Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the nationally syndicated Energy Mix Radio Show produced
by the Energy Network Media Group. The Energy Mix Radio
Show will give you an inside look at the energy
industry and how it affects you by talking with industry leaders, experts,
and government officials on the Energy Mix Radio Show.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the Energy Mix Radio Show, where we dive
deep into the forces shaping the future of energy, technology, policy, markets,
and everything in between. I'm your host, Kimbolado, and today
we're tackling one of the most urgent and complex questions
of our time, and that is how the digital energy
transition is really going. But before we dive in, just
(00:38):
a quick note. If you'd like to hear the full
episode once it airs, or if you've got suggestions for
future guests, topics that you'd love for us to tackle,
or even want to email me to look and see
about potential topics, please feel free to email me at
radio at shelmag dot com. Again, that's Radio at shal
(01:00):
EMag dot com. I'd love to hear from you. Let's
get back on the topic. To help us through the
noise and to get to the heart of the matter.
We're being joined by someone who brings both sharp insight
and unflinching analysis to the conversation. My guest today is
Doug Sheridan. He is the managing director and founder of
(01:20):
Energy Point Research, which is based in Houston, Texas. With
a career spanning from energy policy, corporate finance, capital markets,
and economic analysis, Doug has become a trusted voice in
the global energy dialogue. His work has been featured in
The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNBC, Fortune Magazine,
(01:40):
The Sunday Times, and many more. Doug holds a degree
from Vanderbilt University and the University of Michigan's Ross School
of Business, and he's known not just for his expertise,
but for his principled approach. In fact, he does not
accept speaking fees or gifts of any kind to ensure
his independence and objectivity. So today we are here to
(02:03):
unpack his latest report, the global energy transition and how
it's going, and taking a look at where we stand,
what's working, what's not, and what does the future really hold. Doug,
Welcome to the Energy Mix Radio show. It's great to
have you with us.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
So Doug, before we jump into the global energy transition
research that you did. Can you kind of tell our
listeners a little bit about your company, what you do?
Why did you start Energy Point Research?
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (02:38):
So my background, I've really just done a handful of
things in my career. When I got out of college,
I worked for a bank. I did that for four years,
developed an understanding and hopefully a little bit of expertise
in the world of capital markets.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I also went back.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
And got my MBA at that point and that after
that those four years and further sort of my understanding
of the capital markets. But I also took a journalist
approach where I looked at a lot of operational issues
and marketing issues and that kind of thing. Out of
business school, I took a job with l Paso Corporation
(03:16):
here in Houston, and I was with el Paso's Midstream
Group for seven years. When I left that job, I
was head of strategic Planning for the Midstream Group, which
was about a four billion dollar enterprise. And then I
decided to start Energy Point Research, which was really initially
meant to be a focus on customer satisfaction in the
global oil field. About a half a billion dollars a
(03:39):
year spent on the products and services to the sector,
and I decided that I felt like I was well
positioned to try to remind an objective metritric and input
and insights into the oilfield supply sector. Did that for
about twenty years. It was essentially like a JD Power
for the oil and gas business. I have since discontinued that,
(04:03):
and as I've moved into a latter part of my career,
I've decided to focus exclusively on energy transition and some
of the issues related to it, just in part because
I feel like there's a need for further analysis and,
to be honest, different kinds of analysis than we're getting now.
A lot of the work that I do at this
(04:23):
point would theoretically be research and some of the hard
work I do to eventually write a book on the subject.
And so that's where I am these days, and I
write pretty regularly on LinkedIn. I think that's probably where
you guys first saw me, and that's kind of my
outlet at this point, and that's where I am.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
You know, to our listeners, the majority of where we air,
since we're in syndication, is going to be in the
heart of most shell place here in North America. However,
we expand even outside of the United States, and this
is definitely more of a show that tries to look
at the other side that rarely gets covered the positives
of energy. But at the same time, we do want
to take a balanced approach to we try to cover
(05:04):
things that are not being covered. But we're not anti
energy transition. You know, we all have to live on
this planet. My you know, big picture is I like
to look at things as if North America is probably
one of the best operators in the way of producing
energy with the smallest carbon footprint, that we should probably
(05:26):
be the model for the rest of the world when
we think about how the rest of the world is
actually drilling and producing and putting their oil on the
market or their products on the market. So we're not
anti oil and gas at all on this show, but
we're going to drill down into energy transition. So I
just want to give the listeners, you know, heads up,
we're going to really talk about things that they may
(05:47):
not necessarily like to talk about in the way of
climate change, and you know, the pair's accord, but we're
coming at it from I think it's just time that
we really evaluate the whole picture, you know, we went
from one administration that had a lot of regulation and
had its favorite energy sources to another administration that is
completely flip flopped and is basically believing that oil and
(06:07):
gas is the way to go to energy dominance and
as far as you know, global security. So we're going
to get into your research. Can you give us a
high level summary of or I don't want to get
I'm going to get deep into it. But what did
your global energy transition? Why did you write this research?
What were you looking for? Were there any key factors
(06:30):
that you really wanted to highlight in this research paper?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (06:35):
So my approach all along has really been to try
to understand the challenges ahead of us. And I got
in the industry back in nineteen ninety six, and I
will say that I began to pay attention to climate change,
which is driving all this probably in the early two thousands,
and at the time I had not done a lot
of research. I had some questions about it. The manner
(06:55):
in which it had been rolled out, and to be
honest in retrospect, probably sensationalized. It's kind of spiked my skepticism,
But I also felt like it was an important enough
subject and certainly there are enough political there's enough political
capital associated with it and focus on it that I
wanted to do more to find out. And so I
began to look closely into it. And there are parties
(07:17):
that I've begun to follow, Joe Hanson at NASA, Steve Coonan,
Roger Pilke Jr. These are all parties who are very,
very credible when it comes to climate, and they have
in my mind, convinced me that we've got an issue
related to a greenhouse effect. But that's a very different
(07:37):
issue than saying we know what to do about it.
And as I began to look at it, and just
having the background that I had, and began to look
at the financings of it and the analysis of it,
I developed, from my personal standpoint a concern that mankind
could potentially effectively bankrupt itself trying to fix the climate
using processes and approaches that weren't going to work. And
(07:59):
so that was a concern of mine all along. When
you think about it, there's really two outcomes possible outcomes
for a scenario like that. One is we do fix
the climate. When I say fix the climate, essentially hold
global warming to a level that is manageable for us,
but we bankrupt ourselves, and when I say bankrupt ourselves,
(08:19):
I mean globally where and that will be harmful for
literally billions of billions of people. The other scenario is
that we bankrupt ourselves and we don't fix the climate.
And you know, I'm not predicting that we're going to
continue to spend the levels that we have, but one
of the things that my research aggests is we don't
really have the funds. The US doesn't really even have
the funds, and we're the richest country in the world
(08:41):
to try to affect the energy transition the way that
it's being pursued now, and so I have kind of
grown with it. I am in no way a denier
of climate change. I think it's a real issue. I
think it's going to be a real issue, certainly for
my generation, but more importantly, the answers are going to
reside with future generations, and so I think we just
need to frame the issue in a manner that is
(09:03):
consistent with the facts and try to sort of set
aside the emotion that can arise in the conversation and
just look at the things that we're doing, see whether
they're working, and if they or not, I think we
need to begin to think in terms of replacing those
approaches with approaches that have worked in the past, including
natural gases impact on America's emissions, which has been significant
(09:28):
and as you say and I agree with it.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Could really be a model for the rest of the world.
So that's how I got here.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Well, that being said, I have a whole bunch of
questions to ask you, but I'm going to go outside
of my questions because you've piqued my interests and I
kind of want to get your opinion on I kind
of think when I look out, I've been doing this
show for nine years now and I've never worked today
in oil and gas. So I believe I am like
(09:55):
the people who are listening to me, just trying to
understand what's really happening. And there's a lot of global
you know, climate change deniers, and there's a lot of
people that truly believe in climate change and are you know,
in a hysteria about it. We've got to change it now.
And I blame our elected officials for you know, really
driving this message to the point where we're seeing that
(10:16):
there's hopelessness and even children, are you know, committing suicide.
This has got to stop in some ways. But when
I look out and I see that there are other
countries that these same you know, environmentalists are coming for
the United States so hard that they want to shut
it all down, which makes us very vulnerable in the
way of you know, uh, we're not as energy independent,
(10:40):
and that makes us more reliable on wars in other
countries as well as it's not protecting our home country.
But yet other countries they don't look at them. And
these are bigger polluters that don't have any type of
regulatory oversight. And so when I look at climate change,
while I want to address it too in like the
Paris Climate Accord, which is the question I will be
asking you here, how do we look at this? And
(11:01):
then it's not just oil and gas that's creating these
greenhouse gases. There's other larger polluters in this area, agriculture.
There's just it's not an easy solution, and I just
want to get a big picture idea. How do you
come to terms with knowing we've got to do something,
but what and why is oil and gas the redheaded stepchild?
