Week Recap: US-Russia, EU’s Green Gamble, and US LNG Dominance

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Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Stuart Turley: [00:00:00] I think this is really important if we take a look at critical minerals. It’s not the critical minerals, but it’s actually the processing and or refinement that I think would be the best thing to do for Russia and the United States to work together. It’s my personal opinion on that. [00:00:16][16.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:00:17] Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different layers to this, to say that, you know, us getting into bed with Russia from an investment standpoint is a great thing. I think overstate some of the challenges that we would have, obviously, you know, Russia is a large energy exporter. If Trump truly does want to bring down energy prices, getting Russian fuel and Russian gas back onto the market is a good thing. [00:00:41][24.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:00:49] Hello everybody. Welcome to the Energy Newsbeat podcast. This is the weekly edition. This is a summary of all the best stories that the staff puts together. It has been an absolute wonderful week here on the news desk. I hope that you guys are having a great weekend. We’d like to give a shout out to Steve Reese for sponsoring the Reese Energy Consulting. Go to Reese Energy Consulting. Dot com and give them a look if you’re needing to buy or sell oil or natural gas or if you are needing a data center and you need to know where to get your power, Steve Reese is the team to do it. So with that buckle up and listen to the best stories of the week and have an absolutely fantastic weekend. We’ll talk to you all soon. UK looks to woo investors impacted by Trump tariffs. Michael, there’s about four different key points in here. Following the policies in the US, the UK is actively seeking to fill the market gap by encouraging companies previously invested in the U.S. Investments to consider Britain instead. Prime Minister Stommer has emphasized the UK’s commitment to low carbon future. You take a look at what’s going on in the UK energy policies and marketing. They are about as dumb as it possibly can get. They have lost so much money, they have wasted all this money, and here’s another quote. The government is acting now with muscular industrial policy. I fell apart laughing at that one. Is that because it’s muscle memory that they’ve forgotten and have Biden amnesia? I’m not sure. We’re paying the price for our overexposure for many years, the rollercoaster international fossil fuel markets leaving the economy and therefore people’s business household budgets. But Michael, this is the same thing, same country that is forcing oil companies to go out of business and they want low cost energy. It doesn’t make any sense. [00:02:55][125.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:02:56] Yeah, both those things really stand at odds with each other, at least right now. I mean, you show me a cheap renewable farm. I’ll show you thousands that aren’t. We covered last week how tax credits being taken away from offshore wind. And now all of a sudden, nobody’s building them anymore. So yeah, exactly. Rote row. They pulled a quick Scooby on that one and got out of there. You know, do I think people are now all of a suddenly going to be flying into the United Kingdom for investment? No, I don’t think so. Do I think they’ll get a sum investment? I mean, I think as obviously with the way things are shaking, you are going to see money, money move a little bit. Is that more of an attack on Trump than it is maybe a sound business decision? It remains to be seen. But if this quote, Hey, we’re going to, you know, from the PM over there starmer, Hey we’re gonna bring in new investment by focusing on low carbon Good luck! Good luck. [00:03:51][55.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:03:52] Lots of Luck, US Eyes post-war joint business with Russia in energy and minerals. I get really tickled at this whole story. President Trump sit in the middle of the Vatican with President Zelensky, who is no bigger than a flying squirrel, Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bo Winkle in the Vatican has a very unique picture. I found that very interesting that President Trump had to look at Zelensky and say… We’re ending our support in a closed session with everybody around looking at it. President Putin has offered his minerals, he wants to do business with the United States, and that is the only way we will see an end to this war. If it’s done correctly, we may end up with a new trading partner of Russia. Go figure this out. Russia, encouraged by President Trump’s talk of economic deals, could flow a peace agreement, drawing up a list of projects and assets officials might hope interest the U.S. According to people in Moscow Times. The envoy Steve Wyckoff met with President Putin in Moscow on Friday for talks. I think this is very important. This is a quote, Russia’s trade with China is currently about 70-fold larger than its trade with the U.S. So that naturally limits the available options at Maria Sengolia, the senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the White House could adopt a more flexible approach to sanctions and enforcement, potentially allowing U.S. Companies to secure meaningful stakes in Russia energy ventures. I think this is really important if we take a look at critical minerals. It’s not the critical minerals, but it’s actually the processing and or refinement that I think would be the best thing to do for Russia and the United States to work together. It’s my personal opinion on that. [00:05:51][119.