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M-U Co. Partners with Renewable Co. to Build Solar, Wind, Storage

A press release issued yesterday announced the partnership between an Appalachian driller we aren’t familiar with, Oil Well Shares (OWS), and Canada-based OYA Renewables to form a joint venture called Chrysalis Energy. The new company will use OWS’s 1.5 million leased acres across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia to build solar farms, wind farms, and “energy storage infrastructure projects.” We have some thoughts about this partnership and how it may impact landowners.
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President Biden’s War on the American Oil and Gas Industry

The world is currently in the midst of its third great energy crisis. The first came in 1973 (remember the long gas lines?) when the U.S. sided with Israel in the Yom Kippur war. OPEC (an enemy of Israel and the U.S.) tried to punish us by cutting off oil shipments. We should have learned back then. We didn’t. Near the end of the 1970s, when Islamic fundamentalists took over in Iran, we experienced our next great energy crisis (prices for oil doubled). And now, in 2021/2022, we are in the throes of our third worldwide energy crisis. But this time it is different. Instead of Middle Eastern despots being at the root of this crisis, it is self-inflicted–an irrational war against fossil energy by Joe Biden and those aligned with him on the environmental left.
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Manchin Tries to Sell Permitting Bill to Lefties at Pittsburgh Event

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, from West Virginia, made a stop at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum (a confab of global warming wackos) on Friday to make a pitch for support of his “save Mountain Valley Pipeline” bill without actually mentioning MVP. At the start of his talk, Manchin was heckled by four wackadoodle protesters who were escorted out by security. Manchin then talked about his bill and how it will streamline the process for renewable energy projects. No mention of fossil fuel projects. Love the one you’re with, right?
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Even Leftists at NYT Admit We Need O&G for Decades to Come

Finally, a little honesty from the editorial pages of the New York Times. Yes, the Times still publishes fake news on a regular basis (their news operation cannot be trusted). However, one of their leftist opinion writers, Thomas L. Friedman, recently published a real eye-opener. Friedman says Putin believes he has found a cold war he can win–a war on energy. And the West will not win that war unless “the U.S. and its Western allies stop living in a green fantasy world that says we can go from dirty fossil fuels to clean renewable energy by just flipping a switch.” Whoa! And then Friedman attacks the left’s attack on fossil energy, indicating it will be decades, at a minimum, before we are close to transitioning to energy sources that are not fossil-based.
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NatGas is Greener than Wind & Solar When Counting CO2 Footprint

Every now and again, we come across someone who is willing to risk their career by openly admitting the truth. This time that brave soul is Russell Johns, the George E. Trimble Chair in Energy and Mineral Sciences at the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State University. In a letter to the editor published in the student-run Penn State Daily Collegian, Johns points out that when considering the intense mining operations needed to harvest materials used in solar and wind technology, and the shipping associated with those materials, etc., solar and wind actually have a *bigger* carbon dioxide footprint than does using natural gas. In other words, natural gas is greener than wind and solar!
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Manhattan Institute: “Energy Transition” Delusion – A Reality Reset

In a new report published this week by the Manhattan Institute, “The “Energy Transition” Delusion: A Reality Reset” (full copy below), Mark Mills takes on the dangerous delusion of a global energy transition that eliminates the use of fossil fuels. Looking at energy markets and public policy around the world, Mills asks readers of the report to “consider that years of hypertrophied rhetoric and trillions of dollars of spending and subsidies on a transition have not significantly changed the energy landscape.” Here are the facts: The world still depends on hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) for 84% of all energy, just two percentage points lower than 20 years ago. Solar and wind technologies today supply barely 5% of global energy. Indeed it is a dangerous self-delusion to say we can dump fossil energy anytime soon–within the next 50-100 years. At least, not without a mass extinction (execution) of the human race.
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Biden DOE Names New Minister of Low-Paying Renewable Jobs

Betony Jones

The Bidenistas have appointed a global warming true-believer to head up the Dept. of Energy’s Office of Energy Jobs. But not just any type of energy jobs. They must be “renewable” jobs, or they’re just no good and won’t be supported. Betony Jones, previously the Senior Advisor on Workforce in the Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, will become the Director of the new program. We call her the minister of low-paying renewable energy jobs–because that’s exactly what these jobs are. Low-paying. Her job is to convince labor unions that trading in high-paying fossil energy jobs for low-paying renewable energy jobs is magical and desirable. Good luck with that.
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Research Finds Wind & Solar Fail to Reduce CO2 Emissions in PJM

US power grid regions (click for larger version)

Here’s a serious question for you to ponder: Why would we use wind and solar if it doesn’t actually reduce CO2 emissions? It’s not just an academic question. David T. Stevenson, Director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Policy at the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute, researched how much wind and solar power was generated in the PJM electric grid (which includes Pennsylvania) from 2019 to 2021, comparing the increase of wind and solar with the level of CO2 emissions. He found that wind and solar power generation increased by 30% from 2019 to 2021, but the increase had *no impact* on carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). Carbon didn’t go down. Yet prices for electricity increased due to using wind and solar.
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Exposing the Renewable Lie: Fossil Fuels Provide 79% of US Energy

