Northisle’s new gold resource may boost Vancouver Island project’s economics

Energy News Beat

 

​[[{“value”:”

Northisle Copper and Gold (TSXV: NCX) says its first resource estimate for the Northwest Expo deposit at its North Island project in British Columbia beat expectations and bodes well for rapid development.

Northwest Expo holds 40.3 million indicated tonnes grading 0.1% copper and 0.7 gram gold per tonne for 100 million lb. copper and 871,000 oz. of gold, Northisle said on Wednesday. The deposit holds 30.6 million inferred tonnes at 0.1% copper and 0.6 gram gold for 62.8 million lb. copper and 558,000 oz. gold, the company said.

“Today’s new resource estimate at Northwest Expo has exceeded our expectations of defining a 40-to-50-million-tonne resource within the gold enriched Zone 1,” Northisle president and CEO Sam Lee said in a release. “This sets a strong basis for the rapid advancement of a potential high margin, near surface deposit.”

Shares in Northisle rose more than 11% to C$0.44 apiece in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon, valuing the company at C$99.2 million. They’ve ranged from C$0.12 to C$0.49 over the past 52 weeks.

Northisle is working on a prefeasibility study for North Island and is considering a staged approach with lower capital spending than the C$1.4 billion estimate in a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) in 2021. The project, near BHP’s (NYSE: BHP; LSE: BHP; ASX: BHP) former Island copper mine in Vancouver Island’s far north, holds about 8 million oz. gold in resources.

The entire project holds 567.7 million indicated tonnes grading 0.2% copper, 0.3 gram gold per tonne and 0.007% molybdenum for 2.4 billion lb. copper, 4.9 million oz. gold and 88.2 million lb. molybdenum. It has 447.9 million inferred tonnes at 0.2% copper, 0.2 gram gold and 0.006% molybdenum for 1.4 billion lb. copper, 3 million oz. gold and 54.9 million lb. molybdenum.

Higher-grade areas

A staged development would prioritize the higher-grade areas of the Northwest Expo, Red Dog and Hushamu targets. Studying the concept is expected to be completed by July and form the basis for advanced economic and technical studies, it said.

Northisle is planning to drill after March to increase the indicated resource and to step out south of Zone 1 in Northwest Expo and at the West Goodspeed discovery.

The Northwest Expo target has a net smelter revenue value of C$55 per tonne for the indicated resource as a whole and C$67 per tonne for a higher-grade zone in it, which is more than twice the net smelter value in the project’s PEA, the company said. The project also has 88% gold and 76% copper recoveries and a strip ratio of 2.5:1 waste vs ore, it said.

North Island has an after-tax net present value of C$1.1 billion with an 8% discount rate and a 19% internal rate of return, according to the PEA. The study assumed metal prices of $3.25 per lb. copper, $1,650 per oz. gold and $10 per lb. molybdenum.

The project lies on a 340-sq.-km property stretching 50 km northwest from the now closed Island copper mine. BHP produced copper and molybdenum concentrates there, as well as gold, silver and rhenium as by–products, from 1971 to 1995.

“}]] 

The post Northisle’s new gold resource may boost Vancouver Island project’s economics appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Kimmeridge makes new $2.1 bln offer for SilverBow

Energy News Beat

March 13 (Reuters) – Kimmeridge Energy Management has submitted a new offer to acquire SilverBow Resources (SBOW.N), opens new tab that values the U.S. oil and gas producer at close to $2.1 billion, including debt, the investment firm said on Wednesday.
The offer is a variation of previous unsuccessful bids for SilverBow that Kimmeridge has mounted over the last two years, combining SilverBow with Kimmeridge’s gas-producing assets in South Texas, which Kimmeridge values at about $1.4 billion, including debt.
Under Kimmeridge’s proposal, SilverBow shareholders would be rolling their equity into the combined company at a valuation of $34 per share, according to a statement, which confirmed an earlier Reuters report.
SilverBow shares gained 3.3% in early trading to $32.77.
In a separate statement, SilverBow said it “will carefully review and consider the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the company and all of its shareholders”.
As well as contributing its South Texas assets, Kimmeridge would inject $500 million into the combined company to help pay down debt, Kimmeridge’s statement said.
“It’s really transformative in where it positions this company today,” Ben Dell, managing partner of Kimmeridge, told Reuters in an interview, noting he believed a combined company would trade between $60 and $65 per share.
Dell said the improved finances resulting from the deal should allow SilverBow to start paying dividends, and would help it to pursue future acquisition opportunities.
The investment firm would own a majority of the combined company, which would remain publicly listed, and would choose five directors of a nine-person board.
SilverBow said in an open letter to its shareholders on March 1 that it entertained Kimmeridge’s previous overtures since July 2022 in vain, because Kimmeridge could not secure the necessary financing.
Kimmeridge’s latest offer includes letters from financial institutions that have indicated they are confident they can bankroll the deal.
Addressing previous deal talks, Dell said of SilverBow, they had never done due diligence on Kimmeridge’s assets and “never meaningfully engaged in a combination discussion, which has been disappointing”.
Kimmeridge is the largest shareholder in SilverBow with a 12.9% stake. Last month, Kimmeridge said it would nominate three directors to join SilverBow’s board at its annual shareholder meeting. It said in November it backed calls by another large SilverBow shareholder, Riposte
Capital, for board changes to address governance and performance concerns.
SilverBow’s operations are in the Eagle Ford shale formation in south Texas, adjacent to Kimmeridge’s assets. The tie-up would create one of the biggest energy producers solely focused on the Eagle Ford, benefiting from economies of scale and favorable location for supplying key
liquefied natural gas export terminals on the Gulf coast.
Source: Reuters.com

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

The post Kimmeridge makes new $2.1 bln offer for SilverBow appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Many countries want to start rupee trade with India in “game-changing” de-dollarisation step

Energy News Beat

Ahmed Adel, Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher

On Monday, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that many large and small economies around the world have expressed willingness to start trading in rupee terms with India, which could be a “game-changing” development for India’s trade. This is another important step taken towards de-dollarisation and would better protect India’s economy in case of any future US-led sanctions.

India’s Union Minister said some of the countries that have expressed willingness to start trading in rupees include neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as Gulf countries.

“At some point, more and more developed countries and countries in the Far East will also join the bandwagon,” he said, adding that “more and more countries are realising the advantages of trading in their own domestic currencies and a shift towards direct transactions between local currencies is gaining traction.”

He said that more and more countries are realising the benefits of trading in their domestic currencies, and there is a growing shift towards direct transactions between local currencies.

“Gradually, the conscience is setting in that rather than converting all the transactions into a third currency, both ways add significantly to transaction costs,” the minister said.

It is recalled that the United Arab Emirates was the first to accept payment in rupees for crude oil.

“We started with the UAE. The UAE was one of the first countries to accept this. It’s now picking up traction. We get a lot of countries who come and talk to us that they would like to also initiate direct transactions between the local currency and the rupee,” Goyal said.

India has already started trading in rupees with neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bhutan. Additionally, the rupee has been included in Sri Lanka’s list of designated foreign currencies to facilitate trade. Changes have been made in the Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) to support the use of the rupee in international trade with the aim of establishing the rupee as a global currency.

Using rupees and other local currencies is especially important in maintaining longstanding New Delhi-Moscow ties in the face of US sanctions against the Eurasian country.

Trade turnover between India and Russia increased in 2023 to a record $64 billion, with India’s imports of Russian products increasing by 1.8 times to $60.1 billion and exports of Indian goods increasing by 1.4 times to $4 billion. Russia is now the second-largest supplier of goods to India, trailing only China, and Russia has also overtaken Saudi Arabia to become India’s fourth-largest trading partner.

Although the United States remained India’s main trading partner last year, by the end of the year, the trade volume between the two countries declined by 9% to $119 billion. This is followed by trade volume with China at $116 billion, which declined by 2%, and trade volume with the United Arab Emirates at $78 billion, which declined by 7%.

Meanwhile, according to Arun Garodia, Chairman of the Engineering Export Promotion Council of India (EEPC), a body of over 12,000 small engineering goods exporters, during the current fiscal year ending in March, Indian exporters are expected to receive over a billion dollars’ worth of payments in rupees from Russia.

“Exporters are happy that they are receiving payments in rupees for exports to Russia,” he said.

Indian commerce ministry data showed that the South Asian country’s total exports to Russia rose 46.2% to $2.7 billion in the first eight months of fiscal year 2023/24, ending in March, while imports rose 54.8% to $40.5 billion during the same period. This growth in trade would not have been possible if India had not taken active steps in de-dollarisation by advancing trade in rupees and other currencies.

