From the Energy Corridor

I don’t usually spend so much time on either local or political things. But what we’re facing in my newly created congressional district is a David/Goliath battle against an establishment bent on ignoring the will of the people. So, at least until the primary is over (March 1), and maybe a runoff a couple of months after that, I’ll be talking about this race. And a surprising amount of this is the actual battle for constitutional conservatism. So it may be instructive for others working toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

Today’s topic is, specifically, about oil and gas—and energy more generally. This new district encompasses the Energy Corridor, a section of Houston along I-10 where a lot of energy companies are located. It seems logical that such a district ought to have a representative who knows that industry—in addition to knowing how to return to our Constitution. Mark Ramsey is that candidate.

Last week he was interviewed by the Houston Chronicle in preparation for their making recommendations. The Chronicle is anything but a constitutional-conservative newspaper. You can tell that even in the questions they ask. Today they came out with their recommendation in this race—and of course it was for the Washington, DC, pick—even though that guy reinforced his reputation for never showing up by not even responding to their request for an interview. And their characterization of our candidate was—well, not very accurate.

But let’s give them credit for an interview in which Mark got to spend half the time talking about the energy business—in far more detail than the reporter could grasp, even though he should have; it was all clear enough to me.

I’m hoping we’ll have clips of the recorded interview to share. But today I just happen to have made a transcript of the energy questions. So, let’s just let that run, with minimal commentary from me.

 

Oil & Gas—God’s Gift to Mankind

Mark Ramsey—candidate for CD 38: First and foremost, I would be the best advocate for oil & gas in the entire 435-member Congress. I’m a career oil & gas engineer. I have worked and taught how to drill wells more efficiently, safely, faster, etc., cleaner, on six continents. I have seen the benefit, the actual, real-life benefit to families, particularly in developing countries, where, effectively, if it were not for the oil & gas industry, they would still be a hundred, two hundred years behind Western civilization.

Instead, because of the oil & gas industry’s effect, which— I truly believe oil & gas is God’s gift to mankind. It powers Western civilization. But I have seen firsthand how the oil & gas industry has provided good, high-paying jobs, not just in America but in—all over the world. And that in turn has led, directly or indirectly, to roads, to schools, to hospitals, to clean water, to sanitary sewer systems—things the developing world did not have 50, 60, 70 years ago.

Almost all of that good has come about because of the oil & gas industry. The abundant, the relatively low cost—in spite of today’s price of oil at $92 bucks a barrel—it’s a low-cost energy compared to all the alternatives.

And now, with technology we’ve developed over my lifetime, it’s clean burning…. People think that carbon is an issue; one of the solutions is, you do electric generation with natural gas. That’s one of the cleanest things we can generate electricity with.

 

Mark Ramsey, left; Nick Powell, right
screenshots from Mark Ramsey's personal recording of the interview

No, It’s Not Greed; It’s Supply and Demand and Overregulation

Nick Powell, reporter: Let me just ask you real quick on, you mentioned the rising prices of gas. One of the reasons gas prices are going up is because American producers have decided not to invest in the producing more oil at the moment. They’d rather have higher prices and higher prices.—

Mark: No, that’s not entirely— I can’t really let that slide, but go ahead.

Nick: Well, I was just going to say, you’d say that they bear some responsibility for higher prices in this climate right now?

Mark: No, absolutely not. The reason that we are kind of entering a bit of a scarcity—not a lot; it’s a seasonal scarcity we see every year when cold weather hits; particularly with natural gas, not so much with liquids—but the reason we haven’t actually been drilling as much: oil wells have to be replaced. They deplete. They’re not pipes into the ground that produce forever. They deplete over time. Some last a very long time—20, 30 years or more. There’s fields in east Texas that are still producing almost a hundred years after they were discovered. That’s unusual. Most fields will deplete 3, 4, 5 years after the well is drilled.

We have to continually replace those wells. What happened is, through the ESG [environment, social, and corporate governance] movement, mostly out of New York and northeastern United States, that has shut off a lot of the funding, primarily to the independent and the wildcat style, the smaller companies.