(11:22):
If you will, sorry, no offense to redheads. But why
is it only oil and gas that people want to
come for? Is this a political thing? Is there a
country countries behind? What do you think is really driving
is craziness.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
At the same time, it's a valid point though, right So,
I think there's a lack of appreciation for exactly the
role energy and fossil fuels plays in the global energy sector.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
If you went back to nineteen fifty, the percentage of
the population of the globally that lived in extreme poverty,
it was fifty percent. By nineteen ninety that fell the
thirty percent, and today it's about ten percent. And I'm
saying in extreme poverty that's about eight hundred million people.
(12:09):
What has transpired over the last seventy years has been
a tremendous lifting of the global population from effectively half
it being living in poverty to just a small fraction.
Energy has played a gigantic role on that and you
can't get a get past the fact that fossil fuels
(12:32):
effectively defined that energy over that period. And so there's
not an appreciation for this. And I don't know if
I have an exact answer to your question, but there
is a failure to appreciate exactly what.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Is causing us to get out of poverty, because there
isn't any country that is in energy poverty that is prosperous,
and that's a fact. I'm gonna take a quick break
and we get back on one. Keep back on this topic.
If you're listening to the Energy Mixed Radio show, We'll
be right back and we're back. You're listening to the
Energy Makes Radio I have to show My guest today
is Doug Sheridan, who is a managing director and founder
(13:07):
of Energy Point Research. Doug, before the break, we really
got deep into just thoughts of beliefs of what is
the thoughts of what people most people what's happening, what
are their thoughts of behind climate change and how they
perceive oil and gas And it's the big boogeyman. You've
been doing this a long time, You're well educated, you
(13:29):
understand the topics. So I want to give you the
opportunity to kind of close down what your thoughts were
before we head into the pair's climate agreement discussion.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
So the other problem with the perception in regarding this
issue is there is a belief that oil and gas
exist because the oil and gas industry has an effect
tried to shut down all kinds of alternatives. And I
would argue what they don't really realize is is that
(14:01):
oil and gas and fossil fuels in general dominate because
they are a superior form of energy in terms of
providing it at affordable in a reliable manner, and that's
what drives economic growth. The issue that we're dealing with
on the side is sustainability. But there was really a
belief that somehow big oil and its interests and you
(14:24):
can throw in natural gas and maybe even cole really
have sort of rigged the game for the last several
decades and have just sort of been these parties who
stood in the doorway, disallowing other forms of energy to
effectively move into the limelight. And the fact of the
matter is that that's not true. And here's one of
(14:45):
the reasons I'll tell you I know it's not true.
Is the energy industry globally, and these are back of
the envelope calculations, probably runs for at endpoint, the sales
of it probably runs about seven and a half to
eight trillion dollars a year. It's a gigantic industry. If
there were better opportunities and better ways to provide energy
at less expensively and more fortively. That industry, among all others,
(15:09):
has every incentive to try to find it. And what's
happened is that the oil and gas industry and the
energy sector globally has really been honed to such a
degree that it is so tremendously effective that there's not
a lot of low hanging fruit out there. And so
the concern here is that because parties perceive that oil
(15:30):
and gas would be easy to replace, doesn't mean that
it is. And that's what we're running up against. And
as we go along here, I'll quote some statistics that
effectively show that to be the case. It's just a
complete misunderstanding of exactly the role of energy, and more
particularly the role of fossil fuels and oil and gas
in energy globally.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Well, I do want to get on your research, because
I don't want to take up a whole show on
growing back and forth the big thoughts of what's causing
this and who's behind it and is it real or
is it not real. Let's switch gears and talk about
the Paris Agreement. It's set very ambitious climate goals back
in twenty fifteen and now nearly a decade later. You know,
(16:15):
how would you assess the world's progress towards these targets,
especially in terms of admission and temperatureize and has it
been worth it in countries that really invested in what
they call green energy, which I don't necessarily equate when
turbines and solar to green because they're still byproducts of
(16:37):
course oil and gas. But there are countries who have
really you know, die they dived, dried it in and
if we look at what happened in what was its Fain, Portugal,
they went offline for two or three days, they had
no backup. I mean, I think we need to look
at all you know, I think we need to look
(16:57):
at it from all ends of not just temperature admissions.
But has it been working for these countries that have
taken this path go ahead?
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Well, the Paris Agreement, in my mind, is really sort
of time zero for when you want to look at
the current transition that we're undertaking. And the Paris Accord
was agreed to in December of twenty fifteen. I won't
go into the background, but by the time delegates arrived,
(17:26):
it was pretty well understood that there was going to
be agreement. In fact, the process almost required it. If
it hadn't, the process probably would have fallen apart. And
so everyone knew that they needed to come to an agreement,
and the agreement was amongst nations that they would focus
on voluntary reductions to their emissions. And when you say
(17:49):
it was one hundred and ninety six nations parties is
what they're referred to it in the convention that signed
adopted the agreement into December, and the goal was to
get reductions across all nations to the point where the
scientists said it would reduce or at least limit excuse me,
the global temperatures over and above what existed in the
(18:12):
pre industrial age to about two degrees celsius, what they
refer to as the temperature Anominally that was soon reduced
to one point five degrees celsius because they felt like
we needed some room to kind of work with the risk.
And the issue there is that that's what scientists thinks
right abound around those temperatures there will be we can
(18:34):
avoid irreversible change to the globe and the climate. Embedded
in those promises commitments, I should say from the countries
was an understanding that by twenty thirty, global emissions would
fall from fifty four billion metric tons that existed as
(18:58):
of twenty fifteen the signing agreement to something the order
of twenty eight gigatons by twenty thirty, as a forty
three percent reduction. What's actually happened is that we've seen
an increase of global emissions over the following ten years,
not fifteen, but ten years, of about eleven percent. So
(19:19):
we've gone from excuse me, I previously said fifty four gigatons,
it's actually it was forty eight point eight gigatons at
the signing of the Paris Agreement. It is now at
fifty four gigatons. And so it's an eleven percent increase.
And so how do you get there when supposedly the
Paris Accord said that we were going to all make
these changes. And the fact of the matter is is
that these were targets that were set by scientists and delegates.
(19:43):
It wasn't the energy industry did not have a seat
at the table, and there was no one there to
really tell them that.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
This is this is undoable.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
And so when I talk about the Paris Climate Agreement,
I focus on the fact was what was promised in
what we get and in the private sector, if there
was a project undertaken in which something was going to
be reduced by forty three percent over a period of
fifteen years, and ten years into it, you've actually increased
(20:13):
that thing, but eleven percent there, and now that puts
you in a position where you now need to reduce
that thing by fifty percent over the next six years.
I think in the private sector we would say we failed, right,
and so there's.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Not a lot of momentum. Though there's a lot of
you know what.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
You still can read a lot of our articles where
the scientists will say, oh, we've only got six years.
There's no real understanding or appreciation for the momentum of
why we continue to grow emissions rather than reduce them
when the answer is to what we answer is we
get back to what we spoke about previously, which is
it's just very sticky. The energy that we use is
(20:51):
the best form of energy that we have. It's done
remarkable things in history, and folks just don't want to
give it up. I'm not suggesting that that means climate
change isn't a real thing. I'm suggesting that we probably
have taken approach to trying to deal with it that
wasn't the most effective or realistic.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Absolutely, Doug, let's take a quick break. When we return,
I want to get back on well, who's behind increasing
these numbers? You're listening to the Energy Mix radio show.
Speaker 5 (21:17):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
You're listening to the Energy Mix radio show. Mike. Yesterday
is Doug Sheridan, who is the managing director and founder
of Energy Point Research in Houston, Texas. Doug, before the break,
you were talking to us about your research global energy Transition,
and we were discussing specifically the Paris Agreement, and you
stated that we didn't when the goals were created in
(21:44):
twenty fifteen, they didn't decrease in any way. They increased
in my mind significantly, And in covering nine years on
the air and understanding that you've got really bad countries,
bad actors like China that is going to power period
and they don't care about what the world thinks and
they don't care about climate change. They're bringing on two
(22:05):
to three coal mines a week. How are we increasing
instead of the countries that did sign this Paris Agreement?
How is it that it's successful in some way when
when they're increasing, and who are the countries that are
really they're probably not even a part of the Paris Accord.
Probably you're going to tell me, but who are the
(22:26):
biggest polluters that are completely not paying attention to climate change?
Speaker 4 (22:31):
So the answer, the answer may surprise you, and it's
the majority of the world. Are the biggest polluters are
the ones that are increasing in So, if you were
to look at sort of the leadership in national leadership
with regards to the energy transition as it's currently defined,
it really emanates from Europe and the EU as well
(22:52):
as the UK, and interestingly, some of the the greenees,
the greenes these countries. And this is just the facts,
and I'm not the only one who's pointed this out,
but these countries recognize from a relevancy standpoint, and I'm
speaking geopolitically, I'm speaking economically, I'm speaking cultury, these countries
(23:13):
realize that the ar now beginning to be passed by
other parts of the world. You can point to China,
you could point to Indonesia, you could point to even
the United States continues to chug along. And so there
is a perception there's a belief amongst the decision makers
in Europe that if Europe included in the UK could
(23:33):
in fact get to what's referred to as zero, meaning
by some certain date in this case is twenty fifty.