Following the launch of the special military operation against Ukraine, Russia was banned from using the SWIFT financial messaging system and, therefore, the US dollar to settle payments. Although this was supposed to create difficulties in India-Russia trade, India overtook Europe as the main buyer of offshore oil from Russia in 2022 and began buying Russian oil for UAE dirhams and rubles.

By imposing such measures against Russia, Washington accelerated de-dollarisation as it forced large economies like India to pursue what Indian foreign minister EAM Jaishankar terms “strategic autonomy.” India and other countries like Brazil did not end their relations with Russia just for the sake of the US, and Western sanctions only forced such countries to find ulterior methods and thus accelerate the de-dollarisation process.

Source: Theinteldrop.org

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

 

The post Many countries want to start rupee trade with India in “game-changing” de-dollarisation step appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Biden’s full year 2025 budget hurts oil and gas industry by repealing long-standing tax provisions, IPAA admonishes

Energy News Beat

(WO) – The Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) issued the following statement in response to President Biden’s FY 2025 Budget that would repeal many long-standing oil and natural gas tax provisions.

IPAA President & CEO Jeff Eshelman said, “As we stated last week after President Biden’s State of the Union address, this administration continues to pick winners and losers in the energy sector, which only hurts consumers. The changes in President Biden’s proposed budget to oil and natural gas industry tax provisions are a direct attack on America’s smaller independent producers who develop most of the nation’s natural gas and oil wells, and particularly the small marginal operators. Many of these provisions, such as the deduction of intangible drilling costs (IDCs), are not subsidies but are important tax provisions that promote investment, job creation, and growth.

“Repealing this provision and raising taxes on oil and gas taxpayers is a reckless policy proposal. IPAA continues to fight to preserve industry tax treatment, particularly IDCs and percentage depletion allowance, and to prevent new taxes that would hinder independents’ ability to operate and produce energy for the American people and our allies.”

Source: Worldoil.com

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

 

The post Biden’s full year 2025 budget hurts oil and gas industry by repealing long-standing tax provisions, IPAA admonishes appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

‘Deforestation is actually being accelerated in the name of climate change’

Energy News Beat

Burning woody biomass to generate renewable energy is controversial. Wood pellets are supposed to be CO2-neutral fuel because growing trees absorb the greenhouse gas that was released in the burning. But the Clean Air Committee (Comité Schone Lucht) says harvesting wood pellets leads to major damage to nature and biodiversity. How sustainable is biomass burning really? Patricia Osseweijer, Professor of Biotechnology and Society at TU Delft, and Dr Fenna Swart, Director of the Clean Air Committee, give their views.

 Local or global

While Swart is an outspoken opponent of biomass burning, Patricia Osseweijer and her group are working to design small-scale biomass use, aiming towards sustainable development for local communities. In her research, she focuses mainly on biomass waste streams from agricultute or forestry. These are converted in bio fuels, providing local communities with an extra income.

A bulk carrier delivers 30,000 shredded trees every third day

The biomass debate raging in the EU has a different background: large scale import. For example, a bulk carrier arrives in the Rotterdam harbour to deliver 30,000 shredded trees from the USA and the Baltic States every third day. This biomass, subsidized by the Government, is burned in power plants  supposedly to provide renewable energy.

Non governmental organisations (NGOs) such as the Estonian Fund for Nature and the American Dogwood Alliance, have rung the alarm. They report how huge machines harvest the biodiverse forests of Estonia and the southeastern United States, shredding everything in their path. In an effort to rule out biomass burning as a renewable energy source, on the initiative of the Clean Air Committee, over 25 international nature and forest protection organisations sent a letter to Wopke Hoekstra, Euro Commissioner for Climate.

Large-scale biomass burning accounts for over 40% (source: CBS) of the renewable energy in the Netherlands. Fenna Swart, Director of the Clean Air Committee (Comité Schone Lucht), reports that 50,000 hectares of forest is burned in incinerators in the Netherlands every year. “That will only increase now that Wopke Hoekstra has negotiated a tripling of the share of renewable energy at COP 28 climate conference in Dubai.” In doing so, he disregarded the call initiated by Swart’s organisation, stating that this was “not a topic for discussion”.

Swart can only explain this by the ‘well-organised lobby’ behind biomass. “It’s all about power and money, and meanwhile an unparalleled ecological scandal is taking place where nature and biodiversity are direct victims,” she argues.

Residual streams

According to Patricia Osseweijer, things are not that bad. She does not share the concerns about biomass burning. “In any case, it is good that the share of renewable energy is tripled: every drop or gram of fossil energy we can avoid is a win for the climate,” she says. “Biomass combustion is now covered under the current regulations of renewable alternatives, which allows the CO2 stored by trees and other crops to be harvested.” Of the current woody biomass burnt, 63% comes from the USA. “This consists of 96% residual streams from forestry and agriculture,” Osseweijer continues. “That percentage has grown considerably in recent years; it was 60% in 2020.”

Protected forest

This may sound good, but according to Swart the reality is very different. As early as 1997, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) stated that biomass burning may be effective in reducing CO2 emissions as long as there is sufficient replanting. But, the IPCC stated that this is not working in practice and it is hard to verify. Industrial-scale forest burning was nevertheless formalized because negotiators at the time still thought biomass burning would be at a small enough scale to achieve forest regrowth. Burning biomass was never intended to ship millions of tons of wood thousands of miles to be burned in another country.

Central to the discussion is the question of whether the current certificates that categorise biomass as sustainable are adequate. During the Kyoto negotiations in 1997, the EU argued that the certification system used was effective in ensuring the sustainability of biomass, and that wood pellets do not come from protected forests. Osseweijer agrees. According to available reports, power plants mostly use ‘residual wood’ pressed into pellets. Approved EU certification systems guarantee that the forestry is sustainable, in part on the basis of monitoring the mandatory reporting from the companies.

“In principle, wood from the USA meets these sustainability criteria,” Osseweijer says. “Systematic forest and clear-cutting is not profitable in the long run and is certainly not driven by the increasing demand for biomass for energy generation. After all, wood for building materials yields many times more.”

Conflict of interest

However, according to Swart, practice proves otherwise. “The wood that now fuels European biomass plants often comes from protected, natural forests in North Carolina,” she states. “Replanting is not mandatory in the USA, and compliance with any certification also appears to be ineffective, say several American NGOs, including the Dogwood Alliance.”

A certificate for imported biomass was developed in the Netherlands ten years ago and is now known as the European Sustainable Biomass Program (SBP) certificate. It is awarded through CertiQ. This is a subsidiary (in Dutch) of grid operator TenneT, a key player in the energy transition.

This means that biomass certification is controlled directly by the stakeholders, who sometimes lack a critical stance. In 2017, RWE (Essent) and electricity company Uniper received subsidies of EUR 2.67 billion and EUR 630 million respectively from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs to produce ‘green’ electricity from sustainably sourced biomass.

Disturbing conclusions

Because of the criticism of the SBP certificate, the British Biofuelwatch and the Clean Air Committee held up this label to critical scrutiny. This revealed that SPB allows wood extraction even when – as is the case in Estonia, Latvia and the southeastern USA – intensive logging has led to a decrease in CO2 uptake and storage, as well as forest biodiversity. In addition, the inspection of the sustainability criteria imposed by SBP is in the hands of the wood pellet producers themselves.

The American Enviva company, the world’s largest wood producer, also has the European SBP certificate and claims to be a leader in sustainable bioenergy from wood. It harvests forests in the southeastern USA and processes them into wood pellets at as many as 10 plants. In accordance with regulations, the company visited 150 of its forests in 2019 and even more of them in 2018. The auditors confirmed that all sites met the criteria.

Fraudulent

The consequences of the lack of proper monitoring of the origin of wood pellets turns out to be disastrous for forests and biodiversity. In 2022, a whistleblower told the BBC and Mongabay, an American science portal on conservation, that Envia’s green claims were fraudulent and that whole trees, regardless of their origin, were being shredded and pressed into pellets.

Heather Hillaker, attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a non-profit environmental organisation, confirmed the accusation that “Enviva’s wood pellet mills have caused great harm to small Southern communities”.

According to Dogwood Alliance and the Clean Air Committee, the United States has lost more than one million hectares of biodiverse forest as a result. This is on top of the 15 million hectares of natural forest that the organisations say has already disappeared over the past 60 years. During this period, 17 million hectares of industrial pine forests were added. “While the forests grew in quantity, which is systematically promoted by governments and energy companies, the natural value decreased dramatically,” Swart says.

