Oil
All posts tagged Oil
Net Zero and a rush into unreliable renewables is what got Australia into this mess. Next winter ought to be fun with these people running the show!!
‘Labor Cabinet ministers have slammed the gas companies for focusing on “maximising their profits” and halting major supply contracts following the government’s landmark response to soaring power prices.
The September Heads of Agreement deal which saw the gas companies commit to diverting all additional uncontracted LNG to the domestic market could be under threat.
In a shock response to the government’s $12/gigajoule cap on gas prices, Shell has paused its deal to sell 50 petajoules of LNG to energy providers as it “assesses the impact” of the proposed reforms.
The massive gas giant’s Queensland arm, QGC, was in the middle of an extensive tender process to contract the LNG for 2023/24.
“Pausing the EOI process was not an option we wanted to take, however, QGC needs to consider whether the design of the current EOI will meet the new regulatory requirements, including the 2023 price cap and the proposed mandatory Code,” a Shell spokesperson said.
Shell has paused its tender process to sell 50 petajoules of LNG to Australian domestic market. Picture: NCA
But the government has unleashed on Shell and other gas companies threatening to withhold supply to the system.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen said while the company was focused on boosting profits, the government would “protect the Australian people”.
“Gas companies want high profits at the expense of industries at the expense of workers and industries,” Mr Bowen said on Tuesday.
“Shell is one of the most profitable companies in Australia and we don’t mind them making profits in their … gas exports, they can make as much profit as they want doing that, but Australians have a right to this gas at a fair price.
“The government will be acting in the national interest not in the interest of Shell, not in the interest of any gas company, in the interest of every Australian.”
The cost of gas has soared since the war in Ukraine, with the spot price hitting as high as $27/gigajoule compared to typical pre-pandemic prices hovering around $6/gigajoule.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen accused the gas companies of receiving high profits at the “expense of workers and industries”. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage
As a result of the more than 140 per cent increase in the gas price year-on-year, industry giants Woodside has seen the share price jump by 57 per cent.
Fellow competitor Origin Energy has also seen its share price soar by more than 44 per cent this year and was another signatory to the September Heads of Agreement through its part ownership Queensland-based gas company APLNG.
Industry Minister Ed Husic warned the gas companies against pulling out of the landmark supply agreement as he questioned their claims over project sustainability.
“A lot of these players have made extraordinary profits, so, when these firms are making claims about the viability of projects, this is about them trying to maintain their profits in extraordinary times,” Mr Husic told ABC Radio National.
“For (energy companies) to claim this is a shock, or to threaten the nation, effectively, by saying they’ll walk away from a heads of agreement they walked into, I think they will need to consider their steps very carefully.”
Oil and gas company Woodside Energy joined Shell in warning the government its new caps on fossil fuels would create an “environment of uncertainty” which will see investment rapidly drop.
Industry Minister Ed Husic said the gas companies needed to “consider their steps very carefully” if the continued to threaten supply. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman
In a statement on Tuesday, Chief Executive Meg O’Neill said the industry’s ongoing investment was “crucial” to support the government’s renewable drive and added the government’s proposal failed to address falling supply.
“We need to unlock gas supply now. For example, Woodside has been looking at options to increase supply, including through new LNG import terminals, exploration spending and further development on the east coast,” Ms O’Neill said.
“Unfortunately, the proposed market intervention will make it very difficult for industry to economically invest to increase supply.
“No one wants to see energy shortages and gas rationing. We must develop a comprehensive, longer-term solution that addresses gas supply and reliability.”
The Albanese Government’s proposal to cap gas price, provide indirect energy bill relief and strengthen the consumer watchdog’s price monitoring capabilities will hit an emergency session of Parliament on Thursday.
In addition, Labor will also legislate a mandatory code of conduct for the gas industry which will strengthen the existing bargaining system between producers and buyers and establish a “reasonable pricing framework”.’https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/industry-minister-ed-husic-accuses-gas-companies-of-threatening-the-nation-as-energy-minister-chris-bowen-slams-shell-for-pushing-huge-profits-at-australias-expense/news-story/559284e80da3cc4924125304bc284f17?net_sub_id=282058248&type=curated&position=1&overallPos=4
Sleepy ‘President Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “great reset.”
Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies.
When former President Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news.
There is a common theme here.
In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems.
We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws.
These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes.
So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates.