In most cases, that would somehow catapult these countries back
up to the top of the geopolitical pecking order and
they would basically be able to recapture, reclaim their greatness
(23:54):
that they had in prior years. And I'm not saying
I'm not saying that the UK is trying to cap
sure it's days back to imperialism, but the UK obviously
has played a very important role in the development of
the Western world. And so the answer to your question
is is that it's mostly the rest, mostly the non
Western world, that continues to invest in these energy sources
(24:18):
that they point to the Western world previously and said
it worked for you, we wanted to work for us.
And so when you think in terms of the lop
sided nature of that, that's about one point one billion
people reside in what you could refer to as Western nations.
That means you've got another seven billion who aren't necessarily
playing by the same rules. And there is this perception
(24:41):
that if the West simply gets to net zero the
rest of the world. Believe it or not, they believe
the rest of the world will effectively fall in line
for whatever reason, and as you prod them on it,
it's difficult to see it, but it's really a hail
mary by these countries because they believe it is their
chance to regain their glory. And what's actually happened is
(25:05):
not only have the other seven billion people on the
planet and their nations gone about picking the energy sources
that work best for them or as opposed to the
ones that maybe deem greenness. What's happened, and this won't
come to surprise to you, is that you've had these
countries effectivey begin to de industrialize and their economies are
(25:26):
no longer growing. The UK is stagnant, Germany hasn't grown
its GDP in five years. They've got all kinds of
industry leaving. They have turned over the automotive sector from
what I can tell to a large extent, over to
the Chinese, who have effectively dominated the ev market, which
is kind of unusual because it's really kind of strange. Actually,
(25:47):
it's really hard to pin someone down and say why
exactly is an EV a superior automobile to the internal
combustion engine. And what you get a lot of answers
is that because it's electric, And then you answer the
answer series is why is electric better?
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Especially?
Speaker 4 (26:01):
And then when you point out the costs and then
the range issues. And so there's this narrative out there
that because anything's electric, electric, it's better and Europe has
an effect bought into that, and China has taken advantage
of it by effectively selling the equipment to them that
they seem to be so excited about because it's electric.
And so it's really it's really pretty sad to watch
(26:23):
what's going on in Europe because it's not going to
work out. It's already very clear and sadly, I wouldn't
even say that they're in a position of doubling down.
They're in a position really right now of tripling down.
They're going to have to pare it back a bit.
But the fact of the matter is is the irrelevance
that they so seem to be so concerned about is
just being exacerbated by the decisions that I reckon.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Let's take a quick break. You're listening to the Energy
Mixed radio show we'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (26:49):
Join us as Wednesday, July thirtieth for the Energy Faery
Clinics at the Portland Community Center in Portland, Texas from
nine am to one pm. The fair will be offering
three well checks, screenings and information everything from your blood
pressure to general health consultations. That's the Energy Fair Health
Clinic this Wednesday, July thirtieth, from nine am to one
(27:10):
pm in Portland, Texas at the Portland Community Center. Admission
it's free. For more go to Facebook dot com, slash
Shale Magazine.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
You're listening to the Energy Mix radio show. My guest
today's Deck Sheridan, who is the managing director and founder
of Energy Point Research out of Houston. Doug, thank you
for breaking down the Paris agreement. You know the goals
was successful. No, let's switch gears and talk about your
report suggests that while solar and battery technology technologies are
(27:47):
often labeled as the cheapest energy source, their real world
cost is far more complex. And can you unpack that
for us? And what makes these solutions so expect been practice?
Because I think you know, I have a son who
lives in Vegas and over there, it's like California six
(28:07):
dollars a gallon. Everything is just more expensive. And there's
Tesla's everywhere. And I'm not knocking Tesla's. I think they're
actually very nice looking, but I don't necessarily know where
I stand on the cost versus a regular car. So
tell me what your report talks about, or what it
says not talks about. What it says in battery and
(28:29):
solar technology.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Well, my focus has been.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
On the grid, and so here in Texas we are
known for going all in on renewables, and for reasons
that people don't completely appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
It's really highly political.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
And it's just a transfer of wealth, and I would
argue at the expense of the Texas grid, but we
can get into that in another conversation. If you think
about solar, solar has emerged as the silver bullet in
terms of what the environmentalists want to point to as
an alternative on gas that works, in this case natural
(29:09):
gas gas fired. What they point to is the reduction
in costs of solar panels which come from China, and
it's been fallen by over ninety percent over I think
fifteen twenty years or something. It may be impressive from
that standpoint, but only because it was so expensive previously.
But we've cut to the point where panels are just
a small fraction of the cost of a solar installation
(29:32):
in a utility scale. And so you've got other cost
everything from financing to maintenance costs, to insurance costs, the
cost of inverters, the cost of transformers. Then you can
go further downstream. You've got the transmission costs that always
have to be built because these farms are located in
disparate plate locations, and so effectively, you've got an argument
(29:57):
that because one component, which is a very small part
of the cost of a solar farm, has fallen so
dramatically over in a long period of time, that solar
must be the least expensive. And that's in my mind,
a weak argument. It's no My best analogy I get
it can give is that it would be like the
(30:19):
cost of sheet rock falling by ninety percent over a
course of twenty years and then claiming that as a result,
the cost of housing has fallen as well. But everybody
knows anybody knows anything about housing. Sheet Rock's just a
small component. You've got brick, you've got wood, you've got shingles,
you've got electronics, you've got wire, and you've got other things.
You've got the light itself. And so to suggest that
(30:41):
because panels has fallen so abruptly or so sharply, that
the cost of solar is just inaccurate. And so, but
it's something that the narrative that the media likes. It's
a narrative they can easily say. I see parties, even
such as the Wall Street Journal continue to recant this claim.
And effectively, if you look the numbers, I actually spent
(31:01):
hundreds of hours building out a model. And you have
to accept the fact that solar is a problem because
it is in fact intermittent. When the sun doesn't shine,
clouds appear in the sky is problematic. And certainly when
the sun sets on average, that's going to be twelve
hours out of every day. So you have to have backup,
(31:22):
and so you have back up when it's cloudy, and
you have back up when the sun has been set
for evening.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
And then the quick go to is batteries.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
But the problem with batteries is batteries aren't a substitution
for generation. All they do is store power. You can
call on it when you need it. It is therefore,
in that manner dispatchable. But these batteries don't hold that
much power. If you had a situation back in Uri
where we needed power to go for days on end,
those batteries would run empty very quickly, and so there
is no substitution. And the quick answer to why solar
(31:52):
is not cheapest because when you add all the additional
components that are necessary, and it would be the farm
itself would be batteries to the extent that parties wanted
to try to extend the solar generation through batteries, but
then you also have the same gas backup that you need,
plus the extra transmission. The solar is simply just not competitive,
(32:15):
and so what they want to do is just carve
out the little bit about the panels and allow the
rest to sort of just go in the background and
hopefully nobody will bring it up. But if it were
so competitive, you wouldn't have to subsidize it.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
And I think the proofs in the putting right.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
There absolutely a question. Can you talk about also the turbines,
the wind turbins. I'm not a fan of those either.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
So win turbins are It's kind of interesting. Started off
as that was going to be the answer. But when
turbines have some complications, they two are a subject to
nature's whim. Europe is probably the best example.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
They had two.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
Issues there where you end up having because of seasonal issues,
you end up having periods of time what's called lulling,
where the wind can actually stop for an extended period
of time in them talking days on end, and so
from that standpoint, you absolutely have to have the backup.
Over in say in West Texas. My understanding is they
(33:18):
made a little bit more predictably, but they tend to
the rise and fall with movements of the sun as
the heat currents change. But even those can be problematic.
When you go back and look at the data for
winter storm Ury, the utilization for solar hit zero percent
(33:41):
because when the sun was down they are producing nothing.
But those wind turbines, for a number of reasons, in
part because of the wind just happily actually slowed, they
hit four percent. A natural gas plant on average is
going to be working at utilization rates of seven and
so the wind turbans are problematic too because they've begun
(34:05):
to find that if you stack them incorrectly, that they
will in essence sort.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Of be.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
Cheating the units that are downstream of it, and so
you're effectively robbing will win power from other parties and
the probably would be equivalent to corner shooting or in
the oil gas or so. You know, you don't want
to over develop a field because your pressures fall. Well,
the same has been found to be the case with wind,
and then in Europe they've especially miss miscalculated that.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
But the problem is.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
They're installed and you know, they're in their locations and
you can't move them, and so it's the wind has
The fact of the matter is is if they had
redone it, they probably would have had fewer wind turbans
uh and spaced out farther, which would have meant that
the power that they generated was going to be less.
And so it's just as it's just a technology like
(34:57):
any others, that was very hopeful. It made sense, but
if you really think about it, it's a throwback to
what we were doing one hundred years ago when we
were using windmills to water water pumps and that kind
of thing. It's not a particularly efficient technology and it's
certainly not reliable.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
We're going to have to take a quick break. You're
listening to the Energy Mix Radio show. When we returned,
let's get back on renewables, but I also want to
talk about the geopolitical place that we find ourselves in,
and the financial place we find ourselves in, and a
little bit on research and development. If you're listening to
the Energy Mix Radio show, we'll be right now.
Speaker 7 (35:34):
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two ten, two four ohs seventy one eighty eight.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And we're back. You're listening to the Energy Mix Radio Show.
