Week Recap: US LNG Dominance, Critical Minerals, and Global Energy Challenges

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

Stuart Turley: [00:00:09] Hello everybody, this is Saturday the first, March 1st. It’s already March. Boy, it just seems like yesterday we had an election. But buckle up, the staff has got an absolutely fantastic episode for you. They took the best and most read stories of this week and they’re going to just absolutely line them up for you. But I want to give a shout out to Steve Reese and his staff for supporting and sponsoring The Daily Show. They sponsor the Energy Newsbeat. They are an outstanding resource for anybody in the natural gas space in the United States. If you’re buying or selling oil or LNG, they absolutely understand cradle to grave the entire process from a oil rig all the way out to selling LNG and having an import facility in Germany. they have the entire food chain all the way down. Thanks and have an absolutely wonderful day and we’ll talk to you soon. [00:01:11][62.6]

Stuart Turley: [00:01:12] Let’s go to Mr. Trump’s energy czar has a plan to map baby map. I got tickled at this story with Doug Burgum at CPAC. Burgum suggests stronger USGS role to analyze the potential. And when you take a look at it, the US has $36 .5 trillion in debt, but unlimited knowledge about the value of America’s assets, Burgum says. But in the Trump administration, And we’re going to build that balance sheet as we have trillions and trillions of dollars of worth of natural resources, and we’re going to make sure we understand that those are our assets to be out exceed the debt that we have. I like the way that they’re thinking, Michael. And I think that they’re setting this up for long term a profits for the government profits for the US citizens and opportunities for oil and gas operators to work on federal lands. I think this is phenomenal. [00:02:10][57.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:02:11] Yeah, now I think what they’re talking more about is a reference to critical minerals and things of that nature. I think it’s pretty done well and cooked where the oil is to use a phrase. Like I think we know where all the oil is. Do we know where all the uranium is? Do we know where all the critical minerals are that we could be using that can be advanced in to build up our own semiconductor business, to build up all of these other businesses that we’re live on? I think that’s really the main focus. [00:02:37][26.4]

Stuart Turley: [00:02:36] I think that’s really the main focus of this. Oh yeah, I agree. But in Alaska, on federal lands, there is still a ton that has yet to be explored out. So there is still a lot. It depends on where you’re saying. There is no – [00:02:46][10.1]

Michael Tanner: [00:02:49] explored versus no, there’s oil. There are two, there’s a distinction there because if the price of oil ever shot up, we would go start exploring for places we think there’s oil. I’m absolutely going to take you so far. The only way to figure out if there’s oil somewhere is drill a hole or go build a mine somewhere. So a map will only take you so far and exploration becomes more likely as prices rise. It’s one of the reasons why when prices rise, people go find and oil, and it drives then the price down and we see that balance. Again, I think this has a lot to do with criticalness, but I think this is pun intended, a critical thing for us to be doing because all that stuff on federal land does belong to the federal taxpayer. And if we’re not exploiting it and if it can be used to benefit us, it’s a great thing. So I’m all for this specifically because if you do want to build up your own semiconductor industry in the United States. Critical minerals are pun intended critical. [00:03:47][57.9]

