DR Congo Sues Apple

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

Michael Tanner: [00:00:10] What’s going on, everybody? Welcome into the Thursday, December 19th, 2024, edition of the Daily Energy News. Beat Stand Up. Here are today’s top headlines. First up, D.O.E. finally releases LNG Exports study. We’ve been talking about this one for a while. Next up, Russia continued to ship oil directly to the EU despite sanctions, according to an investigation. Next up, Scottish renewables want interconnector reform. Move over to Africa, D.R.. Democratic Republic of Congo sues Apple over, quote, blood minerals. This one spicy. And then finally, oil washes up along Black Sea coastline following triple tanker casualties. My goodness. This one is not good. Stuart then torturing me. I will quickly cover what happened in the oil and gas markets, mainly covering two things, crude oil stocks and what was just announced. We actually record this on Wednesday afternoon. The rate cut drop by the Fed reserve. We will cover all that and a bag of chips. Guys, as always, I am Michael Tanner, joined by Stuart Turley. Where do you want to begin? [00:01:15][65.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:01:16] Hey, Michael, let’s start with our buddies over there. The DOE. Holy smokes, Batman. Change can’t come fast enough. My goodness. The Biden administration said in January it would pause pending decisions on export of LNG to non FTA countries until the Doe can update underlying analysis for authorizations. Michael Then they buried this and then they lied about it. You can you imagine the government lying to us? I don’t. [00:01:44][28.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:01:44] Know. I wouldn’t expect them to tell the truth 100% of the time. Yeah, I was shocked. [00:01:49][4.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:01:49] The DOE has authorized 48,000,000,000 cubic feet per day or a natural gas export or nearly half of the current domestic production. Another 12 b, c F per day is under construction and expected to double or present volumes by 2030. I’ll tell you what, this story is an absolute disgrace of how bad the Harris Biden Department of Energy was. How can a president make commitments when President Biden stood up and said, we will sell you all the LNG you want, right it. So if President Trump has got the right team of Doug Burgum, Lee Zeldin and Chris Wright, in order to reduce our costs and impact on the environment, that’s the team that’s going to do it and this kind of crap, we’d better not have come out of the Chris Wright Department of Energy. [00:02:45][55.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:02:45] Well, we know it won’t. And we know there’s a lot of it. You can or you’re on releasing this report mainly because they are using this report as a way to pause LNG facilities. Seems like that won’t be the case going forward. I am personally long LNG export facilities, but again, we don’t give financial advice here. We only give opinions. So let’s move to next one. What’s going on in Russia? [00:03:05][19.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:03:06] Let’s go to Russia. Russia continues to ship oil directly in the EU despite sanctions investigation finds. Finally, some investigative journalism going on here. I’m going to butcher her name and I apologize. You have one ski provider from the U.P. has announced Russian oil companies continue. Oil continues to flow into the EU despite sanctions with shipments under the flags of Liberia and Panama reaching the ports of Romania and Bulgaria, both EU and Nato members, they even list the ships out, Michael, and said this is the first time we’ve seen oil being transferred to the EU, not with the shadow fleet tankers registered in onshore locations. I thought this one was a big one. [00:03:54][47.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:03:54] Yeah, no, very, very interesting. I mean, you know, the EU is going to find a way to get their energy one way or the other. They’re not just going to go go cold. That’s what UK and especially how Northern Europe is. So of course they’re going to figure it out. I love how the report, you know, this comes out of the Financial Times great outlet by the way, Love Me, the Financial Times. But yeah. [00:04:15][21.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:04:16] Oil finds away. [00:04:17][0.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:04:17] Oil will always find a way. And you know, I’m surprised it took this long for this type of stuff to come out. To be honest. [00:04:24][7.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:04:25] I think we’re seeing a big change. And let’s go to Scotland. Michael, what do you think in energy security means to you? The lights go on. [00:04:33][8.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:04:34] Yes. Okay. When I want them to cost, that doesn’t break the bank. [00:04:39][5.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:04:40] Well, that does not that means interconnects between countries is bad. Now, Scottish renewable want interconnector reform. You know why? Because they’re not getting paid enough to keep their windfarms off. That’s funny. However, the UK government review of electricity market arrangements there was and has a horrible name to it, has focused on locational pricing rather than exploring reforms with a national framework. The Scottish. US Renewables proposes a broader strategy for interconnects, including closer collaboration with international partners. This is just a wealth scheme as all it is. [00:05:20][40.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:05:21] It really is. And you know, unfortunately they’re doing everything they can to raise the cost of energy to attempt to save. The reason why your energy is so high is because we’re not using renewables that are using it as a way to force people to renewables. The funny part is when you switch to renewables, your costs will also still go up. So it’s this just vicious vortex that they’re going to get themselves in. [00:05:43][22.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:05:44] It’s a vicious beating and all be it’s like beating a rented mule or everyone will be beaten until the the morale improves. Whichever T-shirt that is, we’re going to have that as a T-shirt bent. Beat your rented mule until the morale improves. There you go. [00:06:00][16.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:00] That definitely. [00:06:00][0.2]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:01] Don’t go. Yeah. [00:06:02][1.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:03] Let’s move to Congo. [00:06:03][0.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:04] D.R. Congo Sues Apple over Blood Minerals. This is really disgusting when you sit back and take a look at the energy transition is failing and critical minerals. Michael, you you being a School of mines alumni, a two time alumni and a very smart cat. This is an amazing story. When you sit back and think, well, you’re not a cat. [00:06:28][23.7]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:28] I would say I’m a cat. Maybe not a smart cat, but I’ll we’ll let that one slide. [00:06:32][3.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:32] Okay. In a press release, the legal team claim that the tech company manufactures its gadgets with tin, thallium, tungsten. Plagued from the DRC and laundered through international supply chains. No. Say it isn’t so. They they accused Apple of being deceptive in commercial practices. No way. No way. Rumors that supply chains are clean. They’re not. They’re dirty. They’re blood, blood, minerals. I love it. We recognize the situation in the region is challenging. We’ve increased our support to organizations that will do vital work in helping these communities, said Apples, according to Reuters. Here’s the thing. Do you know how much minerals are in the United States? [00:07:15][42.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:07:16] There’s a decent amount. Not that much, but there is a decent amount. [00:07:19][3.2]