My guest today is Doug Sheridan, who is a managing
director and founder of Energy Point Research. We've had an
exciting show. To me, it's so nice to get somebody
on the show that really has done a lot of research.
It isn't thought based, It isn't well I think, or
I feel, it's actually research based. And you know, to
(36:36):
review your research on you know, global energy transition. It's
kind of an important topic. And so I'm glad that
you're here walking us through what your report is dating
and I do encourage our listeners for more information to
go to your website and to look at it. Let's
talk a little bit about you know, despite all the
talk about renewables, fossil fuel still remains dominant for global consumption,
(37:00):
as you mentioned earlier. But why do you think the
world remained so dependent on them and why and what
does this say about the pace of the energy transition,
Because they say that they're getting off of it, and
they say that they want to go green, and they
say that they're making their way there, But yet I
don't see any country that is truly doing something miraculous
(37:24):
and getting off of fossil fuels. They are actually firing
back up cold plants. So your thoughts, So.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
If you look at the.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
Fossil fuels as a percentage of primary energy globally, you
would see that since the Paris Agreement was signed. That
percentage was I believe it was eighty five point one percent.
It is over the last ten years fallen to a
(37:58):
little less than eighty two percent. It's not much of
a fall, but that's it. From a market share standpoint,
that's just a percentage basis. If you were to look
at the absolute growth in fossil fuels, they have actually
grown by a little over eight percent. From the point
in time when the world supposedly stood united and said
(38:21):
we are going to reduce the use of fossil fuels globally,
they actually rose eight percent. And here's the important part.
It's actual consumption of fossil fuels, regardless of what the
market share is, what the percentage of other energy is.
It's actual consumption of fossil fuels that generates emissions. And
so we have gone from a Paris Agreement where we
(38:43):
thought the emissions were going to fall and we have
actually continued to consume more fossil fuels and we have
seen emissions arise. And so I use in the past
have used the expression it's an epic fail. I don't
mean that in a derogatory sense. I just mean that
and try to get the point across. It's a complete failure.
(39:05):
And one of the reasons is because, as I mentioned before,
oil and gas and fossil fuels in general are just
very sticky.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
They are actually.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
Really really good sources of energy, and they're hard to
come off of. And so the other thing, and this
is where you get a little wonkish, but I'm going
to go down the road a little bit, because it's
true when you look in terms of how you would
try to manage fossil fuel consumption, if you were serious
about it and the public was behind you, you would
(39:37):
in fact tax it.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
To some extent, fossil fuels would be taxed.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
What we've actually done is we have incentivized other forms
of energy through subsidies. And so what you've got is
a bunch of energy that really isn't needed on the market,
as I would say, because they've effectively just ran to
build these assets, not because the energy was necessarily necessary
(40:03):
or even good or even a good fit with what
was needed. It was because they wanted the subsidies. Texas
is a perfect example of this. Texas the grid now
has over eighty six gigawatts of wind and solar on
it for a system that has never peaked above ninety gigawatts.
That's in addition to all the other assets we have.
(40:25):
We've got about one hundred and seventy gigawatts of assets.
And this is Urkut saying this. This isn't me necessary
to try to meet demand that has never gone over
ninety We have a reserve margin that's unheard of at
forty percent. And you effectively decided we were just going
to build a duplicate system, and the duplicate system was
(40:45):
extra energy, non energy that we needed.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
And I'm not the only one saying this.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
Daniel Yuriam, the Pulitzer Prize winner of the who wrote
the prize in nineteen ninety one. He Plu published a
piece a few months ago in Foreign Affairs along with
Peter orszon Zech, where he all but said that the
energy transition has failed because we have gone about it
in the wrong way, and a big part of that
is subsidizing energy that was supposedly green but was never
(41:12):
really going to be able to replace fossil fuels any
great degree anyway. And that's the crux of the problem.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Okay, So one of the reports was giving a more
sobering point about the financial and political limitations in addressing
climate change? And you mentioned Daniel Jurgen, who's been a
guest on this show as well. Completely, I totally respect
everything he says.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
He's great.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, how do how do you see the current fiscal
and political process making any meaningful progress at this point?
Or is this another just we're going to kick this
can down the road because we don't want to take
it on. I mean, President Trump seems to be pretty
(41:56):
dug in and where he's going, but the rest of
the world not so much. So how do we address
with our financial and political limitations here? How are we
going to address climate change in the future? Do you
think you see, well the cost of it? The cost
of it if you decided to use the approach that
essentially has been pushed on us, which is to try
to electrify everything that's on's one big issue, and so
(42:21):
electrification therefore puts renewable energy and evs and electric home
appliances at the center of the strategy. The second part
of the strategy would be biofuels, and those would be
for hard to electrify US industries like a a born, shipping,
long haul, transportation, and aviation, and so that was the
(42:41):
plan there. Then the third would be that you would
conserve your way to better technology on the consumption end,
and that you would have clean tech ventro capitalists who
would come in and create miracles that would reduce the
use of energy. And then you'd have government come in
with some kind of program, whether it be cap and
(43:02):
trade or tax that would that's effectively the plan that
they followed. The problem is all that costs money, and
you're right, Camp, it is hard to get your head
around this issue at so large. The financial side of
it is particularly difficult. But the best.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
Research that I saw, or the breakdown, was from McKenzie
and they basically said it costs two hundred and seventy
five trillion dollars to try to transition to net zero
by twenty fifty. Now, not all of that would be
new money. It would be about three and a half
billion dollars trillion dollars a year would be new money.
The rest would just be money that we would redirect
(43:40):
from say well and gas to renewables. That if you
looked at the United States as the wealthiest country in
the world, that's about three hundred and fifty billion billion
dollars per year that we would spend through twenty fifty
or nine trillion dollars total. Well, the problem is is
that we're currently running about a two trillion dollars DEAFA it.
(44:00):
Our national debt is about thirty six trillion, and so
if you were to dial out to what that might
be by twenty fifty, you'd be looking at a national
debt of about eighty six trillion dollars for just the
United States. To try to transition to net zero using
all these approaches that they told us we need to use,
(44:21):
it's not going to happen. It will continue to be
that would crowd out every kind of benefit that exists
to Americans. They're not going to vote for it, and
it's just not realistic. There's no and it's not realistic
for any other country who all of which don't have
the wealth of the United States has, and so it's
really a sort of debt on arrival approach. But if
(44:43):
you look at parties like Europe, they're doing it for
different reasons, which we already talked about. They hope that
this is their ability to resurrect themselves to the top
of the geopolitical pecking order in terms of what we
should have done, and I would argue, this is what
we do right now. We do have techniclogies that we
know will in fact reduce renew reduce emissions, and that's nuclear.
(45:06):
We know that natural gas is half the emissions of coal.
We've already successfully driven our emissions down in the United
States with this approach, and so the obvious approach would
be to try to reduce coal consumption globally in all countries.
You would certainly try to eliminate it in developed countries,
and you were to reduce it in developing countries, and
(45:28):
you would do so with nuclear and natural gas primarily,
but you would also try to embrace geothermal and then
also hydro to the extent you can build some more.
All of those are either very low costs of very
low emissions, or they're zero emissions. And if we had
done that ten years ago or even farther back, and
that had been the approach and avoided the subsidization of
(45:49):
stuff that's not working, we would be of a lot
farther along. And here's the point that I would want
to say, from a climate standpoint, what our objectives should
objective shouldn't be net zero. We're not going to get there,
it's not realistic. But if we can reduce and bend
the curve downward, meaning right now we're on track for
about three degrees increase in temperatures by the end of
(46:09):
the century, which is seventy five years from now. By
the way, if we can push that point out by
another twenty or thirty years, you've now got a point
where the climate wouldn't really become problematic for another one
hundred years. And so what we effectively need to do
is do the smart things that would reduce emissions and
lower the curve and buy some time to use our
(46:32):
future wealth and our future technology to solve the problem.
And I'm not the only person who said this. Stephen
Coonan into his book Unsettled, really makes the case. He
effectively says climate change is really a second half of
the century issue for the people who are going to
be living in twenty seventy five, because we don't have
the technology and we don't have the wealth. And I
think that's the right answer. The concern is that we're
(46:54):
effectively going to bankrupt ourselves finding that out, and there's
just a lot of idealism out there that's really not
going to work, and it's going to here's the real
problems that at some point the public's going to realize
that they had been fooled, and then when we do
have a solution to climate change, they're not going to
try to implement it because we basically just effectively, I
(47:17):
don't know if I want to use the word lied,
but we were effectively not honest with them about what
we were trying to do and what could be done.
And there's a real concern there. And maybe I'll be
dead by then, but I think that you couldn't blame
humanity for saying you had your chance and you decided
to sort of bamboozle us, So we're not going to
give you a second chance.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Well, Doug Sheridan, you ended with a great bang. Thank
you so much. I totally agree with what you're saying.
Thank you for joining me on today's Energy Mix radio show.
We look forward to having you back in the near future.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
The Energy Mix Radio Show is where we explore topics
that affect us.
