Recent Articles
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Learning from California As It Becomes An Orphan Petrostate

In California, the oil majors are walking away from their asset retirement obligations (aka cleanup obligations). This is a long-employed strategy by the fossil fuel extraction industry that allows them to take all of the profits and then leave the public with the liabilities. What this means is that the public already effectively owns the liabilities of the oil industry in America. The public chipped in $4.7 billion for abandoned well cleanup in 2022. It’s just the beginning. The industry knows this but is planning on the public not realizing it for another couple of decades. At which point, the profits will be gone and the industry will be free to move on.

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New Satellites Alone Won’t Stop the Methane Climate Crisis

In March, a SpaceX rocket launched MethaneSat, a joint U.S.-New Zealand endeavor, which joined a satellite network already detecting methane emissions from oil and gas production on Earth. The new satellite circles the Earth 15 times a day, detecting releases of the greenhouse gas from drilling sites and pipelines worldwide.

However, on the ground in the oilfields of Texas, we see that the promise of this technology will fall short of the rapid reductions of methane emissions needed to slow climate change.

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Oil Industry Methane Pollution Is Business as Usual, Not Accidental

The oil industry is once again winning the messaging war to mislead the public about the true nature of its business. Methane is getting significant media attention these days due to the launch of a new methane-detecting satellite and new U.S. methane regulations that may require some companies to pay fines for large methane emissions. However, almost all of the media coverage is making the mistake of talking about methane “leaks” or “fugitive emissions” being the main problem, when that is far from the truth.

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U.S. Oil Industry Peaks as “the days of easy oil are over”

In October, shortly after Exxon and Chevron announced over $100 billion in combined acquisitions, oilfield services company Halliburton’s CEO Jeff Miller warned about the reality of producing oil in the U.S. shale industry.
“The reality is you have to do more work in order to stay flat.”This is an acknowledgement of the dreaded Red Queen effect for shale oil production. This is the situation where you have to do more just to keep production flat (aka running faster just to stay in place) because fracked shale oil wells decline much faster than conventional oil wells. This isn’t a new concept. Reuters reported on it in 2013 saying, “Shale production has been likened to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen Race, in which more and more new wells will need to be drilled just to offset rapidly declining output from existing holes.”

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Touring Ground Zero of the Methane Emergency

March 12 – Flying into Midland, Texas on my quest to see the source of the Permian’s high methane emissions, I was greeted by familiar images. As the plane descends into Midland, you see endless shale oil wells in grid formation across the Texas desert. I’ve used similar images for my articles over the years but it was the first time seeing it in person. The only thing that surprised me was the amount of waste water pits. The only standing water in this part of the Texas desert is toxic oil field wastewater. It’s everywhere. They are creating so much toxic wastewater producing oil in the Permian that they have nowhere to put it. I first wrote about this issue in 2018 and it continues to be a big problem for the fracking industry. And the “solutions” they have, like injecting the toxic water back into the ground, definitely have consequences.

Mentions in the Media

One analyst I spoke to, Justin Mikulka, who is now director of communications for NGO Oilfield Witness, commented: “This sounds like an interesting approach in Wales, but I’d bet that there are better ways to store the energy than using hydrogen and fuel cells, unless they have so much excess wind energy they just need to use it for something.” Explaining that electricity accounts for some 75% of the cost of green hydrogen, he went on: “When electricity is really cheap, like in Australia, the economics of green hydrogen work pretty well. I’d be interested in the costs for their approach.”

“Despite this, U.S. oil majors have not written down or retired Permian assets or otherwise disclosed assumptions about project breakevens in their SEC filings. Instead, as analyst Justin Mikulka has shown, they have effectively used the media to disseminate an unsupported claim that their Permian assets will be among the world’s low-cost producers.”

Seb Kennedy is a must read on LNG markets. If you want to sign up for my newsletter he recommends, you can do that for free right here. https://powering-the-planet.ghost.io/#/portal/signup

And, Justin Mikulka in “Great News for Clean Power and Storage” at The Daily Kos can probably relate as much as anybody and perhaps understands more than most. He writes: “There is a lot of great news in the clean energy space. We have the tools and technologies we need to transition to clean energy and eliminate carbon dioxide and methane emissions. That said, it isn’t enough yet. Emissions are still rising, including the potent greenhouse gas methane, and climate impacts are getting impossible to ignore. We need to get our politicians to do a lot more, a lot faster.”

I second that.

“Justin Mikulka writes how great it is that the Biden administration is considering scrapping its plans to encourage natural gas plants to burn hydrogen.”

“Justin Mikulka is a great reporter who’s been on the energy beat for more than a decade and this piece draws attention to the incredibly important point that in addition to using the atmosphere as its dumping ground, the fossil fuel industry uses the literal earth as its dumping ground too, leaving taxpayers to clean up the mess of abandoned and idle wells that dot the country.” Amy Westervelt, Drilled

“While the trains are still burning, they’re rebuilding the rails,” Mikulka told Grist. “It’s again an excellent example of how they put profit over public safety.”

“Getting the world to use blue hydrogen made from natural gas gives the oil and gas industry a way to lock in decades of natural gas demand via blue hydrogen,” Mikulka said.

I was on Democracy Now to discuss my Intercept op-ed on the need for the U.S. to build a green steel industry and stop relying on imports from Russia and Ukraine.

The Intercept writes about how the rail lobbying group (Association of American Railroads) targeted me and my work and submitted it to security agencies. The truth is apparently a real threat to them.

My articles and op-eds have also appeared in Scientific American, In These Times, The Intercept, DeSmog, Drilled News, EcoWatch, Real Clear Markets, Truthout, Energy Post (Europe) and Nation of Change.

Contact: mikulka@gmail.com