Judging by the amount of time it took to prepare this sneak peek into the inner workings of Saudi Aramco, I have a feeling that we get everything but a peek into what’s really going on. It’s important to understand how huge organizations with a lot of built-in opacity work. This is not one organization – its an endless series of bigger and smaller power bases, each with its own culture, loyalties and inner workings. Workers lie to their line managers, those lie to their superiors and so on until the top. Why? Easy, people always want two things. Bonuses and avoid blame. But things always go wrong. Admitting something is wrong amounts to career suicide. This is why things are being patched over and the superiors want that as they are on the same hook. This goes on for many decades as there is no cleaning event that a corporate restructuring or a bankruptcy proceeding usually brings. The dynamic is the same all over the world but in Saudi Aramco its must have built up a cellar full of corpses second to none.
 Comments and rants by the Methanist on news features from June 17th to 23rd 2019. ________Saudi Aramco allows sneak peek into its finances________Trump Has Officially Ruined Climate Change Diplomacy for EveryoneTrump has not ruined anything – except maybe the sham of a lying circus that was called Climate summits. Don get me wrong – anyone who has read more than 5 of my posts knows fully well where I stand in this issue. Climate Catastrophism is a religious sect that thrives on brainwash and induces people to believe they can alter the natural evolution of earth and nature. The only thing we can sensibly do is adapt to what earth throws at us. We don’t have a choice here. The fact that a whole jamboree of politicians, celebrities and bureaucrats meet in nice places in order to save the world is a fraud of the grandest order to the people paying for this obscenity. Those politicians are in the know but they tag along as it lets them sign agreements that nobody lives up to in order to claim that they did their jobs before their constituents. They are as useless as another anus right at the forehead. And they are cheaters. They should do their utmost to make their constituents lives better, instead, they rob them blind. Thanks, Mr. Trump for ending this. The Paris Agreement became a milestone in the fight against climate change by binding all countries, no matter their level of economic development or emissions profile, to a unified process for decarbonization. The agreement’s momentum, however, has now been halted by a countervailing force. Call it the “Trump effect.” ________‘Climate Emergency’: Ireland Set to Ban Private Cars While Planning Mass Third World MigrationAussies just had a surprise when voters confirmed the ruling party to another term in power while giving those with radical policies that would have changed the way Aussies live to the core the boot. And we had quite a number of situations like this where the starry-eyed dreamers get kicked out against the odds. This should not come as a surprise to anyone by now. I guess that Ireland is one of those soon to be setups where voters end the socialist dreams of a self-appointed elite. ________Electric Cars: Why Little Norway Leads The World In EV UsageNorway plays the poster child of the EV tribe by using cash it gets from selling oil and gas. Imagine this cash would not be there. they could not afford to pamper their well to do with all those gifts and goodies but the chicken will eventually come home to roost as Norwegians have not taken into account a well known human habit. Balloons inflate and at a certain point, they are past their sustainable size. No matter how much money is there, wasteful schemes of throwing lots of money after toy-boys and girls and their fancy cars will use it up and politicians will not hesitate to kick the bottom out of the barrel just in order to please their glitzy voters. Until it starts to show big time. And when Norway is forced to cut back on its largesse and – God forbid – raise taxes on EV’s as well, sales of EV’s will plummet to zero faster than you can count the horns on a Vikings helmet. ________Sea and iceAll those things are very nice, but they all have a price tag and I sometimes have a feeling that people like to forget that. I am not talking about the price of environmental destruction. I am talking about hard cash that needs to be fronted in order to make this thing run. Doing anything in the deep Arctic is not the same as doing it in toasty Texas with its roads, communities, telecom networks and a home market to match. Russia is running out of easy to develop reserves so they need to cut into those but when one needs to employ accounting tricks and a bag of tax breaks in order to make ends meet, one asks himself how long this is going to last. And this is a question that Europe should ask loud and clear as one day, Russia will want to make money or else. ________Prophecy FailThe Climate Alarmist movement has many of the traits of a doomsday cult. A fanatical following, a discussion dominated by dogma, violent vilification of everyone who even dares to ask questions however innocent they may be, and successive dates by which the world will end. Or not really end but rather by which it will be too