Speaker 7 (47:53):
All in the oil and gas industry.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Every week, our host will interview the movers and shakers
in this fast paced industry. You'll hear from due history experts,
elected officials, and many more on the Energy Mix radio
show
Welcome to the nationally syndicated Energy Mix Radio Show produced
by the Energy Network Media Group. The Energy Mix Radio
Show will give you an inside look at the energy
industry and how it affects you by talking with industry leaders, experts,
and government officials on the Energy Mix Radio Show.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Welcome to the Energy Mix Radio Show, where we dive
deep into the forces shaping the future of energy, technology, policy, markets,
and everything in between. I'm your host, Kimbolado, and today
we're tackling one of the most urgent and complex questions
of our time, and that is how the digital energy
transition is really going. But before we dive in, just
(00:38):
a quick note. If you'd like to hear the full
episode once it airs, or if you've got suggestions for
future guests, topics that you'd love for us to tackle,
or even want to email me to look and see
about potential topics, please feel free to email me at
radio at shelmag dot com. Again, that's Radio at shal
(01:00):
EMag dot com. I'd love to hear from you. Let's
get back on the topic. To help us through the
noise and to get to the heart of the matter.
We're being joined by someone who brings both sharp insight
and unflinching analysis to the conversation. My guest today is
Doug Sheridan. He is the managing director and founder of
(01:20):
Energy Point Research, which is based in Houston, Texas. With
a career spanning from energy policy, corporate finance, capital markets,
and economic analysis, Doug has become a trusted voice in
the global energy dialogue. His work has been featured in
The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNBC, Fortune Magazine,
(01:40):
The Sunday Times, and many more. Doug holds a degree
from Vanderbilt University and the University of Michigan's Ross School
of Business, and he's known not just for his expertise,
but for his principled approach. In fact, he does not
accept speaking fees or gifts of any kind to ensure
his independence and objectivity. So today we are here to
(02:03):
unpack his latest report, the global energy transition and how
it's going, and taking a look at where we stand,
what's working, what's not, and what does the future really hold. Doug,
Welcome to the Energy Mix Radio show. It's great to
have you with us.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
So Doug, before we jump into the global energy transition
research that you did. Can you kind of tell our
listeners a little bit about your company, what you do?
Why did you start Energy Point Research?
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (02:38):
So my background, I've really just done a handful of
things in my career. When I got out of college,
I worked for a bank. I did that for four years,
developed an understanding and hopefully a little bit of expertise
in the world of capital markets.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I also went back.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
And got my MBA at that point and that after
that those four years and further sort of my understanding
of the capital markets. But I also took a journalist
approach where I looked at a lot of operational issues
and marketing issues and that kind of thing. Out of
business school, I took a job with l Paso Corporation
(03:16):
here in Houston, and I was with el Paso's Midstream
Group for seven years. When I left that job, I
was head of strategic Planning for the Midstream Group, which
was about a four billion dollar enterprise. And then I
decided to start Energy Point Research, which was really initially
meant to be a focus on customer satisfaction in the
global oil field. About a half a billion dollars a
(03:39):
year spent on the products and services to the sector,
and I decided that I felt like I was well
positioned to try to remind an objective metritric and input
and insights into the oilfield supply sector. Did that for
about twenty years. It was essentially like a JD Power
for the oil and gas business. I have since discontinued that,
(04:03):
and as I've moved into a latter part of my career,
I've decided to focus exclusively on energy transition and some
of the issues related to it, just in part because
I feel like there's a need for further analysis and,
to be honest, different kinds of analysis than we're getting now.
A lot of the work that I do at this
(04:23):
point would theoretically be research and some of the hard
work I do to eventually write a book on the subject.
And so that's where I am these days, and I
write pretty regularly on LinkedIn. I think that's probably where
you guys first saw me, and that's kind of my
outlet at this point, and that's where I am.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
You know, to our listeners, the majority of where we air,
since we're in syndication, is going to be in the
heart of most shell place here in North America. However,
we expand even outside of the United States, and this
is definitely more of a show that tries to look
at the other side that rarely gets covered the positives
of energy. But at the same time, we do want
to take a balanced approach to we try to cover
(05:04):
things that are not being covered. But we're not anti
energy transition. You know, we all have to live on
this planet. My you know, big picture is I like
to look at things as if North America is probably
one of the best operators in the way of producing
energy with the smallest carbon footprint, that we should probably
(05:26):
be the model for the rest of the world when
we think about how the rest of the world is
actually drilling and producing and putting their oil on the
market or their products on the market. So we're not
anti oil and gas at all on this show, but
we're going to drill down into energy transition. So I
just want to give the listeners, you know, heads up,
we're going to really talk about things that they may
(05:47):
not necessarily like to talk about in the way of
climate change, and you know, the pair's accord, but we're
coming at it from I think it's just time that
we really evaluate the whole picture, you know, we went
from one administration that had a lot of regulation and
had its favorite energy sources to another administration that is
completely flip flopped and is basically believing that oil and
(06:07):
gas is the way to go to energy dominance and
as far as you know, global security. So we're going
to get into your research. Can you give us a
high level summary of or I don't want to get
I'm going to get deep into it. But what did
your global energy transition? Why did you write this research?
What were you looking for? Were there any key factors
(06:30):
that you really wanted to highlight in this research paper?
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (06:35):
So my approach all along has really been to try
to understand the challenges ahead of us. And I got
in the industry back in nineteen ninety six, and I
will say that I began to pay attention to climate change,
which is driving all this probably in the early two thousands,
and at the time I had not done a lot
of research. I had some questions about it. The manner
(06:55):
in which it had been rolled out, and to be
honest in retrospect, probably sensationalized. It's kind of spiked my skepticism,
But I also felt like it was an important enough
subject and certainly there are enough political there's enough political
capital associated with it and focus on it that I
wanted to do more to find out. And so I
began to look closely into it. And there are parties
(07:17):
that I've begun to follow, Joe Hanson at NASA, Steve Coonan,
Roger Pilke Jr. These are all parties who are very,
very credible when it comes to climate, and they have
in my mind, convinced me that we've got an issue
related to a greenhouse effect. But that's a very different
(07:37):
issue than saying we know what to do about it.
And as I began to look at it, and just
having the background that I had, and began to look
at the financings of it and the analysis of it,
I developed, from my personal standpoint a concern that mankind
could potentially effectively bankrupt itself trying to fix the climate
using processes and approaches that weren't going to work. And
(07:59):
so that was a concern of mine all along. When
you think about it, there's really two outcomes possible outcomes
for a scenario like that. One is we do fix
the climate. When I say fix the climate, essentially hold
global warming to a level that is manageable for us,
but we bankrupt ourselves, and when I say bankrupt ourselves,
(08:19):
I mean globally where and that will be harmful for
literally billions of billions of people. The other scenario is
that we bankrupt ourselves and we don't fix the climate.
And you know, I'm not predicting that we're going to
continue to spend the levels that we have, but one
of the things that my research aggests is we don't
really have the funds. The US doesn't really even have
the funds, and we're the richest country in the world
(08:41):
to try to affect the energy transition the way that
it's being pursued now, and so I have kind of
grown with it. I am in no way a denier
of climate change. I think it's a real issue. I
think it's going to be a real issue, certainly for
my generation, but more importantly, the answers are going to
reside with future generations, and so I think we just
need to frame the issue in a manner that is
(09:03):
consistent with the facts and try to sort of set
aside the emotion that can arise in the conversation and
just look at the things that we're doing, see whether
they're working, and if they or not, I think we
need to begin to think in terms of replacing those
approaches with approaches that have worked in the past, including
natural gases impact on America's emissions, which has been significant
(09:28):
and as you say and I agree with it.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Could really be a model for the rest of the world.
So that's how I got here.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Well, that being said, I have a whole bunch of
questions to ask you, but I'm going to go outside
of my questions because you've piqued my interests and I
kind of want to get your opinion on I kind
of think when I look out, I've been doing this
show for nine years now and I've never worked today
in oil and gas. So I believe I am like
(09:55):
the people who are listening to me, just trying to
understand what's really happening. And there's a lot of global
you know, climate change deniers, and there's a lot of
people that truly believe in climate change and are you know,
in a hysteria about it. We've got to change it now.
And I blame our elected officials for you know, really
driving this message to the point where we're seeing that
(10:16):
there's hopelessness and even children, are you know, committing suicide.
This has got to stop in some ways. But when
I look out and I see that there are other
countries that these same you know, environmentalists are coming for
the United States so hard that they want to shut
it all down, which makes us very vulnerable in the
way of you know, uh, we're not as energy independent,
(10:40):
and that makes us more reliable on wars in other
countries as well as it's not protecting our home country.
But yet other countries they don't look at them. And
these are bigger polluters that don't have any type of
regulatory oversight. And so when I look at climate change,
while I want to address it too in like the
Paris Climate Accord, which is the question I will be
asking you here, how do we look at this? And
(11:01):
then it's not just oil and gas that's creating these
greenhouse gases. There's other larger polluters in this area, agriculture.
There's just it's not an easy solution, and I just
want to get a big picture idea. How do you
come to terms with knowing we've got to do something,
but what and why is oil and gas the redheaded stepchild?