While the use of biomass derived from waste streams can often be considered as sustainable, as Ossseweijer’s research shows, the current practices of large-scale biomass combustion in the EU usually are not. Osseweijer says that “Practices like those exposed by Dogwood Alliance and Clean Air Committee are bad for local people and ultimately bad for the planet. It’s important that these organisations are alert to these kinds of practices.”

Source: Delta.tudelft.nl

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

The post ‘Deforestation is actually being accelerated in the name of climate change’ appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

ENB # 199 Uncovering Antarctica: Inconsistencies in Climate Information – Are the sensors bad, or is the data being sensored?

Energy News Beat

Today on our podcast, we interview Frits Buningh, a Data analyst and overall cool cat. I really enjoyed my time on the podcast, and we had a great conversation about the global warming phenomenon. But what I did not expect was actually finding out how the narrative of global warming has been modified by manipulating data.

Frits has also joined the CO2 Coalition.  Gregory Wrightstone is the executive director, and I have had the good fortune of interviewing him twice.

Sit back, buckle up, and enjoy this discussion about data, and please follow and support Frits on his LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frits-buningh-6233832b/

Thank you, Frits, for your time, and let me know if you find any more sensors that are off and not the kind that try to shut down our social media. – Stu

Highlights of the Podcast

01:27 – Stuart congratulates Frits on joining CO2 coalition.

02:43 – Frits investigates Antarctica, trigger unspecified.

08:16 – Frits finds temperature data discrepancies.

13:12 – Frits creates website to share findings.

17:01 – Discussion on biases in temperature algorithms.

19:26 – Consequences of inaccurate temperature data.

23:23 – Frits discusses interactions with Professor Burkle.

27:47 – Emphasis on critical thinking and skepticism.

28:00 – Personal experiences challenging authority.

30:15 – Conversation on environmental activism.

32:30 – Frits shares personal connections to locations.

33:52 – Discussion on nuclear power and environmental impact.

39:51 – Conversation on data analysis methodologies.

ENB Podcast: https://energynewsbeat.co/industry-insights-2/

Take the Survey HERE: https://energynewsbeat.co/survey/

Other great resources from Sandstone and Energy News Beat

Real Estate Investor Pulse

1031 Exchange E-Book https://alternativeinvestments.sandstone-group.com/en-us/tax-benefits-sandstone-group-0-1-1-0

ENB Top News https://energynewsbeat.co/top-news/

ENB https://energynewsbeat.co/

Energy Dashboard https://app.sandstone-group.com/enb-dashboard-version-2

ENB Podcast https://energynewsbeat.co/industry-insights-2/

ENB Substack

https://[email protected]

Follow Stuart On LinkedIn and Twitter

– Get in Contact With The Show –

Stuart Turley [00:00:07] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name Stu Turley, president CEO of the sandstone Group. You know what’s kind of wild in this, day and age of data is that people are making numbers up and they’re throwing them out there. In the UK yesterday, they’re now saying that they have to change their net zero goals because they’re relying on data that was made up in just a matter of a couple days. Well, I’ll tell you what. So I’ve interviewed Gregory, right. Stone with the CO2 coalition, three times now. And I love the work that Gregory Wright Stone is out there doing. And they’re actually saying, is CO2 actually a pollution? How come the plants need it? Well, Fritz, reached out to me. Fritsch burning and he reached out and we are about to talk to Fritz about data in Antarctica and what is going on there. So buckle up, hang on, and just enjoy the conversation with Fritz.

Stuart Turley [00:01:13] Thank you, Fritz, for stopping by the podcast today.

Frits Buningh [00:01:16] You’re welcome. I’m looking forward to it.

Stuart Turley [00:01:19] Hey, congratulations on being, invited into the CO2 coalition. Well done.

Frits Buningh [00:01:27] Yeah, yeah, that was that was quite a surprise. I, I reached out to Doctor Hopper back in October. Kind of like a cold call or cold email, if you might call it. Because, I started working with an Australian scientist after, looking, finding out the data discrepancies on Labor Day and seeing a very cold, extremely cold Labor Day weekend and then seeing the Climate Change Institute making it much warmer. I saw an article by a doctor, Jennifer Hussey, in and in the. Australian magazine. She had interviewed Doctor Harper in October on his tour to Australia about CO2. He gave a lot of lectures there, so I thought maybe Doctor Harper needed to know what I had seen. And I went to his university and found his email, and I decided to just like, well, take a chance and see if he wants to read what I have to say. And he did. And he even responded, I was shocked. So that’s that’s how we got talking.

Stuart Turley [00:02:43] How cool is that? Now let’s tee this up a little bit. Yeah. You love data. It’s kind of weird, but you love to look at data and everything else. What triggered you to start looking in at the Antarctica and what started? You’re thinking. Wait a minute. Something’s not right.

Frits Buningh [00:03:07] Well, that’s a long story. I’ll try to make it shorter, but, you know, and June 15th, our United Nations secretary general gave a rousing speech about solidarity that kind of went down the wrong side of my, intellectual understanding of things. And I figured that 2023 was going to be the year of the climate crisis, whereas 1969 was the year of, the summer of love. Right. That’ll be the summer of the climate crisis. So I thought, well, you know, I worked in data for 35 years. Can I look at this from a data perspective and figure out if this is right or is this wrong? I mean, I don’t know. I watch TV, I watch CNN, Jake Tapper and stuff, and they tell me all these terrible things. I’m not really believing much of it, but I don’t really know, I can’t tell. But I have a background of 35 years of crunching data for the likes of Military Times from Ghana, and even I even worked for a couple of years in science. And, so I thought, well, I’m retired. You know, besides mowing the lawn and raking the leaves and taking out the garbage on time, what else do I do? Okay, I watch Barcelona and Manchester City on occasions, but that gets old too. So I decide to dig into the data. So that’s what I did. You know, I looked at, he in the North Atlantic Forest and. Yeah, yeah, it was there, but I thought it was a windy then. And then I decided then, I started looking at the climate change, and we analyzed a really great graph that they had. Okay. I have a tool there that you can download all their files. So on August the 9th I downloaded all the files, put it, put them next to each other in an Excel spreadsheet. Right. You know, they’re like 17,000 records for six files. From 1979 to 2023. That’s a lot of data. All right, kind of cleaning it up and analyzing it. And then I started looking at things and trying to look at it from an all things perspective. I went through a lot of audits in my time, both audits, BPA, ABC. They want to know from an advertising perspective, are you are you be asking them or, you know, real data about your your circulation because that’s what the advertisers pay money. They pay money for a thousand, you know, magazine drivers. So you gotta be kind of like on the ball and they will turn you inside out and upside down. They want to know how much paper you use, how much postage you did, how many deposits you made in the bank. Right. Really want to know everything. So I thought, well, let’s take the auditing angle and go look at what these know of people. And this Climate Change Institute from University of Maine people are really claiming. I kind of started adding it all up and something didn’t add up in the southern hemisphere. Okay then. Hemisphere of balance out. I could see that, you know, if you had the tropics, the midsection, the Arctic. Okay, maybe close enough. I can’t really make any case about anything, but look at the southern hemisphere and it didn’t match. I can’t apply the same logic in the southern hemisphere that I did in the Northern hemisphere. And the only way I could make the southern hemisphere balance out overall, including the world temperature. Because the room temperature is made up of the southern hemisphere, the northern hemisphere. Add them up divided by two. You get the rural temperature, not the southern hemisphere. Then everything else is, so the southern hemisphere was off, and the only way I could make it balance was to make an article way colder than they said that it was. And I thought, oh, wait a minute, but I know nothing about an Arctic. I thought Antarctica was as big as Texas. Really big. Like Texas big. And then I find out is bigger than the United States, Mexico, Ontario and Quebec combined. Whoa, wait a minute. What? Go take a look at it. That’s what. How? I got to look at it. Back in the fog. It’s mid-August. I started looking at it and and following, what was going on at the stage. I found there’s an Australian outpost on Antarctica, and it was way colder in mid-July than Jake Tapper wanted us to be.

Stuart Turley [00:08:19] Let me share. We were talking right before in that chart that you had, pointed out. Is that the one that you want me to bring up now? And you can count out.

Frits Buningh [00:08:27] That that one. That’s the member Labor Day chart that got me going.

Stuart Turley [00:08:34] Okay. So this is the chart. And what caught your eye as I’m looking at the chart or podcast listeners. We’re looking at, climate back.

