Engaging Articles of the Week
Look out, here comes Canada! Or not…A peculiar and fascinating report somehow showed up in my inbox the other day called “Global Firepower 2025”. It catalogs pretty much what it sounds like, plus a bunch of other stuff, and offers some fascinating metrics. Canada is one weird country. Or rather, we seem weird in the sense of our collective fightin’ assets relative to other countries. For example, MLRS count – we can thank Russia for one thing, no one knew at all what MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket Projector) meant before they invaded Ukraine – Canada ranks tied for 106th with a count of zero, some 22 behind Eritrea, which has even fewer than a peaceful enclave like Singapore with 24. But don’t lose all hope; Canada climbs to 21st in the world in Armored Fighting Vehicle count. We are oddly weak in Offshore Patrol Vessels, in 49th place globally with 24(!), less than half of, say, Bolivia’s count (50) and Bolivia is landlocked (insert head-scratching emoji). Canada ranks 61st in Active Service Members, and Nepal has a soldier count about 50 percent higher. And then there’s this: in the category of Total Railway Coverage, Canada ranks 39th with 4,942 km. What the heck, that can’t be right, the TransCanada railway alone exceeds that…eek, what’s this: “Usability of railways follows the CIA World Factbook’s interpretation.” Oh boy, we’re in way over our heads here. Ninety percent of Canada’s railroads aren’t found “usable” by the CIA? I have no idea what that means, but the site is called Global Firepower and the CIA has put some thought into something apparently and that’s attention that can’t be good. We don’t even have a single rocket launcher. Send help, Eritrea. Anyway, just part of a large and fascinating database of stuff that makes you go ‘huh’. Data table here, at bottom of page.
Oh yeah, that part…Anyone in the natural gas producing community is looking forward to higher natural gas prices the way that farmers look forward to rain after a ten-year drought. In Canada and the US, new LNG export terminals are going to present a mighty call on producers to deliver much higher volumes, and most expect that higher sustained prices will be required to accomplish this over the longer term. Not everyone is happy about that. “We are for an LNG policy that puts America first, not an America last policy, which is what we have now,” said a representative of the Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA). He went on to point out some sobering statistics about the value of natural gas to American industry: IECA member companies generate $1 trillion in revenue from 3,700 facilities nation-wide, and that the flow through cost to consumers of a one dollar increase in Henry Hub prices is about $54 billion. Natural gas is a cornerstone of industry, a fact often forgotten when the media, such as one daily Wall Street feed I get does, gives a morning snapshot of Futures prices that includes Crude, Gold, and Bitcoin. Interesting times ahead. Story here.
In this week’s Industrial Miracle of the Century…Ford called in the press corps and sat them all down so as not to be bowled over by the monumental announcement they had to make: Ford was announcing a “Model T moment”, a reference to the early part of last century when Henry Ford revolutionized transportation by introducing the Model T – the first mass-produced automobile that workers could afford to purchase. The Model T movement ignited the US by allowing affordable transportation in a radius far exceeding that of a horse’s abilities. It was a big deal. The 2025 version? Ford announced that they were introducing – no, not introducing, planning to introduce – a $30,000 fully electric pickup truck. By 2027. The collective eye-rolling generated by the hyperbole no doubt turned that audience’s visages half white. Ford announced a $2 billion refurbishment of a Kentucky assembly plant to achieve this revolutionary item; however, the ‘breakthroughs’ were less than stunning: Ford announced a new assembly process that would use three sub-assemblies rather than one assembly line – pretty much exactly what Tesla’s been doing since the first post-Lotus cars. Ford also announced revolutionary new unicasting processes, whereby one large unicast piece replaces many smaller pieces – that needed to be welded together – with one big piece. Ford also announced that they expected to be able to remove 4,000 feet of electrical wiring compared to previous EVs based on the new Universal Production process. But all these developments beg the question: why wasn’t Ford doing this stuff long ago if it was that simple? Did they wake up in 2025 to the realization that one two large pieces are more efficient to manufacture than 30 little ones that need welding? (Almost incredulously, Ford’s big idea came from Elon Musk’s implementation of same at Tesla, and Musk divulged that the idea came to him via inspiration from die-cast toy cars…so automotive giants are learning how to build cars by copying toy replicas of the very cars they themselves put on the market?? Isn’t that kind of crazy?) To top it off, Ford didn’t even display an actual vehicle, or anything resembling one. It is probably one of gambling’s safest wagers to bet that the truck will not be available for anything near $30,000, that it will not be available anytime near 2027, and that it’s impact on America will fall somewhat short, to put it mildly, of that which the real Model T achieved. Stories here and here.
That’s it for interesting articles for the week. Summer was devoted to reading in categories that could be described as “anything but energy” and “anything but politics” and “anything but social media”. I read (or audiobooked on an epic drive) The Comfort Crisis, an excellent analysis of the perils that too much comfort in our life brings. I read The Alchemist, a story about a Spanish shepherd that leaves his Spanish mountain home in search of a “personal legend”, a tale that from one angle seems cheesy but from another angle tackled exactly the same themes as The Comfort Crisis but from a completely and I mean completely different angle. I read two follow on books by the same author. I read a fun spy thriller from the Slow Horses author. It felt great to read outside the norm, to put aside the divisive sh*tstorm-times in which we live if we are engulfed in the news or social media, to pick up something at totally right angles to the stream in which we swim every day.
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.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)