Nataliya, partner since 2008 (Toronto, ON)
This week in charts
Canadian population
Energy consumption
Opinion: LNG is a hat trick for Canada
Natural gas is the most energy dense by mass of the entire fossil fuel group and generates the lowest emissions when ignited, it’s at the top of the fossil fuel evolutionary ladder if you like. For the record, a molecule of methane has three times the embedded energy as a molecule of hydrogen. In general, from an energy sourcing prospective, we should be migrating towards denser, lower cost, lower emission energy sources. Natural gas most certainly releases carbon when burned, it’s not perfect, but that’s actually the case with all the current components of the world’s energy stack. Whether it’s renewables, nuclear or fossil fuels, each energy source has both positive and negative attributes, be it carbon emissions, cost challenges per unit of energy, or ultimate waste disposal.
The foundation of our modern civilization has been built upon abundant and inexpensive energy. The world’s energy stack continues to ‘transform’ between sources in an effort to systematically improve efficiency, economics, and emission profile to provide energy for our planet’s growing population. Part of that transformation is a rapidly growing ‘transition’ to natural gas envisaged for the next several decades. No matter which forecast or outlook you use, natural gas consumption is growing materially, to as much as 35 to 40 per cent of the entire energy stack within 10 years. So the world is most certainly not transitioning off natural gas, it’s just the opposite.
Canada is currently the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the world, and we are blessed with amongst the largest gas reserves on the planet. We have a well-established gas industry with an extensive natural gas processing and country-wide transportation infrastructure already built and in place. Another advantage is that we have relatively low-cost reserves to develop, the main gas resource plays aren’t particularly deep, and they tend to drill and complete quickly and easily. Although the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin has been producing for almost 100 years, our prime natural gas resource plays, the Alberta Deep Basin and the BC/AB Montney, are actually very early in producing life, and much earlier than their US counterparts to the south. The Montney, for example, has only produced 22 TCF of an estimated 645 TCF of ultimate recoverable gas reserve (current production from the Montney is approximately 5.7 TCF per year). We’re in the top of the first inning and pitching to the first batter, to use a baseball analogy to depict the remaining Montney reserve life. A 4 bcf/day LNG project, the potential size of LNG Canada, is estimated to create up to 20,000 jobs and $9-12 billion in annual export income to the Canadian economy.
And this is a true net reduction for the world. The atmosphere has no borders so replacing coal with gas in China or India is a true 60 MT/year reduction for the world. The second key consideration is that our Canadian gas industry produces on average the world’s lowest-emission natural gas, and our leading clean-tech industry is allowing us to get cleaner, faster than anyone else. The gas is going to be supplied to the countries that demand it; China, India and now Europe, whether Canadian methane molecules show up or not. The global atmosphere is a net loser in that case as the gas will be sourced from producing jurisdictions with a higher emission profile.
The final goal in our hat trick is scored by the opportunity to improve First Nation prosperity. The majority of First Nations in Western Canada are very supportive of oil and gas development as it’s seen as an opportunity for long-term, high-quality employment and a sustained higher standard of living. Be it Indigenous-owned service companies, a growing reclamation business sector, direct employment with producers, or equity investment in pipeline projects; the First Nations’ economic opportunities are myriad if we become a major global LNG player. We need to ensure this opportunity is not lost.
Top Biden Adviser Says US Won’t Rush to Fill Petroleum Reserve
“We’ve seen a decline in oil prices, we’re seeing some crunch there,” [Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security Amos] Hochstein said. “We should take a deep breath and wait and see how this crisis right now impacts the oil and gas industry, production and what the profile is. So far prices have come down. We’re watching it very closely, we’ll continue to watch it over the next several days.”
The SPR, which was designed to shield the country from supply disruptions, is currently at 371.6 million barrels, the lowest since the 1980s, after the historic release of 180 million barrels last year to tame gasoline prices in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
The administration previously laid out a plan to refill the reserve at prices close to $70 a barrel. WTI futures tumbled to almost $66 in New York on Wednesday.
Russia’s Oil Trade Is Starting to Show Signs of Clogging Up
Even after the world’s main oil forecasting agency said output could fall by 30%, exports from the OPEC+ producer have so far been resilient as the sanctions, along with price caps on Russian oil, were intended to keep the flow going. However, cargoes are now starting take longer in finding homes.
As well as having implications for Moscow — proceeds from taxes on oil industry accounted for over two thirds of energy tax revenue in February — the development may alarm US officials, who’ve long argued that the Russian oil needs to flow freely to avoid a surge in fuel prices.
Ships filled with refined fuels are floating off the coasts of Europe, Africa and Latin America, potentially ratcheting up waiting fees. Some vessels hauling the OPEC+ producer’s crude oil are bouncing between ports without discharging, while others are unloading and being stashed at unusual locations.
It all points to a network of logistics that is struggling to keep pace with servicing a country that exports over 7 million barrels a day of crude oil and products. A vast swath of that trade has shifted from Europe to new and less-familiar customers, often thousands of miles further away.
“Although crude oil cargoes are finding new homes in China and India, products are facing increasing difficulties to be placed,” said Tamas Varga, an analyst at brokerage PVM.
Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not.
