Energy Transition - My Skin in the Game
Why I'm writing this Substack, and why you should read it
Thank you for following me – from my stats I see that many of you found this Substack through B.F. Randall - bf.randall.substack.com. Why I follow him is an introduction to why I started this Substack, and I hope that my journey through the energy transition maze will help you, too.
First, I’m a firm believer in having skin in the game you’re trying to get others to play. Mr. Randall has many years of actual experience working in the natural resources and environmental space as an attorney, not an “interested observer” or a reporter who’s writing clickbait to sell ads. I would consider him a knowledgeable advocate for his clients in what the new green movement (out of several that have already happened over the past decades) would call “legacy” energy businesses. As such, I have value for the information he presents about how they actually operate, particularly the nuclear industry.
Why does that matter? Why are so many of us passionate enough about what’s going on right now in the energy space to start arguments, Substacks, and social media accounts?
Energy is literally life. We all have literal skin in the game when it comes to how we get to work, control the temperature in our homes, and travel. We eat, wear, drive, and live in environments and use products that wouldn’t exist without the use of pieces of hydrocarbon molecules. You’d think it goes without saying that we’d be badly affected by their absence, but there seem to be quite a few people, particularly politicians, who don’t seem to know enough about the world we live in to understand this. And they have the power to cause a lot of damage in their unknowing.
I was one of them. Before reaching out to resources outside oil and gas to get a better understanding of the economic and social impact of renewable energy I was in the camp looking forward to wider adoption of at least distributed renewable energy. I grew up in Oklahoma, home of windmills, houses built into the sides of hills, and big shady porches. These seemed to work in the era before air conditioning was widespread in a climate that has all the extremes – sunny, freezing cold, and windy all the time. But then I realized that a lot of these adaptations disappeared when natural gas prices collapsed in the mid-1980s. Says something about whether renewables were really competitive and what life could be like when gas production starts to fall. Time to learn why the new windmills and solar panels can compete with gas for power generation – or can they?
While personal decisions are a good reason for us all to be smarter about what’s going in with the energy transition, I’ve doubled down by putting my professional life in play. I’m a specialist in the “lighter carbon hydrocarbon” part of the energy value chain. This space includes gases like CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, and methane. It also includes products like ethane, propane, butane, and light naphtha, which are critical to the materials world as well as serving as an important fuel source to a surprisingly large part of the world’s population. The supply of these types of hydrocarbons is growing more rapidly than crude oil for a lot of reasons. Simply discarding them because they contain greenhouse gases would create disaster on a grand scale, yet virtually no one in the current Federal government, and certainly no one in charge at the EU seems to realize this or care. Industry experts like me are working to change this and like Mr. Randall, I’ll be sharing stories about these with you that are based on actual experience instead of press releases.
So I’ve got personal choices to make about how I use energy, advice and education to provide to clients who do and want to invest in energy, and career path choices in the game. A lot to play for, and a lot of reasons to work hard to develop wisdom, share it, and learn from others.
Psychologist Igor Grossman breaks down the concept of wisdom down into four principles:
1) Seek other people’s perspectives even if they conflict with your own;
2) Integrate different perspectives into an overall middle ground;
3) Recognize that things can change, including your own convictions;
4) Have humility about your own limited sense perception.
Hat tip to Quoththeraven for publishing this quote. I’m looking forward to providing more insights and education as we figure out what’s best for our own lives, and ways to get through this transition to what’s next in the energy world without losing our skins – literally and figuratively.