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:05:51] Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different layers to this, to say that, you know, us getting into bed with Russia from an investment standpoint is a great thing. I think overstate some of the challenges that we would have, obviously, you know, Russia is a large energy exporter. If Trump truly does want to bring down energy prices, getting Russian fuel and Russian gas back onto the market is a good thing. Obviously, there is some tensions from a- You know, geopolitical strategy standpoint and a national security standpoint. I think to fool ourselves and think Russia is our friend is also a misservice. Russia is a, a convenient partner. And it’s a little bit of like the enemy of the enemy is my friend. It seems to be Trump has made Zelensky out to be the enemy. And now guess what? You end up finding yourselves aligned with people who may not have your best interests at hearts, but you have a common enemy in what’s going on in Ukraine. [00:06:46][54.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:47] Can I say that Zelensky may have done that to himself? I mean, the man owns a ski resort in France. His wife owns a $15 million birdie. She just bought a $2 million dress from Princess Diana. Where are they getting that kind of money? Oh, the U.S. Taxpayers. [00:07:06][19.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:07:06] Yeah, now we could also go down the road of the US is probably the reason that Zolinski is in power because we came in with the CIA and overthrew the government. So we could keep going farther back and eventually saying this war is probably our fault. And so if we’re not going to go in there and support somebody and at least attempt to do something, we’re not even standing up for the own regime that the CIA back in 2014 decided to slip in. So we’re going on. There’s a point of the matter is I think there’s a lot of other stuff going on here. I do think if, specifically… What Steve Witkoff has brought up specifically is those interest in working with Russia on those energy projects that are in the Arctic. There’s a lot of stranded gas going on. Now, Trump has come out and said he has not, and they’ve been very clear that we’ve not lifted energy bans yet. So I think they’re there. Ironically, if they wanted to crush natural gas prices and crush oil prices, they’d come out and just say we have lifted the ban. That would drive down. You’d see a five, six dollar drop in the price right there. I do think there’s a lot to unpack here. Do I really think something is going to happen intimately? No, but something needs to happen at some point. We do know that there’s lot of oil and gas companies in the US that lost a lot of long-standing billions of oil-and-gas infrastructure in Russia. We know that ExxonMobil lost the Sakhalin-1 as it was basically just declared a Russian entity, and all that stuff. So I think it’s going to be very interesting. And [00:08:31][84.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:08:32] You know, this goes back to my comment, Michael, is that I don’t know that we need to do joint oil and gas deals. And as we talked about last week, I don t know that having President Trump in the United States act as the middleman for all natural gas and managing the Russian assets in the EU is a good thing. I think it’s a way to get him to the table. But I sure don’t want to be a middle of a gas policeman. No gas for you today because we have to negotiate with Putin No, I don’t want to get in the middle of that mess. Holy smokes, Batman. [00:09:07][34.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:09:07] Now EQT jumps out buys private Marcellus operator Olympus Energy a Blackstone backed company for 1.8 billion dollars being able to you know the crazy part is too they’re able to you know their their stock is so valued by Blackstone that they went ahead and took 26 million shares of common stock which was valued at about 1.3 billion dollars and about 500 million in cash and well give you guys an idea Olympus owns about 9,000, 90,000 net acres in Southwest Pennsylvania, which is right there next to EQT’s core Marcellus portfolio. It does about 500 million cubic feet a day. You know, they’ve got about 165 gross locations. Another 60 or that’s 165 available in the Marcellas bench. And then they have some, some deeper benches, including the Utica at about 60, so you’re looking at about 210 locations be interesting to actually see how many of those check out. And You know what they claim is that at maintenance activity levels, Olympus holds about a decade of high quality Marcellus inventory and another seven years of Utica upside, you know, I’m just reading straight from here. That’s an IR guy that we quote right there because, you know, who knows, who knows if that’s true. If Scott Sheffield sells tax on for 58 billion then comes out and says, yeah, they’ve only got two, three years left of actual good inventory. You know, i’m going to hold my breath on this fact that there’s 10 years of high-quality Marcellas inventory. Running out here, you know, part of the reason I think Blackstone was interested in the stock was the fact that they also are, are partnered up with a non-operated interest specifically in the mountain valley pipeline, which is acquired by EQ team two years ago, which they spun out and basically monetized again is as what I’ve been saying for a while. Midstream assets, you right before Trump got bought or, or one did stream assets were on aggregate. I felt going to go down because all of a sudden with less regulation means more planes can get built. Which now all of a sudden means the natural monopoly that had taken place because of regulation through legislation, now all the sudden, you can build a pipeline and you don’t have to, you don’t get a premium for just owning a pipeline that happened to have been built five years ago. So, super interesting stuff. EQT is probably one of the better managed natural gas players, they will come. And I think all that stuff, and it’s, yeah, I wouldn’t wanna be in the natural gas space though, they, you know, good for them. [00:11:28][141.