With the sudden decision by U.S. President Joe Biden on July 21 to suspend his re-election campaign, we have seen the Democrat Party coalesce very quickly around Vice President Kamala Harris (Fig. 1) as their replacement candidate. And now that she appears to be the likely nominee when the Democrats come out of their convention in Chicago next month (if not sooner), it is time to go back and look at Ms. Harris’ stands on a variety of issues, including energy.
Let us not forget that the Vice President was an early adopter of the Green New Deal and has been one of its most ardent adherents. During her first run as a presidential candidate in 2019, Ms. Harris issued her "Climate Plan for the People," a $10-trillion spending spree designed to "achieve a clean economy by 2045."
At the time, her campaign website explained that the plan would jump-start the growth of electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines and spend heavily on battery storage, climate-attuned agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and other technologies that would “build our carbon-free future."
Her goal was to achieve "100 percent carbon-neutral electricity" and zero-emission "buses, heavy-duty vehicles, and vehicle fleets." Let us also not forget that a year later, in 2020, Harris showed her anti-oil-and-gas colors by telling a CNN climate change forum that she opposed fracing and offshore oil and gas drilling.
The great Houston power outage. But going back to electricity, the Vice President obviously has never experienced a power loss of the magnitude experienced by the Houston area on July 8, as Hurricane Beryl roared through, with the city on the “dirty” side of the storm. The dirty side of a hurricane is the east side, replete with stronger winds and heavier rainfall.
Beryl hit the Texas coast on the morning of July 8 as a Category 1 storm, near the eastern tip of Matagorda Bay. The eye proceeded to travel north, going over the towns of Richmond and Katy, Texas, to the southwest and west of Houston, respectively. Sustained winds were 80+ mph, with maximum gusts of 97 mph. It was the first direct hit on the Houston area since 1983, and as the storm passed through, a maximum of 2.6 million homes, businesses and schools lost electrical power.
During a Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) hearing on July 25, the region’s primary power generator and distributor, Centerpoint Energy, said that it had to contend with removing or trimming 35,000+ trees, walking and repairing 8,500+ circuit miles, and replacing 3,500+ power poles. In that process, Centerpoint said that during the first 48 hours after the hurricane hit the coast, it restored power to 1.0 million accounts, Fig. 2. But that’s less than half of the total outages, and then the pace slowed a bit. A full week after the storm struck, nearly 300,000 accounts were still without power, and many of those went nine and ten days before being restored.
Centerpoint noted in the PUC hearing that after the hurricane, it mobilized 2,000+ of its own restoration workers, along with 13,000+ mutual aide workers from other parts of Texas and other states. The firm said it had 22 staging sites to direct crews to hard-hit areas and had dispatched 28 emergency generators. However, there were reports that Centerpoint had been slow to request enough mutual aid workers and that the firm had been told/advised to stage a significant number of power crew trucks closer to Corpus Christi. The latter item seemed odd, given that the weather forecasters for a week before the storm hit had talked up the possibility that a break in a high-pressure ridge would open up a path for Beryl to travel farther north, away from Brownsville and Corpus Christi, and hit the central or upper Texas coast. Yet, Centerpoint, Houston city officials, and Harris County officials seemed to be caught off guard.
Curious as to who might have given Centerpoint and local officials less-than-stellar advice, I did some checking. It certainly wasn’t the National Hurricane Center (NHC). This editor actually spoke with NHC Director, Dr. Michael Brennan (Fig. 3), who quickly told me that “the Weather Service doesn't provide those types of decision support services to utilities or private companies in terms of any information that they might have gotten about where to stage assets or anything like that.” He added, “we provide the big picture forecast of the storm, a track with an intensity inside the storm, and go out five days in advance. So, certainly that information is available to everybody.”
Dr. Brennan also admitted that “our (NHC’s) track forecast errors go up about 30 or 40 miles per day. By the time you get out to day 4 or 5, we're talking 120 to 150, maybe 160 miles is our average error.” Indeed, from a week out, when Beryl was still thought to threaten Brownsville, if you multiply each day by 40 mi, and all the movement was to the right (northwestward or northward), you get 280 mi. And compare this to the air distance between Houston and Brownsville, which is 296 mi.
Seth Christensen, Chief of Media Communications and Preparedness at the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), said his agency doesn’t provide staging guidance, either. “I can't speak to any conversations that a private company, Centerpoint, had with the National Hurricane Center or anybody else,” stressed Christensen. “But I can tell you that at the state level, we started tracking this storm as it came off the coast of Africa. And we're watching it very closely for multiple weeks. But we have a variety of sources that we use, not only the National Hurricane Center and the local National Weather Service offices and their forecasts. We also have our own internal meteorologists that we utilize, and we also have private companies that we contract. We just went ahead and prepared for everything from Beaumont to Brownsville.” He said that items they staged initially in South Texas, and then moved closer to Houston include things like high-profile vehicles, standby generators, bottled water, ice and food.
As for FEMA, Jacklyn Rothenberg, Director, Public Affairs and Planning, said her agency “would not be in communication with Centerpoint. And evacuation decisions are made at the local level.” She said that FEMA supports citizens and first responders to ensure that everyone works together to build, sustain and improve capabilities to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards/natural disasters.
For its part, Centerpoint directed me to their prepared comments and presentation at the PUC hearing, which I did watch. At that hearing, PUC commissioners seemed to expect Centerpoint to implement a number of “fixes,” including a strengthening of the power grid infrastructure. At the end of the day, I never did get an answer to the original question, “who told Centerpoint that they should stage more resources toward South Texas?” The answer seems to be nobody.