It’s been an orchestrated effort by Wall Street to shut off funding, which is required with these very expensive projects to drill wells. The technology has advanced just spectacularly. But without the funding to actually drill the wells, you’re not going to be producing as much oil and natural gas.

oil rig in Gulf of Mexico, image found here

The second thing is the Obama-era regulations that came in have almost destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. Prior to the Obama-era regulations, we had on the order of 60, 70, and sometimes even higher than that, what are called deep-water rigs. These deep-water rigs, uh, they are typically either direct personnel that are working on the rigs or indirect personnel that are working on land—those represent approximately a thousand high-paying oil & gas jobs for every rig that’s operating in the Gulf of Mexico. Today we’ve only got about 15. And that’s due to these Obama-era regulations.

What’s even more important, perhaps, than the decrease in the number and the loss of these jobs—most of them permanently at this point—is that most of the activity by these deep-water rigs is primarily in workovers, and in repairing wells that are already there. There’s not a huge amount of true exploration or even drilling in already discovered fields. So that doesn’t bode well for energy independence, which we had achieved under President Trump. And now we’re not quite as energy independent as we could.

I would add one more thing, that the nature of oil & gas prices is that, when prices go higher, that does spur more investment. There’s a time lag that ranges from 6 months to maybe a year or two. But when, prices go high, as they are right now—and that’s not President Trump’s fault; that’s not the industry’s fault; that’s a direct result of things like the Keystone Pipeline being shut down, of federal lands being off limits to drilling. We just had a judge shut down about 1.7 million acres that had been lawfully leased in the Gulf of Mexico, over a Greenpeace-type lawsuit—that’s what caused the scarcity. That’s what causes prices to go up. It’s not greedy capitalist companies. The companies are out there competing tooth and nail. If we could free up the capital to drill more wells, gasoline prices would come back down very very rapidly.

 

Alternative Energy Welcome—but Without the Subsidies

Nick: Let me just ask you this. Let me ask you, what role do you see alternative forms of energy playing in the future, given that, you know, there is a push even by oil companies, Exxon and others, to, you know, to de-carbonize, I guess? How do you see wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal factory in the future?

Mark: Welcome to the energy business. But they should not be subsidized at taxpayer expense. The problem we had with the Valentine Day freeze, almost a year ago now… was that Ercot [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] price structure was putting reliable, low-cost generating capacity—natural gas topping units, basically—it was putting them serving effectively as backup to the wind and photovoltaics. And, as you may recall, the wind and photovoltaics dropped to about 3% of installed capacity in the Valentine’s Day freeze. There’s not hardly a machine, an industry, a plant in the entire world that would be considered a success if occasionally it was only delivering 3% of whatever its product was, in this case electricity.

frozen windmills, Texas Valentine's Day freeze 2021
image found here

Some of that has been corrected with legislation in the past year. The big issue right now is that there is a federal production tax credit on photovoltaics and on wind power that is so generous to those entities that they can sell power into the grid at a loss, and they still make money, due to the production tax credits. And that’s coming out of your pocket. That’s coming out of my pocket. That’s coming out of everyone’s pocket that’s paying federal income tax in the country. That is fundamentally unfair.

If you look at what President Trump did with China, we tried to level the playing field. We tried to stop the imbalance to American manufacturers. We have the exact same situation here in Texas with the wind power. I’m all for wind power. I just don’t think that we should be subsidizing it.

Nick: I have a couple other questions I want to get to and, you know, time is a little bit tight here. But let me, so, to clarify, you don’t support subsidizing renewable energy. Do you support subsidies for oil & gas? Federal subsidies?

Mark: That’s really not accurate. There are no real subsidies for oil & gas. Oil & gas is overregulated. that’s a big tax. For example, every time BSEE [Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement] comes out to inspect a rig out in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s a surprise inspection. There’s no warning. There’s no notice. Every time the helicopter lands, the operator gets a bill for about $30,000 to pay for the helicopter flight. That’s not a subsidy. That’s a penalty that’s going on. We’ve had— Unfortunately, the American government has had a war on the oil industry that dates back several decades now.

