program. In April, the EPA doled out an additional $156 million to TSU’s Bullard Center to finance the development of community solar projects in “low-income and disadvantaged communities” as part of the IRA’s $7 billion Solar for All program.

“It is a very clear conflict of interest, and no one is going to be providing objective advice, or they’re going to be skewing that advice so it makes them more competitive to receive millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer benefits,” Gunasekara told the DCNF.

The EPA under Trump notably filed a directive to bar recipients of EPA grant awards from serving on the agency’s advisory boards in October 2017. The D.C. Circuit of Appeals unanimously struck down the directive after extensive litigation in April 2020. (RELATED: Trump’s EPA Will Get Rid Of Science Advisers Who Get Taxpayer Funding)

In October 2023, the EPA announced smaller awards of half a million or less to several environmental justice organizations represented on the WHEJAC, including Ironbound Community Corporation, Appalachian Voices and the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance. The EPA confirmed these three awards have been obligated to the designated recipients in a statement to the DCNF.

Vice President Kamala Harris has courted the WHEJAC since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration. (RELATED: Green New Deal’ Coalition Endorses Kamala Harris After Member Org Was Awarded $50 Million From Her Admin)

“We need your insight, your expertise, your lived experience. We need your ideas and your recommendations. Basically, we need you, period,” Vice President Kamala Harris told WHEJAC members during the advisory council’s first meeting in March 2021.

Several months later, the WHEJAC put out recommendations advocating against fossil fuel procurement, nuclear power, highway expansion, road improvements and research and development,” in addition to many other left-wing proposals in a May 2021 document.

Several influential WHEJAC members who lead organizations that have been awarded or are slated to receive major grant awards have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for President.

“The environmental justice community will be solidly behind Kamala,” Beverly Wright, WHEJAC member and founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), told Politico in an article published on Aug. 11.

Both Wright and Peggy Shepard, co-chair of the WHEJAC and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, respectively, spoke at Democratic National Committee (DNC) Environment and Climate Crisis Council meetings during the DNC convention in Chicago in August.

“Her participation and remarks were not an endorsement of any candidate; but rather her opinion of the environmental record — both good and bad — of the Biden administration,” Chris Dobens, director of communications for WE ACT, told the DCNF in a statement.

Shepard co-signed a letter endorsing Harris’ candidacy prior to the DNC Convention in a statement that characterized the Vice President as an “environmental justice champion.”

The WHEJAC has largely avoided congressional scrutiny by Republican lawmakers despite advancing an abundance of far-left environmental policies that conservative energy experts consider harmful to the pocketbooks of low-income and minority communities.

“It’s probably more accurate to call them the anti-economic growth, the anti-Black progress council,” Donna Jackson, director of membership development at the Project 21 Black Leadership Network, told the DCNF. “The problem is when they push for all of these radical regulations, when they fight against fossil fuels, who gets sacrificed? Which businesses close? The people that have the least amount of capital — minority communities. Every recommendation is a regressive tax on Black businesses and Black homeowners.”

“For the last three and a half years, they have been taking actions that have made it harder for communities to live, specifically lower-income minority communities, because of things like inflation and high cost energy, they’ve made life that much harder,” Mandy Gunasekara, former chief of staff to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler, told the DCNF.

Former President Donald Trump and his advisors have promised to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s environmental agenda, including the EPA’s stringent rules on new electric vehicle sales and the power sector, if he prevails in November. (RELATED: ‘Gross Overreach’: Energy Groups Urge Congress To Throw Biden-Harris Admin’s ‘EV Mandate’ Overboard)

Gunasekara confirmed to the DCNF that the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the EPA’s newly created Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will likely be on the chopping block as well.

“We would do away with these new offices that were created more as marketing gimmicks and as a process to waste taxpayer dollars by giving funding to nonprofits that have very little to do with improving environmental justice communities and more to do with ensuring Democrats stay in power,” Gunasekara told the DCNF.

“President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump Campaign National Press Secretary, wrote in a statement to the DCNF. “America’s energy agenda under President Trump produced affordable, reliable energy for consumers along with stable, high-paying jobs for small businesses — all while dropping U.S. carbon emissions to their lowest level in 25 years. Kamala Harris’ radical energy policies such as her EV mandate and the Green New Scam will hurt American workers, help China, and do virtually nothing to help the environment.”

The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, DSCEJ, TSU’s Bullard Center, Ironbound Community Corporation, Appalachian Voices and the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

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