You Won’t Guess What RUSSIA is Doing!

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

Michael Tanner [00:00:00] Wait a second here, you’re telling me that if the tax credit wasn’t there, you wouldn’t invest in wind farms. It’s not to take a tangent, it’s one of my beefs with all these oil and gas companies that raise money by saying, but it’s a tax deduction. It’s like, wait, wait wait wait, so I should invest in you just because it’s a tax deductions is not because you actually are going to make me some money on the Wait a second here, so it’s the same way.

Stuart Turley [00:00:29] Tax deduction versus tax credit, big difference. Well, no, no. Okay, deduction credit. It takes financial profits to make a tax deduction, which is an investment, but a tax credit.

Michael Tanner [00:00:48] What’s going on, everybody? Welcome into the Monday, April 21st, 2025 edition of the Daily Energy Newsbeat. Stand up here are today’s top headlines. First up in the spirit of Shakespeare to be or not to be Russian LNG revisited, sticking with the Russian theme. Here’s how gas pipelines and seize Russian assets could give the U S lots of leverage over the EU. We’ll flip it over to the United States clean energy projects in the United States have been lost in the wind to the tune of $8 billion, but how much cheaper will our electricity be? We’ll stick with the U S U S conducts it’s deadliest known recent strike on Huthi oil port. I’ve got some interesting thoughts on that. And then along the LNG theme, us LNG exports rise to 34 cargos. We will then jump over and I will quickly cover what happened to oil. And gas markets here on this three-day Good Friday and Easter weekend. Check in on rig counts, some interesting moves from a rig count standpoint. And then finally, Energy Oil Giant BP, seen as a prime takeover target, is a blockbuster mega-merger in the cards. We will cover all that and a bag of chips. Happy Easter weekend, everybody listening. For everyone, as always, I’m Michael Tanner, joined by Stuart Turley.

Stuart Turley [00:02:14] Where do you want to begin? Despite the EU ambitions to phase out Russian fossil fuels by 2027, imports of Russian LNG surged to record levels in 2024. With Europe importing, Michael, are you ready? 17.8 million tons, a 9% increase over the previous year. Germany imports alone soared over 500% to 7.0. Three two billion pounds or euro excuse me this uptick is partly due to the discounted russian lng prices i’ll tell you what this is just amazing when you consider that they have such a anti russian lng and anti russian natural gas they’re willing to pay a premium to go for russian lng in pretending to be mightier than that i don’t know the average price for Gas in a pipeline, Russian gas is $6, but when it’s LNG it’s $15. That tells you the price difference.

Michael Tanner [00:03:47] That’s something that’s very interesting to note and to watch out for as you’re studying these markets is that price differential Specifically that you pointed out and we all know China is going all in on Russian LNG because I mean quite frankly now Russia They got to have they got to be able to market their gas somehow

Stuart Turley [00:04:05] Well, Russia has done an outstanding job in the article in here, Cyrus does an outstanding job pointing this out, that Putin has moved his marketing to Asia, he’s got his pipelines in there, he has now even had talks with North and South Korea, and the pipelines are there. There’s about 40 miles left to do to connect Japan.

Michael Tanner [00:04:27] Well, and we know Japan is constantly an importer of all things, and they do a very good job of looking out for the Japanese people. Let’s jump over here and talk about these seized Russian assets.

Stuart Turley [00:04:39] This one caught me by a little bit of a whoa whoa. Can you imagine this is from Andrew Koryobokos, a newsletter on Substack. He’s a PhD out of Russia and Reuters reported earlier in the month that Trump’s resource deal with Ukraine includes the Easter egg giving the International Development Finance Corporation control over its international gas pipelines between Russia and the EU. Holy smokes Batman. Okay, when President Trump kind of surprised Secretary Chris Wright and said, Chris, do you think you could manage a Russian nuclear power plant in Ukraine? Sure, says Chris Wright. I did not have the United States being the intermediary between the Russian natural gas pipelines and the EU on my bingo card. This article really of lays it out, that this could be a big deal in the peace process. But here’s what Putin still has in mind. And the president Trump still does not understand why would Putin want to help the EU? The EU has been bad for Russia. So this really is kind of really drawing down to the line. Secretary of state Rubio said, Michael yesterday, we are only going to be in this for a few days and we are either going to cut bait or we’re going to have a deal. So they are not willing to say this is big time news right now, and it’s either going to be a deal or no deal and they’re not going to waste time because secretary Rubio says we got a lot on the table and Ukraine war is not our war. Holy smoke.