Frits Buningh [00:08:46] In pictures and a little bit perspective. Okay. On August 27th, which shows over here to is -29 degrees. You know, the Climate Change Institute has this great tool on the analyzer that you can download, or you can look at specific stations or locations on Antarctica and they give you a ten day forecast. So the ten day forecast for the South Pole, Fuji dome, dome, Argus, Concordia, which is all high plateau. And I looked at all of them and I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is way, way cold. All of them are -70 for the Labor Day, and even some are over -17 for the Labor Day. So then I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if I created a model of like, 20 stations that are topographically and geographically dispersed throughout the continent, and see if I cannot come up with an average of what it should be like. And then when I plug, plugged in 20 stations and locations in Antarctica, I got to an average of -40, 41 degrees. Now you got to know that on the reanalyzed the website from the NOAA people, the number of people provides them the data. They are from the University of Maine. The absolute ultimate. All time cold. According to the Climate Change Institute, was August 10th of 2010 of -38.6 degrees. Right. Looking all of a sudden at -41. And I’m saying that three degrees colder than what the all time record is. How can this be? So that’s when I started following very closely at that point. And then on the 30th of August, I wrote the Climate Change Institute and email and told them, you’re going to break the record. Are you going to hold a press conference? Are you really and tell the national audience that we have a new record on Antarctica? Of course, I never did get an answer to that email. Oh, sure. What did happen? The very next day, he made a U-turn and started making Antarctica warmer, whereas the NOAA people had said it was going to get freaking colder. And it did go quick and go there. And I thought, all this data is from the U.S. automatic weather stations, one of Antarctica. This is all data that you can’t really challenge unless you want to tell the University of Wisconsin-Madison that they’re cheats, which I don’t think anybody wants to do. Right. So this data is pretty solid. So that you can whatever the climate change is. The third, what’s happening there is basically this proven by all of the purple and yellow. I mean, anybody who is half a green cannot look at this and say, this makes sense. Wow. So that’s where and but nobody knew about any of this. You didn’t see it in the media. You didn’t know who they were. So I went I took that data, I stuck it in an email, and I emailed it to ten, 15 people that I thought were climate realists. Right. Nothing happened. So after about ten days I was getting really frustrated. So I woke up in the middle of the night and I went to go, daddy.com. And I bought me a domain triple ETF, and the triple A is a little bit of a stab at science, where I work for the last two years of my career that didn’t go so well. And I wanted to call it the American Association and Art, the Daily Temperature Service or something like that. Because I loved because I knew that. And, and and so this is.

Stuart Turley [00:13:13] This is your site. I’m sharing my.

Frits Buningh [00:13:15] Phone. Yeah, that’s my website. Thank you. Pulling that up? Yeah. Lots of interesting stuff over there.

Stuart Turley [00:13:24] Oh. How fun. And so the website is, again, a d t.com.

Frits Buningh [00:13:31] I love it. I change the name a little. I make the name. You know, I can go many ways. I can call it the Antarctic over the Arctic. Average daily temperatures, servers or statistics or system or. I don’t really decide on exactly what I want to do with it. I put my two exposes on there. The one original, I suppose, and, you know, I eventually they buckled under for the climb here. Go back on the CFS exhibits. I think it’s put that up there. CFS that’s the NOAA model exhibit. by is over the Antarctic. Now, if the if if that model has a bias that mean all the temperature data from the last decades or two are all phony and right. Yeah, because that means the southern hemisphere is up. If the southern hemisphere is off, that means the world temperature is up. So none of these heat records are actually real because they are they even say themselves. It’s all estimates. So whatever they put up, it’s estimates based on last year’s estimates, which then estimates based on 20 years of estimates in the past. What do you got? You know, how many error factors do you have to calculate in? Yeah, but this statement to me, winter warm buys over portions of Antarctica. So are you going to call the New York Times and tell them we’re retracting? The July 6th is the hottest day of the of the Earth forever. And 120,000 years. Have they done that? No. That statement disappeared two days later and was replaced by regarding high global temperatures. Copernicus, US and NOAA are all in. We are all in agreement that it was hotter than ever. Now, Copernicus, they put this new model up. Error five and error five is two degrees colder than NOAA cfs, but they both end up declaring that July the 6th is hotter than ever. Now you can have two models that are two degrees apart and come to the same conclusion. Mathematically, that is beyond me, right? I don’t you know, I come from a one on one inch two kind of perspective. You know, I’m not a Ph.D. or a scientist, but, you know, I’m just a simple guy doing data and adding stuff up.

Stuart Turley [00:16:14] I love this. This is absolutely, well done, because I don’t understand, things that are not data oriented, you know, in the energy space, physics, data and finance matters.

Frits Buningh [00:16:31] And. But from an accounting. If you were to take a forensic accountant and have them look at this. Right. Go nuts. But, you know, of course, depending on their political vision of where they want the end result to come out. Right. But the data mathematically, none of this data and, you can’t make sense out of any of it. Wow.

Stuart Turley [00:17:01] So when you were going through this and just to clarify this, that you were really looking at the the hemisphere once one hemisphere numbers are off, the whole model is off that you were quite right.

Frits Buningh [00:17:15] Yeah. Because like on Antarctica, like the South Pole. And I’ve confronted them with this. They have they put up a South Pole forecast for ten days. Right. The climate change is two people do. But then Noah has a forecast for the airport. At the South Pole. Now, the airport forecast matches what the Madison University, Wisconsin. Data from the South Pole. They match. Those two are in agreement. And the South Pole from the Climate Change Institute is 8.8 to 14 degrees warmer than the other two. Now, if you are a pilot and you’re coming into landing and it’s -40 degrees, the other one says it’s -28 or -30. As a pilot, you may make some different decisions on how to position the flaps or the ice deicing whatever. That could be a life changing situation. So they are consistently 8.8, but 40 degrees warmer in the wintertime of Antarctica, which is our summer. June, July, August. Right. And then the interesting part is that now when we go towards the summer, that difference narrows. And by about December, the six. You can see that the model from the climate changes to my model are in total harmony. We agree 100%. Look. See, there are two. But then in the summer, they’re ten degrees off. How can that be? Is that a systematic? If there is a systematic bias? The the the difference between the two models should be consistent. I should be consistently off in Greece, but we are now so that.

Stuart Turley [00:19:27] The matic biases out in.

Frits Buningh [00:19:29] Algorithm. There are some under the hood algorithm that suppresses cold temperature. And you can see it if you look at the graphs, you can see consistently that when when the Arctic air throws the deep cold system, that the climate change Institute dips a little bit and then comes back up. They they smooth it out and you can see it in the data. I mean, I analyzed bird data very closely. Birds to a record of -45 in 2023. Right. No, it says no, no, no, no, it was only -38 with seven degrees off. And it doesn’t make sense, because when I went back and looked at 2001. No, and University of Madison, Wisconsin, the US and the NSF at Ohio State University and other place where they maintained data from Bird Station since 1957. They are the gold standard. They have all the data from 57 2022, and they’re all in agreement in 2001. The last year they were in agreement. Then after that, Noah begins to get warmer. Now the Madison University and Ohio State University are in total agreement. Every year since 2001, including 2021, 2018 was called 2015 was cold. And they’re in total agreement. But Noah getting warmer, warmer, warmer, warmer. Or maybe I should go the other way. Warmer. This way that. That’s. Substantially so. And by the time you get to 2023, they’re off by seven degrees. Now, that’s a lot. It is, of course, the the Arctic Square mileage is 7700, million, whatever. That’s about 4.5% of the Earth. Right. Arctic is the same 4.5%. So between the Arctic and Antarctic, we have 9%. So if you’re up by seven degrees. And in 4%. Yeah, that adds up. When you get to the world campus. And that’s when the things go haywire, because, you know, you’re making statements about world temperature, but the bottom block of your arithmetic is shaky, and it’s kind of like a house of cards. You pull that one out, then the rest crumbles. It’s like a pyramid, you know. You have the Antarctic. Here’s the Arctic here, the tropics, the midsection. Then you have the world temperature. You know, you build it up like a pyramid. Now, I have half of that pyramid on one side. Is is is is off. You know, the pyramid kind of starts to tilt.

Stuart Turley [00:22:48] There’s no way.

Frits Buningh [00:22:49] The temperature goes up.

Stuart Turley [00:22:52] You know what, Fritz? Here’s why. It’s despicable. And that’s because they’re printing money to get the renewable energy so that they can lower the carbon so they can lower the temperature. But they’re manipulating the temperature so that, you know, they’re forcing everybody to have higher energy expenses.