Hunter Biden’s lost laptop will be declared, by fiat, not news. In contrast, the fake Alfa Bank “collusion” narrative will be national headline news for weeks.
Middle class lifestyles will be curbed as we are instructed to strive for sustainability and transition to apartment living and mass transit. But the Obamas will still keep their three mansions, and Silicon Valley futurists will insist on exemptions for their yachts.
In truth, we are about to see a radical reset—of the current reset. It will be a different sort of transformation than the elites are expecting and one that they should greatly fear.
The world and the United States are furious over hyperinflation that may soon exceed 10 percent per year. We will be lucky if it ends only in recession or stagflation, rather than a global depression.
The mess was created by the same apparat who bought into “modern monetary theory.” That silly university idea claimed prosperity would follow vastly expanding the money supply, keeping interest rates at de facto zero levels, running huge annual deficits, piling up unsustainable national debt, and subsidizing workers to stay home.
Natural gas and oil costs are now soaring to unsustainable levels—and to the point where the middle class simply will not be able to travel, keep warm in winter, or cool in summer.
Both in Europe and the United States left-wing governments deliberately curbed drilling and non-Russian pipelines. They shut down nuclear power plants and subsidized costly, inefficient solar and wind projects. They ended up not with utopia, but with fuel shortages, high prices, and energy dependency on the world’s most repressive regimes.
The woke revolution in the West was supposed to teach us that the “white male”-dominated Western world is toxic. Its origins, ascendence, and current leisure and affluence were supposedly due only to systemic exploitation, racism, and sexism.
Elites introduced cancel culture, doxxing, deplatforming, and social ostracism to shame these supposed exploiters and to destroy their lives and careers.
Few asked how a supposedly noxious West of some 2,500 years duration became the number one destination of millions of global non-Western migrants and offered the greatest degree of global prosperity and freedom for its citizens.
So a reset reckoning is coming—in reaction to the “new orders” championed by Biden and the Davos set.
In the November 2022 midterms, we are likely to see a historic “No!” to the orthodox left-wing agenda that has resulted in unsustainable inflation, unaffordable energy, war, and humiliation abroad, spiraling crime, racial hostility—as well as arrogant defiance from those who deliberately enacted these disastrous policies.
What will replace it is a return to what until recently had worked.
Closed and secure borders with only legal and measured immigration will return. Americans will demand tough police enforcement and deterrent sentencing, and a return to integration and the primacy of individual character rather than separatist fixations on the “color of our skin.”
The public will continue to tune out of the partisan and mediocre “mainstream” media. We will see greater increased production of oil and natural gas to transition us slowly to a wider variety of energy, strong national defense, and deterrent foreign policies.
The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance.’https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-real-reset-is-coming_4359506.html?est=%2FxtgDjc8eJpffOedD%2BiK6%2BVFD8sLoyyHLVRiF5LcxFBSV%2F4oNX50yQ4o1vNHHKXPiQ%3D%3D
Sleepy Basement Leftist Senile Joe Biden has already put several thousand Americas out of work on his first day in office by canceling the Keystone Pipeline. Nevertheless, Sleepy senile ‘Joe Biden’s plans to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline is a gift to someone. The radical green groups for sure: they have opposed the oil link since its inception. The trucking and railroad industry will benefit, too, because once the pipeline is stopped, then the oil will be transported in and around America by something with wheels. It’s also a gift to our adversaries: for who will benefit when America and Canada can’t bring their fossil fuels to market? The competition. Russia and Venezuela will be thrilled to know their market share will increase thanks to the Biden Administration’s fumble.
What’s fascinating about Keystone is how un-fascinating the project actually really is. Sure, it’s a marvel of engineering and an extraordinary accomplishment of human and mechanical skills. The 1,200 mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast carrying crude oil to be refined is a great infrastructure project. A State Department study commissioned during the Obama Administration (when Joe Biden was Veep, a point which requires emphasis) determined the pipeline would create 3,200 temporary construction jobs directly, 42,000 additional jobs indirectly, and generate over $2 billion in wages. For the people in Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska, the states through which the proposed pipeline will transverse, that’s an enormous opportunity.
Joe Biden claims to love infrastructure. His “Build Back Better” program commits to infrastructure programs which create “good paying” jobs and achieve “net-zero” emissions. (Know what has emissions? Trucks and trains. Know what doesn’t? Pipelines. But alas, there’s no place for facts in a party which simplistically “believes in science.”). Eliminating Keystone for purely political reasons eliminates these jobs and all the opportunities for these communities. Rural America will not fare well under the Biden energy agenda. After all, this is just the beginning.