(11:22):
If you will, sorry, no offense to redheads. But why
is it only oil and gas that people want to
come for? Is this a political thing? Is there a
country countries behind? What do you think is really driving
is craziness.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
At the same time, it's a valid point though, right So,
I think there's a lack of appreciation for exactly the
role energy and fossil fuels plays in the global energy sector.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
If you went back to nineteen fifty, the percentage of
the population of the globally that lived in extreme poverty,
it was fifty percent. By nineteen ninety that fell the
thirty percent, and today it's about ten percent. And I'm
saying in extreme poverty that's about eight hundred million people.
(12:09):
What has transpired over the last seventy years has been
a tremendous lifting of the global population from effectively half
it being living in poverty to just a small fraction.
Energy has played a gigantic role on that and you
can't get a get past the fact that fossil fuels
(12:32):
effectively defined that energy over that period. And so there's
not an appreciation for this. And I don't know if
I have an exact answer to your question, but there
is a failure to appreciate exactly what.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Is causing us to get out of poverty, because there
isn't any country that is in energy poverty that is prosperous,
and that's a fact. I'm gonna take a quick break
and we get back on one. Keep back on this topic.
If you're listening to the Energy Mixed Radio show, We'll
be right back and we're back. You're listening to the
Energy Makes Radio I have to show My guest today
is Doug Sheridan, who is a managing director and founder
(13:07):
of Energy Point Research. Doug, before the break, we really
got deep into just thoughts of beliefs of what is
the thoughts of what people most people what's happening, what
are their thoughts of behind climate change and how they
perceive oil and gas And it's the big boogeyman. You've
been doing this a long time, You're well educated, you
(13:29):
understand the topics. So I want to give you the
opportunity to kind of close down what your thoughts were
before we head into the pair's climate agreement discussion.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
So the other problem with the perception in regarding this
issue is there is a belief that oil and gas
exist because the oil and gas industry has an effect
tried to shut down all kinds of alternatives. And I
would argue what they don't really realize is is that
(14:01):
oil and gas and fossil fuels in general dominate because
they are a superior form of energy in terms of
providing it at affordable in a reliable manner, and that's
what drives economic growth. The issue that we're dealing with
on the side is sustainability. But there was really a
belief that somehow big oil and its interests and you
(14:24):
can throw in natural gas and maybe even cole really
have sort of rigged the game for the last several
decades and have just sort of been these parties who
stood in the doorway, disallowing other forms of energy to
effectively move into the limelight. And the fact of the
matter is that that's not true. And here's one of
(14:45):
the reasons I'll tell you I know it's not true.
Is the energy industry globally, and these are back of
the envelope calculations, probably runs for at endpoint, the sales
of it probably runs about seven and a half to
eight trillion dollars a year. It's a gigantic industry. If
there were better opportunities and better ways to provide energy
at less expensively and more fortively. That industry, among all others,
(15:09):
has every incentive to try to find it. And what's
happened is that the oil and gas industry and the
energy sector globally has really been honed to such a
degree that it is so tremendously effective that there's not
a lot of low hanging fruit out there. And so
the concern here is that because parties perceive that oil
(15:30):
and gas would be easy to replace, doesn't mean that
it is. And that's what we're running up against. And
as we go along here, I'll quote some statistics that
effectively show that to be the case. It's just a
complete misunderstanding of exactly the role of energy, and more
particularly the role of fossil fuels and oil and gas
in energy globally.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Well, I do want to get on your research, because
I don't want to take up a whole show on
growing back and forth the big thoughts of what's causing
this and who's behind it and is it real or
is it not real. Let's switch gears and talk about
the Paris Agreement. It's set very ambitious climate goals back
in twenty fifteen and now nearly a decade later. You know,
(16:15):
how would you assess the world's progress towards these targets,
especially in terms of admission and temperatureize and has it
been worth it in countries that really invested in what
they call green energy, which I don't necessarily equate when
turbines and solar to green because they're still byproducts of
(16:37):
course oil and gas. But there are countries who have
really you know, die they dived, dried it in and
if we look at what happened in what was its Fain, Portugal,
they went offline for two or three days, they had
no backup. I mean, I think we need to look
at all you know, I think we need to look
(16:57):
at it from all ends of not just temperature admissions.
But has it been working for these countries that have
taken this path go ahead?
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Well, the Paris Agreement, in my mind, is really sort
of time zero for when you want to look at
the current transition that we're undertaking. And the Paris Accord
was agreed to in December of twenty fifteen. I won't
go into the background, but by the time delegates arrived,
(17:26):
it was pretty well understood that there was going to
be agreement. In fact, the process almost required it. If
it hadn't, the process probably would have fallen apart. And
so everyone knew that they needed to come to an agreement,
and the agreement was amongst nations that they would focus
on voluntary reductions to their emissions. And when you say
(17:49):
it was one hundred and ninety six nations parties is
what they're referred to it in the convention that signed
adopted the agreement into December, and the goal was to
get reductions across all nations to the point where the
scientists said it would reduce or at least limit excuse me,
the global temperatures over and above what existed in the
(18:12):
pre industrial age to about two degrees celsius, what they
refer to as the temperature Anominally that was soon reduced
to one point five degrees celsius because they felt like
we needed some room to kind of work with the risk.
And the issue there is that that's what scientists thinks
right abound around those temperatures there will be we can
(18:34):
avoid irreversible change to the globe and the climate. Embedded
in those promises commitments, I should say from the countries
was an understanding that by twenty thirty, global emissions would
fall from fifty four billion metric tons that existed as
(18:58):
of twenty fifteen the signing agreement to something the order
of twenty eight gigatons by twenty thirty, as a forty
three percent reduction. What's actually happened is that we've seen
an increase of global emissions over the following ten years,
not fifteen, but ten years, of about eleven percent. So
(19:19):
we've gone from excuse me, I previously said fifty four gigatons,
it's actually it was forty eight point eight gigatons at
the signing of the Paris Agreement. It is now at
fifty four gigatons. And so it's an eleven percent increase.
And so how do you get there when supposedly the
Paris Accord said that we were going to all make
these changes. And the fact of the matter is is
that these were targets that were set by scientists and delegates.
(19:43):
It wasn't the energy industry did not have a seat
at the table, and there was no one there to
really tell them that.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
This is this is undoable.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
And so when I talk about the Paris Climate Agreement,
I focus on the fact was what was promised in
what we get and in the private sector, if there
was a project undertaken in which something was going to
be reduced by forty three percent over a period of
fifteen years, and ten years into it, you've actually increased
(20:13):
that thing, but eleven percent there, and now that puts
you in a position where you now need to reduce
that thing by fifty percent over the next six years.
I think in the private sector we would say we failed, right,
and so there's.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
Not a lot of momentum. Though there's a lot of
you know what.
Speaker 4 (20:31):
You still can read a lot of our articles where
the scientists will say, oh, we've only got six years.
There's no real understanding or appreciation for the momentum of
why we continue to grow emissions rather than reduce them
when the answer is to what we answer is we
get back to what we spoke about previously, which is
it's just very sticky. The energy that we use is
(20:51):
the best form of energy that we have. It's done
remarkable things in history, and folks just don't want to
give it up. I'm not suggesting that that means climate
change isn't a real thing. I'm suggesting that we probably
have taken approach to trying to deal with it that
wasn't the most effective or realistic.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Absolutely, Doug, let's take a quick break. When we return,
I want to get back on well, who's behind increasing
these numbers? You're listening to the Energy Mix radio show.
Speaker 5 (21:17):
We'll be right back, and we're back.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
You're listening to the Energy Mix radio show. Mike. Yesterday
is Doug Sheridan, who is the managing director and founder
of Energy Point Research in Houston, Texas. Doug, before the break,
you were talking to us about your research global energy Transition,
and we were discussing specifically the Paris Agreement, and you
stated that we didn't when the goals were created in
(21:44):
twenty fifteen, they didn't decrease in any way. They increased
in my mind significantly, And in covering nine years on
the air and understanding that you've got really bad countries,
bad actors like China that is going to power period
and they don't care about what the world thinks and
they don't care about climate change. They're bringing on two
(22:05):
to three coal mines a week. How are we increasing
instead of the countries that did sign this Paris Agreement?
How is it that it's successful in some way when
when they're increasing, and who are the countries that are
really they're probably not even a part of the Paris Accord.
Probably you're going to tell me, but who are the
(22:26):
biggest polluters that are completely not paying attention to climate change?
Speaker 4 (22:31):
So the answer, the answer may surprise you, and it's
the majority of the world. Are the biggest polluters are
the ones that are increasing in So, if you were
to look at sort of the leadership in national leadership
with regards to the energy transition as it's currently defined,
it really emanates from Europe and the EU as well
(22:52):
as the UK, and interestingly, some of the the greenees,
the greenes these countries. And this is just the facts,
and I'm not the only one who's pointed this out,
but these countries recognize from a relevancy standpoint, and I'm
speaking geopolitically, I'm speaking economically, I'm speaking cultury, these countries
(23:13):
realize that the ar now beginning to be passed by
other parts of the world. You can point to China,
you could point to Indonesia, you could point to even
the United States continues to chug along. And so there
is a perception there's a belief amongst the decision makers
in Europe that if Europe included in the UK could
(23:33):
in fact get to what's referred to as zero, meaning
by some certain date in this case is twenty fifty.