Stuart Turley: [00:03:48] Exactly. The US LNG export surge, but is long -term growth uncertain. The United States leads LNG export, but Cutter’s plans to double output and capacity by 2030 is a major competitive threat. Yeah, they can approve things a little faster in that one. The King goes, yes, the Europe’s LNG imports have declined. So maybe King Trump can go, yes. That was a by the way, Europe’s LNG exports have declined within an increased effort. Now, when we take a look at, I think LNG is going to be President Trump’s ace in the hole for offsetting the tariffs, you know, and I think that that’s going to be a major part of his thing, just like he did with Japan last week. [00:04:34][46.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:04:34] Absolutely. And you’re going to have to figure out a way to get all of this LNG economically over to all of these individual countries that want it. I mean, we know the first is building the infrastructure, but then setting up the economic incentives for a lot of this stuff to get sent. I do agree with the sentiment in this article that eventually our LNG capacity is going to plateau because it’s an infrastructure problem. Qatar, all of these Middle Eastern countries are thinking in 30, 50 year increments. We don’t necessarily do that. The largest we tend to think is sometime about 20 years. So from the standpoint of where our infrastructure needs to be relative to where it needs to go for us to continue to dominate the LNG space, I think it’ll be interesting. But I do think what you’re going to see is the demand for natural gas at home is going to continue to rise as AI continues to be big. I mean, three weeks ago, DeepSeek basically said power was useless for their models. It’s not the case, but that was the sentiment around that, oh, we don’t need all these data centers now. It only costs $5 million to train these models. Then Grok3 just came out and that was trained on Colossus, which was the largest data center in Memphis. And that has surpassed all of the benchmarks between OpenAI and what Meta are doing and even DeepSeek. So now everyone’s like, oh, we need bigger data centers again. So it’s a constant give and take with all this stuff. So I think LNG exports may flatline, but we will continue to use natural gas in the United States heavily. At the standpoint of where our impersonal [00:05:07][32.7]

Stuart Turley: [00:05:57] I think as more people get used to LNG and LNG to energy plants come online, you’re going to see that that still is going to help that infrastructure out. I think LNG to power plants in Africa would be extremely cool. [00:06:14][16.6]

Michael Tanner: [00:06:14] It wouldn’t, it definitely would. But that’s it, now that’s a grid problem. Exactly, which came first. Yeah, exactly, exactly. [00:06:21][6.5]

Stuart Turley: [00:06:22] Natural gas prices surged 160 % and they’re not coming down anytime soon. They’ve jumped in recently to all major consuming markets, including the United States, where prices have soared more than 160 % from the colder weather. In Europe, the end of the Russian gas transit flows via Ukraine stopped on January 1, prompting the continent to buy more LNG and prepare for a more intense refills season between April and October. Going forward, prices both in the U .S. and Europe are set to remain high even at the end of the heating season in northern hemisphere as Europe will need to stock up on much larger volumes ahead of the next winter. Here’s where I don’t have it in my crystal ball. And I think that there is such a great forward progress that there is hopes that we may end the Russian -Ukraine war. And if you go to energynewsbeat .co and take a look at the resources, go to check out our articles from George McMillan. George McMillan has got a series out there on why the Kellogg Plan is DOA. And he has been, I’m really impressed with his information. Once he and I talked about it, the change to the Ukraine negotiations happened. Coincidence or cost? Not sure, but I’ll tell you what, he has got some great information out there and I see an end to the war. How soon? It just depends on the administration and how fast they can get it done. It’ll be good for no wars in the world. It would be a great goal. [00:08:03][100.8]