Stuart Turley: [00:07:19] There is. And we could get what we could get here and not have to rely on a large chunk of blood, diamond blood, a mineral. If we had proper permitting, I would rather. Michael, let me ask this question. The United States exploration and production produces the cleanest oil and gas on the planet. Is that a fair statement? [00:07:40][20.7]

Michael Tanner: [00:07:40] It’s 100% true. [00:07:41][0.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:07:41] And would the same apply to the same thing? We would not have children being abused in mines in U.S.. [00:07:48][6.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:07:49] Absolutely. But it comes back to the point. It’s more expensive to mine minerals here. So a company like Apple says, Yo, I want the cheapest possible mineral, so I’m going to go find it to where I’m going to look the other way and say, I know. [00:08:06][17.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:08:07] They’re going to do a chainsaw show. [00:08:08][1.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:08:09] But yeah, but it’s not my fault. And this is where this is a this is a much, a, much longer, you know, soapbox that I could go off. But this is there are very few cases to where capitalism and the incentives of capitalism break down. And this, you could argue, is one of those is one of those sets. It’s why always it’s one reason why outsourcing has become the move for all of these companies, because in the United States, we have capitalism, but we have controlled capitalism. There are rules. There are things you can’t do. There are things you can do. There are child labor laws. There are securities laws. There are an immense amount of regulations that if you abide by those regulations and we can argue about whether or not big corporations have to abide by them, whether small ones, we can have that other argument. But by and large, it’s what I would call controlled capitalism. But you go over to the Congo, they ain’t no control. All it takes is a couple hundred thousand dollars slipped underneath some minister’s door. And guess what? I see nothing. [00:09:10][61.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:09:11] Napster. Yeah. [00:09:12][0.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:09:13] Companies take advantage of the unfettered capitalism and unfettered access. Outsource the problem to a third party so that when it comes around to say, well, we were just buying our minerals from Congolese mines. Okay, well, who’s at fault? Congo. The Congolese mineral companies or the people that buy the minerals? It’s kind of like the drug dealer. Who’s who? Who’s in charge? Who’s really at fault? The individual street drug dealer or the cartel? In this case, the cartels. [00:09:41][28.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:09:41] Apple, Right. Or are you saying that we are for buying Apple phones out now? [00:09:46][4.7]

