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DAILY ENERGY NEWS | 12/12/2023

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On the bright side, if you can't afford a home, you won't have a place for you heat pump, your gas stove, or your EV charger.

Wall Street Journal (12/11/23) reports: "Homeownership has become a pipe dream for more Americans, even those who could afford to buy just a few years ago. Many would-be buyers were already feeling stretched thin by home prices that shot quickly higher in the pandemic, but at least mortgage rates were low. Now that they are high, many people are just giving up. It is now less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home, and the math isn’t changing any time soon. Home prices aren’t expected to go back to prepandemic levels. The Federal Reserve, which started raising rates aggressively early last year to curb inflation, hasn’t shown much interest in cutting them. Mortgage rates slipped to about 7% last week, the lowest in several months, but they are still more than double what they were two years ago. Typically, high mortgage rates slow down home sales, and home prices should soften as a result. Not this time. Home sales are certainly falling, but prices are still rising—there just aren’t enough homes to go around. The national median existing-home price rose to about $392,000 in October, the highest ever for that month in data that goes back to 1999. In mortgages, higher rates add up fast. An increase of just a few percentage points can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars more in interest over the life of a standard 30-year loan."

"Policymakers should let markets work. The American people—investors and consumers alike—should be free to drive the disclosure of all types of environmental information by the companies they invest in or support with their purchases. Government mandates distort this process and open the door to further intrusion into our lives by busybody officials."

– Travis Fisher, Cato Institute

In honor of COP28, Ford will cut production of the F-150 EV by 50%.

Market Watch (12/12/23) reports: "Ford Motor Co. will slash production plans for its electric F-50 Lightning pickup trucks by about half in 2024, according to reports late Monday. CNBC and Automotive News reported Ford will make a major strategic shift due to “changing market demand,” reducing its planned Lightning production to about 1,600 a week at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Mich., down from recent plans to produce 3,300 a week. A Ford spokesperson said via email that the company would 'continue to match Lightning production to customer demand.' In August, Ford reopened the Rouge facility after a six-week shutdown to expand the plant and triple its manufacturing capacity to 150,000 vehicles a year. U.S. electric-vehicle sales have been growing, but not at the same fast rate as last year, and automakers have been scaling back on EV spending. Ford cuts prices for the electric F-150 by as much as 17% in July in an effort to gain market share."

The locals weren't playing games...

But American politicians were more than happy to fly halfway across the world to make life harder for their constituents.

The Jones Act costs consumers of petroleum products $800 million a year. Maybe we should just pay the Jones Act lobby to go away.

National Review (12/11/23) reports: "The Jones Act was passed in 1920 and is one of the strictest protectionist laws on the books. It says ships carrying freight between U.S. ports must be built, owned, and crewed by Americans, and they must be flagged in the U.S. Few ships meet those requirements (in the case of LNG tankers, zero ships meet those requirements), so American consumers pay higher costs for a variety of goods. Those costs are especially notable in the petroleum industry. Most refining in the U.S. is done near the Gulf Coast. It would be very convenient to load gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and other refined products onto ships and transport them to the East Coast, which is home to a significant portion of the U.S. population. But the Jones Act makes that difficult, so the East Coast frequently imports fuels from abroad that cost more than what U.S.-made fuels would cost... For the entire East Coast, they found that if the Jones Act didn’t exist, U.S. gasoline would replace 36 percent of imports, and average prices would decrease by 63 cents per barrel. Imports of jet fuel and diesel would essentially disappear entirely."

Energy Markets

WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $69.25
Natural Gas: ↓ $2.37
Gasoline: ↓ $3.13

Diesel: ↓ $4.09
Heating Oil: ↓ $252.22
Brent Crude Oil: ↓ $73.57
US Rig Count: ↓ 655

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