[00:08:05] AGDC market interest in Alaska LNG continues to rise. This is really, really pretty cool because they stated AGDC stated that this via social media after the Philippine ambassador to the U .S. Jose Manuel Romandas said that the Philippines plans to procure LNG from Alaska to meet its growing needs to develop the country sector. As I talked a little bit about that in the energy Reality’s podcast with Irina Slav, David Blackmon, and the Tammy Nemeth this morning, the LNG export is a Trump’s ace in his back pocket when you start to try to take a look at trade imbalances. People are going to pay a little bit more for LNG to buy it from the United States. It’s a pretty cool thing, especially when you consider that that may wipe out a trade tariff from the United States. I think people are going to go me, but on X today, I don’t know if this is true or not. I saw president Putin saying, uh, president Trump, I would even enter into a negotiation with you for critical minerals. So president Trump is onto some, if this is true, and president Putin is going, Hey, I don’t mind trading with you for critical minerals. It’s about business. And I think it’s pretty funny that we’re going to get into this kind of thing that president Trump’s deal making is going to have a very significant wide range. [00:10:07][122.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:10:08] New York’s net zero dream unravels as utopian climate plans face lawsuit woes. New York was really relying on theoretically wind and solar to save its electrical woes. And they had multiple, multiple contracts to build very large wind farms to replace some of their fossil fuel generation. But all of them or most of them have already been completely canceled or rebuilt at a much higher and uneconomic prices, which is the minority. Basically, the reason why this situation has got worse is because since President Trump has taken place, he began dismantling the federal support and subsidies for these, which goes to show that these projects can’t stand up without any subsidies. According to this, this executive order, which temporarily withdrew all outer continental shelf from leasing wind power, most, if not all, of New York’s offshore wind is actually on these leases. So they really can’t actually build anything. But you know, basically what this goes to show is that New York was relying on many billions of dollars to prop up wind, solar and green. It’s pretty unbelievable to see what’s happened. To give you guys an idea, the New York state climates leadership and community protection app of 2019 actually remains on the books. The statute commands the complete restructuring of New York’s energy economy. I’m reading straight from the article now to reach quote net zero greenhouse gasses by 2050 with an immediate first deadline of 20, 70 % of electrical generation renewables by 2030, though they actually never had a plan to achieve that that was supposed to be on the book. So it goes to show you that all this green stuff is, is, is, was being propped up by subsidies. If one, if, if, if by a stroke of a pen, a president by just pulling away subsidies can absolutely decimate an industry, it goes to show you really how much they do rely on subsidies and how it really can’t hold its weight under scrutiny relative to other sources. So wind farms, they’re falling left and right. [00:12:04][116.1]

Stuart Turley: [00:12:05] Let’s quickly look over at Civitas. They go ahead and release their earnings today. Pretty fascinating to see. Basically, I think the thing to see here is that their earnings were okay. I mean, you saw about 1 .3 billion of free cashflow net income at $151 million, adjusted net income at $171 million, operating cashflow at about $858 million, sales volumes of about 352 BOE a day, oil volumes of about 164 BOE a day, capex of about $279 million and adjusted pre -cashflow at about $519 million. Stock got absolutely hammered though, down 18 percentage points, shed about $9 all the way down to 40 .35, really due to the fact that they out of a whim terminated their COO without cause. And basically, T. Hodge Walker, the COO was officially terminated without cause, effective immediately, the company said. He was originally their VP of their Chevron, of the Chevron’s Rockies divisions prior to becoming Civitas COO in April, 2020. He can’t even last two years. Not great there. They also did say they’re eyeing a 10 % workforce reduction, which means all doesn’t quite go well. Yay, cashflow numbers look great, but they’re still eyeing a little bit of it up. So the street didn’t like any of those numbers. [00:13:28][83.6]

Stuart Turley: [00:13:29] Restarting Germany’s nuclear reactors. Germany is a failed state from the standpoint, let me rephrase that, the Green New Deal won. So they have totally de -industrialized Germany into a fiscal major issue. Germany shut down its last three nuclear reactors, April 15th of 2023 and Doug Sandridge wrote this article. It is absolutely a fantastic article going through the whole process of what they’ve done to become green energy, which is an oxymoron when you shut down your nuclear, which is the ultimate green energy of not having any net zero output. When you take a look at its energy crisis manifested after that, and then the wind felled out, 20 years of poor energy policy finally manifested itself into full blown crisis upon Russia’s unexpected invasion, and I’m glad to see that that invasion may be stopping here pretty soon. As a nuclear influencer, Mark Nelson has long advocated to restart some of the German nuclear power plants. As the founder of Radiant Energy Group and a nuclear energy professional, Nelson has to provide a feasible study on how to make it feasible again. By 2028, three reactors could be restarting, adding four gigawatts of capacity. If decommissioning stops now and rehiring begins, Brokaw could resume operations as early as the end of 2025 with swift legislation of action. This is really huge. Restarting any number of Germany’s nuclear power plants would be impactful within a short period of time at relatively low cost. You cannot beat this kind of energy that to have sitting there and you’re in the process of decommissioning is just plain dumb. Hats off to Doug Zandridge and well done on the article. [00:13:29][0.0][739.7]

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