 

It's Time to Shut Off the Subsidies

There was a point in the Chronicle interview where Mark was about to tell this anecdote about solar energy subsidies but got interrupted. I think it should be included in a post about energy—and the free market. I had recorded him speaking in January at a meet & greet, and he included this story. So this is a transcript of Mark from that event.

Mark: I’ll give you a little anecdote. I used to live in Colorado. Right down the road from me was a place called the Solar Energy Research Institute. Sounded great. I was fresh out of college. You know, what could be better? Just free energy from the sun, kind of thing. So I went and interviewed with them, OK. I mean the job I had was great, but that one was even better. So I went and interviewed with them. It was an interesting interview. And at the end of the interview, they asked me if I had any questions. I did of course. One of the things I asked them was—this is back 40 years ago—one thing I asked them was, how long is it going to be until this is commercially viable without subsidies? I’ve been a conservative since a long time ago. This was actually back then, right out of college. “When is this going to be viable without subsidies.” You know what the answer was? Five years. Five years, OK. Five years.

I’m still on their mailing list. I like reading their stuff. Just recently they sent an annual report out. It was real interesting. It had something in the annual report: How long will it be until this is viable without subsidies? You know what the answer was? Ten years. Ten years. Ten years.

So that gives you an idea of where I’m coming from. It’s time to shut off the subsidies. Maybe phase them out. But get rid of the subsidies so that everything’s competing on a level playing field, and we’re not forcing oil & gas and nuclear and coal to play second fiddle to all these others.

 

Mark Ramsey, candidate for Texas Congressional District 38
image from campaign materials

The main opponent, by the way, the one who doesn’t show up—the Chronicle reports that he “acknowledges the importance of combating climate change but believes oil and gas are still critical in this transition period toward a decarbonized future.” In other words, he’ll keep subsidizing alternatives and penalizing oil & gas, including clean burning natural gas. And energy independence—which we had up until a year ago—is not even among his concerns.

The Energy Corridor is in this district. CD 38 deserves to be represented by an oil & gas expert. And it’s time Congress had an oil & gas expert among them. We can have that with Mark Ramsey.

Surviving the Snowpocalypse in Texas

It was 72˚ today. A week ago the high was the inversion of that: 27˚. Texas is fickle that way.

Last week’s freak winter storm (it was named Uri, by the way) was something like a 150-year event. In other words, the last time we faced extended freezing temperatures down into the teens, most Texans were used to getting by without electricity. So there wasn’t a “last time” to learn from, to know how to prepare for this one.

Mr. Spherical Model took this photo early Monday, Feb. 15, early morning. We got a 

bit more snow, and it stayed in patches until Saturday. When he posted this, he said: 

Question: What's unusual about this picture?

Answer: * My house is in Houston.

    * It's 14˚F.

    *RealFeel is -10˚F (It's what my phone says, but doesn't feel like it to me).

    * I have power. At least for now. Over 375,000 in Houston area do not have power.

    * I do not have water. No water pressure at all. And it's not caused by frozen pipes 

       in my house. It's a regional problem.

    * By Sunday we'll have a high in the 70's.

One thing I've noticed about life in the Gulf Coast: there will be natural disasters. Usually they're hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. In some areas, wildfires. This weeklong deep freeze was a new scenario to living Texans. But, as with the others, Texans are reminded who to rely on. We need to rely on God. And we need to rely on one another for help through the acute situation.

If government, or a utility company, is who you rely on—your god—you’re going to be let down.

I’m hesitant to criticize the frontline workers, who have to work to repair and restore power during the worst weather conditions—while the rest of us are hunkering down in our homes, where at least we have blankets and food. They are the heroes.

But the people in distant offices, making decisions that affect our lives—they’re fair game for criticism, and for getting our crowd-sourced suggestions on how to learn from this one so we’re better prepared for the next 150-year event—which, who knows, might show up next year.

