UK goes Bonkers on Green Energy

ENB Pub Note: The following is an interesting article from Felicity Bradstock on Oilprice.com. Britain’s plan to create thousands of clean energy jobs for the oil and gas workers is an example of what won’t […]

The UK’s Green Energy Transition Faces Critical Slowdown Amid Growing Concerns

May 18, 2025 Clark Savage

Net Zero crusade by Ed Miliban is adding billions to their broken system.

May 18, 2025 Clark Savage

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Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

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Michael Tanner: [00:00:00] You know, Stu, we’ve been talking about… Energy as a national security issue. Does does this give you any cause for pause that we’re handing the keys over and allowing. These foreign countries, regardless of who they are. To come in and own significant chunks of our energy infrastructure. Are you worried about that at all? [00:00:19][19.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:00:19] Somewhat, but if the contracts are written appropriately and guarded. Now, do I want Chinese owning our farmland? No. Do I want Bill Gates owning our farmland. No. I want both of those people out of the country. So the answer is, as long as the contracts written correctly, I think we’re okay. [00:00:38][19.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:00:46] What’s going on everybody? Welcome into the Monday, May 19th, 2025 edition of the Daily Energy Newsbeat. Stand up, here are today’s top headlines. In a little group of three trio, first up Britain’s plan to retrain oil and gas workers for clean energy jobs. Yeah, trust me guys, that ain’t gonna work. But next up, UK’s energy. Or green energy transition faces critical slowdown amid growing concerns And finally, in this first group of three, Net Zero Crusade by… Ed Milban is adding billions to their broken system. We’ll then fly back to the U.S. President Trump. Golf Tour Inc’s significant and significant energy and technology agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar. And the UAE Next up, Republicans have one last chance to kill the green news scam subsidies. Forever. Finally, the Trans Mountain Oil Pipeline in Canada has changed the export market. For the Canadian crew. Stu will then toss it over to me. I will quickly cover what happened in the oil and gas markets, touch on rig counts. U.S. Frat count spread. And then finally, a little article we ran on Newsbeat, ourselves, U.S. Oil and gas drillers backing off. We’re slowing down drilling. We will cover all that in a bag of chips, guys. As always, I am Michael Tanner, joined by Stuart Turley. [00:02:01][74.6]