late. That is even sneakier. No big eyes when the true believers are waiting to be picked up for salvation – just endless terror avoiding anything that might dent the believer’s zest. They make mistakes though – like when the management of a national park predicted that glaciers would be gone by 2020 and in 2019 it became painfully clear that this was simply not going to be true but glaciers were actually growing in size. They learned – now announcements are way vaguer in order to avoid those pesky facts. ________Global Man-made CO2 emissions 1965 – 2018According to the Paris agreements, the developed world is expected to carry 100% of the carbon reduction effort. But it only causes a bit more than one-third of the emissions. According to the Paris agreement, rising emissions in countries responsible for the two-thirds are no problem to the climate at all while ever lower emissions in countries with the one third will kill the planet. Who else thinks that something is wrong here? ________Climate scientists’ motivated reasoningMany times I am accused to be in it for the money while Climate Scientists producing alarmist papers and studies are selfless creatures that only want this planet to et better. Aside for me to not be in it for the money which I can prove as LNG Europe is a non-profit, there are mighty incentives for those selfless writers to get it right for themselves. Recognitions, grants, potentially books and celebrity status. And much more – it’s sexy to be a Climate Scientist today. Not bad for a profession that just a little more than a decade ago was as sexy as old shoes. ________TRANSPORTING LNG BY RAIL: TRUMP’S NEW CHALLENGE FOR THE US FREIGHT SECTORThe transport of hydrogen chloride is currently allowed in tank cars in the US. Hydrogen Chloride is a gas that forms acid when its inhaled and leads to severe burns. But the railcars used for its transport are safe enough to transport it. LNG on the other side is non-toxic, non-corrosive, does not explode and does not even burn as such. The only rail cars I know of are those from Chart Chemicals and knowing Cart I would endeavor to claim that they are safer than any other chemicals and hydrocarbons vessel that currently moves through the US. All LNG containments are double walled, vacuum insulated. Those are not the crap railcars transporting crude. LNG has a reputation for extreme safety and a record to match. Electric cars are way more dangerous than LNG as the batteries do sometimes explode with no warning. This happens all the time. How many LNG containers have exploded without warning so far? Right – none in more than 50 years. ________Global LNG producers see cost risks looming over next wave of projectsIf you don’t make your move now, you won’t make any move anymore. That’s an old sellers tactic to apply pressure to hesitant buyers. I have seen quite a number of such situations in small, every day matters as well as in big projects and in virtually all cases it was a good decision to do things when their time is here. New projects cannot trust in some superstar market like China to take their products with no questions asked. New LNG projects must start some real market development. Not angling for sovereign guarantees but rather building a market that will grow by itself. Like promoting LNG as a fuel. ________A $1 Trillion Energy Opportunity The U.S. Can’t Afford To MissAnother country that tries to get concessions from the US by waving the LNG stick. We won’t buy LG from you and you won’t be able to build stuff here in India. This would clearly hurt some US companies – but caving in to those attempts to blackmail would do incomparably more harm to the US economy. The customer is king – that’s the mantra I grew up with. Half of my extended family are small entrepreneurs and I got this with my mother’s milk. Now, countries like China and others seem to believe that they hold the better end of the bargain. They don’t. As long as a country is a consumer country as it buys more than it sells, it holds the advantage. No amount of bickering is going to change that – and we have heard astronomical numbers of projects from other parts of the world. Bubbles Galore. ________
The future of energy isn’t fossil fuels or renewables, it’s nuclear fusionWhen I was a boy, barely 10 years old, I was fascinated by science. I devoured particle science and was one of the few kids that understood the difference between fermions and bosons, how the standard model fundamentally worked and what nuclear fission was. But I was particularly intrigued by nuclear fusion. Together with O’Neil habitats and antimatter propulsion, it was one of the big promising technologies that I would see at work in my lifetime. This was 40 years ago. I was born in the year of the first moon landing and I am a techno freak but I have given up dreaming of bountiful, cheap fusion energy. We have fission now and it can be done safely contrary to what many like to believe. We have methane as a great carrier medium. Fusion is still a dream, not a solution to anything. Nothing we should build our future upon. Read the original article on medium.com ________The Great Wall of ChinaThe Chinese-Russian partnership hinges on someone who foots the end-bill. And that’s a market that buys all that