Engaging Articles of the Week
US Electrical grid trajectory: “The status quo is unsustainable.” Thus speaks the first Highlight of a report from the US Department of Energy called “Report on Evaluating U.S. Grid Reliability and Security”. Under the previous US administration, the Department of Energy was gutted of anyone that might have even thought “hydrocarbons are kind of useful.” The entire upper echelon was staffed with energy transitionists; those who knew it was all happening and fast and that there was no need whatsoever to spend any time at all on “stranded assets”, the derisive term used to dismiss the world’s oil and gas fields that would no longer be needed within the next few years. So confident was this bunch that they scheduled the closure of 104 GW of natural gas/coal baseload power generation, to be replaced by 22 GW of new baseload and 187 GW of intermittent power, because that was the style in those days. What could go wrong? So anyway this new DOE report mapped out that, even with no retirements, the risk of power outages in several regions increases more than 30-fold, and no one wants to talk about what it would look like if all those scheduled retirements were to happen. The report outlines how a new methodology has been developed by the DOE to identify at-risk regions and ensure the grid can keep pace with the booming growth in US electrical demand. This phenomenon is Full report here.
It’s not all peaches and cream in the new US administration, however, with President Trump slapping a 50 percent tariff on copper. While it is understandable that the US wants to re-shore a lot of manufacturing, thereby refilling all those empty rust belt industrial towns, it is unclear how he expects the US to re-shore copper production; new mines are not exactly laying all over the place. Even more inexplicably, on the same day, Trump took to his Truth stump to declare that “tariffs have had ZERO IMPACT on Inflation. In fact, the Study shows that Import Prices are actually DROPPING, just like I always said they would.” Copper is quite relevant to pretty much everything industrial, just like oil or natural gas, and so the world is eager to see just how this new math will work, how a 50 percent increase on a key and irreplaceable industrial component will DROP PRICES. He may be pointing at an outcome in a somewhat cloaked manner; in the same boisterously exuberant Truth Social post he notes that “Tariffs are making our Country “BOOM.” ‘ The pertinent implications of the word BOOM are left undefined. Copper tariff story here, Truth Social post here.
A US company has successfully stimulated hydrogen production underground via bio-stimulation. Of particular interest to the Canadian oil patch is that this trial was conduced in a legacy oilfield that was no longer producing oil. Pretty cool to find uses for one of those. The company, GoldH2, biologically stimulated the reservoir to release hydrogen, which it did, at a rate of 40 percent hydrogen in the gas stream. It would be wonderful indeed if a way was found to repurpose abandoned infrastructure and wellbores and produce low-cost hydrogen that might facilitate the adoption rate of all that cool fuel-cell technology being developed by the likes of Honda and Toyota, as flagged last week. Let’s hope the idea works at scale. Story here.
Explore the lighter side of energy, and think of it as you never have before in The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity – the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
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