Recent Articles
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Peak US Oil Production Looms as the Domestic Shale Boom Ends

It appears that the U.S. fracking boom is ending far earlier than many industry experts and CEOs predicted. After an understandable dip in 2020 due to the pandemic, oil production still has not regained the record levels achieved in 2019, and predictions that the industry would set new records this year have not materialized, despite 2022’s high oil prices.

In late 2018, DeSmog first raised the alarm about the reality that the U.S. shale industry was likely to hit peak production much sooner than most experts expected.

At the time and since, the oil industry has continually promised big things for the future of U.S. shale oil production.

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Oil and Gas’s Pivot to Blue Hydrogen Is Falling Through

THE OIL AND GAS industry’s plan to convince the world to switch from natural gas to hydrogen made from natural gas is being upended by an unexpected cause: economics.

As the climate emergency has gotten more and more impossible to ignore and the world has started moving away from natural gas, the industry has hyped a new technology: so-called blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when burned or converted into electricity, but the main component in producing blue hydrogen is methane, the most potent greenhouse gas.

It isn’t currently possible to produce clean blue hydrogen on a commercial scale, and it is important to acknowledge the risks of trying. But the market is also playing a role in pushing oil and gas away from this dangerous endeavor.

A major argument against transitioning fully off fossil fuels and toward clean energy like green hydrogen — a clean form of hydrogen made with renewable energy — has been that we can’t afford it. But the market logic is now changing, due to the rapidly falling costs of producing renewable energy, which is 75 percent of the cost of making green hydrogen. At the same time, the cost of producing green hydrogen is also falling quickly, while natural gas prices have risen around the globe.

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Russia-Ukraine War Is Another Reason to Break Free of Dirty Steel, but U.S. Companies Still Chase Profits Over Green Future

THE WAR IN Ukraine has threatened a vital component of the U.S. industrial base: steel production. Over the weekend, reports surfaced that a large steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine, had become one of the last holdouts for Ukrainian troops in the besieged city. The fighting appeared to escalate there on Monday, when videos surfaced showing large explosions at the plant, Azovstal, which produces millions of tons of dirty steel.

In 2021, Russia and Ukraine supplied over 60 percent of the pig iron imported by the United States. Pig iron, made from iron ore, is the raw material used in most steel production, and the war has fueled pig iron panic-buying on the part of U.S. steel producers. Since the February 24 invasion, U.S. steel prices have surged by 50 percent. A December U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey of the commercial construction industry found that the high price of steel combined with product shortages could stall the post-pandemic commercial construction recovery.

This disruption in the steel supply will impact everything from the auto industry to the rate of inflation. It could also have a profoundly negative effect on renewable energy, a rapidly growing sector in the U.S., which is already hitting major supply chain constraints.

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Shale Oil Fraud Case Reveals Executives Ignore Their Own Engineers and Mislead Investors

In April, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by former investors in the shale oil company Alta Mesa could proceed. Their case alleges multiple instances of fraud and reveals that not only did engineers in the company warn executives that they were lying to investors about oil production estimates but that executives went on to ignore those warnings.

Alta Mesa is among a string of oil and gas companies that in recent years have either been accused or found guilty of fraud, including ExxonMobil and Miller Energy.

Many of these emerging fraud cases show a consistent pattern of employees warning leadership that they were misleading investors about how much oil the companies could reasonably produce in the future, but rather than changing course the employees were ignored or fired.

This scenario is repeatedly playing out in the shale oil and gas industry where the people who are paid to estimate how much oil is in the ground — the petroleum engineers — are told their estimates are not high enough, and executives then claim more optimistic numbers instead.

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Green Hydrogen’s Rapidly Falling Costs Undermine the Gas Industry’s Argument for Blue Hydrogen

New research predicts that green hydrogen — a clean fuel produced from water using renewables — will be comparable in cost and likely cheaper than blue hydrogen by 2030. This is much sooner than what the blue hydrogen industry is estimating when advocating for the natural gas-based fuel to be widely adopted — essentially eliminating the only viable argument to invest in blue hydrogen.

“The True Cost of Solar Hydrogen,” the report from a European research team led by the European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics, was published September 7 in the journal Solar RRL and concludes that “during this decade, solar hydrogen will be globally a less expensive fuel compared with hydrogen produced from natural gas with CCS [blue hydrogen].” (CCS is carbon capture and storage.)

This is a much different scenario than the argument being made by supporters of blue hydrogen, such as the gas industry and others who are claiming that within a decade green hydrogen will still be at least double the cost of blue hydrogen.

Mentions in the Media

“Every potential opportunity to exploit oil and gas reserves in this country has been looked at in detail by experienced professionals,” said Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at the energy-transition think tank New Consensus. “We now have some people with no experience who are looking for a lot of public money to do this project, which raises a red flag. They will get paid handsomely if they are able to pull it off — that doesn’t mean it’s a good financial investment.”

“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.”

“Economically, as a long-term investment, you want to be in green hydrogen,” said Mikulka of New Consensus. “And so I think that there’s a lot of risk in pursuing these blue hydrogen projects.” 

“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 quoted in this AP piece on the big green hydrogen/salt cavern project in Utah.

I was on Democracy Now with Zack Exley to discuss the need for the US to build a green steel industry and stop relying on imports from Russia and Ukraine.

I talked to Stephanie Mencimer from Mother Jones for this article about the ill-advised oil train project in Utah.

My work used in an article by The Esperanza Project on “The Corruption of Science.”

As Justin Mikulka writes for DeSmog, switching to blue hydrogen also enables firms to avoid widespread scrutiny concerning their carbon footprint. However, blue hydrogen is not as green as it seems.

Bill McKibben references my recent article in his recent piece in the New Yorker.

“Reporting has really started to pick up on what’s happening on this story at the national level. I highly recommend you follow the reporting that Alex Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo are doing at HuffPost, Emily Atkin in Heated, Kate Aronoff at The New Republic and Justin Mikulka at DeSmog.”

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 fracking finance work highlighted at Naked Capitalism.

My articles have also appeared in In These Times, The Intercept, DeSmog, Drilled News, EcoWatch, Naked Capitalism, Real Clear Markets, Truthout, Energy Post (Europe), Nation of Change and The Contributor.

Contact: mikulka@gmail.com