As a consultant I’ve been told my job is to develop a forecast, “defend it” with data and logical arguments, and give my clients guidance about how to respond. Over the years I’ve worked in business units that bought forecasts, and somehow they always seemed to support whatever business plan we wanted to execute that year. I rarely saw anyone ask for a track record from the consultants, athough it would have been a good idea. For me it was a matter of personal pride to at least check to see if I’d been close, even though a lot of the time I was doing 5 and 10 year studies so the wait was long. And in the end I gave good advice, whether or not the client wanted to take it.
When I first started this Substack last year, I thought the ‘energy transition’ debate was fairly settled. I expected to be focusing on how the energy markets would move forward to use more natural gas to replace oil in the mobility sector while we built out renewables and expanded the power grid. I assumed that since windmills were popping up everywhere I looked in rural Texas and Oklahoma that we’d be building out connections to get the power onto the grid and into the cities where prices were spiking.
But the more I read about the costs involved in building windmills in the first place, saw that much of the work was being outsourced instead of creating jobs in the US, and that some of the “excess” power was being basically given to Chinese companies to use in Bitcoin mining, the more I realized how much I didn’t know about alternative energy. And wondered how many other people were only reading the marketing pitches and not doing much more thinking about what we were supporting and investing in. When my neighbors died during the winter storm in February 2021 because the power was out, they were cold, and they tried to use their fireplace, I also realized the gas industry had some issues too.
I’m writing about energy matters as someone who’s been in the business working in most parts of the value chain, from paying the bills for drillers to going to the FERC to file applications for a pipeline project, to forecasting prices and supply for LNG terminals, ethylene plants, refineries, and producers, to moving and selling propane to chicken farmers. My goal is to identify and hopefully fill gaps in our knowledge about some very important decisions that are being debated around where we’ll be getting our heat, light, transportation, and the things we touch, wear, eat, and live in. I think we all still have a lot to learn, and it matters, because energy is literally life itself. It’s not just money.