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April 6, 2020
Comment Letter to the Railroad Commission of Texas
To the Railroad Commission of Texas: Re: Motion for Commission Called Hearing on the Verified Complaint of Pioneer Natural Resources U.S.A. Inc. and Parsley Energy Inc. to Determine Reasonable Market Demand for Oil in the State of Texas Dear Commissioners: My name is Benjamin Zycher; I am the senior economic and policy staff member for…
March 30, 2020
Oil-market Central Planning: Not Just for Socialists Anymore
Hard times indeed are hard, and that adjective is wholly inadequate to describe the double whammy now afflicting U.S. crude-oil producers: declining demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the large increase in overseas production attendant upon the flood-the-market tug-of-war between the Russians and the Saudis. As a result, the domestic price of crude oil (West…
March 23, 2020
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the Fallacies of “Embargo” Thinking: Does the Private Sector Stockpile Too Little Oil?
President Donald Trump announced a few days ago that the US Department of Energy (DoE) will purchase “large quantities of crude oil” to be stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), created under authority of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, enacted in the wake of the 1973–74 oil “embargo” imposed by the Arab members of the…
February 19, 2020
The FERC Minimum Price Order and Federalism
In the Beltway, no inefficient policy deed goes unrewarded. That is an eternal truth illustrated well by the expansion of federal powers—at the expense of state and local authority—attendant upon efforts to ameliorate the adverse effects of prior policies to favor one set of energy technologies over others. The latest example of this dynamic is a recent order from…
December 20, 2019
ExxonMobil and the Politicization of Law Enforcement in New York
The New York Supreme Court announced its landmark decision earlier this month in the first climate change-related securities lawsuit—“People of the State of New York v. Exxon Mobil Corporation”—to be tried to a verdict in the U.S. On December 10, Justice Barry Ostrager ruled that the New York Attorney General had failed, even under a…
December 3, 2019
Another Round of Energy Pork
Christmas is upon us, and the elves are busy in the North Pole suburb of Capitol Hill. The House has produced a draft piece of “green energy” legislation that would yield massive costs, massive economic distortions and massive environmental damage. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-California, justifies his “Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now (GREEN) Act,” as…
November 13, 2019
The Long and Winding Saudi Aramco Initial Public Offering Road
The initial public offering (IPO) for up to 5 percent of the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Aramco) has been delayed several times recently, ostensibly due to a seeming difference of opinion about the value of Aramco between the House of Saud ($2 trillion) and the larger investment market (substantially less than that). The IPO will…
November 11, 2019
Massachusetts’ Lawsuit Against ExxonMobil Brings New Meaning to Silly
Attorneys General are supposed to enforce the rule of law. They are not supposed to use lawsuits to achieve policy outcomes not enacted by the legislature. They are not supposed to pick targets that are politically unpopular and then try to find some hammer with which to attack them. They are not supposed to transform…
October 12, 2019
The Trouble with ‘renewable’ Energy
“Renewable” electricity — predominantly wind and solar power — is all the rage, described by numerous commentators, politicians, pundits, journalists, and other such “experts” as cost-competitive, clean, and a major part of the solution to the “existential crisis” now purportedly looming large as an attendant effect of anthropogenic climate change. A massive expansion of wind…
April 30, 2019
Nigeria and the US: A Tale of Two Energy Economies
When last we visited the topic of Nigerian energy markets and happenings, the reason that Nigeria simultaneously is energy-rich and energy-poor was illustrated by the ongoing tug of war between the Nigerian government and Process and Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID). This was over a prior agreement for P&ID to build a state-of-the-art natural gas processing plant along…