Michael Tanner: [00:09:47] Now you’re back to an extremely, extremely touchy subject. You know, everybody else is but me. My my. Not my iPhone. [00:09:54][7.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:09:55] Not my iPhone. I want to buy I want to make sure that when Eli comes out with his phone, we’re moving our company to Elan phone and we’re moving. [00:10:03][7.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:10:03] Over to X Mail when he rolls out. [00:10:04][1.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:10:05] Absolutely, baby. I’m all in on that. But when we. You sit back and let’s take a look at the last one here. Oil washes up on Black Sea coastline following a triple tanker casualty. This is a side effect, Michael, of the unintended consequences or the second order consequences of sanctioning these rest buckets that you get at. You need a tetanus shot for looking at these things are dangerous. And they they sank three of them in a storm. And we have all these tankers that need to be just scrapped and they’re being used 20 years past their life expectancy because of a horrific sanctioning policy. [00:10:51][45.7]

Michael Tanner: [00:10:51] Yeah. This comes back to what we were talking about in the earlier segment. The United States produces some of the cleanest and most energy efficient oil and gas. You want to outsource this just like Apple outsources their mineral production to Congo. You start we get so reliant, you become reliant on countries that don’t give a hoot about the environment. [00:11:11][20.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:11:12] No. And in fact, you see a poor victimized bird there sitting on the shore and it looks like a loan. [00:11:19][6.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:11:19] It does. It does it. Poor loon. I wish it was a whale, but it’s okay. We’ll say. You know, I you know, I’d be all fine with that. But I kid I kid for a long time listeners the show me and whales we go we have beef going back years now but it just again around the world they take the environment and they take these type of standards out way less than we do. Way less. So it is. Let’s go ahead and jump over to finance. Stu, before we do that, let’s go ahead and just pay the bills real quick. As always, the news and quote unquote analysis you just heard is brought to you by the world’s greatest website. www.energynewsbeat.com Stu in the team, do a tremendous job making sure that website stays up to speed. Everything you need to know to be the tip of the spear when it comes to the energy and the oil and gas business. Go ahead and hit that description below. All links to the timestamps, links to the articles and do subscribe to our substack. Thank you as always to our premium subscribers. If you are a premium subscriber, we do give you a shout out at the end of the show. So if you want to get your name added to that list, go to our substack. Sign up for a premium subscription. Basically, that gives you access to our historical database of all articles that we’ve run on Substack. If you are a free member, you only get access for about two weeks and then we turn it down. Be careful because we might increase that to only a day or two. So please thank you for everybody for supporting us. Great Christmas gift. If you want to gift substack subscriptions to your family members and keep them on the good fight of energy. Happily do that. That’s the energy news. Beat that substack.com. We’re coming up on the end of the year folks. If you have a tax problem, please invest in oil dot energy news beat.com. It’s the best way to save on taxes. Become Billy Bob Thornton from land man. Diversify your portfolio and really achieve a steady dividend as as or a steady distributor as pumped out by oil and gas. We love oil and gas. We put our money where our mouth is in terms of trying to offload our tax deduction. I just like I’m sitting here, I got to drop this. I’ve got to drop one of our checks off in the mail at some point this week anyway. So we love legitimately, we love mailbox money, but it’s also a great way to reduce your taxes. Invest in oil.energynewsbeat.com. If you have a tax drop, we will hit you up and get you all the information. But Stu, let’s just jump over here. Let’s go ahead and look at the top line indices before we dive into oil and gas. S&P 500 has actually dropped tremendously. The Fed, just to kind of tell everybody what has happened up front, the Fed, about ten minutes before we recorded this, announce that they are actually only dropping the Fed funds rate by a quarter percentage point and have signaled they’re slowing down rate cuts, which is why you’ve actually seen in the last 15 minutes the markets really fall. They were actually up slightly on the day, but now down about half a percentage point. Nasdaq down even worse, about 8/10 of a percentage point. Two and ten year yields have spiked 1.4 and 1.1 percentage points. Dollar index up 0.6%. A Bitcoin down two percentage point, still above $104,000. Crude oil was somewhat up for the day. We’re actually up above 7056. In light of the rate cut or the slowing down of the potential future rate cuts, it’s always interesting on that from that standpoint, we’re still at $77.10, still up about 6/10 of a percentage point. Brant oil’s actually down 5/10 of a percentage point or half a percentage point. Natural gas up about 1.8 percentage points, $3.37. And our XO contract, which are EMP future oriented exploration companies, aggregate was up about or down about 0.9 percentage points, mainly off the mainly what rose prices in the morning was EIA coming out with crude oil and their crude oil inventory report this producer if we can throw that image up there you know what we do see here is commercial crude oil storage, excluding the SPR, actually dropped by about 900,000 barrels relative to. What people were expecting. Now, obviously, what’s sort of pulled back, the the gains from that has been that the rate cut, while it did get cut a quarter of a percentage point, that was the expectation. And what we are seeing now in light of that rollback is that they may slow it down a little bit. Quote unquote, if you read our good friends at Reuters. A cautious approach to loosening their monetary policy next year. This is Alex Hodes. He said this in a note While the market is at 25 basis points cut baked in, investors will look for what the forward thinking from the Fed is and how aggressive they will be in 2025. And they signaled they will not be terribly aggressive in 2025. So that’s where a lot of this stuff ends up. And that’s really all I got to it’s a little bit you know, it’s coming up on Christmas here. Everyone’s kind of slow. There was a small little 2500 BOE per day Brigham exploration deal that they did dump into some non-op a little too small for us to really dive into. But I think things are kind of getting, you know, things are slowing down for Christmas kind of on the bigger deal stuff. And I expect things are January to kick up with earnings. You got anything else for us? [00:16:11][291.8]