Mining bitcoin does not involve actually digging anything out of the ground—unless you count the fossil fuel that often powers it. The process involves using heavy-duty computers to grind through trillions of calculations, solving equations to create virtual coins. The method is known as “proof of work.” Once upon a time, bitcoin mining was something that people did if they had a couple of spare computers they wanted to put to work. Over time, it’s taken more and more computing power to unlock a single coin; now most mining is done in large-scale operations using purpose-built mining rigs.
And it is America’s problem now. After China clamped down on crypto mining in 2021, such computing work increased in the United States. Miners set up shop in communities with low energy prices. And owners of unprofitable power-generation infrastructure, such as waste-coal-burning power plants, opened up crypto-mining operations to create another revenue stream. These companies have put a lot of money into their hardware and their physical space, and they will continue mining until they are actively losing money. “There are miners that have been quoted saying, ‘As long as the price is over $10,000 per coin, it still can generate money,’” Elizabeth Moran, a policy advocate at the green law firm Earthjustice, told me. And that is a big reason crypto keeps spewing out so many emissions even during the “crypto winter”: Bitcoin prices in particular have held up, in fact they just passed $28,000 a coin. That’s still far below their peak of almost $68,000 in late 2021, but represents a bit of a comeback from the sub-$16,000 prices of last fall.
So it is still very possible to make money at this game. Some companies bypass the energy grid entirely; depending on the price of gas and the price of bitcoin, turning natural gas into crypto might be twice as profitable as selling it to the wholesale gas market. Gas companies bring in a trailer or three jam-packed with generators, plugging one end into the well and the other into “shipping containers full of bitcoin miners,” says Rob Altenburg, the senior director for energy and climate at PennFuture, an environmental nonprofit. “We’ve heard of three different companies doing it. But we’ve got thousands of fracked gas wells across the state and just simply have no way of knowing where this is happening.” Gas drilling is heavily regulated, but crypto mining itself is not.
A recent federal investigation in Colorado found crypto mining powered by gas wells on public-lease lands, creaming energy off before it hit the grid and converting it to crypto without paying any royalties. The report noted that because the generators and rigs are usually on trailers, the entire operation can be moved quickly, so miners can stay ahead of government oil and gas inspectors. Other “behind-the-meter” operations are physically located at power plants. The natural-gas-fired Greenidge Generation Station, on the shores of Seneca Lake in upstate New York, opened a massive bitcoin-mining operation plugged right into the plant, which in 2021 consumed the bulk of the electricity it produced. Tapping into energy before it hits the grid is just one way bitcoin miners keep costs down; they’ll seek out and exploit any cheap source of energy.
Lots of other digital activities do consume power and cause greenhouse-gas emissions—questing with pals, hoarding years of work emails on the cloud, making friends with a hallucinating AI. One analysis in 2019 suggested that our online lives were responsible for 3.7 percent of planet-wide emissions; the number may have gone up since. Schneps likened bitcoin’s global electricity consumption to “roughly the same as video games.” But even if that’s true, while two-thirds of Americans play video games, just 21 percent of Americans own crypto, and even less bitcoin in particular. The massive environmental impact of bitcoin is harder to swallow because it is part of an industry that is, in essence, “smoke and mirrors,” as the crypto blogger James Block put it in an interview with Charlie Warzel. “There’s nothing produced by these companies.”
This week’s fun finds
St. Patrick’s Day moai
Although we couldn’t find an Irish place that would cater, Luke ordered some deli sandwiches and the obligatory Guinness for the big day. Lucky us!
Why Are All Action Heroes Named Jack, James, or John?
The first step was to define my data set. Since there exists no one official pantheon of action heroes, I started by turning to the first port of call for many researchers: Wikipedia. According to its list of action movies, 2,206 modern movies had been released in the genre, beginning in 1962 with Dr. No, the first movie to star James Bond. From these movies, I narrowed down the list to include only Hollywood productions and movies centered on a male everyman–type hero. The trope is well known: A lone man facing seemingly unbeatable odds conquers any foe put in his way—be it his government, a terrorist cell, or a natural disaster. Gone from the list were movies that featured ensemble casts or were about buddy cops or female heroes. (This last category didn’t take long to remove.) If it was not immediately clear whether the movie was built around a single man of action, I dug deeper, consulting trailers, plot summaries, and other marketing materials to make an informed decision. (This also led me to watch some great action movies I’d never heard of, like 2002’s Extreme Ops.) After going through all 2,206 action movies, I was left with 790 movies featuring an everyman-type lead.
Out of those 790 movies, 542 featured single male antagonists. I added up all the names together, expecting to see a few popular villainous names emerge, but this was not what the data showed. The most frequent fiendish name in the data was Victor, seen in only 10 movies. Villains had names beginning with J only 7 percent of the time.
Jennifer Moss, from BabyNames.com, told me over email, “When I sit down to watch a new show and hear that the protagonist is named Jack, I think ‘Isn’t that over, yet?’ ” Going back to the data, I wanted to see how the trend has changed over time and whether we are seeing an end to it. From the data dating back to 1962, J-named action stars overtake all other names a few times, in the early 1970s, for a moment in 1984, and last in 2002. It’s already been more than two decades since the J’s reigned supreme.
