Most Obnoxious Article Of The Week -- Oilprice -- November 3, 2025

Locator: 49329GLOBALWARMING. 

Link here.

Link here. 

How many coal plants is China building each year?

In GW, the size of the average new coal plant in China?

 In GW, what's the average size of a coal plant in the US?

When was the last new coal plant commissioned in the US?

How many new coal plants were commissioned in the US last year (2024)? 
 

So, for the sake of argument, let's assume the average size of a new coal plant in China is GW is 0.500 GW. With a total of 30 GW of new coal construction in 2024, that would yield 30 / 0.5 = 60 average size coal plants in the US. 

China's Coal Boom -- Daily Newsletter -- Bloomberg -- January 17, 2025

Locator: 44702COALCHINA.

Link here.

This is not a surprise to anyone following the global energy story. 

The figures run contrary to hopes that China may have begun to reduce emissions last year, more than half a decade ahead of its 2030 target, after massive additions of wind and solar power and a rebound in output of hydropower.

But all that extra clean energy wasn’t enough to cope with the expansion in electricity consumption, which was set to outpace overall economic growth for the fifth straight year in 2024 due to strong demand for computing, and as sectors from heating to transport electrify.

The trajectory of electricity demand will be key to determining whether fossil fuel generation begins its decline in 2025. At the same time, China is maintaining its world-leading pace of renewables deployment, and is spending more on power lines and energy storage equipment to ensure the clean energy isn’t wasted.

LOL, taking the same road that Germany took:

It’s increasingly possible that renewable sources can meet all of the country’s new electricity consumption this year, and pave the way for China’s power sector to achieve peak emissions in 2025, said Gao Yuhe, a Beijing-based analyst at Greenpeace East Asia.

But lying through their teeth. LOL.

Closing Out The Weekend -- September 10, 2023

Locator: 45602EVS.

Before we get started, the Dallas Cowboys are clobbering the New York Giants, 39 - 0 -- yes, 39 - 0 early in the 4th quarter.

Now back to regular programming:

Three links from a reader:

• the cost of a new battery for a low-mileage $23,000-Chevy Bolt (see below);
• the lack of EV chargers -- even for the US SecEnergy; I still think she is the least smart member of the current president's cabinet;
• China imploding before our eyes. This was all predicted by Peter Zeihan in his 2020 book.

The first two questions EV buyers need to ask:

• how long will the battery last? And how much will a replacement cost?

They need to get the answer in writing. My hunch: no dealer will be willing to put the answers in writing.

No one will buy a "used EV" with a battery older then three years. Unless they feel comfortable replacing the battery.

Fossil Fuel Is Dead! Long Live Fossil Fuel -- March 25, 2021

Link here. 

Imagine this headline in the United States: 

Texas and Louisiana now have at least -- repeat, at least -- four major new refineries under construction. Most of these new refineries along the Gulf Coast are expected to produce plastic feedstocks, such as ethylene and propylene.

Instead, we get this headline: President Biden kills they Keystone XL which would have brought much needed Canadian heavy oil to US refineries along the Gulf Coast. 

In fact the actual headline is this: China has at least four major new refineries under construction, most of which are expected to produce plastic feedstocks, such as ethylene and propylene.

The article at the link is chock full of interesting data points.

The world leader in refining:

• until recently, it had been the US:
• due to Covid-19 and a concerted effort to shut down the US oil industry by some faux environmentalists, China succeeded in overtaking the USA as the world's biggest oil refiner in 2020;
• China's lead is most likely only temporary with the USA back in first place by the end of the year (2021), assuming no more bad news from the Biden administration;
• but long term, it's probably likely that America's lead will be short-lived as oil demand continues to rise across Asia.

Fossil fuel is dead! Long live fossil fuel!

That Suez ship: it may be in worse trouble than we are being told. From a reader who knows this stuff pretty well. First note earlier this morning:

Long story short ... ships are not designed to 'sit on the ground'.

If this fully-laden, 1,200 foot long ship is resting on bottom anywhere along its keel  (certainly a portion of its bow area is right now), the unbalanced structural stresses could be enormous.

If any cracks develop, the ship will take on water and no longer be simply a floating obstruction ... it will be a sunken one.

Removal could be several months up to a year depending upon many factors.

Then this, from later this afternoon:

Upon much closer inspection of pictures, not only is the bow 20 to 30 feet higher than the stern, there is a noticeable list to port side. (VERY bad implications there).

Evidence of hull leaking growing, not receding.

Ramifications too numerous to elaborate.

Next 48 hours could be pivotal.

And, so there we are. How fast can "they" get Huey helicopters there to start air-lifting containers off that container ship, if that's even possible.

This From The NY Times -- A Type Of Story Normally Seen At Internet Tabloids -- But In The NY Times? Note The Reference To "Record Cold" -- December 21, 2020

Global warming? What global warming? The impact "going green" is having on China. 

Wow, this is the kind of story I would expect to see over at Breitbart or ZeroHedge, but here it is, in the NY Times:  China running out of energy. The whole city was dark. China rations electricity for millions.