Frits Buningh [00:23:15] They don’t want to lower the temperature. They want to control your life.

Stuart Turley [00:23:20] Exactly. But you see where I’m going with this?

Frits Buningh [00:23:23] Is that that’s what they’re telling you, that that’s not there. They want you to believe that they’re one and that that’s what they want. They don’t care. They. They know just as well as you and I that they’re saying yes. Then that’s the only way they can get anything done. But if you confront them on this, I did. I went to Berg. Professor Burkle is the head of this analyzer project. He put it together right after. After the Labor Day. You know, I sent him an email and said your your data doesn’t make any sense. Your mathematics is way, way, way, way off. Right. And he actually responded to me and started giving me guidance and lectures about how great they were. And he gave me academic articles to read. So I went and read the academic articles, and then I went back to him and say, well, you say they say, you know, some of your stuff doesn’t make sense. Like we came in an article from 2010, which was the model upon which everything is based. No, no, you’ve got to realize that the article I looked at the publication date of the article was August 1st, 2010. Now. What I told you earlier is the record was August 10th of 2010. At 38 degrees minus. So you have a model that they published ten days before the record came out. Now, if they publish the article, that meant that they wrote all that years in the past. So I asked them, how can a model that doesn’t include an old time code predict an all time code when they don’t know that it’s going to happen? That model cannot predict that this is going to happen. So your model is bad. Wow. He didn’t like that. And then I told him. I tell you what, Shawn, you have your data. I build a model of training stations. I tell you what, that is 30. There’s ten more. There’s about 30 of them. You are the expert. You’ve probably been to Antarctica. You know everything about it. Here, 30 stations, you pick 20. And then we’re going to we’re going to do a parallel test. I pull all the data of the 20 that you pick because you are the expert. Right. And then we’re going to compare what I get for my 20 say or your 20 stations. We’re going to compare that to what you put on your graph every day. That’s when he goes for months. He didn’t want to talk to me. No more than that. I’m not talking to this guy. Maybe he looks eccentrically, a little old, maybe a little dementia along the way. Well, I’m not talking to him anymore. So about a month later, I went over his head and I went to the executive secretary of the University of Maine president. And I told him, you know, this is not a good look, you know. Right. Well, I’m not sure of your numbers. This is not how science is done. You’re looking weak. You’re looking disheveled. You can’t. You know how to take me seriously. And Jason Charland is the guy that was the assistant to the university president. He called, Shawn Burkle to task, and within five minutes, John Darko was back talking to me. Nice. We kept talking for another couple of months, and he kept making. You know, admissions of guilt, sort of, until the bias statement came out. And then somebody pulled the rug out from under him, and they replace that with July was the hottest ever. Since then, we all agree. Forget the bias thing. Yeah. We don’t want to tell the world that one.

Stuart Turley [00:27:39] Oh my goodness. You know, it’s funny how data can be changed to prove a point.

Frits Buningh [00:27:47] Yeah. And, they throw so much data, you have people just throw a blank. They don’t know what to do with it. You know that they trust that they’ve been told the truth.

Stuart Turley [00:28:00] Not. Yeah. Trust no one I think anymore without. And I think that with, people not trusting mainstream media without trusting, I don’t watch TV anymore. I just, despite I despise watching TV and I would rather listen to podcasts, talk to real people, talk to folks like yourself, and and really make my own mind that I am not a fan of, mainstream, propaganda.

Frits Buningh [00:28:33] So I bought I listen to Crosby, stills, Nash and Young. I don’t like their politics, but I love the new view. So one time we, I went to see, Crosby, stills, Nash, road trap, and I said I paid a lot of money. I got, I sent in the six row. Nice. And David Crosby started talking. I loved him, I loved all his music, just not as politics. I mean, he started talking about, you know, turning tanks into plowshares and stuff like that. And I was I was so tempted to get up and down and and shut up and play the music. I, I almost did, I think I got up and then I shut myself down. Was that, it was a beautiful summer’s day. Wolf. You don’t wanna know that. It’s there stage, is there? Music? Right home. Go there. You know, don’t do it. So I shut myself up. I sat down and I enjoyed the concert. And God bless David, he left us this year or last year of Covid. I’m sorry to see him go. I love that music. I just kind of. But the thing was back in the 70s and that’s where I’m from. We challenged authority at every level, right? They did that. That’s what they did with the Vietnam War. And we challenged authority at every level, and I still do. But the youth today, it’s kind of bowed down to authority as if they’re God’s right. And this is what’s no good to young people. I totally off the page, right.

Stuart Turley [00:30:15] Doctor Moore, doctor Patrick Moore, I, got the ability to interview him twice, and I, I always thought Greenpeace was just a bunch of lefties, a bunch of nuts. And he was the co-founder of Greenpeace. If they great. Isn’t that great?

Frits Buningh [00:30:35] I have a problem with that.

Stuart Turley [00:30:38] What’s that?

Frits Buningh [00:30:39] He used my image for the cover and he got me about it. Oh.

Stuart Turley [00:30:52] For our podcast listeners, we will have that big shot in numbers.

Frits Buningh [00:30:57] I could prove that in court. I rest my case, Your Honor.

Stuart Turley [00:31:03] After talking to Doctor Moore, the man was all about in, trying to save, the world from nuclear proliferation. He’s trying to save the Seals. He’s trying to save the whales. And I respect that. And I’m over here going. Well now, he was there in the first 15 years. The second after that. They have a whole left wing group that is not that is running Greenpeace, that when the wind farms offshore are now representing data that they’re killing, animals. The onshore wind farms are killing bats, eagles by the millions and migratory birds are coming.

Frits Buningh [00:31:51] The eagle thing is terrible.

Stuart Turley [00:31:53] It is terrible.

Frits Buningh [00:31:54] But they get wiped out.

Stuart Turley [00:31:57] And and and, we now have the second order impact of mosquito over populations of mosquitoes because all the bats are dying, and getting killed by them. Doctor Moore is a rock star. I love Doctor Moore. After he really, you know.

Frits Buningh [00:32:14] And I hero to I. You know what I love? What I love about it. And I don’t know if you can see the poster behind me, seeing that one.

Stuart Turley [00:32:26] Travel the world British Columbia. Yep.

Frits Buningh [00:32:30] I worked in the mines in Canada, up in Timmins, Ontario back in 1977 six 1976. I was a mining student back then. Nice. I worked underground in a copper mine up in ten minutes. And then after a year I went on and I went out west and I hitchhiked to British Columbia, and I ended up on Vancouver Island, right where Patrick Moore lived and grew up. And I did a seven day hike of the Pacific Coast Trail near to Chino. So whenever Patrick Moore, when I hear that story about where he grows up, I did absolutely wonderful because I spent that was a highlight of my year in Canada, hiking the seven day Pacific Coast Trail. Watch the whales offshore and the sea lions on the rocks and the eagles overhead. It was absolutely if I ever make it fabulously rich, which, of course, everybody hopes to write, I would live on Vancouver Island for sure. And maybe I’ll even ask Patrick where I should settle down.

Stuart Turley [00:33:42] I think we all are. That area may be the only place that survives a nuclear attack, is what he was thinking. I can’t talk.

