Energy Scarcity: What Bill McKibbon's wins mean for the poor.

*Full Disclosure: I work in government reporting/regulatory for a mid-major oil and gas company based in Houston. The opinions presented here are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer, the board, or any officer of the company.  Also, because I work in the O & G industry I realize that many of you will discount my thoughts out of hand.  That's OK, I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to the reasonable people out there.  

EPA Expands Methane Rules to all Oil and Gas Wells. James Osborne, FuelFix (Houston Chronicle)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expanding its crackdown on methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling to all existing wells.

The announcement from the White House Thursday came as part of a joint agreement with Canada on climate change, curbing methane emissions from North America and taking steps to protect the Arctic region from rising temperatures and oceans.

The EPA had announced plans to cut methane emissions from new oil and gas wells last year. But if the United States was to reach the goal set out by President Obama of cutting methane emissions at least 40 percent by 2025, existing wells have to be included, said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

“Based on this growing body of science it’s become clear it come time for EPA to take additional action,” she said in a press conference. “We’ll start this work immediately and we intend to work quickly.”

As a world wide consumer of energy this is bad for you. If you're poor in America, or live in a developing country, this is even worse for you.  The reason for this is that the new rules are going to come with an extreme cost, and that cost is going to be paid for by the consumer, most notably by the poor who will not be able to absorb the cost increase.

Of course, I can hear you say, 'But the Democrats are the party of the poor, how can they want to hurt the poor?' The problem with your question is that it is bunk. The Democrats are not the party of the poor, they do not work for the interests of the poor, nor do they care all that much about the poor except to provide them with sufficient government subsidy to ensure their vote.

At this point Republicans chime in 'See!! WE'RE the party of the poor, and OUR policies really help the poor.'  But they don't.  Because too many Republicans look at a problem as see an opportunity for a big G Government solution.  Even Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, the founder and champion of the State's Tea Party Caucus (Which, tellingly, has absolutely nothing to do with the Tea Party) has been known to suggest that "Government must do something!" when a problem arises.

It is the nature of those who Govern, who we have elected to govern us, to want control, to want to purchase power through largesse funded primarily by your tax dollars. In the end, the entire anthropogenic climate change fallacy is nothing more than an attempt to do that. Al Gore has leveraged a scientifically dodgy movie to do just that to the tone of Millions of dollars in personal wealth, all while not changing his or his families lifestyle one iota. Mr. Gore still travels via personal jet, in armored sports utility vehicles running on diesel. In most cases he is driven, and the house in which he lives is less climate friendly than some gas processing plants.

Then we have the story of Bill McKibbon, the new-age climate change activist who has coined the term "Keep it in the ground" which, he thinks, is a call to eliminate all oil and gas production, but is being used by the government as a means to attempt to control an industry that has vexed politicians for decades.

America is unique in the fact that it allows private citizens to have ownership, and profit off of, mineral royalties. In other countries the monies paid in royalty for oil, gas, coal etc. are exclusively the property of the government.  This is why Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other countries enjoy a standard of living so high. It's why Scotland thought they could afford to break-away from Great Britain, and it's why many of the so-called "Nordic Democratic Socialist" governments can make things work. In all cases, they are not socialist but oil emirates in government structure.

There is a large group of Statists in America who want our company to operate the same way.  They have latched on to the carbon movement to try and accomplish this goal. What you are being sold is that it is "Wall Street" who are going to be hurt by this and who cares right?

In truth, the people who are going to be hurt the most are the landowners who rely on those royalty checks, in many cases to bridge gaps in their income.  The working poor are also going to be hurt because rising energy prices will affect them the most.

Scarcity of energy will be felt the most in developing economies. In fact, lack of energy being increasingly acknowledged as a prime contributor to World poverty.  You don't often hear the green movement address this because it's one of their many inconvenient truths that they seek to hide from the general public.

In fact, the green energy movement is not about plentiful, so called 'free', energy as the businesses and politicians in their pocket would have you believe.  In fact, even so-called 'new-environmentalists' admit that the movement views people to be the problem. Specifically, too many people of the wrong socio-economic class and mindset.

When Bill McKibbon, Al Gore and their sycophants suggest that on carbon we need to "keep it in the ground" what they're really suggesting is that approved forms of energy production should only be available to the groups they want it to be available to.

I have no doubt that the Earth's climate is changing. I believe this just as I believe that pollution above certain levels is a bad thing. However, I remain unconvinced that we know about this planet to determine the entire cause to be anthorpogenic.  There is the problem of the warming pause to which climate change true believers have attempted to discount only by tweaking their computer models. And if you're serious about science then any contention that Mann's Hockey Stick has not been totally debunked is based only on faith in the movement.

At some point, we're going to have to come to grips with the fact that man is pretty much powerless, despite all of our hubris, to alter the Earth's climate significantly. In other words.....


