And, Briefly…
Natural Gas Now Best Picks – August 5, 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: EV insurance losses portend more control, politics limit prosperity from oil and natural gas, COVID lockdowns are morphing into climate emergencies, and much more.
Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!
Are Insurance Losses the EV Achilles’ Heel?
It’s sure beginning to look like it:
Four hundred ninety-eight electric vehicles (EVs) and over 3,200 other vehicles, including 350 Mercedes Benzes, were bound for Egypt on the Fremantle Highwaywhen one or more of the EVs caught fire, costing at least one seaman his life and injuring several others…
At last report, the Dutch coast guard admitted that it has been unable to put out the fire and that the ship has taken on water and is “listing” and on a trajectory toward a capsize. Should the ship sink, the total loss would also threaten the Frisian island of Ameland, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to over 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species and located near one of the world’s most important migratory-bird habitats…
Just a year ago, the “Felicity Ace” sank as it was being towed from the site where 13 days earlier a fire had broken out on board. That ship, too, was transporting EVs and internal-combustion vehicles – including 15 Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultimae supercars valued at half a million dollars apiece. Also lost were 1,117 Porches, 1,944 Audis, 561 Volkswagens, 189 Bentleys, and 70 other Lamborghinis…
Even at $80,000 per vehicle (a low number, perhaps), the insurance loss for the nearly 4,000 vehicles on the “Felicity Ace” alone would be $320 million – and this does not include the loss to end-buyers of the opportunity to drive a vehicle that they may have already purchased.
But massive fires are not the only insurance concern with EVs … insurance companies are having to write off EVs with just a few miles – leading to higher premiums – because of the many EVs for which there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents. EV battery packs are ending up in junkyards in multiple countries…
The higher costs for auto insurance only add to the already-higher costs of purchasing an EV, then procuring a personal charging station and spending more money to upgrade home wiring boxes (especially for older homes). The inconvenience of having your nearly new vehicle totaled – and then having to wait perhaps months for a replacement – further adds to the “buyer avoidance” that has frustrated those who demand an immediate end to the traditional gasoline-powered vehicles that most people around the world rely upon.
EVs are obviously no panacea for anything and the evidence is mounting that they’re intended only as a transitional 3-step policy to get us out of vehicles altogether and into 15 minute cities where we can be controlled with public transportation. Step 1 is getting us out our cars and into EVs. Step 2 is to acknowledge we can no longer afford EVs and need to drop the subsidies. Step 3 is gradually pushing us all into the 15 minute cities.
Hat Tip: D.S.
Politics Is the Enemy of Prosperity for All
It’s true, sadly, as the following commentary illustrates:
I once had aspirations to take natural gas and oil shale to the world, with the idea that if developing and undeveloped countries could build their own gas supplies, they could electrify their populace with economic power plants, and create manufacturing, even improve their agricultural production (people often do not realize that fertilizer is a product of natural gas).
I got to try, and got to travel to great places like The Netherlands, and Paris, France to work with companies there, but soon realized that the barriers were not in geology or in engineering. I got to work in places like Eastern Europe, North Africa, and even South America (I studied Russian hoping that it would be the next frontier, and it still is the next frontier, but for Westerners nyet).
The geology is there in many places in the world and the gas deposits are abundant in many countries. Engineering is simply a matter of bringing in the right technology. But natural he real barriers are political. The United States is the only place in the world where we had the foresight to make mineral rights private property, and when the government owns all mineral rights, it becomes almost impossible to develop resources.
Cuadrilla’s natural gas development site in Lancashire, UK, where there is not enough support for drilling to get the project going again because the royalties disappear into government coffers.
The true oil curse is one created by governments that refuse to understand economics of resource development. Some parts of the world have done it, but the hurdles take decades to overcome when dealing with government and a citizenry that gets no direct benefits from oil production such as royalty payments. Royalty payments distributed great wealth to many landowners in the US, and in turn supported many others.
I used to say that every time I found another Trillion cubic feet of gas, I created a few billion dollars of new wealth, and probably several times more than that in GDP. When you realize it is actually not that hard to find hundreds of Tcf (1 Tcf is about a quad BTU) it becomes apparent that many parts of the world are not wealthy (and healthy) only because they won’t use those resources.
We have a third world because of politics, not because of unequal resource distribution. I have lived and worked among the two billion people on this planet that still don’t have a reliable source of electric power or any at all. Places where they burn cow manure to cook a meal, and “gas stations” are kids on the side of the road selling two liter bottles of diesel and gasoline. Places where they only have fresh meat if they kill something because they have no refrigerators. Places where the “hotel” owner hunted rabbits during the day to be able to feed me dinner at night.
They deserve more (and they far outnumber the First World people who have the luxury of buying electric cars and putting decorative solar panels on their roof, a roof made of oil, so they can virtue signal).
A lot of truth in this; unfortunately, politics is the evil we cannot avoid. Just look at all the natural gas banning going on today.
Hat Tip: G.F.
COVID Morphing Into Climate Emergency?
It’s all about control and some of us on both sides of the natural gas debate are united in understanding this. We see COVID lockdowns were the test case for seeing just how much bureaucrats, corrupt politicians and special-interest NGOs could get away with before we revolted against their corporatist power aggrandizing. Now, Biden is being urged go bigger using climate as the phony excuse.
Some energy industry groups are expressing concern that the White House will declare a COVID-19-like emergency—but for the climate instead.
“They’re leaning to that direction,” U.S. Oil and Gas Association President Tim Stewart told Just the News in an article published on July 30. “If you grant the president’s emergency powers to declare a climate emergency, it’s just like COVID.”
An emergency declaration on the climate could give the president “vast and unchecked authority to shut down everything from communications to infrastructure,” said Mr. Stewart, who has been a critic of the Biden administration.
Infrastructure around water and electricity could be affected by such a decision, he said.
“They can literally do exactly what they did in COVID,” Mr. Stewart said. “If you disagree with the climate emergency, [speech] can be shut down. We really need to be paying attention to that because that power could be extended indefinitely until the ‘climate emergency’ is over. Who knows how long that would last.”
Be afraid. They got a taste of blood with COVID and they thirst for more.
Hat Tip: R.N.
Natural Gas Stove Banning Is Just the Beginning, from E.I.
The Militarization of the EPA, from T.C.
Banks Say Demerits for Thee But None for Us, from B.T.
UN Promoting Food and Climate Crises?, from S.H.
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