In most cases, that would somehow catapult these countries back
up to the top of the geopolitical pecking order and
they would basically be able to recapture, reclaim their greatness
(23:54):
that they had in prior years. And I'm not saying
I'm not saying that the UK is trying to cap
sure it's days back to imperialism, but the UK obviously
has played a very important role in the development of
the Western world. And so the answer to your question
is is that it's mostly the rest, mostly the non
Western world, that continues to invest in these energy sources
(24:18):
that they point to the Western world previously and said
it worked for you, we wanted to work for us.
And so when you think in terms of the lop
sided nature of that, that's about one point one billion
people reside in what you could refer to as Western nations.
That means you've got another seven billion who aren't necessarily
playing by the same rules. And there is this perception
(24:41):
that if the West simply gets to net zero the
rest of the world. Believe it or not, they believe
the rest of the world will effectively fall in line
for whatever reason, and as you prod them on it,
it's difficult to see it, but it's really a hail
mary by these countries because they believe it is their
chance to regain their glory. And what's actually happened is
(25:05):
not only have the other seven billion people on the
planet and their nations gone about picking the energy sources
that work best for them or as opposed to the
ones that maybe deem greenness. What's happened, and this won't
come to surprise to you, is that you've had these
countries effectivey begin to de industrialize and their economies are
(25:26):
no longer growing. The UK is stagnant, Germany hasn't grown
its GDP in five years. They've got all kinds of
industry leaving. They have turned over the automotive sector from
what I can tell to a large extent, over to
the Chinese, who have effectively dominated the ev market, which
is kind of unusual because it's really kind of strange. Actually,
(25:47):
it's really hard to pin someone down and say why
exactly is an EV a superior automobile to the internal
combustion engine. And what you get a lot of answers
is that because it's electric, And then you answer the
answer series is why is electric better?
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Especially?
Speaker 4 (26:01):
And then when you point out the costs and then
the range issues. And so there's this narrative out there
that because anything's electric, electric, it's better and Europe has
an effect bought into that, and China has taken advantage
of it by effectively selling the equipment to them that
they seem to be so excited about because it's electric.
And so it's really it's really pretty sad to watch
(26:23):
what's going on in Europe because it's not going to
work out. It's already very clear and sadly, I wouldn't
even say that they're in a position of doubling down.
They're in a position really right now of tripling down.
They're going to have to pare it back a bit.
But the fact of the matter is is the irrelevance
that they so seem to be so concerned about is
just being exacerbated by the decisions that I reckon.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Let's take a quick break. You're listening to the Energy
Mixed radio show we'll be right back.
Speaker 6 (26:49):
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Clinic this Wednesday, July thirtieth, from nine am to one
(27:10):
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it's free. For more go to Facebook dot com, slash
Shale Magazine.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
You're listening to the Energy Mix radio show. My guest
today's Deck Sheridan, who is the managing director and founder
of Energy Point Research out of Houston. Doug, thank you
for breaking down the Paris agreement. You know the goals
was successful. No, let's switch gears and talk about your
report suggests that while solar and battery technology technologies are
(27:47):
often labeled as the cheapest energy source, their real world
cost is far more complex. And can you unpack that
for us? And what makes these solutions so expect been practice?
Because I think you know, I have a son who
lives in Vegas and over there, it's like California six
(28:07):
dollars a gallon. Everything is just more expensive. And there's
Tesla's everywhere. And I'm not knocking Tesla's. I think they're
actually very nice looking, but I don't necessarily know where
I stand on the cost versus a regular car. So
tell me what your report talks about, or what it
says not talks about. What it says in battery and
(28:29):
solar technology.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Well, my focus has been.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
On the grid, and so here in Texas we are
known for going all in on renewables, and for reasons
that people don't completely appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (28:43):
It's really highly political.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
And it's just a transfer of wealth, and I would
argue at the expense of the Texas grid, but we
can get into that in another conversation. If you think
about solar, solar has emerged as the silver bullet in
terms of what the environmentalists want to point to as
an alternative on gas that works, in this case natural
(29:09):
gas gas fired. What they point to is the reduction
in costs of solar panels which come from China, and
it's been fallen by over ninety percent over I think
fifteen twenty years or something. It may be impressive from
that standpoint, but only because it was so expensive previously.
But we've cut to the point where panels are just
a small fraction of the cost of a solar installation
(29:32):
in a utility scale. And so you've got other cost
everything from financing to maintenance costs, to insurance costs, the
cost of inverters, the cost of transformers. Then you can
go further downstream. You've got the transmission costs that always
have to be built because these farms are located in
disparate plate locations, and so effectively, you've got an argument
(29:57):
that because one component, which is a very small part
of the cost of a solar farm, has fallen so
dramatically over in a long period of time, that solar
must be the least expensive. And that's in my mind,
a weak argument. It's no My best analogy I get
it can give is that it would be like the
(30:19):
cost of sheet rock falling by ninety percent over a
course of twenty years and then claiming that as a result,
the cost of housing has fallen as well. But everybody
knows anybody knows anything about housing. Sheet Rock's just a
small component. You've got brick, you've got wood, you've got shingles,
you've got electronics, you've got wire, and you've got other things.
You've got the light itself. And so to suggest that
(30:41):
because panels has fallen so abruptly or so sharply, that
the cost of solar is just inaccurate. And so, but
it's something that the narrative that the media likes. It's
a narrative they can easily say. I see parties, even
such as the Wall Street Journal continue to recant this claim.
And effectively, if you look the numbers, I actually spent
(31:01):
hundreds of hours building out a model. And you have
to accept the fact that solar is a problem because
it is in fact intermittent. When the sun doesn't shine,
clouds appear in the sky is problematic. And certainly when
the sun sets on average, that's going to be twelve
hours out of every day. So you have to have backup,
(31:22):
and so you have back up when it's cloudy, and
you have back up when the sun has been set
for evening.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
And then the quick go to is batteries.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
But the problem with batteries is batteries aren't a substitution
for generation. All they do is store power. You can
call on it when you need it. It is therefore,
in that manner dispatchable. But these batteries don't hold that
much power. If you had a situation back in Uri
where we needed power to go for days on end,
those batteries would run empty very quickly, and so there
is no substitution. And the quick answer to why solar
(31:52):
is not cheapest because when you add all the additional
components that are necessary, and it would be the farm
itself would be batteries to the extent that parties wanted
to try to extend the solar generation through batteries, but
then you also have the same gas backup that you need,
plus the extra transmission. The solar is simply just not competitive,
(32:15):
and so what they want to do is just carve
out the little bit about the panels and allow the
rest to sort of just go in the background and
hopefully nobody will bring it up. But if it were
so competitive, you wouldn't have to subsidize it.
Speaker 3 (32:29):
And I think the proofs in the putting right.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
There absolutely a question. Can you talk about also the turbines,
the wind turbins. I'm not a fan of those either.
Speaker 4 (32:41):
So win turbins are It's kind of interesting. Started off
as that was going to be the answer. But when
turbines have some complications, they two are a subject to
nature's whim. Europe is probably the best example.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
They had two.
Speaker 4 (32:57):
Issues there where you end up having because of seasonal issues,
you end up having periods of time what's called lulling,
where the wind can actually stop for an extended period
of time in them talking days on end, and so
from that standpoint, you absolutely have to have the backup.
Over in say in West Texas. My understanding is they
(33:18):
made a little bit more predictably, but they tend to
the rise and fall with movements of the sun as
the heat currents change. But even those can be problematic.
When you go back and look at the data for
winter storm Ury, the utilization for solar hit zero percent
(33:41):
because when the sun was down they are producing nothing.
But those wind turbines, for a number of reasons, in
part because of the wind just happily actually slowed, they
hit four percent. A natural gas plant on average is
going to be working at utilization rates of seven and
so the wind turbans are problematic too because they've begun
(34:05):
to find that if you stack them incorrectly, that they
will in essence sort.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Of be.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
Cheating the units that are downstream of it, and so
you're effectively robbing will win power from other parties and
the probably would be equivalent to corner shooting or in
the oil gas or so. You know, you don't want
to over develop a field because your pressures fall. Well,
the same has been found to be the case with wind,
and then in Europe they've especially miss miscalculated that.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
But the problem is.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
They're installed and you know, they're in their locations and
you can't move them, and so it's the wind has
The fact of the matter is is if they had
redone it, they probably would have had fewer wind turbans
uh and spaced out farther, which would have meant that
the power that they generated was going to be less.
And so it's just as it's just a technology like
(34:57):
any others, that was very hopeful. It made sense, but
if you really think about it, it's a throwback to
what we were doing one hundred years ago when we
were using windmills to water water pumps and that kind
of thing. It's not a particularly efficient technology and it's
certainly not reliable.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
We're going to have to take a quick break. You're
listening to the Energy Mix Radio show. When we returned,
let's get back on renewables, but I also want to
talk about the geopolitical place that we find ourselves in,
and the financial place we find ourselves in, and a
little bit on research and development. If you're listening to
the Energy Mix Radio show, we'll be right now.
Speaker 7 (35:34):
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Speaker 2 (36:11):
And we're back. You're listening to the Energy Mix Radio Show.