Frits Buningh [00:33:52] More. You know, I think his is his reasoning. I heard his lecture. He said, when, you know, in 1989 or 1990, when the Berlin Wall came down, a lot of the intellectual elites didn’t have anywhere to go. What could they say? Their their their hero or their their experiment of socialism totally failed in this union and they didn’t have anywhere to go. So they infiltrated the environmental movement and turned it into what it is now. They have political organizations using environmental causes in a right gain political power. And that’s what Patrick Moore angle is about it. And I’m originally from Europe. I’m from the Netherlands, and I remember Germany, you know, and all the anti-nuclear protest. And. Right. I have to say, I turned down a job in a uranium mine in Ontario back in 1976 at Elliot Lake, because I read a lot of, you know, stories about dumping the tailings into the lake back in the 50s and 60s, which then influenced the health of the people there, which happened, and that happened. But I think we’ve come a long way since, and that stuff doesn’t happen anymore. And I think that nuclear power is the way to go for the future. All the wind and solar is basically a waste of time and energy, right? Hopefully a power combination. You know, even coal. I worked in a coal mine in Germany and, yeah, black lung disease. It’s. And. Yeah, I got some of that, too. You know, I mean, there’s a trade off for everything, you know, like like I worked in a copper mine, I think grad a pipe bomb in Sweden has a lot of copper, and he’s not throwing it out for all I know for sure. Right. These young people that are protesting, they’re all holding up the island pool of copper. Well, you know, I work there, and. Yeah, that was a brutal environment. Yep. A lot of dust. And yeah, it’s not that’s not pretty, but it’s a trade. You know, there’s trade offs for everything. We try to make the best, do it the best way you can. And I think the time we’ve gotten there, we’ve made a lot of improvements in mining and even, like the coal, the whole thing about, like, you know, when they talk about pollution. The carbon dioxide. That’s nonsense, because if an engine runs clean and has 100% carbon dioxide, it’s the carbon monoxide that kills you. It’s the sulfur dioxide that makes you cough. And it’s a particular matter that gives you asthma. And those are things that with scrubbers on the pipes, you can solve that problem. When I came into Sudbury in 1976, it was a ghastly moonscape type of environment. When you go today to suffering, it’s probably no longer like that. Probably right? Lots of green and lots of trees. We way past all those. So to grow that CO2 is somehow a problem. No no no. It’s also to it’s it’s the particulate matter. Right. Those things have been solved. And nuclear power. You know, we are much more careful with the way we’re mining it. But yeah, the way it’s processed, it delivers much better at a much better price. And it’s and it’s reliable. I mean, it is absolutely reliable. Oh, in the last 50, 60, 70 years where the wind farm, you have to replace it in 20 in there. And then where you put all the junk, they can take it down. Most people leave it up and it becomes some kind of a windmill from hell. You know, in the landscape. I yeah. So you land scape is messed up by all these.

Stuart Turley [00:38:16] Data matters and it ain’t 20. There’s not any of them that are going to last that long. And then, they become service. After eight years. You can’t. They don’t, sir. They are never carbon neutral.

Frits Buningh [00:38:36] Never be good. Yes. It takes a lot of carbon and a tremendous amount of concrete to put them up and make them stable, and then never catch fire. Then what do you do then? And then they kill the birds and egos. And, you know, I did a whole thing about the eagles. And, someday I’m going to put a thing about that on my website. The Biden administration put out a new directive about, you know. Licenses for what they call taking eagles and taking eagles means how many eagles can you kill, right? The license use to call 250,000 for killing five birds in five years, or something like that, right? The Biden administration said, well, we want to mitigate that. But mitigation really meant making it cheaper for the wind farms to kill the eagles. Yeah, well, they reduce the cost to 40,000 instead of a quarter of a million. And that was the mitigation. It wasn’t about killing last eagles. It was making it cheaper to kill the same amount of eagles. That is mitigation in government spending.

Stuart Turley [00:39:51] In our government has jailed people that have killed eagles because the eagles were killing their livestock. So, you know, it’s like depends on which in the eagle you’re on, whether you’re in jail or you’re like rewarded for killing them. And it’s despicable. Well I tell you what, we are going to have all of your show notes here and congratulations on your new membership into the C02 coalition. And we are going to make sure we get your story out there. What do you see coming around the corner? And you’re going to be watching to try to see what the next move is for the climate arguments. What do you see.

Frits Buningh [00:40:38] I’m doing is, you know, I’ve discovered this, this trend where I’m saying, okay, we’re off ten degrees in the summer, but in the in when it comes to December, we’re in the same. Right. Really? I reconstructing all of 2023. I’m going back to January and I’m adding all the month in and I have to pull all the data for 16 stations. So it’s a little time consuming. It’s not very sexy, but you know, it needs to be done. And then I that way I got a graph and I’m benchmarking 2023 basically. Right. And I said okay, what I see for a bird station in 2001, everybody was in agreement. There was no or nothing was off. So I’m going to work backwards from 1223 bi steps of five years. And then I want to see that because I’ve picked a new model of 16 stations where I know that I can go back and get all the data right. Data from the University of Madison, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, or the British Arctic System. Okay. World meteorology data that nobody can really dispute. So I don’t have to deal with that. And then I’m going to go back over time, five years at a step and to see what the regression is going to be, because I’m expecting to find that now we’re up ten degrees when it’s warmer, which is a suppression of cold, which I think is the whole gambit. And I think if once I get back to 2001 that that there won’t be any suppression of cold at that time, that, that’s it. So I think gradually over time that has been increased, increase the increase and they’re getting bolder and bolder and bolder and doing so. Wow. That’s what I’m looking at. It’s very time consuming. But you know, hey I’m retired.

Stuart Turley [00:42:51] But yeah like.

Frits Buningh [00:42:53] I said they only have so many games. And on Saturday and Sunday I can add five dimension to that. But still I got a lot of time left. So I’ll be, you know, I listen to, David Crosby’s. You know, if I can only remember my name, it’s my favorite album. I use that the crunch data very, very peaceful, you know, I get it done. And so maybe over time, I can come back and, you know what I’m finding.

Stuart Turley [00:43:25] Absolutely.

Frits Buningh [00:43:26] Interesting.

Stuart Turley [00:43:27] I’ll tell you what. We want to publish anything that we can. And also on your website, the again, it’s a a dietz.com I notice a donate button. So if anybody does want to donate to your, efforts to help speed you up, they can go there and do that, right?

Frits Buningh [00:43:47] I would be great. I would love to buy a new computer with more memory. You know, I have my Excel spreadsheet every now and then, praise the whole computer and I have to do the reboot, like what we did before the show, because my screen goes dark and, you know, so I reboot and I go have lunch and, and hopefully by the time I. The Excel spreadsheet will work again. And then there’s this little round, little blue thing that says, we’re working on it. We’re working on it. And I’ve got to know that thing very well. I look at it for about 2 to 3 hours a day. Yeah, it’s a little frustrating.

Stuart Turley [00:44:23] Okay. We got to get somebody to donate to you. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the podcast.

Frits Buningh [00:44:31] I enjoyed.

The post ENB # 199 Uncovering Antarctica: Inconsistencies in Climate Information – Are the sensors bad, or is the data being sensored? appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans

Energy News Beat

KEY POINTS

Automakers from Ford Motor and General Motors to Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans.
Though consumer demand for EVs hasn’t shown up in the way executives had expected, sales of the vehicles are still predicted to increase in the years to come.
A broad return to a more mixed offering of vehicles — with lineups of gas-powered vehicles alongside hybrids and fully electric options — assumes an all-electric future at a much slower pace, and it calls attention to ambitious EV targets set for the years ahead.

DETROIT — The buzz around electric vehicles is wearing off.

For years, the automotive industry has been in a state of EV euphoria. Automakers trotted out optimistic sales forecasts for electric models and announced ambitious targets for EV growth. Wall Street boosted valuations for legacy automakers and startup entrants alike, based in part on their visions for an EV future.

Now the hype is dwindling, and companies are again cheering consumer choice. Automakers from Ford Motor and General Motors to Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans.

Even U.S. EV leader Tesla, which is estimated to have accounted for 55% of EV sales in the country in 2023, is bracing for what “may be a notably lower” rate of growth, CEO Elon Musk said in late January.

The broad return to a more mixed offering of vehicles — with lineups of gas-powered vehicles alongside hybrids and fully-electric options — still assumes an all-electric future, eventually, but at a much slower pace of adoption than previously expected.

“What we saw in ’21 and ’22 was a temporary market spike where the demand for EVs really took off,” said Marin Gjaja, chief operating officer for Ford’s EV unit, during a recent interview with CNBC. “It’s still growing but not nearly at the rate we thought it might have in ’21, ’22.”

Ford is significantly increasing its production and sales of hybrid models, which can help ease the transition to electrified vehicles for drivers who may not be ready for fully electric models. They can also help companies meet tighter federal standards for carbon emissions.

GM, which was the first traditional automaker to go all in on EVs, plans to roll out plug-in hybrid electric vehicles for consumers alongside EVs and gas cars. Others, such as Hyundai Motor, Kia, Toyota Motor and, potentially, Volkswagen, plan to offer different levels of electrification across their lineups.

“I think the balanced approach is the best way,” VW of America CEO Pablo Di Si told CNBC last month, adding he is in discussions to bring hybrid vehicles to the U.S. The automaker currently sells hybrid vehicles in Europe, but none stateside.

A VW ID.BUZZ EV vehicle

“These technologies exist within the VW group, whether it’s hybrids or plug-in hybrids,” he said. “I think it’s just a matter of time until we bring it here.”

To be clear, although consumer demand for EVs hasn’t shown up in the way executives had expected, sales of the vehicles are still predicted to increase in the years to come.

U.S. EV sales were a record 1.2 million units last year, representing 7.6% of the overall national market, Cox Automotive estimates. That share is expected to increase to between 30% and 39% by the end of the decade, according to analyst forecasts.

