Daniel Yergin is right to call it the Energy Addition. In an essay in Foreign Affairs called The Troubled Energy Transition, he notes that since 1990 hydrocarbons have dropped from 85% of primary energy to around 80% today. That can hardly be called a transition. Since 2000 global energy consumption has increased from 397 Exajoules […]

Suppose for a moment that the Sierra Club was a political party, with candidates running and elected officials in government. They might look like Germany’s Green Party, which has drawn support from idealistic German voters since the 1980s. They are politically left, view everything through the narrow prism of environmentalism and have a history of […]

It seems a lifetime ago, but in the latter stages of the capital bust that was the shale revolution, capex plans were often poorly received. In late 2018 Targa Resources (TRGP) drew the ire of investors when then-CEO Joe Bob Perkins dismissed criticism by calling their spending plans “capital blessings” (see 4Q18 Energy Infrastructure Earnings […]

Among Winston Churchill’s many memorable quotes is, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” This applies to some European countries’ posture towards Russia. The Economist recently asked, Will Europe return to Putin’s gas? Could they return to their reliance on Russian energy? The question has been buffeting LNG […]

On Thursday morning Williams Companies released their earnings without the rumored announcement of a Behind The Meter (BTM) deal. The stock briefly dipped as algos reacted to the news release but was soon rallying because the broad outlook for natural gas demand remains strong. It’s turning into a global high tech arms race. Proliferation of […]

On Monday Energy Transfer announced the first Behind The Meter (BTM) agreement of the AI era. They’ll provide up to 450 Million Cubic Feet per Day of natural gas to a data center being built by CloudBurst Data Centers in central Texas. This represents 0.45 Billion Cubic Feet per Day (BCF/D), almost 0.5% of US […]

On Friday both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times ran stories about planned capex on data centers by the big US tech companies. The DeepSeek news of two weeks ago hasn’t resulted in any discernible change. The case for increased power generation remains intact. On Wednesday Williams Companies will report their quarterly earnings. […]

Although the US is energy independent and a net exporter of petroleum products, we still import certain blends of crude. Canadian tar sands oil is the heavy type for which American refineries are configured as is Mexican oil. Shale oil is lighter. So we buy what we are set up to handle and sell what […]

Following Monday’s “sputnik moment” for AI the market has had a few days to consider the ramifications of DeepSeek’s apparent breakthrough. Mark Zuckerberg reaffirmed Meta’s plans to spend $60-65BN on data centers. They have embraced an open-source approach to AI, believing that sharing code freely will drive penetration. Since DeepSeek also published their code any […]

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen called it, ”AI’s sputnik moment.” The news that Chinese start-up Deepseek may have leapt ahead of the US in AI caused an unpleasant start to the week. In 1957 Sputnik’s orbit led to the creation of NASA and fears that Russian satellites could attack the US from space. While Americans have […]