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:11:28] Spain and Portugal hit by widespread blackout it eased over into France and a few others and Where we in the United States only have grid interconnects with Mexico and snow Mexico I mean Canada you have France Germany interconnects you have Spain interconnects You have UK they’re all interconnected up there, and I put all of those in this article Michael to go through all those here in a bit But the Spain-France-Bexis-Santa leg of it is 2800 megawatts. France-Germany is 13.6 gigawatts, Spain-German connected via France. Then you have Spain-Portugal. This whole thing. And Javier Blas put out a great post. It was about solar was 60 percent, wind was 12 percent, nuclear was a good solid 11% But you have a combined cycle or what they call dispatchable or no inertia. Inertia is what’s called dispatchable, or power plants that are spun up. And that’s called inertia. So gas fired was less than 3%. They basically idled all of their non dispatchable power. I mean, they’re, it was just unbelievable. Was this. How was this done? And so when the sun goes down, it’s evening there in Spain now, past the siesta time and they’re now into the dinner hour, if they haven’t got it fixed yet, they’ve got some serious boo-goo problems today. [00:13:05][97.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:13:06] Yeah. I mean, obviously our hearts and thoughts and prayers go out to everybody in, in Spain who’s affected by this. I mean there’s untold number. I mean it’s good. There’s going to be a body count associated with this energy. As Stu pointed out is security. It’s one of the reasons why, you know, we pound the, our fists on the table to for the United States. Watch out to this stuff. It’s pretty unbelievable. This blackout started this morning or really last night and kind of rolled over. Into the morning as you said it not only affected spain and portugal did lead into france a little bit you know right now there’s there’s kind of there’s really one cause or at least what they’re telling us is the cause is some sort of cyber attack whether that state sponsored whether it’s a rogue group you know or or whether it a combination of the two like kind of a hamas situation where iran is really sponsoring hamas but then Iran can say, when Hamas does something, we’re at an arms length. I’m not saying either of those two are involved. I’m just kind of using the idea of, you know, some sort of non-governmental backed, but kind of governmental backed organization. I mean, it’s pretty crazy. Things are still out right now. I mean we’re sitting here at about five 30 central time, right? So things are still. [00:14:17][70.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:14:17] Yes, and it’s really a big deal. It is bringing to light the, and a good pun by the way, it’s bringing to life the horrific problem of renewable energy that is not renewable, it is not sustainable, and is not dispatchable. That is the critical part. In the article on energynewsbeat.co Robert LaFargo from France on LinkedIn wrote, a massive block out has struck in Spain, Portugal and parts of France, but he puts in here possible causes for state cyber attack, but he also says that it could have really been a cyber attack. And Michael, I want to bring this up to a very big point to our listeners on Energy Newsbeat. The Biden administration put back into the grid. Let me make this very clear. From a wall street journal article that I reported on two years ago, they put back in to the grid, grid components that can be cyber hacked by China and shut down 490 different major interconnects that can shut down by China. So this is a real thing. Energy security starts [00:15:35][77.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:15:35] at home. [00:15:36][0.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:15:47] Well, if you really want my honest opinion, I think that the EU and the as an organization is in trouble. And the EU is looking at ways of controlling the population. And if there are massive blackouts, the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab said that there will be blackouts and we will take you down. Would you believe that the man is just nutty enough? He just retired, but are his mechanisms still in place? Yeah. Be prepared. Good old Klaus Schwab. I knew you had something. [00:16:21][34.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:22] Crazy cooking behind there. [00:16:23][1.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:16:23] I’m not saying it is. I’m saying that it is a cyber attack, or it was non-dispatchable power that they’ve overdone on the grid. And they’re absolutely… grid planning is horrific. [00:16:37][14.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:38] You go with Klaus Schwab, I’m gonna say it was the Ukrainian Seals. That’s my- [00:16:42][4.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:16:43] I’m going to go with the dolphins, the Ukrainian dolphins training the Ukraine seals, and he was brainwashed by Schwab. Help the lizard people. [00:16:51][8.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:53] But no, but, but in all seriousness guys, just to kind of wrap this up, really scary situation, what’s going on in Spain and Portugal, prayers go out to everybody there, you know, we will keep you updated as, as new information rolls out, but super scary stuff. [00:17:06][13.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:17:06] The title of this article is California’s new drilling permits drop from thousands to dozens per year. This exemplifies what a horrific energy policy looks like. Statistics provided by the California Department of Conservation to the Epoch Times show that the new drilling permits in the state increased from 1,788 in 2018 to 2,676. In 2019 and then decreased 1,994 in 2020. Since then new permits plummeted from 564 in 2021 and 561. Michael we’re talking only 500 wells. We’re talking California was energy independent before Gavin Newsom got into office and he has destroyed [00:18:02][55.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:18:04] Yeah, I think this is hilarious right now. So California Geological Energy Management Division, CalGEM, is the one, is kind of the regulating body that approves these permits. Get this, Stu. Currently, the rules say that if CalGem doesn’t reply within 10 days, a permit is automatically approved. The catch, CalGems will send an email automatically acknowledging receipt of the application, but then doesn’t respond for years. And that’s according to State Senator Shannon Grove, who represents the Bakersfield area. So you get an auto reply of, hey, we got it. We got it, it’s in our inbox, we’ll get to it. And if you’ve ever hung out at the DMV, you know how slow things can get. So. [00:18:46][42.