stuff. China makes money by making stuff and selling it. Russia makes money buy extracting stuff from the soil and selling it. When China cant sell its stuff, it cant buy Russias stuff. The dominant factor in this relationship is the market. Ah, there is the new Chinese middle class you say. Hold on – this Middle class is a middle class only when money from selling stuff made in China still comes in. When this fails, the middle class is not quite so middle anymore. Neither China nor Russia are true consumer economies – they are fiefdoms selling whatever they find in their countries. Russia its sub-soil and China its sweat. This Great wall might well be only a small garden fence. ________The World’s Most Insane Energy Project Moves Ahead“the US is the most notorious climate criminal in the world” – wow, that’s a statement from a magazine that’s apparently totally blind to China which has publicly stated that it will rely on coal for its main energy needs until at least 2050. This comes from a nation that consumes half of all the coal the planet produces. All the Alarmist community is apparently not concerned about this. But if CO2 will kill this planet, does it matter where the CO2 molecules come from? Is Chinese CO2 warming the planet less than ZS CO2 which is, by the way, decreasing while Chinas CO2 output still grows at breakneck speed? Either the Alarmist community goes to China and glues their body parts on the doors of the Chinese Communist Party headquarters or they are simply cowardly liars. Read the original article on rollingstone.com ________Russia’s Budget Can Work With $40 OilThe author of this article would do well to dig into the concept of a stranded asset. Stranded oil or gas is a reserve where the development cost a way to high in order to justify the cost of development as an investment. We know that there is Kerogen oil in the Austrian east,. We also know that developing this Kerogen would cost far more than importing oil from somewhere else. The Russian deep Arctic reserves are notoriously hard to develop and require rather elevated oil prices to be worth the pain. It’s not for nothing that Gazprom had shelved Shtokman years ago. And Russian shale, yes there is a lot. Bazhenov is gigantic, possibly the biggest field ever. But its also in the Middle of nothing with virtually no infrastructure and also very little known on-field structure. The head start US drillers had in the shale evolution is not possible here. Shale is not as much a technology game as its an optimization, logistics game with plenty of entrepreneurial spirit and open data sprinkled all over it. Things that are in woefully short supply in Russia. ________No War For Oil, Says … Donald Trump?It’s true, the US won’t be impacted a lot even in the event of a closure of the Strait of Hormuz however unlikely such a scenario is. The much bigger impact would be on China which buys a lot of its oil but also its LNG from the Persian Gulf. So, I imagine that the Chinese Navy won’t take closure very kindly. This makes it even less likely to happen. Trump does the right thing – no war for oil. Read the original article on hotair.com ________How China Is Improving Coal TechnologyCoal will continue to dominate China's energy sector until 2050 at least. That’s the key sentence. Combined with Alarmist credo that China is one of the good boys in CO2 commitments this makes for an odd statement. We have been told that we need to reduce our carbon footprint drastically as otherwise, we face a calamity. The biggest consumer of coal on earth says that coal will remain its key energy source for another 30 years at least which means more carbon emissions and China still is given a clean bill of health by the IPCC. So, either the IPCC does not believe its own predictions as it would be much more concerned about Chinas coal addiction or there will be a miracle at some point in time. I believe that the OECD world is being sold for an idiot by the Alarmist church so they can run their racket and they know full well that China would never fall for their fraud so they want to pass it off as a good boy because they know that nothing bad will happen in 2030 with higher CO2 and its good to make some cash in the meantime. Read the original article on powermag.com ________In maintaining Jones Act, the winner is PutinIs there some Russian LNG getting into the US through Boston? Yes. Could this LNG theoretically be delivered from the USGC? Sure it could. Is Jones Act preventing this now? Absolutely. Let’s keep things in perspective, however. Total volumes of LNG from Russia are less than significant. We are talking of single cargos – literally a drop in the overall US gas market. This LNG could come from a number of places and as it does – once in a while a Russian cargo slips in. As said, tiny. While I am in favor of revoking the Jones Act or making more liberal use of exemptions, making pipeline building towards the North Eastern States easier would do a lot more to take care of the situation. And it's the radical Greens who oppose new pipes. The Methanist
P.O. Box: 0026 - 1092 Vienna - AUSTRIA
Copyright The Methanist | All Rights Reserved | Please read the Page on intellectual and artistic property for information.
To change your subscription, click here.
|