Michael Tanner [00:06:27] Yeah, I mean, which is what we’ve been, I think people who voted for Trump have been asking for it. It’s really not our war, but you bring up a great point of what is going to happen with all of these assets? I mean what’s going to happened with Nord Stream? I mean who knows what’s gonna happen? You know, I do they rebuild it? Do the Ukrainian Seals just come back in and take them out again?

Stuart Turley [00:06:49] And give them wrenches and so I could wrench the pipe back up and the funny thing is most people don’t realize the only turbines that would work on the gas prom are Canadian. Now with the Canadians you know there’s six of them that are needed in order to turn on one pipeline. So let’s go to the next story here. I had fun writing this one. This was a lot of fun. Clean energy projects in the United States have been lost in the wind to the tune of 8 billion dollars. But Michael, how much cheaper will our electricity be if we didn’t use them? And I have a number that is coming to mind. Let’s go through some of these stats. Research suggests that 16 large-scale clean energy projects were canceled in early 2025 with about $7.9 billion. The exact number is yet kind of here in the house. One of those was Frere Battery which canceled at $2.5 billion and I liked that project Michael because Frere battery was one of the few projects that actually the battery technology was allowed to be recycled. I understand subsidizing a little bit to get a new technology started if that helps the consumer and the environment. I’m disappointed this one is getting canceled. Bosch also canceled with a $200 million hydrogen fuel cell in South Carolina. That one, I think, is a smart move.

Michael Tanner [00:08:17] No, I do think it’s a smart move. And you have been a friend of fry battery, not just because they came on the podcast.

Stuart Turley [00:08:23] No, I like the technology. I like recyclable battery technology. Right now, everything else is not there. And I want to go into some of the key points here. Warren Buffett said, Michael, in 2014 in an article from the Daily Caller, I will do anything, this is quote from Warren Buffett, I’ll do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire tax rate, Buffett told on an audience in Omaha, Nebraska this weekend. For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without tax credit. This has gotten us almost shut down, Michael, for us talking about this. It’s the powers that be did not like us talking like this.

Michael Tanner [00:09:15] It’s true and you know, we’ve seen Trump come out in the last month or two and basically whack offshore wind in New Jersey and New York. And guess what? Well, guess what people are and he hasn’t whacked offshore wind saying you can’t develop offshore wind. What he’s saying is there’s no more tax credits to do this and guess what people are doing? Oh, well, we can’t build them anymore. It’s like, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Wait a sec. And wait a second here. You’re tellin’ me! That if the tax credit wasn’t there, you wouldn’t invest in wind farms. It’s not to take a tangent. It’s one of my beefs with all these oil and gas companies that raise money by saying, but it’s a tax deduction. It’s like, wait, wait wait wait, so I should invest in you just because it’s a tax deductions, is not because you actually are gonna make me some money on the back, wait a second here, so it’s the same way. No, I’m waiting, I waiting.

Stuart Turley [00:10:08] A tax deduction versus tax credit? Big difference. Well, no, no. Okay, deduction credit… It takes financial profits to make a tax deduction, which is an investment, but a tax credit is theft.