“The market was never going to make a smooth transition to EVs, and we expected a slowdown in this shift as early adopters were satisfied,” said Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions. “Moving on to less tech-savvy buyers will slow the EV market share growth over the next few years.”

EV targets

As ESG investing — or investing geared toward environmental, social and governance principles — emerged in recent years and as Tesla rose from niche EV player to the most valued automaker by market cap globally in 2020, the automotive industry largely took note and began plotting its path forward in EVs.

Automakers wanted to emulate Tesla’s success, with some promising to exclusively offer EVs in the not-too-distant future.

Among those targets: Stellantis-owned Alfa Romeo said its vehicle lineup would be all-electric by 2027. Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo said the same but by 2030. GM said it would offer only electric consumer vehicles by 2035, with its brands Buick and Cadillac aiming to exclusively offer EVs five years sooner. Honda Motor set its target to exclusively sell EVs and fuel-cell-powered vehicles in North America by 2040. Other, more specialized brands such as Lotus and Bentley have also announced EV-exclusive targets.

While none of those automakers has officially announced changes to its long-term goals, there’s been a notable shift in tone and messaging around their goals. Companies are monitoring consumer adoption, global emissions regulations and EV charging infrastructure to determine future plans, officials have said.

Since first adopting an all-electric deadline, of sorts, in January 2021, GM CEO Mary Barra and other executives have more recently said customer demand will steer its efforts. They maintain that the 2035 goal remains its guiding plan. Cadillac now says it will offer a full lineup of EVs, but not necessarily end production of all gas-powered models by 2030.

“We have the best of both worlds right now,” Cadillac Vice President John Roth said last month during an interview. “We’ll see where it heads here in the future, but we are still committed to offering a full EV portfolio by the end of the decade.”

Ford, for its part, has never stated plans to exclusively offer EVs globally, but it did set targets to be all-electric in Europe by 2030, for 50% of its sales in North America to be electric by that same year and to achieve an 8% EV profit margin by 2026. It has since backed off many targets and is cranking out hybrids — specifically trucks — along with EVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles for the U.S.

“We’ve always had a freedom-of-choice kind of approach,” Gjaja said. “Some of that was to protect ourselves against going too far in one direction, because the market right now, as we’ve seen, is very uncertain.”

Ford Motor Co., CEO Jim Farley gives the thumbs up sign before announcing Ford Motor will partner with Chinese-based, Amperex Technology, to build an all-electric vehicle battery plant in Marshall, Michigan, during a press conference in Romulus, Michigan February 13, 2023.

CEO Oliver Blume during Porsche’s annual media event Tuesday said the German sports carmaker is “in a flexible position” regarding its vehicle manufacturing. He said the company is monitoring EV adoption and regulations but still has a goal of EVs making up 80% of its global sales by 2030.

“We have to keep tabs on it … although the ramp-up is slower than planned last year, we are always in a position to respond flexibly,” he said, adding the company will “have to see in 2026 and 2027” regarding its plans to significantly reduce spending on gas-powered vehicles.

The widespread shift in sentiment brings more automakers closer to the ethos of Toyota. Led by Chairman and former CEO Akio Toyoda, the world’s top-selling automaker has argued for years that a diversified lineup was the right strategy to meet all customer needs and reach its goal of being carbon-neutral by 2050.

The Japanese automaker is now expected to reap the benefits of its strategy, which includes hybrids, plug-in hybrids, EVs and hydrogen fuel cells.

“Toyota is almost completely absent from the [battery electric vehicle] market yet will gain more U.S. market share than any other car company this year. Let that sink in,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in an investor note last week. “EVs may be ‘the future’ but are struggling in the present. Hybrid sales are growing 5x faster than EVs in the US.”

What happened?

After significant interest from early EV adopters — bolstered by low interest rates and Tesla’s rise — interest rates skyrocketed, raw materials costs surged and the vehicles became much more expensive compared with their traditional counterparts.

It’s also become clear that the automotive industry and the Biden administration, which set its own target for half of new U.S. vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, overestimated the willingness of consumers to adopt a new technology without a reliable and prevalent charging infrastructure.

U.S. President Joe Biden gestures after driving a Hummer EV during a tour at the General Motors ‘Factory ZERO’ electric vehicle assembly plant in Detroit, Michigan, November 17, 2021.

The adoption curve of EVs rapidly went through first adopters and some “EV curious” consumers, but has been a tougher sell with mainstream buyers.

“The expectations for EV growth in the U.S. market have shifted from ‘rosy to reality’ as sales increase, but customer acceptance of EVs isn’t keeping pace,” Cox Automotive said in its 2024 forecast report.

The available inventory of EVs in the U.S., measured in days’ supply, has ballooned to 136 days, according to Cox. That compares to the overall U.S. industry at a 78 days’ supply of new vehicles. The data excludes Tesla, Rivian and other automakers that sell directly to consumers rather than through franchised dealers.

“A few years ago, there were wildly ambitious ideas of how EV sales would go and it seemed like nobody was thinking about bumps in this road,” said Michelle Krebs, an executive analyst at Cox. “Now they’re here, and so reality has set in.”

The slower adoption of EVs has led to price cuts or discounts on several models such as the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Tesla Model Y and, most recently, the Nissan Ariya.

Trisha Jung, senior director of Nissan U.S. EV strategy and transformation, said the cuts of up to $6,000 will “improve the model’s competitiveness and ensure we are delivering maximum value to our customers.”

What’s next?

Industry strategy with regard to EVs may shift even more drastically in the months ahead, depending on political pressures, including the finalization of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fuel economy and emissions standards.

A driving force behind the rollout of EVs by traditional automakers, particularly the so-called Detroit Three, was the need to meet federal vehicle emissions and fuel economy requirements to avoid costly penalties.

Proposals currently under review by the Biden administration to hike fuel economy standards through 2032 could cost automakers more than $14 billion in fines based on the fuel efficiencies of their current fleets, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents the largest automakers operating in the U.S.

Cars make their way in traffic on a Los Angeles freeway on January 25, 2024.

A separate letter to federal regulators last year by the American Automotive Policy Council estimated such regulations would cost GM $6.5 billion in fines and Jeep parent Stellantis $3 billion. The council, which represents the Detroit automakers, said Ford’s penalties would total about $1 billion.

Shifting strategy comes with its own costs: Automakers that invested heavily in EV infrastructure and have since changed course could face write-downs or higher capital needs to shore up different production lines. But without consumer sales, they’re left with little option.

It’s unclear how much hybrids and plug-in hybrids would help automakers to meet the potential regulations, given the standards were crafted with a fast EV adoption in mind. But the automakers’ product mix will need to satisfy federal guidelines to remain a viable path forward.

Automakers’ fuel economies are based on a fleetwide mix of vehicles sold. The better fuel economy and fewer emissions a vehicle produces, the better it is for the automaker’s overall score.

“It all depends on what the final regulation looks like,” said Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council.

Blunt said the trade group hopes the Biden administration listens to the industry’s concerns and “understands that a part of transitioning to electric vehicles is having a reasonable fuel economy regulation in place.”

Biden is reportedly expected to dial back certain targets amid the slower-than-expected pace of EV adoption, which was a major piece of his plans to combat climate change.

Looming in the distance, too, is the U.S. presidential election in November. If former President Donald Trump is reelected, he’s expected to scale back or remove the fuel economy mandates, as he did during his first term in office.

A reversal of those standards come January could pave the way for an even longer era of gas-powered and hybrid models.

Automakers operating in Europe face stricter governmental EV regulations, which currently aim to ban sales of traditional, fossil-fuel vehicles by 2035. However, changes have already been made to the regulations and conservative groups such as the European People’s Party have called for dropping the ban.

Source: Cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

The post EV euphoria is dead. Automakers are scaling back or delaying their electric vehicle plans appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Oil Steady as EIA Confirms Crude, Gasoline Draws

Energy News Beat

The Energy Information Administration reported an estimated inventory draw of 1.5 million barrels for the week to March 8. Gasoline stocks also declined while middle distillates inched up.

The figures compared with a crude oil inventory build of 1.4 million barrels for the previous week, with substantial declines in both gasoline and middle distillates for that week.

A day before the EIA released its report, the American Petroleum Institute reported inventory draws across both crude and fuels, pushing oil prices higher on Tuesday. Benchmarks continued higher on Wednesday.

In gasoline, the EIA estimated an inventory draw of 5.7 million barrels for the week to March 8, which compared with a decline of some 4 million barrels for the previous week.