Image from Chad Prather on Facebook

I’m not likely to ever be an expert on energy, enough to know what happened. But I’ve compiled some resources below. I’ll do a brief timeline summary. Then I’m going to share son Political Sphere’s assessment of what happened. I haven’t had him write a guest post in a long time. It’s a short one, so I’ll embed it in the middle, and then add a few comments.

 

Basic Timeline

·       There was an executive order on about day one of this presidency. It required adherence to “green energy” standards, which were not going to be useful during a polar vortex in Texas.

·       A week ahead of the polar vortex, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas—it manages the electric grid covering most of Texas) requested permission to temporarily exceed emission standards in order to provide power to Texans during freezing weather.

·       The federal government refused; they suggested Texas buy energy from out of state, rather than exceed standards (although nearby states would also be suffering from freezing weather—even Mexico faced this problem). ERCOT wrote a letter dated February 14 to explain that they had exhausted all other avenues, and that the temporary permission to exceed emission standards was necessary; the Feds responded that day, 8:00 PM, that it would be OK, as long as they did as much as possible not to exceed, and it was temporary. 

·       This was the day of the arrival of the storm. Cold temperatures arrived before the additional capacity was brought online. It would have taken less energy, and been less stressful on the system overall, if the permission had been granted so additional capacity could be brought online during warmer temperatures.

·       ERCOT workers saw that need was rising quickly, and supply was falling short. Fearing catastrophic failures (fires that would destroy capacitors, as I understand it), they turned off some capacity—shedding they call it—and started rolling blackouts.

·       People began losing power on Sunday afternoon, February 14—Happy Valentine’s Day!

·       Rolling blackouts didn’t go as planned, at least in my area (Houston). They couldn’t easily switch, once an area was switched off. So areas that lost power Sunday stayed blacked out until Wednesday or even Thursday. My area was without power for only 31 hours between Monday night and Wednesday afternoon; we are a mile from a fire station, which may have helped.

·       Power was prioritized for hospitals and fire stations. It was not prioritized for gas suppliers to energy plants, which meant loss of fuel sources, making the situation worse.

·       Wind and solar, often unreliable, were unable to provide their expected allotment of power. Wind turbines froze. They were not hardened for the weather, because it was not considered cost-effective to do so in an area that hadn’t seen such low temperatures in a century.

·       Nuclear power (there is one plant in the Houston region and two others in the state) is typically reliable; however, a sensor froze, and the system interpreted that as a problem requiring shutdown. Once resolved, this source was brought back online.

·       Residents were requested to lower the heat to 68 or below (66 or below later on) to lower power needs. But once power was lost to homes, indoor temperatures dropped dramatically. We kept our home no lower than 59˚, using a gas fireplace. Other homes—particularly those that lost power on Sunday (we didn’t lose ours until late Monday night)—went as low as 42˚ for several days.

·       Pipes froze. If this happened with water in them, the water expanded and broke the pipes. Once they thawed, this caused indoor flooding. (We didn’t suffer as much cold; plus our pipes were not on outdoor walls. We were among the lucky.)

·       Water service failed in many areas, because of frozen pipes and water mains. In many areas, even with water pressure restored, most of the county was under a boil water order. Many areas got this order lifted on Sunday, February 21, but our area continues.

 

photo from Texas Scorecard

Thermal vs. Renewable Energy Sources

A couple of days into the disaster, we started hearing about blame and mismanagement. Up until then (with no internet or much other access to news), I was assuming it was just an overwhelming natural disaster—like Hurricane Harvey, or Ike, or the Tax Day Flood, or…. And, in the end, it is a natural disaster. But Tucker Carlson offered this rather obvious opinion: 

Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.

More GW (gigawatts) were lost to fossil fuels than to wind. Because a larger percentage is provided by fossil fuels. But enough of wind power was down that, by percentage of expectation, wind was definitely a failure.