Tying back to Vice President Harris, I mention all of these details and comments for a reason—if a city like Houston can’t handle a Category 1 hurricane without being brought to its knees by power outages, what would happen in a similar situation, if more of her policy ideas were adopted? What if a much higher proportion of cars, trucks and buses were electrified? What if many other functions were suddenly electrified, not to mention growing demands from A.I. data centers? Just imagine the paralysis that would occur from a similar storm. And perish the thought that a higher category hurricane would hit Houston or another city head-on. It’s a scary scenario.
Guyana and Namibia lead continued wave of deepwater projects. Recent announcements and trends in Guyana and Namibia should give everyone in the industry optimism about the future of deepwater development. On July 16, Bloomberg reported that ExxonMobil is planning a potential 30-well drilling campaign for its seventh oil and gas project offshore Guyana, named Hammerhead. The project aims to start production in 2029, boosting Guyana's oil production capacity to over 1.4 MMbpd, Fig. 4.
Exxon, along with partners Hess Corp and China's CNOOC, expects Hammerhead to produce between 120,000 and 180,000 bopd, which is less than the 250,000 bopd from its largest vessels offshore Guyana. The project will include an FPSO capable of storing 1.4 MMboe to 2 MMboe. This unit will be located 9 mi southwest of Exxon's Liza Destiny vessel. Hammerhead was discovered in August 2018 and is ExxonMobil’s ninth oil discovery in the prolific Stabroek Block.
Meanwhile, offshore Namibia, it’s still early days, and none of the discoveries in its waters have yet been declared commercially viable. But TotalEnergies intends to approve its first development at Venus field later this year, and CEO Patrick Pouyanne has said the country could, one day, enjoy a boom like the one underway in Guyana. The French firm, along with Shell and Portugal’s Galp Energia, has made a series of discoveries (oil and some gas) about 180 mi offshore Namibia during the past two years. Since the start of 2022, multiple wells drilled have hit oil and/or gas around 80% of the time—an almost unprecedented success rate. News services reported that among 17 pure exploration wells drilled since February 2022, there have been 15 confirmed discoveries of commercial quantities of oil or gas. Needless to say, a surprisingly high success rate could spur more activity offshore Namibia.
U.S. voters prefer fracing. On July 18, the highly respected U.S. polling firm, Rasmussen Reports, released poll results entitled, “‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’: 63% of Battleground State Voters Want More Fossil Fuels.” Rasmussen said that despite concerns about climate change, increased domestic oil and gas production is favored by a majority of U.S. voters in key “battleground” states in this year’s presidential election.
A telephone and online survey by Rasmussen and the Heartland Institute finds that 63% of “Likely Voters” in six battleground states would support a law that reduces gasoline and energy prices by dramatically increasing oil and gas drilling in the U.S., including 44% who would “Strongly Support” such a law. Only 29% would oppose a law to boost U.S. oil and gas drilling.
Support for increased domestic fossil fuel production remains high, even though 51% of battleground-state voters believe the Earth is experiencing “a dangerous level of climate change.” Thirty-six percent (36%) don’t think climate change is at a dangerous level, and 13% are not sure.
“The majority of likely voters from battleground states want to see a dramatic increase in domestic oil and gas production in order to fix the energy crisis,” said Linnea Lueken, a Heartland Institute research fellow. “It's notable that even among Democrats, who are the group most concerned about climate change, 44% say they strongly or somewhat support increasing drilling.”
The survey of 5,605 Likely Voters in six battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) was conducted on July 5-12, 2024, by Rasmussen and the Heartland Institute. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Nearly half (48%) of battleground state voters say they wouldn’t be willing to pay any additional tax money to battle climate change. Twenty percent (20%) would be willing to pay $50 a month in extra taxes to fight climate change, while 12% would be willing to pay $100 monthly, three percent (3%) would pay an extra $500 a month in taxes to battle climate change and four percent (4%) would be willing to pay even more. Fourteen percent (14%) are not sure.
Two thoughts on this poll: 1) If the results are truly representative of voters across the U.S., V.P. Harris has a big problem with her views on energy; and 2) You really have to wonder about the 3% of people surveyed, who said they would pay an extra $500/month in taxes to battle climate change and the 4%, who said they would be willing to pay even more. Who has that kind of spare change for taxes? WO
IN THIS ISSUE
Special focus: Permian Basin Technology. Our lead theme this month includes three features. In one article, a Halliburton author discusses what it takes, in terms of technology and techniques, to drill in West Texas today. For one West Texas operator, the combination of advanced nanoparticle-based additives and digital technology delivered cost savings and predictable results. In a second feature, a Rotork expert explains electric actuation in the Permian basin, which is termed one of the biggest methane emitters in the world. As producers come under pressure to cut emissions to tackle global warming, electric actuation can slash emissions, while making processes more efficient. Finally, two co-founders of PropX and a senior engineer with NSI Technologies detail frac sand’s incredible journey. Frac sand and proppant supply have evolved massively over the past decade and are still changing rapidly, with new ideas and new techniques.
Production technology/Sustainability: Reducing methane emissions in upstream oil and gas. In this article, Emerson’s vice president for oil and gas says that by leveraging a robust mitigation strategy of optimized maintenance and process control—enabled by instrumentation insight—the industry is able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously increasing production. This is an example of allowing sustainability to support the bottom line.
Regional report—Guyana and Suriname: Rapid expansion of production continues. Contributing Editor Gordon Feller details how, during the past 12 months, Guyana and Suriname have started to become a fulcrum of energy development in the Americas. While they are both found in the same region, these two countries still have different oil and gas stories to tell. Major production growth is imminent in Guyana, while Suriname is still a few years away from first oil but with significant future potential from recent discoveries.
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