Big Digital Energy

0:00 Welcome to another great episode of Digital Wildcatters, BDE. And we're kicking off of the first question, Mark, who is a outdoorsman.

0:11 He's a songwriter.

0:12 He knows everything about energy.

0:15 And you went fishing in Canada.

0:16 And so the question I throw to you right now is our pontoon boats.

0:21 Yes or no, if they've got 300 horsepower Yamaha's on them, they are.

0:27 OK, you heard it here I got no take on

0:32 that.

0:33 All right.

0:33 So you were telling us about Muhammad Ali. What's this?

0:36 So I did meet Muhammad Ali in the Las Vegas airport.

0:40 Little flex there.

0:41 And this was Muhammad Ali late in life.

0:44 The private jet section, right?

0:46 Yeah, this is back when I was poor or

0:50 yeah, I went poor rich and then poor again.

0:52 So but anyway, I went up to him and said, Hey, champ, big, huge fan And you are the greatest.

1:01 And it was a little awkward in that, you know, his Parkinson's and he was shaking.

1:07 And I didn't really know what to do, but it wanted to be really cool.

1:10 He kind of was shaking, but came up and punched me on the chin and said, Still I am.

1:18 That's awesome.

1:18 Yeah, it was very cool.

1:20 My great fighter story got onto an elevator late in the evening at the Mandalay in Vegas.

1:27 My wife and I were there and George Foreman walks in Nice.

1:32 And I'm not one to, as we say, gurm on celebrities, but

1:39 exchange pleasantries.

1:41 And she was taken by the fact that when you shook hands, it was a very soft handshake for a man who makes a

1:48 living with his hands, right?

1:51 With the forming girl.

1:52 And of course, she was happy to inform him that she has his grill.

1:57 Nice.

2:02 Hey, he made 150 million bucks off that.

2:04 So, yeah, the former growth that are good.

2:08 Yeah, I do.

2:08 Yeah, okay.

2:11 All right, so.

2:12 No calling.

2:13 No calling.

2:14 Where's Colin?

2:15 He is in Miami.

2:17 They're doing the, there's a Bitcoin conference there.

2:22 The big debate, he's on the panel, right?

2:25 Yeah, I think so.

2:26 I think he's actually speaking So there

2:30 we have, we got him.

2:32 All right, so

2:35 let's do rigs, crude price, all that.

2:39 Yeah, we're kind of

2:41 in this tedious, continued drifting down.

2:44 Horizontal rig count looked at TPH this morning.

2:46 They summarize every week on Monday.

2:51 Both Baker and Verus data sources were down under 600, Somewhere between

2:58 567 Baker Hughes and Belief.

3:01 591 in Varus, TPH is saying they're looking for a trough in Q3,

3:11 which starts a week from today.

3:14 And so notable in that was pretty stable pricing on the rig front, and this is all part of the guessing game as we watch what happens to crude oil in the US, which is according to the latest EIA 914

3:33 and getting around all the noise of the adjustment factor that we've talked about.

3:39 Taking the numbers at kind of face value, November was a peak at around 132 million barrels a day, 13185, I believe.

3:49 March was after a down tick in January, freeze-offs, et cetera, at around 12 and a half, 1255 in barrels a day.

3:59 March came in at just under.

4:01 Um, 132.

4:03 So if you look at the curve from a zoom out, it looks like we're seeing a plateau and I guess the anticipation of a rollover as activity ebbs here, um, didn't look at spread counter docs, et

4:16 cetera.

4:16 But, um, you know, the big guessing game and the prognostications around rollover and to what level and how steep the decline is if it, if it actually shows up in a material way

4:28 So it's crude, crude's knocking on the door of 81 this morning.

4:32 Last I look, Brent's 85,

4:36 you know, saw some commentary around the fact that there's kind of an accelerating glasses have full around demand, really picking up inventories following, uh, following, plus you've had

4:49 escalation in Ukraine, Russia that is kind of outside the scope of, of, of this discussion, we'll get to another Russian sanction issue here in a minute Did you see that video of the drone?

5:01 Oh, yeah.

5:02 Of the guy like the, he spent 400 bucks building it.

5:05 Right.

5:06 No, this is all I see is this, this soldier.

5:08 I don't know if what side he was, what side of Russia or Ukraine, but he's running and like he holds his prayer hands up as like, and then a drone comes into play and he jumps into a kind of a

5:19 ditch.

5:20 The drone gets right over him and it blows up and kills the guy.

5:24 Yeah, I saw that.