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:18:47] Man, watching paint dry is a whole new meaning, so I’m excited about this entire thing. And you know who the losers are in this, Michael? The consumers in there. We’ve also had a story run on energynewsbeat.co. We had a story about the gasoline prices in a new study that was, wait for it, not caused by pilfering or theft. It was 100% based on their policy. [00:19:16][29.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:19:17] The EU’s green dream ignores the U.S. Warnings and falls into China’s geopolitical grip. This story has an underlying story that’s not talked about it. This is written at the Daily Caller. And when you take a look, it’s the article talks and says, uh, the European officials are seemingly not very concerned about the possibility that the continent’s green energy agenda may be vulnerable to Chinese aggression in the future. I for one would not want Chinese, you’re just offloading your solar and your wind to be manufactured by Chinese equipment and there is lots of gear that they can control. There’s a reason you should not be in your phone system. There is a very big reason for this. Um, it’s really not a surprise that Europe has a hard time understanding the need to pivot on energy and security and serious approach to sustainability. Steven Yates, a senior fellow for China and national security policy at the heritage foundation told the daily, uh, caller news foundation, how does increased dependency on the world’s leading polluting nation do anything for the planet, much less for their goals, whether we agree with them or not, what a great point. I mean, they’re putting out more coal and that great wall of China does absolutely nothing for keeping all of their coal fumes and pollutants in China’s green energy giants. Meanwhile, been accused of engaging in unfair or predatory trade practices as well as benefiting from slave labor. You know, the green new deal is really coming to light and you’re finding out that the green New Deal is not sustainable. And the grid requires two things, physics and fiscal stability in order to run. Those two things cannot be, um, falsified or shortchanged. If you falsify or shortchange the physics or fiscal responsibility, you will end up like what just happened in Spain, and we are going to see more of that around the world. What this is underlying is the EU as a trading block is losing power. The green new deal, the green new energy policies equals deindustrialization. And we are seeing that play out in real time. China gets wealthier, the rich get richer, and then the poor and the middle class get wiped out. And this is almost all about, and could be all about control. So the EU is trying to control the population in the EU and the UK and Canada, I’m lumping all three of these groups in the same. What is gonna happen is the trading group and importance is going to slide to Asia more and more and India is the number one trading block in the world right now you’re gonna have India you’re going to have other areas of importance to trade with the EU is really should be waking up and going the green new deal. Regimes change when high prices and energy prices happen. We’re about to see not only regimes change, you’re going to see trading blocks lose their viability. [00:23:01][223.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:23:02] This story is from the crude truth. Substack. I recommend following it over there. Go to the Crude Truth com and check out everything over there as well. I just want to give them a shout out. Let’s take a look at US LNG will be the United States largest export product, Secretary Chris Wright. But buried in this article is Poland’s buying a nuclear plant from the United States and Secretary Chris Wright was there during the signing celebratory mission. But I want to give Ray Trevino a shout out here for this article because when President Trump is out there saying drill baby drill, and all of the great oil and gas exploration companies in the United States have been giving money back to their investors while remaining fiscally responsible, I think that the regulatory things talked about in this video from Chris Wright are spot on. And I think Ray Trevino is spot on from the standpoint. That the United States drilling cannot be supported at $60 oil. We really need that $70 oil or higher. We can make money, but it’s how you plan your wells out and how you define them out, just not every piece of well or every land is going to be used at $80 oil and the well efficiencies, whether or not they can be used. But let’s go to Secretary Wright in this article that Ray put out. Oil, gasoline, and diesel prices have been the lowest in years saving American consumers. Enabling more affordable and abundant energy is critical for emerging industries like AI to survive. Exporting nuclear reactors to Poland is extremely huge. LNG has become the second largest U.S. Export and will soon be the largest. Here’s my warning That’s not in this article from the crude truth. President Trump, you have got to get our ship building in line. I know it’s going to take time, but we’re going to have to buy tankers and flag them just to get around the. Jones Act and we got to get the rhinos up off their carcasses so that we can get the Jones Act killed. It is going to be a big deal to get that thing done. And in here, the secretary right has just more fantastic points in there. The return of common sense has been welcomed across the in the world, and this is exemplified. By Secretary Wright in Poland during the signing of two companies being able to supply the nuclear power plant to Poland. Outstanding meeting and well done Secretary Wright, President Trump and Ray Trevino. [00:23:02][0.0][1347.6]

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