[It should be noted that there have been similar headlines coming out of California the past years.]

I was also surprised, that for some reason, despite this story being behind a paywall, I was able to access it directly without a password. Archived. 

From The NY Times (this link will likely be blocked by a paywall):

In the city of Yiwu in eastern China, the authorities turned off streetlights for several days and ordered factories to open only part-time. In coastal Wenzhou, the government ordered some companies not to heat their offices unless temperatures are close to freezing. In southern Hunan Province, workers have reported climbing dozens of flights of stairs after elevators were shut down.

Large swaths of China are scrambling to restrict electricity use this winter, as the country’s rapid economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and unexpectedly frigid temperatures have sent demand for power surging. Officials in at least three provinces — where a total of more than 150 million people live — have issued orders limiting energy use, warning of potential coal shortages.

Demand for coal is so high in the mining hub of Henan Province that buyers have been lining up in trucks at the gates of coal mines, jostling for access, according to a recent report in the state-run news media.

Chinese officials have sought to remind citizens of the country’s ambitious environmental goals while reassuring them that there is plenty of energy to keep people warm and the economy humming.

“In general, please believe that our ability to ensure stable energy supply is not a problem,” Zhao Chenxin, secretary general of the National Development and Reform Commission, which steers energy policy, said on Monday.

But the drastic measures point to potential longer-term problems in China’s energy universe, as leaders juggle competing priorities.

Perhaps I will post more of the story later. It's quite fascinating. 

With regard to locations mentioned in this story, see the "one-of-a-kind" China map at this post.  

Another Nightmare: China's Thirst For Energy -- Oilprice -- October 24, 2019

Nothing new here, but a fun article to read. See link below.

There have been a lot of "peak demand" articles recently. Apparently the "peak oil" meme failed, and so the next meme came along, "peak demand."

Sure.

Link here. Data points, quotes, and observations from the linked article:

• China's population four times that of America's 330 million
• China is already at a severe energy disadvantage
• the gap will widen
• China already scrambling to meet energy / water needs to sustain current population
• energy / water demand to "skyrocket"
• IEA: China's natural gas consumption to grow at nearly Beijing's previous projections
• the forecast came after President XI placed a 25% tariff on LNG from the US, starting June 1, 2019; "cut off one's nose to spite's one's face"
• that decision no doubt made a bad situation worse (sort of like the pipeline ban in NYC)
• China already the world's fastest-growing importer of natural gas
• second biggest importer of LNG, following Japan
• China's efforts to boost domestic production may be too little, too late

"Peak demand"? Probably not.

**************************************

The Book Page

This week (actually it's a bedside bookshelf book): Provocations: Collected Essays, Camille Paglia, c. 2018.

I've had this book for a year. I will generally read an essay or two every few weeks. I have to be "in the mood" to read her essays, and it's a not book one would read from beginning to end.

Word for the day: melismatic.

From essay #49, "On Canons," page 383:

The centrality of canons can be seen in popular music. Seventeenth-century British ballads, preserved in America's Appalachian Mountains, were reinterpreted during the 1930s and '40s bythe leftist folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Guthrie's devoted disciple, Bob Dylan, then shaped the imagination of an entire generation and made an immense impact on other singers and bands worldwide.

The canon in black music equally obvious: West African motifs (with melismatic Muslim tonalities) survived under slavery in rural African-American blues and were transmitted through singers Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf to young musicians in the postwar British blues revival, such as the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. In Brazil prolific canonical figures of genius status, such as Antonio Carlos Jobim and Dorival Caymmi, can be easily identified.

From elsewhere, an essay on Amy Winehouse:

You know what melisma is by now, surely. It's when a singer takes a word or phrase and, instead of stapling it to one note, uses the occasion to worry the word through the entire musical scale, in a display of vocal acrobatics designed to wow judges and people gathered at a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah.

It's showy. It's dazzling. It takes a while to learn.

Even Shakespeare had a phrase for it: "Sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Amy Winehouse had no use for such tricks. When she sang, she told you what she was actually feeling. In lyrics that were smart, snarky, darkly funny and often had a wicked backspin on them. But in her own colloquial, un-tricky, no-melismas-allowed-here voice.

**************************************

Politics

A brand new poll has been posted over at RealClearPolitics. This is a biggie. A lot of folks consider Quinnipiac one of the more reliable pollsters. If so, look at this:

• Biden: 21% (wow -- down from 31% where he has been trending for quite some time)
• Pocahontas: surges to 28%; and clearly out-pacing Biden; should give Biden huge concern
• Sanders: pretty much unchanged at 15%
• others: pretty much in line with where they've been for quite some time -- going nowhere
• Klobuchar momentum: if one considers a jump from 2% to 3% momentum, Klobuchar has it
• Buttigieg at 10% nationally, but in South Carolina he will be lucky to poll 3%
• but that spread between Pocahontas and Biden in the Quinnipiac poll, I think, will turn out to be an inflection point