Surprise for the Special Envoy

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DAILY ENERGY NEWS | 07/25/2022

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Who could have possibly predicted the Chinese Communist Party would lie?

Aljazeera (7/20/22) reports: "China approved the construction of 8.63 gigawatts (GW) of coal power in the first quarter of this year, nearly half the amount seen in all of 2021, as energy security trumps climate concerns, environment group Greenpeace said on Wednesday. China has promised to strictly control coal power capacity over the 2021-2025 period as it bids to bring its climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions — the highest in the world — to a peak by 2030. Its new projects also slowed last year. But rising energy supply worries, driven in part by a wave of power outages last September, have triggered an increase in approvals, with provincial authorities aiming to resolve 'shortcomings in local power generation,' Greenpeace said in a research report, citing approval documents. 'Energy security has become a sort of code word for coal, rather than for reliable supply of energy,' said Wu Jinghan, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace in Beijing. China’s National Energy Administration did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment. China’s coal-fired power construction plans were a chief point of contention during global climate talks in Glasgow last year, where countries agreed to 'phase down' rather than 'phase out' global coal use."

"The punchline here is obvious: at the very moment that the Lone Star State desperately needs a resilient electric grid -- one that can deliver reliable and affordable juice during the hottest and coldest days -- consumers and the grid operators at ERCOT have been left to hope that the wind starts blowing."

– Robert Bryce,
Power Hungry Podcast

If Biden and his activist allies don't want to allow mines, it means they prefer reliance on imports from China.

AP (7/24/22) reports: "Opposition from friends, not foes, is creating potential roadblocks to President Joe Biden’s green energy agenda on federal lands in the blue-leaning, Western swing state of Nevada. Two lithium mines and a geothermal power plant in the works in the biggest U.S. gold-mining state are under attack from conservationists, tribes and others who otherwise generally support Biden’s efforts to expedite the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The conflicts put a spotlight on an emerging reality as the Biden administration tries to meet its goal of having the U.S. power grid run on clean energy by 2035. Renewable or not, the actual mining of the resources faces many of the same regulatory and environmental hurdles the government has encountered for decades when digging for coal or drilling for oil. Whether it’s tapping hot underground water to generate electricity with steam-powered turbines or extracting lithium to make electric car batteries, the operations still must comply with laws designed to protect wildlife habitat, cultural and historical values, and guard against pollution or other degradation of federal lands."

It doesn't get much ch scarier than this. If democracy doesn't give progressives exactly what they want, then democracy is broken and needs to be replaced with “a mild species of dictatorship.”

Washington Post (7/22/22) column: "It’s been a good month for West Virginia in its fight to keep the planet burning. The Supreme Court, in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, blocked the EPA from doing more to push the country off coal. The court held that it was up to Congress to decide major policy questions about burning fossil fuels and clarify what vaguely written environmental laws like the Clean Air Act meant. A couple weeks later, West Virginia’s senior senator, Joe Manchin, a Democrat, shut down the Biden administration plan to wean Americans off coal, making clear that on his watch, with the slimmest of Democratic majorities, Congress would do nothing. The court’s conservative majority is out to shrink the administrative state in favor of decision-making by Congress, but it’s a Congress incapable of deciding much at all. Or at least the Senate is incapable — and the House is ineffective without the Senate. The inaction may have been survivable in the past, when Congress was merely too dysfunctional to deal adequately with health care, labor law or many other issues. In the case of Obamacare, it was astonishing that it came up with a law at all; exhausted from that effort, Congress under President Barack Obama did little else. Under President Biden, the “soft infrastructure” bill collapsed — Congress couldn’t handle its provisions for things like child and elder care, clean drinking water, universal broadband, and community colleges. This is the sort of congressional inaction that the United States may be able to withstand — day-to-day life will go on, even if the country becomes more unequal and perhaps eventually falls apart. Climate change is another matter. Inaction here has graver consequences. And by empowering a dysfunctional Congress to do nothing about climate change, the court is, no doubt unwittingly, endangering Congress as an institution. If there is a paralyzed Congress, unable to delegate to an administrative state, it may lead one day to an emergency where Congress is set aside — Biden is already having to resort to executive order to try to stop fossil fuel burning."

As with everything else, once the government gets involved the market signals get a bit hazy.

Mackinac Center (7/25/22) article: "'Dying of an incurable attack of market forces.' This diagnosis of the nuclear energy industry comes from environmental activist Amory Lovins. Reuters agrees that nuclear power is financially untenable, claiming that bringing reactors online is 'too slow, too expensive' as the market for non-carbon-emitting energy heats up. You might be inclined to agree with these skeptics. After all, what do the benefits of powerful, clean, safe, and efficient nuclear energy matter if the cost is prohibitively high? As it turns out, the economic case against nuclear energy is faulty. An analysis of the metrics used reveals serious flaws with those methods, misleading conclusions about nuclear energy, and unrealistic assumptions about potential alternatives...Considering the LCOE of new sources also misses the comparatively low cost of existing generation, according to a 2019 report by the Institute for Energy Research. 'The average LCOEs for existing coal ($41/megawatt-hour), CC [combined-cycle] gas ($36/MWh), nuclear ($33/MWh) and hydro ($38/MWh) resources are less than half the cost of new wind resources ($90/MWh) or new PV solar resources ($88.7/MWh) with imposed costs included,' the report states. Imposed costs include the need to keep baseload energy like coal or natural gas idling in case the wind or solar are not producing enough energy to meet demand; such costs are often ignored by advocates of wind and solar. Thus, levelized cost of energy misrepresents the cost of solar and wind as too low, puts nuclear energy’s costs as too high, and misses key parts of the picture."

Energy Markets

WTI Crude Oil: ↑ $95.63
Natural Gas: ↑ $8.60
Gasoline: ↓ $4.35

Diesel: ↓ $5.41
Heating Oil: ↑ $350.29
Brent Crude Oil: ↑ $104.05
US Rig Count: ↑ 832

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