By Edward Ring
Ground zero for the war on conventional energy in the United States is in Kern County, California. It is home to some of the largest oil fields in the United States, with estimated reserves totaling more than 27 billion barrels. Most of these reserves contain what is considered heavy oil, making it more difficult to extract and refine, but as a result, Californians have developed what are among the cleanest and most sophisticated extraction and refining technologies in the world. All of that is melting away under a relentless regulatory onslaught.
Despite sitting on ample reserves, today, California imports 75 percent of its oil and 90 percent of its natural gas. And despite subjecting taxpayers and energy consumers to literally hundreds of billions in extra costs in order to replace oil with renewables, 50 percent of California’s total energy production is fueled by petroleum, with another 30 percent coming from natural gas. That total, 80 percent from fossil fuel, is a mere two percent better than the global average. In 2023, 82 percent of worldwide energy production came from fossil fuels.
Californians are victims of a special interest-driven regime that is determined to keep the state on the bleeding edge of so-called renewable energy technology. It is naive to think Kamala Harris is going to deviate from these energy policies if she ends up getting elected US president. Across the entire nation, the result will be higher energy costs than ever, costing taxpayers and consumers not hundreds of billions, but literally trillions of dollars. Most of this money will be wasted.
Back in Kern and other Californian oil-producing counties, new drilling permits are now almost impossible to acquire, and existing wells are subject to new laws that require setbacks of nearly a mile from any “sensitive receptor,” i.e., any building that houses people or is open to the public. Oil extraction within California, steady throughout the 1980s at nearly 400 million barrels per year, has fallen to only 118 billion barrels in 2023, with escalating restrictions that promise to eliminate production entirely within the next five to ten years.
Today, if you still have a job with a rebranded energy corporation in California, it is often only because you are the beneficiary of some of those billions the Biden/Harris administration awarded as part of the “Green New Deal.” And if so, that means your employer collected federal grants and subsidies to research hydrogen energy solutions or carbon sequestration projects. Each of these schemes requires a bit of explanation.
Hydrogen proponents claim it is “the most abundant element in the universe.” That’s about the extent of its virtues. There is no practical method yet known to store hydrogen because it is so light that to pack a meaningful quantity of usable energy into, for example, a tank on board a hydrogen-fueled vehicle, the gas has to be pressurized at 10,000 PSI. For comparison, natural gas can be stored in usable quantities at 300 PSI. Hydrogen also cannot be transported through conventional pipelines because the nature of the gas causes it to embrittle the pipes, inviting catastrophic failures. Hydrogen fuel, moreover, has to be produced from some other fuel. “Green” hydrogen has to be electrolyzed from water using electricity, an inefficient process whereby only 60-70 percent of the energy of the electricity is converted into hydrogen energy. Converting hydrogen back into electricity to power an electric motor requires a fuel cell. However, this process typically achieves an energy conversion efficiency of only about 60-70 percent.
If this numerical reasoning is too convoluted to package into a sound bite, welcome to the green machine. It grinds on, while anyone with an engineering background either throws up their hands in frustration or figures that if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them. The special interests pushing hydrogen solutions know it’s a technology that still requires years of research before it may or may not be commercially competitive with conventional fuel. We may rest reasonably assured that Kamala Harris doesn’t have the slightest idea what “energy conversion efficiency” even means, much less the percentages that apply to any real-world applications of hydrogen electrolysis or fuel cell production. But Harris does know who donates to her campaigns.
Carbon sequestration is a similarly convoluted concept, attracting even more billions in funding from both taxpayers and consumers. There are two versions of the carbon sequestration scam, and it’s important to know the difference. The lessor scam is to extract CO2 from flue gas, that is, the emissions from, for example, a natural gas power plant. The benefit of doing this is it might actually allow a cost-effective coal or natural gas-fueled power plant to escape regulatory shutdown, while the retrofit typically only equals about 10 percent of the capital cost of the plant. Then there’s the big scam: extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.
The reason for this ought to be clear to any policymaker, but with the bludgeon of climate-driven existential peril, rational voices are ignored. Flue gas, typically, is about 4 percent CO2, i.e., 40,000 PPM. The atmosphere, as we are forever admonished, has now reached that dangerous, deadly threshold of 400 PPM, i.e., 4/10ths of one percent CO2. From which feedstock, then, might we more efficiently extract CO2? The air, where it is a trace gas, or powerplant emissions, where concentrations of CO2 are 100 times greater than they are in the atmosphere? Again, ask Kamala Harris to explain this distinction. You’ll get a soliloquy on her middle-class upbringing.
Replacing coal, natural gas, and petroleum with “renewables” such as solar, wind, and geothermal energy is an impossibility. Solar energy can play a role, but the panels are still too resource-intensive; they need to operate more efficiently, and with current technologies, they degrade at a rate between 0.5 and 1.0 percent per year. They are destroyed by hurricanes and tornadoes and they are pulverized by hail. They’re useless at northern latitudes for several months each year. Wind turbines are expensive to maintain, preposterously resource intensive, devastate wildlife, look terrible, drive humans within miles crazy with low-frequency sound, and offshore they are exterminating sea life, including whales. And for all the trillions that we’ve spent on wind and solar already, along with mega-batteries to balance their intermittency, in 2023 they contributed a whopping 5 percent to global energy production. As for “carbon-neutral biofuel,” these “farms” now consume more than 500,000 square miles worldwide to produce less than 2 percent of global transportation fuels. How, exactly, does biofuel save the planet?
Smarter people than Kamala Harris recognize these facts, and they will not permit her to completely destroy America’s energy industry. But expect California’s nonsensical waste and punitive costs to permeate the country nonetheless. Expect streamlined zoning and tax subsidies for solar and wind farms. Expect restrictions not only on conventional fuels but also on every imaginable petroleum derivative, including fertilizer. Expect therefore to see every business that lacks the economies of scale to withstand the new regulations to die a slow death, while “green” financiers and “green” monopolists—i.e., Kamala Harris’s donors—consolidate and dominate every sector of the American economy.
Mentioning the impact of “climate” policies on housing, by the way, is more than an afterthought. Expect high-density housing to be the only expedient way to get a building permit since building detached single-family homes with yards allegedly contributes to excessive emissions of “greenhouse gas.” Expect every single aspect of life in America, from what we eat and where we go to how long we turn on the lights or run showers and sprinklers, to be micromanaged. And, of course, expect to be told that it is how we will save the planet.
If Kamala Harris is declared the winner in our imminent presidential election, every county in America will be ground zero for climate policies.