In 2012, fossil fuels accounted for roughly 82% of total U.S. energy consumption. We have seen an incredibly aggressive pro-renewable push since then, with countries (including the U.S.) pledging to hit net-zero emissions by 2050 as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Not a day goes by without an article in Big Media about renewables like wind and solar taking over “any day now.” Fossil fuels are passe, the past, almost gone, on the way out, killing the planet, etc. etc. And yet, renewables ARE NOT taking over. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), fossil fuels accounted for 79% of total U.S. energy consumption in 2021–a drop of 3% in 10 years.
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We are Seeing an Energy Expansion, Not an Energy Transition

If we hear the phrase “energy transition to renewables” or that natural gas is a “bridge to renewable energy” one more time, we’ll throw up. We’ve written, a number of times, that fossil energy–natural gas in particular–is the destination, not a bridge to somewhere else. Here’s the truth of the matter: We need ALL forms of energy. We need solar and wind, we need nuclear, we need hydro, and yes, we need oil and natural gas. And we will continue to need all forms of energy for decades–likely a century or more. That’s the simple truth. We spotted an excellent column that says it perfectly: The changes we’re seeing in the energy sector are an energy expansion, not an energy transition. It’s simple, yet profound.
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Comparing PA Farmer’s Quest to Install Solar vs NatGas Drilling

Solar panels hogging up an entire field (click for larger version)

The left OPPOSES individual land rights if exercising those rights results in a tiny natural gas well pad–a pad that nobody can see from 200 yards away that allows the land above it to be used as it always has been used, whether for farming or otherwise. But if a landowner (farmer, in this case) wants to install huge, ugly solar panels that rob the land of being used for farming or any other purpose in perpetuity (for 20-30 years at least), all of a sudden the left is in FAVOR of individual land rights. Kind of funny, no? More like, it is blatantly hypocritical.
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National Grid Surrenders, Dumping Fossil Energy in NY-MA by 2050

If you still live in New York or Massachusetts and National Grid is your utility company, now is the time to move. Preferably to another state. National Grid has finally waved the white flag of surrender to the leftist mob that demands the elimination of all fossil energy. National Grid will force its customers to quit using fuel oil and “non-renewable” natural gas by 2050 at the latest–forcing its customers to use electric heat pumps instead. By our estimates, National Grid customers can expect to pay 4-5X more than anyone else for their energy. Escape while you can!
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NE Renewables Complain to FERC About Grid Auctions Favoring NatGas

The left always fights dirty. One of their favorite tactics is to demand a change in the rules of the game when they are losing. Free enterprise, allowing the best companies and best solutions to win based on economics, doesn’t work in the world of leftwing radicals. They seek to skew things–change the rules–tie a 50-pound weight on the back of the runner next to them in order to give themselves an advantage in a race. Which is exactly what’s happening in New England, where UNRELIABLE renewables (solar and wind) are complaining to FERC and FERC’s Chairman, Richard “Dick” Glick, a former wind lobbyist, that electricity auctions are awarded to natgas-fired power plants instead of so-called renewables because natgas is 100% reliable and renewables are not. Time to change the rules.
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Net-Zero Mirage Exposed – Wind & Solar “Parasitic” to Carbon Energy

For over a year the oil and gas industry has been swept up in net-zero carbon emissions mania. We can provide countless examples of M-U drillers and pipeline companies jumping on the net-zero carbon bandwagon (see our stories here). Last September we brought you a contrarian viewpoint from Paul Driessen, a senior policy advisor for CFACT (Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, D.C. think tank), taking aim at ESG, or environment, social, and governance programs like net-zero carbon (see The ESG Emperor has No Clothes – Will Anyone Else Say So?). We have another terrific column to share with you today, pointing out net-zero is a “mirage” and that solar, wind, and other so-called renewables are parasites of carbon-based energy.
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Ukraine Crisis Forces Liberals to Get Honest About O&G, Renewables

A Forbes article caught our eye and we had to do a double-take. Two liberals from the Left Coast, professors at the University of Washington, Seattle, wrote an honest and transparent article about how the crisis in Ukraine is making their fellow liberals take an honest, probing look at the policies they advocate for. Renewables, which the two profs support, are not enough to power the world today. Not in the real world of 2022 with Vlad Putin threatening to overrun half of Europe.
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Dan Rice’s Renewable Energy SPAC Moving to Houston, TX

In December 2020, Dan Rice IV, former CEO of Rice Energy and a member of the EQT board of directors, launched a “blank check” acquisition firm, called Rice Acquisition Corp., to invest in various energy ventures. Dan found that something-to-invest-in just a few months later in the form of acquiring and merging together Archaea Energy and Aria Energy into a single company focused on providing renewable natural gas (RNG) and “green” hydrogen (see Dan Rice Bets $1 Billion that Landfill Gas is the Next Big Thing). With the merger done, the new company (using the Archaea Energy name) is moving from Pittsburgh to Houston, Texas. Because of the move, the company needs a new chief financial officer and a chief legal officer.
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