Stuart Turley: [00:02:02] Where do you wanna begin? Let’s start with our buddies over there in the UK. It is absolutely a trio of articles that you just can’t really buy this kind of entertainment on an updated Newsbeat edition here. This one is from Felicity Broadstock on oilprice.com and when you talk about retaining and you talk about moving workers from the oil and gas space to the green energy space, this is pretty interesting when you sit back and kind of go, have you and I heard this before? The UK government plans to extend its windfall tax on oil and gas companies to fund the retaining of fossil fuel workers for green energy roles. Michael then they also want to partner with Norway to boost renewable energy investments creating THOUSANDS of THOUSANDS of new green jobs. And then posting. Closing tax loopholes and reallocating subsidies. Could generate… Billions for just the transition. I find this a bunch of horse [00:03:08][66.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:03:09] Yeah, and I mean, what I find interesting too, is that this was something that actually, when I was going back to grad school was a possible master’s kind of project or thesis of mine was helping develop curriculum. To retrain oil and gas workers to go work in clean energy. Now, I wasn’t really going to be helping with the curriculum itself. More some stuff on the back end, but… What was realized real quickly and ultimately they scrapped the problem is there’s or they scrapped the ideas, there’s a bunch of problems with the first one. Being, okay, retraining, it’s technical. It’s not just like you’re going from serving at one restaurant to serving at another restaurant and you just have to learn. A couple of the new policies it’s literally going from one profession to another profession. And that costs money and it’s technical. Number two, there just aren’t that many clean energy jobs. You’ve got, you know, they’re talking about thousands of jobs in clean energy. Well, there’s probably 50,000 people who work in the oil and gas space. In the UK. So guess what? Where are they all going to? You’ve got 50,000 people now fighting. For 1000 specific jobs and number three do people actually want to do this you have to get people who work in oil and gas aren’t just dying to go work in clean energy they can also do other things so there’s a whole host of problems with it i think this whole retraining idea. Is is is like you said a bunch of hand waving to make themselves sound good really what they want to do is to shut down the fossil fuel industry they only care about the workers Okay? Here about the workers [00:04:35][85.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:04:35] no and that’s the funny part michael’s let’s go to the next story here the uk’s green transition faces crucial slowdown and then growing concerns This article coincides with the group of three here, the Yu Kingdom. United Kingdom has adopted numerous policy instruments to scale back the domestic fossil fuel industry while propping up clean energy generation. And this is absolutely hilarious. Not only is the power struggle over the terms and conditions of the UK clean energy transition. But it’s also creating major threats to the national energy security and climate goals. And climate goals without strong renewable sector to take the place of the flagging fossil fuels. I hate to break it to him in this article. But I added this in this article and here the energy mix. That they have. Fossil fuels comprise 27, predominately 27.1% of their energy mix. Is natural gas from Norway. And they’re even getting rid of that and the North Sea renewables account for 41%. But as we saw in Spain, what two weeks ago, Michael, you get to that high of renewable energy without a dispatchable power. You run into some serious problems. Their nuclear is non-existent. It’s only 14%. But they’re not able to grow it because it’s been sitting on the side. [00:06:04][88.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:04] Yeah, it’s pretty unbelievable from that standpoint. And again, I think it’s. It it’s it’s really unbelievable and and and to be honest You know, it’s a whole host like you said, it is a bunch of bull hockey. From the standpoint of. We know when doesn’t work. We know, we know it’s not necessarily even economically available to do this. So the fact that they’re. Having these repeated delays and the fact that they want to they think they’re going to go 95% clean by 2030 I mean, that’s a joke. Good luck with that! Good luck with that! [00:06:36][31.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:36] It ain’t going to happen by 2030. I went to Oklahoma state university and had to cover it up with an MBA from another university, Oklahoma city university. But I can count to five. One. Two. It ain’t gonna happen. All right, let’s go to Net Zero Crusade by Ed Miliband as adding billions to their broken system. This is from The Telegraph and The Teegraph is a pre-release really of Katherine Porter’s article that is coming out tomorrow or today actually when this releases. And she’s agreed to come on the podcast and I’ll keep you posted on that. The author of this article is very very cool. Here’s what the problem is if you think green energy is cheaper you might want to look at Germany, New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii and the UK. They all should be in what the not To do policies for energy. Let’s take a look at the. Problem here net zero will pile on 20 billion onto the energy bills holy smokes the hidden costs Michael, there’s a chart in here. That absolutely is amazing to see that the UK is the highest price Electricity. In out of the UK, France, Germany and Spain and the United States. Unbelievable! This report from her coming out tomorrow… [00:08:01][84.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:08:03] Yeah, no, it is huge. And I mean, I think first off, if you look at this image of this dude, holy smokes, he looks like. He’s got a thousand milligrams of caffeine just pumped into his body. 10,000 of caffeine. I mean, you’ve done a great job of explaining. I mean the UK is heading off a cliff right now. [00:08:20][17.3]

Stuart Turley: [00:08:21] They’re doing a Thelma and Louise for Lemmings. You’re gonna see a line of Lemming’s line up to get in that convertible before it goes off of the cliff. It’s really sad, Michael. It really is. What’s next? Let’s go to President Trump’s. The fist bump that infamy was not this trip. This trip was holy smokes, Batman, president’s golf tour. Inc. Significant energy and technology agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE This was an amazing trip, Michael, when you take a look at two trillion announced by the White House visit, which includes stops from Riyadh. Obby Dobby and a couple others. The White House put out a video with $10 trillion of investment. It’s unbelievable. And the fanfare, I really appreciated that we have a president. That is well respected again in that area. But I want to point out in this article, Michael, I added a post from Josh Young. We have Steve Witkoff talking to Tucker Carlson and bringing up a very big point that I’m connecting the dots. This big point is there’s a new trading block in town. The new trading bloc is going to be the Middle East India. And Pakistan, they’re going to calm that down in there, and then it’s going to be Russia and the United States. It’s a whole new trading bloc about to happen in here. And he says in this video clip. That the Middle East can outshine the E.U. And the EU is on a death grip here. That is pretty amazing. 600 billion investment. We have it all detailed out here. AI and data centers. We’re talking, we also have XTO, I believe it was either XTO or somebody else is now drilling for Cutter. There’s an article that I was trying to get written before taping this. It’s unbelievable between the LNG support with McDermott and cutter unbelievable 8.5 billion providing offshore So it’s almost like, I believe it was. Somebody from oil price.com said it’s like the bromance between the United States oil and Middle East oil is on again Pretty funny. [00:10:39][137.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:10:39] No, it really is. I mean, there’s a lot we could talk about with this trip, to be, to be honest with you, a lot happened. It’s great to see this amount of investment. I think. You know, from Saudi Arabia’s standpoint I think they see an opportunity quite frankly to take advantage of us. From the standpoint of we are. Looking for investments in energy that’s not coming domestically and if they can come in and buy in on a You know, what do they say? Buy low, sell high. I mean, again. And, and, and I guess my question with this is, you know, Stu, we’ve been talking about energy as a national security issue. Does. Does this give you any cause for pause that we’re handing the keys over and allowing… These foreign countries regardless of who they are to come in and own significant chunks of our energy infrastructure. Are you worried about that at all? [00:11:27][48.2]