Are pipelines scary? If you think so, I have the plot of a horror film: the call is coming from inside the house. Your house is full of pipelines. America is crisscrossed with over 2.6 million miles of pipeline. That’s enough to get to the moon and back….more than five times. Is there a risk? Of course, and the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, records all pipeline incidents. Last year there were fewer than a dozen considered “serious” and one tragically resulted in the death of four workers in Texas.
Let’s compare that to trucking, which is the fallback transportation method after the pipeline is ignorantly canceled. Another office at the Department of Transportation, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, also records accidents. In 2018, the most recent year for recorded data, large trucks were involved in 4,862 fatal crashes, 112,000 crashes which resulted in injury, and 414,000 crashes which resulted in property damage.
You tell me which is greener and safer: pipelines or trucks? The facts are clear, and this is no way a knock on the trucking industry which is a vital, noble, and risky profession. It’s just a technological reality.
Keystone was also making a massive renewable energy investment, and you’d think that alone would please the green Biden team. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Canada’s TC Energy Corp. TRP 0.29% is committing to spend $1.7 billion on solar, wind and battery power to operate the partially completed 2,000-mile pipeline.” Furthermore, the company pledges “also to hire a union workforce and eliminate all greenhouse-gas emissions from operations by 2030.” These points which hit the very plan Biden promises should trump (pardon the pun) politics and keep the project alive.
Canada has an economy to run, too, and the country has lots of oil to sell. If Keystone is stopped, it will simply be sold elsewhere. China? Probably. As the world’s largest oil importer at 10-11 million barrels a day, China would love to buy oil from anyone but America. Canada needs revenue and jobs. China needs oil. Losing our northern neighbor’s reliable, inexpensive, and abundant crude to the Chinese Communist Party nation would be a foreign policy collapse. But if Biden wants to continue the Obama-Biden tradition, more foreign policy disasters are to be expected.
I’ve written here before about the great gift to China which is the entire Biden energy agenda. At the same time he will be watching Canada’s oil go to China, Biden will be buying Chinese wind and solar technologies with borrowed American tax dollars. Meanwhile, Russia will be selling its natural gas to Europe, while America will join the other eunuchs of the Paris Climate Accord to keep China and Russia laughing at all of us.
Great plan. Putin and Xi themselves couldn’t have crafted a better one.
Energy policy isn’t the simplicity of soundbites. “Cancel Keystone” is a bumper sticker, not the decision of a serious politician who sees the real world fallout of jobs and geopolitics let alone the increase in emissions that will result.
This is just the beginning of an energy agenda that will cripple us on so many levels: jobs, cost of living, and opportunity. It will hurt our critical allies in Canada and Europe. It will benefit our enemies Russia and China. And it will do absolutely nothing for the environment.
It’s almost as if Joe Biden isn’t the “moderate” we were always told he is, even if his tweets will be nicer than his predecessor.’ https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/01/19/earth_to_joe_biden_canceling_keystone_xl_pipeline_is_a_gift_to_china_and_russia_656961.html
Man cannot change the climate as many politicians in the West say! These politicians are either stupid, ignorant or liars! Whatever they are this climate change scam is going to change your and my lifestyle. This climate change scam is going to cost lots of money which will go into the bank accounts of the elite such as Hunter Biden! You’ve heard his name recently, haven’t you? Perhaps not if you only get your news from CNN and those like it. Well, Hunter’s daddy sleepy ‘Joe Biden is heading to the White House with a promise to overturn four years of US retreat on climate action.
The election was called for Biden on Saturday, as his lead in the swing state of Pennsylvania – where he was born – with 98% of the vote counted put the result beyond dispute. Biden was also pulling ahead in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, putting him on track to win 306 electoral college votes, comfortably above the 270 needed to secure the US presidency.
“[Voters] have given us a mandate for action on Covid and the economy and climate change and systemic racism,” Biden tweeted in anticipation of victory.
It marks the end of a four-year assault on environmental protections from the White House under Donald Trump.
Elected on the most ambitious climate platform ever presented by a presidential candidate, Biden promised a $2 trillion clean energy revolution.
He will govern with Kamala Harris as vice president, who has a track record of suing oil companies as former attorney general of California.’https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/11/07/joe-biden-wins-white-house-pivotal-moment-global-climate-action/
whatyareckon 