Here is Political Sphere’s take on it:

The numbers are not adding up. I am hearing from several sources that it is the fossil fuels, not the renewable energy, that has created our problems in Texas this week. A good example of this opinion journalism was published by the Texas Tribune under the headline “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages.” It opens noting that renewable energy sources were only expected to make up approximately 20% of the approximately 83.5 GW total capacity expected to be available this winter. This means renewable energy sources were expected to provide 16.5 GW of power (of that 16.5 GW only 6 GW was expected to come from wind).

16.5 Gigawatts is an interesting number. ERCOT, the agency responsible for ensuring the Texas grid, does suffer cascading power failures as other major grids across the US have done (think the Northeast power failure of 2003 that left 55 million people in the northeast United States and Canada without power for 2 full weeks during August of that year), reported that at its peak on Monday they were instructing service providers to shed 16,500 Megawatts (16.5 GW).

It is true, as pointed out in that Tribune article, that at its worst 45 GW of capacity was unattainable. Approximately 28 GW was from thermal sources (which would include both fossil fuels and nuclear) and 18 GW was from renewable energy sources according to the ERCOT officials cited in the article. The article and others use this to say that, see, a larger number of GW were lost overall from thermal sources than renewable, meaning that blaming it on renewables is wrong as the fossil fuel sources were a bigger problem. But this is a clear oversimplification, failing to take into account how much of a percentage of expected energy that is for each type. Going to our numbers above, we can see that we lost greater than 100% of the total expected capacity from renewable energy sources while only 42% of the expected capacity was lost from the thermal energy sources.

This is not to say that there were not some significant problems with the fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources; there clearly were. There will be an investigation find all the causes for the 4 million plus without power this week, and I am sure the investigation will discover there were many failures that led to such a massive inability to deal with this extreme event, but it appears that you cannot expect renewables to produce any energy during major crises and should prepare to have a hardened and ready replacement for every Gigawatt they are calculated to produce when energy production really counts.

 

Energy source	Expected	Unattainable	% Failure
Renewable (wind, solar)	16.5 GW (6 GW from wind)	18 GW	100%+
Thermal (oil, natural gas, nuclear)	67 GW	28 GW	42%
Total	83.5 GW	45 GW	54%

 

Political Sphere shared an analogy with me, about what the federal government was asking of Texas. Say you’re on the brink of a hurricane and need to hunker down very soon. But you need to resupply your bottled water, in case you don’t have water for several days. But the store says, “Before you can buy water here, you need to have tried buying water in a neighboring city at price gouging rates. Do that first.” So you do all you’re able. You find that the asking price is 83 times higher than your normal rates—if the neighboring cities had it to sell at that rate. But you find that water isn’t to be had in the neighboring cities either, because they’re facing the same likely natural disaster. [All states but Florida were hit with this polar vortex, and so was Mexico.] So then the store says, “OK, but only just enough to sustain life for a couple of days. Because we really don’t want you producing too much plastic waste, you know.” Yeah, plastic waste is the least of your worries during a hurricane. 

What needed to happen was, Texas should have gone ahead and added supply—assuming the permission would come. Because a small temporary increase in carbon dioxide was the least of our concerns when people were about to die of hypothermia inside their icy, flooded homes.

 

Conclusion

There’s one thing this disaster showed us: we’re pretty dependent on electricity. That makes us very vulnerable. It’s one thing to have a one-week outage; it’s another thing altogether to lose power for a much more extended period of time.

We need to protect our electric grid. This is, once again, an issue I’m doing some citizen lobbying on in the state legislature. Just this past week we finally got a couple of bills addressing it. If you’re in Texas and care to call your representatives about it, these are: HB 1731  and HB 1180. Neither is adequate. They mostly just look at the situation and hope to come up with a plan. But that’s a start.

The most urgent concern is not another polar vortex, which may not happen in our lifetime. It isn’t even increased need for energy during high temperatures, which happen every summer and are planned for. The most urgent concern is an electromagnetic pulse, which can be natural or manmade (terrorist or enemy military attack) caused, and which can result in loss of power for months. Loss of life would be tremendous. All our prepping and camping supplies would run out quickly. And the prevention could be accomplished at relatively small cost, passed along to consumers without additional taxes.