5:25 I thought you were talking about the guy, the Ukrainian guy who made the, who made400 drone that supposedly took down the multi-million dollar drone from Russia.

5:38 Yeah, but yeah,

5:42 no, it was weird because there were two people and there's one person in front, one person in back.

5:48 It was like that person was almost a hostage of some sort because the person in front person in back were both loaded up.

5:57 They had machine guns, you know, all that and they're running along.

6:01 It's almost like they kind of let him do the area of zapping.

6:05 Yeah, which kind of looked like, which was, which was crazy.

6:09 But I mean, besides that, I mean, that craziness.

6:12 So Mark summer, it's just another summer.

6:15 I mean, cyclical, is it, or you tell me?

6:18 I know we're about to have rolling blackouts 'cause that's what Urcoc keeps telling us that we have a 16 chance in August to have some rolling blackouts because that's gonna feel good.

6:28 That was from David Blackman That was Blackman.

6:31 Yeah, I read that this morning.

6:33 There was also Bloomberg Green's story just out on the seemingly unprecedented number of deaths that

6:44 have occurred due to extreme heat during the Hajj, which attracted 18 million pilgrims.

6:49 Damn.

6:49 114 degrees or 46 degrees C. So,

6:56 of course, the following commentary is, because of the.

7:01 Structural global warming, we're going to see continued unprecedented heat waves and you know, we're seeing the same back and forth Politically in the US relative to your conversation with With

7:15 Chris Martz on Chuck Yates needs a job.

7:17 It's crazy if you if you follow Chris on Twitter or on X It's amazing in that you know the headline will be unprecedented heat wave and he'll say well Actually, if you go back to 1902 to 1905

7:35 the data shows us and We have recorded data history from even though I don't think we have farmers all the neck, right?

7:45 We've got we've got all this stuff from 1850 even though I don't think we had thermometers and so All it 1880, but we say America's talking about killing everybody mercury was yeah real stuff But we

7:60 actually, we have all this recorded history and the juxtaposition between what you read in the media and just following Chris saying, well, actually, supposedly we're on the third largest run of

8:16 not being a hundred degrees in Washington, DC. in history.

8:20 Right, like some number of thousands days.

8:23 Interesting.

8:24 When it hasn't happened So it's, I love the, I love when you see the reports from TV, the weather reports and it's all unread 'cause it's hot and you go back 10 years and they would do those same

8:39 temperatures and like.

8:41 Right, right.

8:42 Yeah, so if you, I've looked at NOAA's CPC, the climate prediction charts, they have the eight, 14, six to 10 day And to

8:55 the uninitiated above normal is increasingly deeper shades of

9:03 red and orange disaster, but those are probability contours.

9:07 So equal is white in the contour, as much chance of being below is above normal, blue is below normal, and increasing degrees of probability below normal is what those contours represent.

9:21 I guess what I'm asking, Mark, is as people are about to check out for the summer holidays, we're coming up on the best freaking holiday of the year besides Christmas.

9:33 All of you religious people get off my back, July 4th is pretty damn awesome.

9:39 Why should people care, and why should people tune in to DW right now?

9:44 What are we gonna tell them that they're like, I've got to listen to this right now, but before I check out and put it on Joe Rogan.

9:50 Get in your car and fill her up.

9:51 I paid293 this morning.

9:54 Boom,

9:56 that's right.

9:58 And we have someone in the other room, Chuck, not to name names that doesn't want to be here because of the

10:06 cheap gasoline that fueled you to get here, right?

10:09 Yeah, exactly.

10:10 Well, and more importantly, the hydrocarbon career her father had, that was able to provide such a wonderful, nice life for, hey, but before we do that, let's come back to the rigs just real

10:22 quick,

10:24 'cause I just googled, what were the most rigs ever running in the United States and when was it?

10:32 What's your guess, Kirk?

10:34 I mean, I'm saying 2014, maybe?

10:38 And how many rigs?

10:39 No idea.

10:40 I'll get close, 1981, 2000.

10:44 So you are correct about '81.

10:46 It was December of '81, 4, 530 rigs were running in the United States back then.

10:54 All right, let's do the same with the lowest.

10:57 Lowest number of rigs running, when was it?

11:00 I mean, how many rigs?

11:02 Don't know the answer of how many, but I'm gonna say right when the shale crashed.

11:06 I'm going still to

11:09 2015.

11:10 It was April of 2002.

11:12 I mean, this guy is a man, he doesn't know.

11:16 It was actually August 2020, COVID.