Stuart Turley: [00:16:11] I know I just had a fantastic interview with Representative Spartz from the Indiana’s fifth District. She’s a class act and quite honestly, a true I’m going to call her a national hero because she was calling this spending spree that Congress is going on right now. A total She had a few good words for her. [00:16:31][19.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:16:31] Now they want to raise Congress’s salary. [00:16:33][2.2]

Stuart Turley: [00:16:34] This is just disgusting. I am so disgusted with this. And I have about ten more senators and congressmen that I’m interviewing and lining up. And this is just disgusting that we’ve even come to this. And I am now trying to confirm one other rumor. Michael, are you ready? Another Chinese spy balloon is in the air right now. And I’m trying to I’ve got a tracker on it. This is just nuts. I don’t know if it’s real or not, but you can’t buy this kind of entertainment. I did not have that on my bingo card today. [00:17:06][32.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:17:07] No, but we don’t have much on our bingo cards. All right, guys. Jack, we will let you get out of here as always. You’ll. You’ll. What do we have on tap for tomorrow, at least? [00:17:18][11.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:17:19] Probably Representative Spratt. And then I have George McMillan after that. [00:17:22][3.4]

Michael Tanner: [00:17:22] Right. So we’ve got two, and that will probably come out Saturday. You also hear the weekly recap dropping on Saturday. We’ll take Sunday off, be back in the chair Monday. What’s our plan for Christmas? What are we thinking? [00:17:33][10.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:17:34] I haven’t got that far yet, dude, I’m trying to survive. [00:17:37][3.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:17:38] No, we’re day to day. Well, probably should a show Monday. Tuesday will probably take Wednesday, Thursday off, be back and we’ll probably just shoot a show Monday, Tuesday, take the week off. Will probably be back Monday. Take you know you know it’s weird with Christmas on a Wednesday New Year’s then falls on a Wednesday as well so. [00:17:55][17.6]

Stuart Turley: [00:17:56] The markets. [00:17:56][0.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:17:57] May be a little bit choppy. We’ve got a lot in the bank. What we’ll probably do is get a yearly recap put together or a monthly recap, some top highlights from the show put together from the team and run those a few times. So we appreciate everybody. Thank you all. Seriously, if this is the last time you listen for the rest of the year, we appreciate every one of our listeners tuning in to this show. And your support in 2024 has been great and we’re looking forward to out to a heck of a 2025. So. All right, guys. With that, we will let you get out of here, get back to work. Start your Thursday. As always, thank you for checking us out here on the world’s greatest podcast for Stuart Turley. I’m Michael Tanner will see you on Saturday. [00:17:57][0.0][1041.6]