After a week like we’ve just had, I’d say protecting against loss of power is a pretty high priority. And Texas ought to be doing what we know we need—regardless of some federal bureaucrat crying foul. They do not have our best interests in mind; they’ve proved that.

 

Resources

·       “The Texas Power Outage Started with Bad Policy” Jason Isaac for The Cannon, Feb. 17, 2021. (This was possibly the clearest explanation I found.)

·       “Could Lawmakers Have Prevented Texas’ Blackouts?” by Robert Montoya for Texas Scorecard, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “We are ordering an investigation into ERCOT and immediate transparency by ERCOT.” Statement by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Feb. 16, 2021. 

·       Notice of Public Hearing of the Energy Resources Committee on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021, shared on Facebook  

·       “The Narrative is Overshadowing Truth in the Texas Energy Crisis” Erick Erickson, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Did Frozen Wind Turbines Impact the Texas Freeze? Here's the Data” by Bryan Preston for PJ Media, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages” by Erin Douglas and Ross Ramsey for The Texas Tribune, Feb. 16 (updated Feb. 17), 2021. (This is the article Political Sphere referred to.) 

·       “Q&A on Texas Blackouts” Rep. Dan Crenshaw on Facebook Feb. 18, 2021 

·       “Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts, officials say” by Erin Douglas for The Texas Tribune, Feb. 18, 2021. 

·       “A Giant Flaw in Texas Blackouts: It Cut Power to Gas Supplies” Rachel Adams-Heard, Javier Blas, and Mark Chediak for Bloomberg, Feb. 20, 2021. 

·       “Texas Spins into the Wind: An electricity grid that relies on renewables also needs nuclear or coal power” Wall Street Journal editorial board, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Tucker Carlson: The Texas Green Energy Disaster Is Coming to You Next” by Kipp Jones for The Western Journal, Feb. 16, 2021. 

·       “Joe Biden’s Dept. of Energy Blocked Texas from Increasing Power Ahead of Enduring Storm” by Adan Salazar for [your]News, Feb. 19, 2021.  (Facebook marked this as false according to independent fact checkers, but it does seem to coincide with information on the ERCOT website for February.) 

·       “Electricity Prices during the 2021 Winter Storm” Public Utility Commission of Texas winter storm price explainer 

·       “As Texas deep freeze subsides, some households now face electricity bills as high as $10,000” by Leticia Miranda for NBC News, Feb. 19, 2021. 

·       “Texas households face massive electricity bills, some as high as $17K, after winter storm” by Brook Seipel for The Hill, Feb. 19, 2021. 

·       “Texas utilities can't stick customers with huge bills after storm: Abbott” by Linda So, Jonathan Allen for Reuters, Feb. 21, 2021. 

 

Social Media Conversations among Texans Who Know Energy

·       “Here’s another ERCOT kick in the pants...” John Boggan live on Facebook Feb. 17, 2021  (On the video he says ERCOT was cutting power to the providers that natural gas producers who were providing fuel to the power plants—because they weren’t considered essential infrastructure.)

·       “So here is Biden’s dark winter… directed at us!” Christine Gagne, February 21, 2021 (near midnight, on Facebook) 

·       Bryan Preston Feb. 19, 2021 on Facebook  “One more nerdy chart and then I swear I'm done. ‘The wind turbines don't freeze in (pick your favorite very cold place) and shouldn't freeze in Texas!’ Right? Like Alaska, right?” (includes chart on Alaska’s energy sources)

·       Rolando Garcia, Feb. 17, 2021, on Facebook, passes along a Scott Friedman tweet from NBC5, suggesting ERCOT inspections were done virtually this year because of the pandemic. 

·       Mark Ramsey passes along a summary from Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, pointing out “every natural gas plant online at the start of this crisis stayed online.”