Six days at the charging station

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DAILY ENERGY NEWS | 01/02/2024

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Six days on the road & I'm NOT gonna make it home tonight! (EV version)

Wall Street Journal (10/1/23) reports: "Electric trucks are supposed to save the world, but they’re wasting Mike Stanley’s time...After Jan. 1, 2024, any new big rigs IMC registers in California have to be powered by hydrogen or electricity. Already, planning the logistics for electric trucks has added 10 to 15 hours a week to Mr. Stanley’s workload. California has nowhere near enough chargers to service the number of electric semi trucks that will soon be on the road. Mr. Stanley can’t risk a truck running out of battery; getting towed only 10 miles costs $600. The state’s Advanced Clean Fleets Regulation, which the California Air Resources Board approved on April 28, mandates that companies rapidly phase out diesel semi trucks, starting with older models, and replace them with zero-emission trucks in an effort to improve air quality and limit greenhouse-gas emissions. To find out what this means in practice, I rode along with IMC driver Ariel Ramos, 41...Mr. Ramos left IMC at 5:30 a.m. He drove 9 miles south to a charging station near the Port of Long Beach, where he remained for an hour, charging the battery from 54% to 90%. He then made his first haul, picking up a container and delivering it to a customer. A second haul started around noon—and that was it for the day. In a diesel truck, Mr. Ramos said, he could have made six hauls. But even the second one required another visit to the charging station—33 miles out of his way, and another hour and a half of charging. A diesel semi can fuel up in 15 minutes and then drive 1,000 miles—a round trip from Los Angeles to Reno, Nev.—before needing to refuel. Making the same trip, Mr. Ramos’s electric truck would have to make six recharging stops of at least 90 minutes each."

"It’s time to abandon climate imperialism – and to set Africa free to chart its own destiny. That would be good for Africa, even better for the planet and all of its people."

– Duggan Flanakin.
Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Some New Year blues for Big Green, Inc. after having trouble implementing their illegal S.E.C. rules.

Bloomberg (12/29/23) reports: "The Securities and Exchange Commission’s failure to complete an ambitious climate-related agenda in 2023 is making environmental activists nervous. Less than a year before a US presidential election that could scuttle the regulator’s environmental, social and governance efforts, the SEC has yet to finish a mandate for public companies to disclose their environmental footprints. In addition, the agency’s specialized ESG enforcement task force has brought few climate cases since it was created in 2021. During the Biden administration, the SEC has led the charge in calling for more financial regulation and disclosures tied to ESG issues. But pressure on Chair Gary Gensler has been building as the agency’s efforts become a political lightning rod. Progressive advocates say the SEC should use securities regulations to tackle a range of social and climate issues, arguing that they are important to investors. But conservatives and business groups criticize such moves as overreach and have indicated they may sue to thwart them."

We’re on a train to nowhere…

Wall Street Journal (1/1/24) reports: "It didn’t get a lot of attention, but last month the White House awarded $3.1 billion to the California High-Speed Rail project. This was supposed to be a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours. Instead, its costs keep rising even as the state scales back the plan. Since 2008, when California voters authorized a $10 billion bond issue for the train, they’ve been sold a bill of goods.The original total estimated construction cost to taxpayers was $33 billion. That’s risen to at least $100 billion. The authority decided to offer service between San Francisco and Los Angeles in Phase I, then eventually extend the train service north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. Phase I was to have been completed by 2020. Within five years of the bond approval, costs had soared so high that the California High-Speed Rail Authority had to adopt an emergency plan to contain them. One idea was to slow down the trains by having them share tracks with conventional commuter trains in parts of the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. That reduced projected costs by billions of dollars—but made a mockery of the 'high speed' rail claim...Then the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Committee dropped another bomb: The San Francisco to Los Angeles phase would take another 15 to 20 years to build, would cost three times as much as projected, and would be unable to meet legally mandated trip times."

Elon the free speech warrior: 👍
Elon the quintessential contra capitalist: 👎

Just The News (12/29/23) reports: "When the long-anticipated Cybertruck was revealed during an event in Austin last month, the specs further cemented Tesla CEO Elon Musk as a man who makes a lot of promises he fails to deliver on, according to some critics. Musk was once loved by the political left. In 2016, he was praising carbon taxes, which tax companies for the carbon dioxide they emit, and presenting the concept as a libertarian one. He promised great innovations in solar, which would include running Tesla charging stations entirely on solar panels and batteries. That has yet to happen...Alex Stevens, manager of policy and communications for the Institute for Energy Research, told Just The News that while Musk is held up as a great entrepreneur and says a lot of things with which conservatives agree, all his business ventures are backed up by subsidies. He called Musk the 'quintessential contra capitalist.' 'Elon’s main innovation is his ability to deploy humanist rhetoric to generate political support for his business ventures. Those businesses have been largely built by gaming the regulatory system and generous public funding,' Stevens said on X. In an interview, Stevens said that in a free market, the entrepreneur’s success depends on the reputation of his or her word, and Musk has often fallen short in that regard. 'Market institutions in general incentivize honesty and being a reliable person,' Stevens said."

Energy Markets

WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $71.54
Natural Gas: ↑ $2.58
Gasoline: ↓ $3.97

Diesel: ↓ $3.10
Heating Oil: ↑ $253.67
Brent Crude Oil: ↑ $77.12
US Rig Count: ↓ 657

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