Gasoline production last week averaged 9.9 million barrels daily, which compared with 9.6 million barrels daily for the previous week.

In middle distillates, the EIA reported an inventory increase of 900,000 barrels for the week to March 8, with production averaging 4.6 million bpd.

These changes compared with an inventory draw of 4.1 million barrels and production averaging 4.3 million barrels daily for the previous week.

A day before it released its weekly oil inventory report, the EIA revised its U.S. oil production outlook in its Short-Term Energy Outlook, now expecting stronger growth than earlier. The EIA now expects production to add 260,000 bpd this year, for a total of 13.19 million barrels daily. That’s up from a modest 170,000 bpd growth projection earlier.

This should have been bearish for prices, but the EIA also said in its STEO that it saw OPEC production remain constrained while demand strengthened, which would lead to a tighter market beginning as soon as the second quarter of the year.

Following this report—and the API’s inventory estimate—oil futures were around 2% higher on the day, boosted additionally by expectations of rate cuts by the Fed come summer. These expectations are not based on signals from Fed officials who remain cautious about any rate-cutting commitments especially as inflation ticked higher in February.

Source: Oilprice.com

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

 

The post Oil Steady as EIA Confirms Crude, Gasoline Draws appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Exploding Energy Prices in California

Energy News Beat

“California leaders know that rising prices are a huge problem. The state is now considering a plan to tie utility rates to personal income so that the rich pay more and low-income residents pay less. Costly California looms as an example of poor energy policy.”

Energy prices are skyrocketing in California. The state’s electricity, gasoline, and natural gas prices are amongst the nation’s highest and rising. Green energy policies are the primary cause for high and escalating California energy prices.

Electricity

California electricity prices increased by 98.2 percent over the last 15 years, the highest rise in the nation. No other state comes close in terms of price increases. US average electricity prices rose 30.6 percent over the same period. California power prices rose to a level that is the second highest in the nation, only lower than Hawaii. In contrast, prices in Texas have actually declined since 2008 due to a focus on retail competition and a sharp decrease in natural gas prices, more than offsetting wind and solar additions. [1]

California is the epicenter of green energy in the United States. The state established the first renewable portfolio standard in 2002, mandating that 20 percent of electricity be from renewable sources by 2017. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger instituted a 33 percent renewable requirement by 2020. In 2018, Governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order mandating 100 percent zero-carbon electricity by 2045.

The transition from traditional power plants to renewables has been a top priority for California for the last 20 years. By the start of 2023, California’s grid contained more than 6 gigawatts(GW) of wind, 17.5 GW of utility-scale solar, and 14 GW of residential rooftop solar.

Over the last two decades, the state retired 11 coal-fired power plants and converted three other coal plants to burn biomass fuel. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station closed in 2013, and the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the state’s last nuclear plant, has been scheduled for closure.

In 2022, natural gas provided 42 percent of California’s in-state electricity generation, with other sources providing: solar (27%), nuclear (8%), hydroelectric (8%), wind (7%), geothermal (6%), and biomass (2%). The state imports about one-fifth of its electricity from surrounding states.

Solar and wind generators are more expensive than traditional coal, gas, and nuclear generators. Wind and solar occupy huge amounts of land, perform poorly during winter months, and suffer from intermittent output.

Vaclav Smil’s book Power Density points out that wind and solar systems use about 100 times the land area of traditional generators to produce the same electricity output. Renewable facilities also tend to be far from population centers, requiring expensive buildouts of transmission systems. Land and transmission costs boost the price of electricity from these generators.

The intermittency of wind and solar generation has the largest cost impact. Cloudy days and nights eliminate solar output and windless days idle wind turbines. Winter solar output drops to about half the available summer output. About 90 percent of traditional coal or natural gas generators must be maintained as backup for intermittent wind and solar systems, boosting power prices.

Batteries

California leads the US in deployment of grid-scale batteries. The plan is to use batteries to store electricity when wind and solar generation is high and then release the stored power back to the grid when wind and solar output is low. Wind and solar plus battery systems are being deployed as a low-carbon alternative to coal and gas power plants.

But the use of grid-scale batteries to backup renewable generators multiplies the cost of electricity. Utility-scale solar systems cost about $1 million per megawatt (MW) of rated capacity. Grid-scale batteries with four hours of discharge duration cost about $1.5 million per megawatt of capacity. These batteries can back up solar for only about four hours.

To replace a gas-fired power plant, a battery system would need to back up a solar installation for one or more days. A battery that can back up a $1 million one-megawatt solar facility for a single day would cost about $9 million. Grid-scale batteries only have a 12-year lifetime, about one-half of the solar lifetime. Adding batteries to backup solar for a single day boosts the total capital cost by more than a factor of ten.

Gasoline

February 29 found California regular gasoline prices at $4.74 per gallon, the highest in the nation. California drivers pay 40 percent more than the national average. The state has its own blend of gasoline, and claims that the blend will emit fewer greenhouse gases when burned. Higher gasoline taxes and a shortage of local refineries also factor into the high prices.

Natural Gas

California also consistently ranks in the top 10 in natural gas prices. Prices are high because the state has long discouraged local production, importing more than 90 percent of its gas from other states. There is a also a shortage of gas storage facilities.

Green energy policies affect not only electricity and fuel prices, but also housing utility and construction costs. Many regulations aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. The California Air Resources Board passed a regulation outlawing new residential gas heaters by 2030. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities have voted to ban gas appliances in new construction. Only electric heat pumps, water heaters, and stoves may be used. These measures further boost the cost of energy for homeowners.

Housing Costs

Housing prices are rising because of green energy mandates. The 2020 California Solar Mandate requires newly constructed homes to have solar panels and wiring for electric appliances. The California Building Standards Commission enacted standards that require electrical conduit for level two EV charging in single-family homes and parking facilities with EV chargers for multi-family homes and hotels. These additional requirements make the cost of housing less affordable for low-income residents.

Conclusion

Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric, the big California utilities, have all asked for 2024 rate increases, in part needed to bury hundreds of miles of transmission lines to reduce the threat of forest fires. Residents already pay $300-500 per month for energy. There seems to be no end in sight to rising California energy prices.

California leaders know that rising prices are a huge problem. The state is now considering a plan to tie utility rates to personal income so that the rich pay more and low-income residents pay less.

But affordable energy is clearly not as important as efforts to try to stop global warming. Costly California looms as an example of poor energy policy.

—————–

[1] Storm Uri (February 2021) rate spikes of $10 billion or more have been paid by floating bonds and/or are in legal limbo, which would make Texas’s electricity rates higher than recorded.

Source: Masterresource.org

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

 

The post Exploding Energy Prices in California appeared first on Energy News Beat.

 

Shell Plans to Cut 20% of Jobs in Its M&A Unit

Energy News Beat

The ongoing job cuts at Shell are extending to the team handling mergers and acquisitions for the supermajor as the oil and gas giant is looking to eliminate around 20% of several hundred positions in the M&A unit, unnamed sources familiar with the plans have told Bloomberg.

Shell has been saying for months that it is pursuing a leaner organization and aims to make larger cost savings by reducing headcount.

In 2022, Shell employed more than 90,000 people.

After job cuts in the low-carbon energy division, Shell has expanded the reductions to other teams and now it’s the turn of the deals team, according to Bloomberg’s sources.

Staff in the team, who are estimated at several hundred employees, have been told to expect a significant number of positions to be eliminated, with details to be communicated in April, the sources told the newswire.

Last year, Shell said it plans to cut 15% of the 1,300 jobs in its Low Carbon Solutions business as it scales back some green energy ambitions and focuses on profitable projects including in the oil and gas sector.

In December 2023, the oil major announced internally a broader plan for job cuts in other departments, too.

Early this year, Shell began hundreds of layoffs, sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg in January, as the supermajor looks to create more value through simplification and discipline.

Positions in the low-carbon business will be the first to be eliminated, followed by additional job cuts in the corporate affairs division and project and technology departments, according to Bloomberg’s sources.

“Shell aims to create more value with less emissions by focusing on performance, discipline and simplification,” a spokesperson for the supermajor told Bloomberg.

“Achieving those reductions will require portfolio high grading, new efficiencies and a leaner overall organization,” the spokesperson added.

Source: Oilprice.com

Take the Survey at https://survey.energynewsbeat.com/

1031 Exchange E-Book

ENB Top News 
ENB
Energy Dashboard
ENB Podcast
ENB Substack

The post Shell Plans to Cut 20% of Jobs in Its M&A Unit appeared first on Energy News Beat.