Stuart Turley: [00:11:28] Somewhat. But if the contracts are written appropriately and guarded. Now, do I want Chinese owning our farmland? No. Do I want Bill Gates owning our farmland. No. I want both of those people out of the country. So the answer is as long as the contracts When written correctly, I think we’re okay. Okay, cuz [00:11:49][21.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:11:49] You know, I- We got guys, you know, there is a little bit of. Pause I have I mean obvious [00:11:55][6.0]

Stuart Turley: [00:11:56] Well, take a look at Japan. Japan has bought, all the way from the molecules now, they own mineral rights in Hainesville. And they can ship them all the way out through they own partial all you know they got their own tankers they’ve got seven tankers. So they’ve bought their energy supply line all the way through with 20 year contracts. 20 year contract. So yeah, this is not the first one that’s happening. People want to buy into United States energy. [00:12:25][29.3]

Michael Tanner: [00:12:26] Yeah, no, they do. They do. They definitely do. [00:12:28][1.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:12:28] All right, let’s go to the Republicans have one last chance to kill the green new scam subsidies forever. Michael, I would like to go on record right now and say I am tired of rhinos. Rhinos should be all Run out of town. This is despicable now That being said, the ones that are holding up the bill, I agree with for the first time. The ones that kind of holding it up because they all need to get this done. I’m holding Speaker Johnson. Responsible. For not codifying President Trump’s desires for getting rid of the Green New Scam. And it is a hundred percent. On. Speaker Johnson. [00:13:14][46.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:13:15] Yeah, no, I mean he- You’re absolutely right. It’s it’s. He needs to get this done, it’s really crazy how… There’s this infighting between what’s going on in congress you’d think Congress understands the mandate that happened, but… You know, this definitely needs to get passed. You’ve got… [00:13:30][15.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:13:30] The speaker Johnson put the bill out Michael. I didn’t mean to interrupt and I apologize speaker Johnson Put the bill, out there that will kick the can down the road for years That’s not the way to codify the mandate period [00:13:44][14.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:13:45] Yeah, at some point the chickens come home to roost, so it’s like what we’re doing with the debt ceiling, you know, we keep kicking. This can down the road and keep slowly slowly slowly moving it up so It’s going to be very interesting. Let’s see how this all goes, but we’ve got to get rid of the green new scam. And we love this, this article by an Ireland here. Let’s move to the next one. [00:14:02][16.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:14:03] Yes, Ed Ireland shot out, go to his sub stack is absolutely phenomenal. I put this one out here with the Trans Mountain Oil Pipeline has changed the export for the Canadian crude. Michael, I did not realize how much the Canadian oil field sands was going to be then going to the Asian market with this pipeline. It was kind of like one of those things that went the Canadians are going to start entering into the Asian market. Guess who’s the loser here? The United States. So they’re now having an open market to where we used to hold down their price Now they have the ability to sell the oilfield sands. Good for Alberta! Bad for the United States. [00:14:46][43.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:14:47] No, it’s definitely bad for the United States and- you know, Canada, we think of Canada as an ally, but they’re the farthest thing from an ally. And you know you you can argue we’re not doing it A great job of trying to bring them in as an ally. The point is they’ve been taking advantages for the very long and this is they’re doing this intention i think you know if this is an intentional switch in order to. Hurt the united states and and theoretically i mean i don’t want to say they’re trying to prop up China, but they’re definitely trying to hurt the United States with this move. [00:15:21][33.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:15:21] And in fact, that’s, I would think prime minister Carney is brought in just to hurt Trump and if you want my honest opinion. My opinion is is that they want to align themselves with the EU trading block so you are gonna and everything they’re telegraphing is that there gonna line with the UK the EU and the UK is looking at getting back into the EU. And they had new trading blocks, you’re going to see the EU fail, and then you’re going to the successful trading blocks that I mentioned earlier. Really come to light in the next six months. [00:15:56][35.0]