Michael Tanner [00:10:21] Yeah it works the same concept of your if the if if okay great i’m gonna spend a billion dollars and i get a deduct five hundred million from that but if now all the sudden the deduction goes away i wouldn’t build it why well because there’s no money in actually building

Stuart Turley [00:10:36] Now this is going to bring up two huge issues coming around a corner. It takes about 350,000 to 925,000 or more per wind turbine, Michael, to take them down and try to get them recycled or put the blades in a Boneyard. There are 75,633 wind turbines in varying sizes on the grid in the United States right now. That’s a lot of money that is sitting there as a liability for all this land out here. I came up and I’m going to throw a dart at this and I’ve got a cost that if we did not have wind and on our grid, we would be having about 44% cheaper prices. I got reasons for that number. So we’re going to bookmark that number as we come in and write more numbers

Michael Tanner [00:11:32] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I just want to say this. This is what I tell everybody who asks me about different investments. If the investment metrics that somebody is telling you on a project that you’re looking at, ask them, does it include or not include the tax benefits? Because if they’re telling you the return includes the tax benefits, your next question needs to be, well, what is it without the tax benefit? And you’ll for seeing it go significantly down. Or if it still is within a range that you’re interested then you know that’s a good project to think about but too many times these people use tax deductions to juice the returns and when you strip them out it’s like well wait this project’s not gonna make any money

Stuart Turley [00:12:13] When they were when all of the wind folks were talked about land reclamation. They went they pulled a scooby-doo They would not put land recclamation in there and said it’s not worth it. So we got us a big problem Let’s go to the last story here on this. I mean I’ve got two more stories, but this next one U.S. Conducts its deadliest known recent strike on Huthi oil port. Michael, this is dramatic! We got an oil port that was hit! Well, guess how much? 49,000 barrels per day of crude oil. According to the CIAC data, this was a sharp drop from early 2000s. So all this was was cash flow for the Huthis, so this is not going to impact global markets. It’s going to be about four more bombs less.

Michael Tanner [00:12:55] Yeah, it’s, I mean, here’s the thing, if Trump gets us into a war in the Middle East, that will be the worst thing he can do. Yes, all the prices will go to the moon. Maybe they’ve got a good reason for it. It’ll be terrible. be terrible and it’s if that happens, we won’t, you know, the verge of losing me, quite frankly.

Stuart Turley [00:13:19] Absolutely. I do not want a war. I want all wars stopped. In fact, we have about 64 B-1 bombers. They’re not in the United States. They are all over the place deployed. It scares me to death. We have six B-2 bombers on Diego Garcia ready to strike and if not doing some of these strikes. No, I do NOT want a War. I don’t want that going on record. I am not for war. Yeah, no, let’s go to the last one or the last one here, the last story on a regular basis. Michael, I’ve been really tracking LNG as an export because, and why it matters to investors and why it matters to our listeners is that president Trump is using energy export as a service, possibly, even if we take a look at energy management of EU’s Russian natural gas pipelines, holy smokes. But if we also take a look at all shipments out of Cheniere Energy, out of the Marcellus, out the Permian Basin, I tracked these. And this compares to this past week, we had 34 cargoes go out. The EIA said in its weekly report. Shipping criteria provided by Bloomberg Finance, the total capacities is 129 BCF. This compares to 30 shipments of 113 BCF in the week ending April 19th. And I’ve been tracking the number of ships and the number of builds and new kinds and everything else. And it turns out we are going to be buying LNG carriers because Michael, we have one LNG carrier flagged to the United States right now.

Michael Tanner [00:15:04] This just comes back to the Jones Act, we know it, so.

Stuart Turley [00:15:07] Stuff we’re tracking.

