So-Called Energy Transition Got Derailed by the Real World in 2022
It seems like a day doesn’t go by without so-called reporters regurgitating the same tired talking points that fossil energy is killing Mom Earth, and everyone MUST transition to renewable energy. But then reality, the real world, sets in. Like it did in 2022. How did the great “transition” to renewables go in 2022? According to one of the biggest boosters of forced conversion to renewables therapy, the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal consumption across the planet reached a new, all-time high in 2022. Whoops! Guess the transition didn’t quite go as planned, eh?
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) is at it again. In May 2021, IEA issued an astonishing report calling for an end to all investments in oil, gas, and coal to reach the fantasy goal of net zero by 2050 (see 
We’ve heard the peak oil theory peddled countless times since we began publishing Marcellus Drilling News in January 2009. Every single time predictions that the world (or the U.S.) has reached its limit and will now begin using less oil have been astoundingly wrong. Yet every few months, you’ll read another “expert” or guru announce this it…we’ve finally reached peak oil. Have we? NO. Not even close. When will we? We’ve got an answer.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
