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The Simple Math of US Oil Exports

President Trump and many of the traditional oil industry cheerleaders and propagandists are selling a very big lie right now about the U.S. oil industry. They want people to believe that while oil companies make record profits exporting U.S. oil to the rest of the world, that this

The Simple Math of the Death of LNG

Imagine you wanted to buy a new car.  Now imagine that you have a choice of two cars that are identical except one of the cars requires you to buy expensive fuel to run it and the other runs on free fuel. It’s pretty easy to see how the

Global LNG Industry Growth Will Be Casualty of War

A year ago I wrote this:  “The global LNG industry has an economics problem.” That was from an article about how India was more likely to move to renewables to replace coal power generation than LNG (liquefied natural gas aka methane).  How did that last year go? By September, Bloomberg

Mad Fascists: Epic Fury Straights

Generals always fight the last war.

Mexico’s Plans for Natural Gas Dependence Will Harm Economy

Mexico’s increasing dependence on natural gas (methane) imports from the U.S. will lead to higher energy prices for Mexico while missing the opportunity to rapidly transition to solar plus storage.  1.  Mexico’s energy system is heavily reliant on imported U.S. natural gas, giving the U.S.

LNG Update: A Rising Tide Sinks All Boats

The world is waking up to the obvious when it comes to the global LNG glut and the havoc that it will wreak on the economics of U.S. LNG exports and the domestic gas market. What has been obvious for a long time can no longer be ignored. However,

The Donroe Disaster

In 2017, former Exxon CEO and Secretary of Energy Rex Tillerson called President Donald Trump a fucking moron. Now it is unusual for me to find common ground with an Exxon CEO about much, but on this we agree.  Now, I’ve found no common ground with Rex’s replacement

Playing to Lose

In March of 2018 I pitched the editors at DeSmog on a series of articles about the finances of the fracking industry. To their credit, they liked the idea and over the years I wrote a lot of articles for them on this topic. All freelance. Most years that I

Lessons from the Bakken

The New York Times recently profiled Harold Hamm, Continental CEO Resources chairman emeritus, and noted how Hamm is advising Trump to go all in on fossil fuels. This should surprise no one as Harold Hamm is a one-trick pony. His one trick is making bold promises about the future of

US LNG - Debts No Honest Man Could Pay

Before the epic U.S. housing and commercial real estate crash of 2008, bankers were applying innovative approaches to lending. One of their new products was the NINJA loan, which stood for “No Income, No Job, No Assets.” You might be thinking, “How could anyone be so dumb to loan

Gluttons For Punishment: Oil Industry Doubles Down Against Reality

The world is facing a multi-year oil glut where the oil producers will be pumping more oil out of the ground than the world is using. This will keep oil prices at low levels – likely well below the level that most US shale oil producers can make a profit. But

Gambling Debts

In 2019 there was a bidding war for the Permian-based oil and gas company Anadarko. Chevron reached a deal to pay $33 billion for Anadarko but then Occidental (Oxy) got into the game and a bidding war ensued and Oxy ended up paying $57 billion. This was made possible by

As Solar Dominates, the Sun Sets on the LNG Boom

Gastech is a big deal in the global methane/natural gas industry. Gastech also openly embraces the false claims that the gas industry is somehow going to  “...accelerate the global shift toward cleaner, more sustainable energy.” The idea that methane in the form of LNG is somehow cleaner or more

LNG - The Oil Industry’s Last Scam

Do you remember the “algae as oil” years? For a whole ten years we were subjected to this scam from the biggest oil companies. We learned about it in 2009 and at the time Exxon predicted “it could produce fuels in five to 10 years.”  And then after four years