Michael Tanner [00:15:08] Alright, let’s jump over here and touch on some finance stuff, guys. Before we do that, let’s go ahead and pay the bills. As always, thank you for checking us out here on the world’s greatest website, www.energynewsbeat.com. Stu and the team do a tremendous job making sure that website stays up to speed. Everything you need to know to be the tip of the spear when it comes to the energy and the oil and gas business. Go ahead and hit that description below for all links to the timestamps, links to articles. Subscribe us on YouTube, subscribe to us on Spotify and or Apple podcast, go ahead and leave us a five star review or whatever review. If you think the show sucks, give us a one star and make sure to leave a comment. If they’re watching, they’re leaving a review. Yeah, especially if it’s a solo show from Stu. He gets better views than I do on my solo. So we need to down rank his shows. So if you can help me out and boost me and his solos, that would be great. Also subscribe to us on sub stack the energy newsbeat dot sub stack dot com. Great place to support the show. We have a little paid subscription going there. Thank you to all of our subscribers there They allow us to do what we do here It’s a great place to get some custom articles stews in the you know We’re putting a lot more custom content there So if you want to stay up to speed with everything that we’re thinking in real time check us out there and please sign up for a paid Subscription also shout out and thank you for supporting the show Reese energy consulting, who’s your oil, natural gas, LNG, and mid-stream company, guys. If you’re an upstream operator and you’re not working with a marketing firm, I promise you, you are getting screwed out of cash from your first purchasers. You’re leaving money on the table, not working with Reese Energy consulting. If you are in the midstream space, they’re all over. They do everything from helping you design LNG facilities to working you on bringing that life to plan. Buying and selling crude oil and jet fuel and LNG if you need anybody. Guys, call Reese Energy Consulting. We love them. Stu’s doing a bunch of podcasts with Steve Reese. One actually just dropped on Friday with him and Mark Stansberry. So guys, check them out. ReeseEnergyConsulting.com via the description below. Tell them that Energy Newsbeat sent you and you will get a little bit of a discount. I’m sure if you tell them that we sent them and you can tell them that I said that. You tell them you got a it’s 75% discount if you say no it’s a joke no that’s a 90% discount no no no but just tell them that newsbeat sent you we would much much appreciate that and finally guys if you are looking i mean it’s all you everyone just got done with their 2024 taxes if you owed the government money now is the time to start thinking about how you don’t do that in 2025 we just talked about tax deductions in the earlier ones so if you do want to become Billy Bob Thornton from Landman. You wanna lower your tax burden. More importantly, you wanna make a little bit of cash because that’s the key. We’re not just giving you a deduction, we’re actually sending you a check. And you want to diversify your portfolio, get into the oil and gas market, show up to a party and be like, you know, I actually own a few oil and gass wells. We have some great information and an oil and gas e-book we’d love to send you on kind of what investing in the oil or gas markets look like. And we have a great, great project that we would love to get you in contact with, so check us out. That’s investinoil.energynewsbeat.com, or you can go ahead and hit the link in the description below to fill out the formula. And we will get you all the information. We appreciate everybody who has done that. Stu, let’s jump over and dive into the markets here. Pretty interesting. Markets closed on Friday for Good Friday. So the last trading day we had was Thursday. Pretty quiet though. Market, you know, S&P 500 was only up three tenths of a percentage point. NASDAQ was legitimately flat. Two and 10 year yields jumped a little bit, 0.6 and 1.2 percentage points for the two and 10 dollar index down about an eight or about a tenth of a percentage point. Bitcoin down about half a percentage point over this four-day weekend, $84,611. Crude oil on Thursday was up 2.5 percentage points or $1.50, ending at $64.01. Brent oil was up to $68. Natural gas was fairly flat, $3.24. And our XOP, which is our EMP securities contract, was up 2.7 percentage points to $111.93. So pretty fascinating there. Mainly, I think the reason you’re seeing oil go up is twofold. You’ve got trade deal hopes. I mean, one could argue that the tariffs, at least from a trade imbalance standpoint, have led to some renegotiations, some deals. Obviously, we are in a trade war, clearly, with China. But basically, what we’re seeing and what we saw Thursday was that the United States and EU began negotiating on a potential new trade deal. And the U.S. Also went ahead and slapped on new Iranian oil exports, you know, basically what they did, which was these sanctions that were dropped last Wednesday by the Trump administration, basically said that you cannot export oil to China, and they specifically went in and targeted specific Chinese refineries, known as the Chinese-based teapot oil refinery. And this is in response in And really, Stu, why they’re doing this, and I’d love your opinion on this, really why they’re going hard at Iranian oil is because they’re in midst of the Iranian nuclear deal. And I want to ask you a question. Are these all related? And if we see an Iranian nuclear deals, will that include some Iranian oil exports? How do you see those mixing? Because that’s what’s overhanging all of this geopolitical stuff is the fact that Steve Witkoff and Secretary Rubio. They’ve been in Iran the past couple days trying to work all this out.