Climate change is coming regardless of what we try and do so our focus had better turn to how to DEAL with it rather than how to PREVENT it.

Because dealing with the issue means providing developing economies with the tools they need to power their economies in the cleanest, cheapest way possible so that they can have access to technology and medical services at a 1st world level. In order to do this we need carbon.  We also need political leaders who are not pushing fantasy in a thinly veiled attempt to grab power.

Does the Oil and Gas industry need to do a better job capturing methane?  You bet.  But the way to accomplish this is not to punish them into leaving mineral resources in the ground.

The way to do it is to encourage other countries to adopt natural gas so that the price rebounds and capture becomes economically feasible, and profitable. The Obama Administration (aided by a complicit Congress, is doing exactly the opposite by enacting regulations that are going to greatly increase the cost of energy for the poorest among us.

Hope and change for the ruling class. Pain and suffering for everyone else.  I don't think he said that on the campaign trail did he?

Oh yeah, he did.* But his predominately poor supporters ignored that and voted against their own economic interests.

We're doing this to ourselves, and there will be no reason for the government to stop until we require them to.




































*OK Sorry, I couldn't find a video linking to that tweet that didn't have the crazy, birther stuff in it.  My apologies.

Houston Economy: Let's talk for a minute about the Oil and Gas Industry*.

Gloom & Doom.

If you read through the pages of the media all is gloom & doom as the oil industry reels from low prices caused by supply glut caused in part by a big slow-down in the global economy coupled with the refusal of any producing bloc to agree to cut back.

The details are much more complicated than that but in general that's a pretty accurate overview of what's going on right now.

At this point you might as "We're still drilling?" and the answer to that is "Yes, we are." Although it's at much lower levels than it was in a high-price environment.  There are many reasons why a company might still be increasing production during a price environment such as this, lease obligations, sunk costs, contracts, marketing obligations, pipeline obligations etc. but a large part of it is that continued growth acts as a hedge to bottoming stock prices.

In short, market analysts expect companies to increase production at certain rates. Failure to hit these rates is generally seen as a "bad thing" in terms of market share and can result in the price of a company's stock free-falling.

The problem, as I see it, is when the cash-flow needed to continue development develops a conflict with the cash-flows needed to continue dividends to shareholders.  Some companies will kill the dividend, some companies with kill growth. Both options will have a negative drag on stock price initially, but I believe that stopping development would be more beneficial to the long-term health of the market than would ending the dividend.

Granted, there is some development that companies cannot avoid.  For example, most processing contracts with plants come with minimum volume requirements that the plants need to maintain efficiencies, the same goes for transportation contracts and pipelines.  The operators of both the pipelines and the plants don't want to see their volumes reduced because it hurts their profit margins (their profit is based mainly on fees and tariffs, not on commodity price [plants are more sensitive to price fluctuations than pipelines, due to processing allowances etc.]). Because of this they have no incentive to work with producers to cut down on volumes.

Royalty owners (private) want to see more production as well.  Already most private royalty owners are seeing their checks cut by almost 2/3rds from 2013/2014 levels. For most seniors living on a fixed income this is quite the shock to the system.  The only way to hedge against this is for companies to continue drilling on their leases.  However, owners of non-developed leases should be OK with companies waiting until higher margins can be found.

Finally, governments (yes, even the Federal Government) are pushing for increased production. State and Federal coffers are losing revenue to the point that they're seeking to re-write the rules to punish companies during market downturns and hedge their revenue from price fluctuations. In short, the Government still thinks that oil and gas royalties are annuities.  As such they're writing new rules and leases (including Texas FWIW) which could serve to further retard exploration on government lands even IF the price returns to $50-$60/Bbl since they would make other opportunities more profitable.

I've said before that the companies who did not take on a lot of debt, and who had discipline when signing leases and agreements would have the flexibility to ride this out. Those companies who lost sight of fundamentals, or who bought high and at poor terms to get into rich areas, will shortly be paying the price.  For all of the talk of bankruptcies etc. what you're more likely to see is a wave of mergers and acquisitions now that so-called "big oil" has purged it's balance sheets of non-core assets.

Yes, this will mean a loss of jobs, damage to the local real-estate markets as homes are lost and offices consolidate, but it will also mean a stronger, leaner Oil and Gas industry on the other side. While this also means that Houston Region is in for some tough times, it could be doubly tough for the City of Houston as more and more companies seek to operate in the much-cheaper suburbs.

Oil and Gas companies are currently bringing their costs in-line with a protracted low-price environment, something they have the ability to do right now because they DID learn their lessons from previous boom/bust cycles.  The companies that didn't learn will soon be gone, their assets purchased by the survivors.

Remember that when you read the gloom and doom stories and the chastisements that another boom was "pissed away" because it wasn't. Anyone suggesting otherwise is telling you a lie.






















































*Note: As I've stated many times before: I am employed by an Oil and Gas firm in Houston. Some might call this bias, I would suggest that it's insight.