Michael Tanner: [00:15:56] Yep, absolutely. Well, let’s go ahead and quickly cover the oil and gas markets, guys. But before that, we’ll quickly pay the bills. As always, thank you for checking us out here on the world’s greatest website, www.energynewsbeat.com. The best place for all your energy and oil and gas news, Stu and the team do a tremendous job making sure that website stays up to speed. Everything you need to know. To be at the tip of the spear when it comes to the energy and the oil. And gas business, go ahead and hit that description below. All links to the timestamps links. To the articles you can check us out on substack the energy newsbeat.substack.com. It’s a great place to stay up to speed with all of our Latest and greatest writing Stu’s doing a great job of writing some really great stuff here Go ahead and also subscribe to us on YouTube. At the Energy Newsbeat. We’d also like to give a shout out to friend of the show, Reese Energy Consulting. Guys, if you are in the upstream space and you are not working with an oil and gas marketing company. Reese Energy Consulting is the go-to place. They’re going to save you. Lots of, lots of money on your net backs. If you’re, you know, when they’re first purchaser contracts, your midstream contracts. They’re going to get you money back on that. If you’re in the midstream space, they have a host, host, and host, host, I can’t say it more, a host of knowledge. When it comes to that space, they will help you with everything when it comes to the mid-stream space. Give them a shout out, reeseenergyconsulting.com. And finally, guys, if you are considering adding energy to your investment portfolio, check out Invest. In oil.energynewsbeat.com. We have a great ebook. That’ll tell you exactly. How you can get involved, what to look out for, what you should be looking for. And it’s a great, great ebook written by one of our colleagues. Again, that’s InvestInoil.energynewsbeat.com. [00:17:40][103.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:17:40] Let’s go ahead and jump over now. And look at the top. Headlines we’ve got S&P 500 they’re up 7 tenths per percentage point NASDAQ up four tenths for percentage point two and 10-year yields up. Basically a full percentage point for the two and about three-tenths of a percentage point for the $10 index sitting at about a tenth of a percentage point up. We saw, we’ve seen Bitcoin up about a two and a half percent over the weekend currently sitting at $104,000 a coin. Unbelievable. Crude oil slightly up for the day, slightly up for the week, even though it’s, you know, since Wednesday was a little bit soft, $61.97. What’s the close? We’ll open somewhere. Around 61. 93 here in about an hour or so. Uh… Brent oil sixty five thirty six natural gas three dollars and thirty three cents after pretty much slumping all week, you know, really what we’ve seen is, is Supply is continuing to grow even though we’ve seen oil on a you know, two-week straight basis have gains and that’s mainly due to the fact that US-China has calmed down from a trade tension standpoint? But we, we, have seen OPEC plus both adding those barrels back and I ran. I know we’re trying and the Trump administration has been very clear about trying to stamp out Iranian crude. They’re still getting some oil to the market so we need to We need to watch that Vice President of Trading over at BOK Financial, Janis Kisler. His quote in the Reuters article expected increase in opec production along with the more probable Iranian nuclear agreement has resurfaced. The bear trade and they basically what he means by that is there’s a possibility I ran. Strikes a deal with the United States that allows them to export some oil. But also in exchange for shutting down their. Their nuclear stuff. It’s going to be very interesting. If you talk to Trump, part of the deal, the deal is sealed, they just got to sign it. Iran is a little bit shaky on whether or not the terms are actually reached. So it’ll be interesting. To see, you know, sources close to that say that, talks, there’s still issues. To resolve. We did see rig counts. Two rigs dropped week over week. We’re down to 567. Canada added seven rigs internationally. There were eight rigs shed. We also lost two frac- Cruz US frat count spread down to 190. So that’s the third straight week of frack cruise being lost. Finally, Stu, US oil and gas drillers, are they backing off or are they slowing down? This is actually an article. That you wrote. Which basically covered a bunch of different points. Specifically leaning upon. The article that Diamondback’s outgoing CEO, Travis Stice, wrote, which is super interesting. I’m actually going to be… Bringing back on Bennett Williams, who I did a deal spotlight with a year ago. Specifically talking about the Chevron Exxon. He’s actually coming back on the podcast and gonna be talking with me all about that letter. He wrote a great article for upstreamonline.com kind of diving into all. What that means. But, I mean, Stu, we’re seeing… Rigs. U.S. Drilling