Stuart Turley [00:21:04] I think that they are, A, they’re worried about Iran. Iran has enough nuclear material to make six nuclear bombs if they already don’t have one. And if they do, President Trump said to the press the other day, the US would probably get one of those. So, you know, it’s a big, big deal. And that’s why they’re shutting him off again, or Iran, off again on the oil. I think that Iran will wake up and smell the don’t get a nuclear weapon coffee here real quick. And I think it is a merger. I think we what is not covered, Michael, in the news is that there is more China has a shorter fuse for the tariffs than does the United States. We are China’s biggest customer. And so China has got factories that are shut down. They have people protesting, there is money not being made, and now it has come out that the designer shoes that you paid for designer shoes are a $200 sneaker, or the Chinese factories are only making $8 a tennis shoe, and so that’s a lot of money being made by the brand names that are not going to normal manufacturing. So I think China is on a shorter fuse than is Iran.

Michael Tanner [00:22:27] Yeah. And I do think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens when the Iranian, the deal nuclear happens. I assume something’s going happen. The question is, is it going to, is it going be something tangible and is it gonna include their ability to export a little bit of oil? Because if that is the case, then you’re going to see a depression of oil prices. Cause what you’re seeing right now, the fact that prices have risen since the tariff, you know, massacre that happened two weeks ago, that happened to weeks. Is has a lot to do with the fact that i’m terribly sincere decrease potential demand and they’ve decreased supply at the same time by maximizing pressure theoretically on iranian oil

Stuart Turley [00:23:06] I’m going to disagree with just a little bit, and that is the dark fleet of about 1300 different ships, there’s about 1300 that are possibly in that dark fleet, OPEC and OPEX plus have lost control over the amount of oil being produced by their folks. So I think the sanction relief of that, all it will do will be allow them to make more money legally. Because whatever they can produce, they sell anyway. Fair enough. Fair enough, so.