My guest today is Doug Sheridan, who is a managing
director and founder of Energy Point Research. We've had an
exciting show. To me, it's so nice to get somebody
on the show that really has done a lot of research.
It isn't thought based, It isn't well I think, or
I feel, it's actually research based. And you know, to
(36:36):
review your research on you know, global energy transition. It's
kind of an important topic. And so I'm glad that
you're here walking us through what your report is dating
and I do encourage our listeners for more information to
go to your website and to look at it. Let's
talk a little bit about you know, despite all the
talk about renewables, fossil fuel still remains dominant for global consumption,
(37:00):
as you mentioned earlier. But why do you think the
world remained so dependent on them and why and what
does this say about the pace of the energy transition,
Because they say that they're getting off of it, and
they say that they want to go green, and they
say that they're making their way there, But yet I
don't see any country that is truly doing something miraculous
(37:24):
and getting off of fossil fuels. They are actually firing
back up cold plants. So your thoughts, So.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
If you look at the.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
Fossil fuels as a percentage of primary energy globally, you
would see that since the Paris Agreement was signed. That
percentage was I believe it was eighty five point one percent.
It is over the last ten years fallen to a
(37:58):
little less than eighty two percent. It's not much of
a fall, but that's it. From a market share standpoint,
that's just a percentage basis. If you were to look
at the absolute growth in fossil fuels, they have actually
grown by a little over eight percent. From the point
in time when the world supposedly stood united and said
(38:21):
we are going to reduce the use of fossil fuels globally,
they actually rose eight percent. And here's the important part.
It's actual consumption of fossil fuels, regardless of what the
market share is, what the percentage of other energy is.
It's actual consumption of fossil fuels that generates emissions. And
so we have gone from a Paris Agreement where we
(38:43):
thought the emissions were going to fall and we have
actually continued to consume more fossil fuels and we have
seen emissions arise. And so I use in the past
have used the expression it's an epic fail. I don't
mean that in a derogatory sense. I just mean that
and try to get the point across. It's a complete failure.
(39:05):
And one of the reasons is because, as I mentioned before,
oil and gas and fossil fuels in general are just
very sticky.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
They are actually.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
Really really good sources of energy, and they're hard to
come off of. And so the other thing, and this
is where you get a little wonkish, but I'm going
to go down the road a little bit, because it's
true when you look in terms of how you would
try to manage fossil fuel consumption, if you were serious
about it and the public was behind you, you would
(39:37):
in fact tax it.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
To some extent, fossil fuels would be taxed.
Speaker 4 (39:42):
What we've actually done is we have incentivized other forms
of energy through subsidies. And so what you've got is
a bunch of energy that really isn't needed on the market,
as I would say, because they've effectively just ran to
build these assets, not because the energy was necessarily necessary
(40:03):
or even good or even a good fit with what
was needed. It was because they wanted the subsidies. Texas
is a perfect example of this. Texas the grid now
has over eighty six gigawatts of wind and solar on
it for a system that has never peaked above ninety gigawatts.
That's in addition to all the other assets we have.
(40:25):
We've got about one hundred and seventy gigawatts of assets.
And this is Urkut saying this. This isn't me necessary
to try to meet demand that has never gone over
ninety We have a reserve margin that's unheard of at
forty percent. And you effectively decided we were just going
to build a duplicate system, and the duplicate system was
(40:45):
extra energy, non energy that we needed.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
And I'm not the only one saying this.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
Daniel Yuriam, the Pulitzer Prize winner of the who wrote
the prize in nineteen ninety one. He Plu published a
piece a few months ago in Foreign Affairs along with
Peter orszon Zech, where he all but said that the
energy transition has failed because we have gone about it
in the wrong way, and a big part of that
is subsidizing energy that was supposedly green but was never
(41:12):
really going to be able to replace fossil fuels any
great degree anyway. And that's the crux of the problem.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
Okay, So one of the reports was giving a more
sobering point about the financial and political limitations in addressing
climate change? And you mentioned Daniel Jurgen, who's been a
guest on this show as well. Completely, I totally respect
everything he says.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
He's great.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, how do how do you see the current fiscal
and political process making any meaningful progress at this point?
Or is this another just we're going to kick this
can down the road because we don't want to take
it on. I mean, President Trump seems to be pretty
(41:56):
dug in and where he's going, but the rest of
the world not so much. So how do we address
with our financial and political limitations here? How are we
going to address climate change in the future? Do you
think you see, well the cost of it? The cost
of it if you decided to use the approach that
essentially has been pushed on us, which is to try
to electrify everything that's on's one big issue, and so
(42:21):
electrification therefore puts renewable energy and evs and electric home
appliances at the center of the strategy. The second part
of the strategy would be biofuels, and those would be
for hard to electrify US industries like a a born, shipping,
long haul, transportation, and aviation, and so that was the
(42:41):
plan there. Then the third would be that you would
conserve your way to better technology on the consumption end,
and that you would have clean tech ventro capitalists who
would come in and create miracles that would reduce the
use of energy. And then you'd have government come in
with some kind of program, whether it be cap and
(43:02):
trade or tax that would that's effectively the plan that
they followed. The problem is all that costs money, and
you're right, Camp, it is hard to get your head
around this issue at so large. The financial side of
it is particularly difficult. But the best.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
Research that I saw, or the breakdown, was from McKenzie
and they basically said it costs two hundred and seventy
five trillion dollars to try to transition to net zero
by twenty fifty. Now, not all of that would be
new money. It would be about three and a half
billion dollars trillion dollars a year would be new money.
The rest would just be money that we would redirect
(43:40):
from say well and gas to renewables. That if you
looked at the United States as the wealthiest country in
the world, that's about three hundred and fifty billion billion
dollars per year that we would spend through twenty fifty
or nine trillion dollars total. Well, the problem is is
that we're currently running about a two trillion dollars DEAFA it.
(44:00):
Our national debt is about thirty six trillion, and so
if you were to dial out to what that might
be by twenty fifty, you'd be looking at a national
debt of about eighty six trillion dollars for just the
United States. To try to transition to net zero using
all these approaches that they told us we need to use,
(44:21):
it's not going to happen. It will continue to be
that would crowd out every kind of benefit that exists
to Americans. They're not going to vote for it, and
it's just not realistic. There's no and it's not realistic
for any other country who all of which don't have
the wealth of the United States has, and so it's
really a sort of debt on arrival approach. But if
(44:43):
you look at parties like Europe, they're doing it for
different reasons, which we already talked about. They hope that
this is their ability to resurrect themselves to the top
of the geopolitical pecking order in terms of what we
should have done, and I would argue, this is what
we do right now. We do have techniclogies that we
know will in fact reduce renew reduce emissions, and that's nuclear.
(45:06):
We know that natural gas is half the emissions of coal.
We've already successfully driven our emissions down in the United
States with this approach, and so the obvious approach would
be to try to reduce coal consumption globally in all countries.
You would certainly try to eliminate it in developed countries,
and you were to reduce it in developing countries, and
(45:28):
you would do so with nuclear and natural gas primarily,
but you would also try to embrace geothermal and then
also hydro to the extent you can build some more.
All of those are either very low costs of very
low emissions, or they're zero emissions. And if we had
done that ten years ago or even farther back, and
that had been the approach and avoided the subsidization of
(45:49):
stuff that's not working, we would be of a lot
farther along. And here's the point that I would want
to say, from a climate standpoint, what our objectives should
objective shouldn't be net zero. We're not going to get there,
it's not realistic. But if we can reduce and bend
the curve downward, meaning right now we're on track for
about three degrees increase in temperatures by the end of
(46:09):
the century, which is seventy five years from now. By
the way, if we can push that point out by
another twenty or thirty years, you've now got a point
where the climate wouldn't really become problematic for another one
hundred years. And so what we effectively need to do
is do the smart things that would reduce emissions and
lower the curve and buy some time to use our
(46:32):
future wealth and our future technology to solve the problem.
And I'm not the only person who said this. Stephen
Coonan into his book Unsettled, really makes the case. He
effectively says climate change is really a second half of
the century issue for the people who are going to
be living in twenty seventy five, because we don't have
the technology and we don't have the wealth. And I
think that's the right answer. The concern is that we're
(46:54):
effectively going to bankrupt ourselves finding that out, and there's
just a lot of idealism out there that's really not
going to work, and it's going to here's the real
problems that at some point the public's going to realize
that they had been fooled, and then when we do
have a solution to climate change, they're not going to
try to implement it because we basically just effectively, I
(47:17):
don't know if I want to use the word lied,
but we were effectively not honest with them about what
we were trying to do and what could be done.
And there's a real concern there. And maybe I'll be
dead by then, but I think that you couldn't blame
humanity for saying you had your chance and you decided
to sort of bamboozle us, So we're not going to
give you a second chance.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Well, Doug Sheridan, you ended with a great bang. Thank
you so much. I totally agree with what you're saying.
Thank you for joining me on today's Energy Mix radio show.
We look forward to having you back in the near future.
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
The Energy Mix Radio Show is where we explore topics
that affect us.
Speaker 7 (47:53):
All in the oil and gas industry.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Every week, our host will interview the movers and shakers
in this fast paced industry. You'll hear from due history experts,
elected officials, and many more on the Energy Mix radio
show
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