Another new AI data center, another half a B – half a billion cubic feet per day of gas, that is. Energy Transfer LP announced a long-term agreement with CloudBurst Data Centers. Energy Transfer’s Oasis Pipeline will provide up to 0.5 BCF/d of firm natural gas supply to a new data center campus in Texas. That word “firm” is a big one – it will be a steady demand sink for natural gas, adding to the impressive list of new demand centers springing up across the US (let’s hope they start springing up across Canada as well). If FID is a go, the center would be operational in Q3/2026. It is important to keep in mind the sheer scale of demand we’re about to see for natural gas from AI – this is but one data center campus of many springing up. Between new LNG export capacity and the ever-increasing AI power demand, another entire Canada’s worth of natural gas production is forecast to be needed within the next 5 years. Let’s see how that goes. News release here.
If only there was something interesting in politics to talk about…nope, all is quiet. So back to AI. It really is hard to keep up. Despite the Chinese DeepSeek apparent breakthrough, no one is taking their foot off the gas yet. A year ago, annual AI capital spending was optimistically placed at $100 billion per year, globally. As of this past week or so, with the big tech titans unveiling their capital spending plans, four US companies alone – Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft – have budgeted a staggering $315 billion for AI infrastructure in 2025. Yes, they are huge companies, but even all the piddly little $100 billion market caps are pursuing AI like racing dogs after that little mechanical bunny. Story here.
Ok on to something completely different. Have you ever stood on the shores of the Bay of Fundy and watched in astonishment as the tide races up your ankles before you can finish an ice cream cone? It truly is an incredible site to see how much water moves in and out of that Bay – every six hours, the same amount of water flows in (and then out) as the equivalent of three times all the rivers in the world combined. You might shout “BS!” but I assure you once you experience it, you’ll recant. Stand in Parrsboro and look across 20 km of water rising an inch every minute or two. But anyway for anyone that cares about energy, tidal power seems like the ultimate low hanging fruit – how hard can it be to harness all that energy? Turns out it is incredibly hard. Here is a first hand account from a brilliant engineer (and a great Substack follow) named Jordan Taylor who actually engineered one of the contraptions into existence. The number of challenges they had to overcome is mind-boggling. A wildly entertaining read for engineers and humans alike, here.
US President Trump has vast plans to crank US energy production into high gear (“Drill Baby Drill” as you’ve no doubt heard a million times already this year). How he intends to achieve that is a bit of a mystery, because he also wants oil prices to come down, which might be a cockamamie scheme that works in his real estate world but doesn’t in the oil patch. Producers want higher prices in order to bring forth more oil, not lower. In the latest indication that, metaphorically speaking, you can’t suck and blow on a straw at the same time, Chevron announced that it is becoming questionable whether planned US oil export terminals will be built because US crude volumes are not growing as fast as many seemed to think they would. It is a curiosity in the resource extraction world that some people view a growth spurt as a permanent upward sloping line because of some new tech, or some new efficiencies, or both (it is not uncommon now to hear that the US has “virtually unlimited supply” of oil and/or natural gas which, if one understands that we live on a ball, most of which is under miles of water, that grows thirstier for hydrocarbons every year, is a bit of an odd concept to espouse). But hey it gathers the eyeballs and attracts adoring politicians, so who am I to argue. Read Chevron’s story here.
Turns out an energy transition isn’t quite so simple. Read why in The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity – the energy story for those that don’t live it, and want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.