Michael Tanner [00:23:40] Another interesting note, Stu, we’ll go ahead and throw this chart up, rig counts, up two. Nice. Well, and what this counters, I think a lot of what the people in the oil business were expecting from the fact of with, you know, everyone keeps saying it’s $60 oil, nobody can drill. And so the real question is, why is there an increase in rig count? And I think there’s a lot of interesting theories floating around. I think it’s a little early to jump and say, everyone’s an idiot. Why are you drilling unprofitable wells? It’s just one week. It’s it’s, you know, someone has a drilling rig contract that they need to get done. You know, there’s there’s also the theory of, you know, really what’s going to drop is and what we really should be counting is the frat count spread, because drilling rigs actually at low oil prices. What happens drilling rig’s drop their rates in order for companies to drill. And so the cheapest time to get pipe in the ground is actually when prices are down, you’ll just duck the well. And then when prices come back, you’ll then end up completing the well, so is it really rig counts we should be looking at or is it the frat count spread? There’s a lot of really interesting stuff. I wanna give it a few more weeks before we dive into some of that, but that’s just something I’m watching. Let’s do this. Last one here, energy oil giant BP is seen as a prime takeover target, is a blockbuster merger in the cards. Last Thursday we saw, behold, its kind of annual general meeting, which is the same thing as a shareholder meeting, but because they’re based in the Lundic Stock Exchange is what they call it. If you do not recall, they have a 5% activist investor in them. I forget the name of them. I think it’s Elliott Management. Yes, it’s Elliot Management, who has basically been pushing them in the last year to make significant business increases. And part of what That plan was, was in February BP came out and said they’re slashing the renewable spending and boosting its annual expenditures on its core oil and gas business. That’s according to the CEO, Murray Antje Kloss, who used to be their former CFO when their old CEO who got caught fooling around with his assistant got axed. I mean, it happens, you know, it’s unfortunate, but it happens. You know, this kind of U-turn. Has basically really brought up and you know this isn’t a new rumor but a lot more people are chirping now about two things. One this article points out of a relisting in the United States you know BP right now trades at a multiple relative to EBITDA that’s less than its counterparties in its same peer group that would be listed on the U.S. Stock exchange okay and I think that’s the interesting interesting piece here. Their EBITTA multiple right now is about four to five times EBITDA. Where they have portions of their business that could trade it 10 times EBITDA, which is specifically their marketing business, not the marketing business that we think of. They’re not selling social media management. I’m talking about marketing oil products, which if you need help marketing your oil products just call up our friends over at Reese Energy Consulting. So when you’re trading it three times or four times EBITA, but there’s parts of your business that could rate it 10. And overall, your core business could trade in a slightly higher multiple if you were listed in the US. Maybe that’s something you consider. Well, then it brings up the second point of, should they just go ahead and merge with somebody? And we’ve all heard about the rumors of BP and shell merging. And I think there’s some legitimacy to that. I think you’re going to have a, I think I would argue that that’s more complicated than not, mainly because of the UK regulatory system. You think it’s hard, you think the FTC is scrutinizing mergers in the United States, but they’re scrutinizing them in the Uk. And what’s interesting is that the new head of the FDC following up, Lena Kahn, is about as a stickler on mergers. I mean, you haven’t seen an explosion of mergers right now, because I think Trump is a little bit more. Populist than he is pure unabridled capitalist from the standpoint of they are concerned about you know too much consolidation in businesses and and so it could be it could be the fact that they’re seeing that but also here’s the here’s here’s the rub if they get listed in the united states does that put a merger with exxon or chevron on tape. Ooh, what do you think about that, Stu?

Stuart Turley [00:28:03] I think a merger would be fine from BP to Chevron or Exxon. I think it would be fined from a non-compete kind of a thing. But from a UK energy perspective, it is a nail in the coffin for them. And their energy policies have absolutely decimated the oil and gas industry. And we’re going to continue to see the decline of the UK and the EU. Under this kind of a policy.

Michael Tanner [00:28:35] Yeah, I mean, I think a merger makes sense because they have the ability to, you know, they’re especially if they merge with somebody who already has an offshore business, there’s a lot of synergies there. I also do think it’s an extremely complicated merger to make because for a variety of reasons for a

Stuart Turley [00:28:53] Absolutely, but I’ll tell you the UK losing their entire oil manufacturing would be true. They’ve done it to themselves. So not only did they shoot themselves in the foot, the splatter caught all the citizens.

Michael Tanner [00:29:07] Yeah, we will be bidding, Newsbeat will be bidding. I’m not going to quite say what our bid’s going to be, but we will be bidding to merge with them. We’ll see what happens. My favorite part of the week, Stu, is what should people be worried about upcoming? What should people be scared about? What’s keeping you up at night?

Stuart Turley [00:29:23] Nothing. I sleep very good at night. I know that I’ve been absolutely on target and on the map. So life is good. Things are getting better. China is in a lot worse shape than the United States. Buckle up. We are in for some serious entertainment and everything will be okay.

Michael Tanner [00:29:43] Yeah, absolutely guys. Well, we appreciate you starting the week with us. We’re going to have a great week. We’re gonna have a great month. And so we appreciate again, all of our listeners guys, but with that, we’re going to let you get out of here, start your week, get back to work for Stuart Turner and Michael Tanner. We appreciate you guys checking us out. We will see you tomorrow!

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