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MORNING ENERGY NEWS  |  04/06/2020
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Elon the Philanthropist: Personally doing his part to reduce the oil glut.

"It is time for Canada to return to being a grown-up nation, to jettison this government’s insane energy policy, and certainly to ensure that we have and can produce what we need in medicine and medical equipment and supplies."

 

– Conrad Black, National Post

When people get serious, unserious things get the boot.


E&E News (4/3/20) reports: "From Denver to Des Moines, the novel coronavirus pandemic has state legislatures on pause as they grapple with a growing public health crisis and heed social distancing warnings. Interruptions have left state budgets unfinished and other policy priorities in limbo. In some instances, they include proposals to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy and help remake the grid. As the number of coronavirus cases — and deaths — continues to mount, at least half of state legislatures have postponed sessions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. 'If we were looking at a map, we could pick a state in every region where things have ground to a halt,' said Kristy Hartman, director of NCSL's energy program. But pinning the interruptions on the virus is difficult, she added, because most of the delays happened within the past couple of weeks, and it's impossible to say how quickly bills in individual states would have moved."

Plastic bags save lives.


National Review (4/3/20) reports: "Single-use plastic bags are a miracle of modern technology. Cheap, light, convenient, and ubiquitous, they provide an elegant solution to a problem. If you recycle them, as most people do, and put your rubbish in them, that creates a net reduction in carbon emissions compared with buying the heavier, thicker garbage bags sold in stores. Best of all, they’re sanitary. Cue up a head-spinning headline: San Francisco has just banned the use of reusable tote bags and switched back to single-use plastic bags to help fight the spread of the coronavirus...Whoever could have warned us that cloth tote bags were unhygienic? Well, there was this New York Post columnist who wrote, six years ago, “Reusing that Earth-friendly tote gradually turns it into a chemical weapon” and noted that plastic-bag bans were associated in one study with a 46 percent increase in death from food-borne illnesses. Cloth tote bags are inconvenient, they’re eco-unfriendly (more carbon emissions than single-use plastic, unless you use them more than 14 times, which people tend not to do), and oh, by the way, they’re deadly."

What is old is new again.


Bloomberg (3/30/20) reports: "The falling cost of making hydrogen from wind and solar power offers a promising route to cutting emissions in some of the most fossil fuel dependent sectors of the economy, such as steel, heavy-duty vehicles, shipping and cement. Hydrogen Economy Outlook, a new and independent global study from research firm BloombergNEF (BNEF), finds that clean hydrogen could be deployed in the decades to come to cut up to 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and industry – at a manageable cost. However, this will only be possible if policies are put in place to help scale up technology, and drive down costs...For hydrogen to gain use, policy is critical. 'The clean hydrogen industry is currently tiny and costs are high. There is big potential for costs to fall, but the use of hydrogen needs to be scaled up and a network of supply infrastructure created,' Bhavnagri said. 'This needs policy coordination across government, frameworks for private investment, and the roll-out of around $150 billion of subsidies over the next decade,' he added. 'That may sound daunting but it is not, in fact, such a huge task – governments around the world currently spend more than twice that every year on fossil fuel consumption subsidies.'"

Energy Markets

 
WTI Crude Oil: ↓ $27.68
Natural Gas: ↓ $1.67
Gasoline: ↓ $1.92
Diesel: ↓ $2.56
Heating Oil: ↓ $106.71
Brent Crude Oil: ↓ $33.23
US Rig Count: ↓ 642

 
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