operations are slowing down. And you posed the question, are drillers backing off or slowing down? I think, you know, I don’t know how to cut that down the middle and take both sides, but. That’s really what it is. I think what they’re doing is they’re slowing down and trying to prepare. They’re preparing for prices to be in the $60 to $65 range for at least the next six months. And so what they’re doing is they’re reorganizing their drilling plant. I mean, at these prices, there are very few locations that are profitable. So what does that mean? You’ve got to go find your absolutely Banger our locations and I mean tier one your tier one a locations have to be drilled. You can’t go you know, exploration’s gonna have to cut itself right here. You know, we’ve seen, you know, speaking of Diamondback… They reduced their capital, their 2025 capital budget by 400 million. You know, we’re seeing other, other, you know, people cutting Chevron, Oxy, Pioneer, you’re Chevron Occidental and Exxon who included pioneer, you know, they’re slowing down. You’ve, you’ve heard. You hear scott sheffield three months ago say there’s You know, only 2027 worth of inventory left for… For Pioneer who got bought by Exxon, I’m sure they love that. We’re only see, you know, you talk about… You know what’s going on in the bach and there’s only 32 rigs active which is you know unchanged week-over-week but generally that would be higher continental you know they basically said we’re only focusing on our tier one wells you know all this stuff right now Is is going down, you know, we’re seeing Oklahoma and the Uinta are two of the few areas where people are actually starting to increase rigs on. Which I think is super interesting, I think you need to The Uinta is a very fascinating, fascinating play. You know, we are seeing ducks continue to increase or actually falling, excuse me, what we’re. The turn in lines are falling, but ducks… Are actually decreasing because all you know instead of drilling new wells companies are just going to their ducks and fracking them because that to have cycle economics on a, you know, if you look at the cost fallacy, if you drilled the well six months ago. You’ve already spent the money and now today you only have to spend say 50% of them you’ll have to spent five million dollars to crack the wells that have ten million to drill and frack the actual economics look okay. I have a little bit of a hard time with that, because I tend to look full cycle, not half cycle. And we can have that argument later. But I think there’s a lot going on, Stu. I think you hit the nail on the head with this one. [00:22:43][302.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:22:43] Well thank you, but I think this is also going to bring up a bigger topic that we’re going to talk about in the next six months, Michael, and that’s the change of the molecules. And when you sit back and take a look demand for natural gas. Is going strong for the next. 20, 30 years. Oil will be decreasing for demand over the next 20 to 30 years. And so people will be like in Texas. When they were drilling for oil and gas in Texas and flared gas was a waste by-product molecule. Well, now they’re going to be drilling for natural gas if the takeaway capacity is there when you’ve got all the data centers and more electricity being generated off of natural gas. It’s going to be interesting. [00:23:25][41.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:23:25] No absolutely absolutely it’s it’s going to be very interesting i i think this data center stuff is interesting i’m going to be hesitant to say that i think eventually Technology is going to. Advanced so much someone’s going to come out with an ability to run these models on less energy. I don’t think all of a sudden we’re just going to see Trillions and trillions of TCF of gas being used. I think people are going to figure out a way to either use less energy or move into nuclear, or something that’s, I don’t wanna say renewable, but something that is more self-generating, but I think it’s gonna be extremely interesting. Favorite part of the week, Stu. What should people be worried about this week? [00:23:56][30.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:23:56] Well, we’re releasing a new podcast coming out and it podcast is going to be on. I had a great guest. We’re going to tee it up when I roll it out later in the week on AI and data centers. And I mean, we are really going to hit a whole new series on all things energy and AI. This is a cool company, we’ll just leave that tease out there, it’s a whole new series. [00:24:22][26.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:24:23] Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So it’s going to be very interesting guys. Well, with that, we’re going to let you get out of here, get back to work, start your week, appreciate you guys checking us out on the world’s greatest energy podcast for Stuart Turley and Michael Tanner. We’ll see you tomorrow folks. [00:24:23][0.0][1439.0]