11:20 Oh, there you go.

11:21 Oil prices have gone negative, right?

11:23 So we were shutting in 244 rigs And the only reason I bring that up is if you're trying to wrap your head around how incredibly efficient and good the rigs are today.

11:35 I mean, you were throwing numbers out, let's just say we're flat.

11:38 We're flat running above 13 million barrels a day with 567 rigs

11:46 running.

11:47 That's just over twice the lowest amount of rigs we've ever had running in the United States

11:56 one ninth of the most strings we've ever had run.

12:00 I mean, so the peak trough that sticks in my mind, we were writing reports around it.

12:07 In 2001, July of 2001, at the peak, there were 1, 068 gas-directed rate.

12:16 By April of 2002, that was down to 394.

12:20 You remember the great gas collapse after10 gas that literally NIMEX closed at 10, 000 on December 31 of 2000.

12:32 And gas went from 10 to much, much lower.

12:37 The companies, the real gas-heavy companies at that time, the first week of January of 2001,

12:45 there were several companies, Chesapeake, Lloyd Rifus, a couple of others that were XTO, put on these beautiful collars of, or 50 to nine.

12:57 and the stocks got absolutely crushed in response to that news.

13:01 Oh, yeah, interesting, interesting.

13:05 That's why those red count numbers stick in my head.

13:08 Yeah, there you go.

13:10 All right, back to

13:12 the climate protests and our lovely young - Let's start with the most recent one yesterday.

13:18 I mean, all I'm doing is like, I didn't get to watch the golf house do another things.

13:23 And then I look on the green, and I see all this like paint and bullshit going what happened there, smoke bumps.

13:29 So then I went backwards and watched it.

13:31 I mean, there's some damn good tackles going on.

13:34 Like talk about takedowns.

13:35 These guys, it's awesome when someone takes their job seriously, especially at like a PGA tour event.

13:42 So that was PGA tour, not a live tour tournament.

13:45 It wasn't live.

13:46 It was PGA. Okay.

13:47 It was the travelers.

13:49 It was the travelers.

13:49 The Scottish shelter had like putt through paint, you know?

13:52 I mean, or smoke bomb.

13:53 It was great And if you don't follow Super 70 sports on Twitter.

13:58 I got it.

13:58 You should.

13:59 Funny as follow.

14:00 Oh, what did he say?

14:02 He just basically, and I'm kind of paraphrasing paraphrasing a very

14:08 clever quote posting it.

14:10 Yeah.

14:10 And he said, said something to the effect that I expected Scottie Scheffler to yank out of shiv and take down a couple of those guys said, lesson is don't, don't, don't shock an ex-con

14:27 Yeah, but Bunkie Perkins had tweeted out something to the effect of, did he freak out with the cops running,

14:34 running up on the, on the 18th, but,

14:38 and there, they apparently had t-shirts that read, if we can get a picture of those that read something to the effect of there is no golf on a dead planet, or as we said, when the climate

14:49 processors ran on the green today at the travelers, I thought for a second Scottie Scheffler might produce a shiv and take a couple of them out.

14:56 This moron's likely to be alive.

14:58 you can't start all the next con like that.

15:02 But if you don't follow super 70s, you have to.

15:05 Yeah.

15:06 I mean, what's up, I mean, let's go.

15:08 It seems these protests always happen in the summer.

15:11 So they're clearly students are unemployed people that have nothing to do and they figure, hey, for a couple bucks, I'll go protest, right?

15:19 Is that kind of the model?

15:21 Or older academics that are, you know, classes and in session, so.

15:25 Oh yeah, I guess one of those guys kind of looks like one, you're right No golf on a dead planet.

15:32 I don't even know what you do with that.

15:34 Yeah.

15:35 I don't know either.

15:36 I mean,

15:38 I love the meme where it's, the psychiatrist is sitting there or the therapist sitting there with the youngster.

15:47 And the youngster is like, oh, I'm just very distressed about the environment in 50 years.

15:54 And the therapist is like, have you tried gluing yourself painting, it's like, this doesn't make any sense.

16:02 I don't think it's winning anyone over to its cause.

16:06 I mean, I think it's the height of the echo chamber narcissist.

16:10 I will say this though, that, you know, many of us knew, like I knew people that came back from NAMM and they were messed up.

16:18 Of course, they were like my parents' age, but it was like, they were fucked up.

16:22 That war fucked them up.

16:25 And we realized as things go on, like PTSD is a real thing.

16:29 Like our heroes from

16:31 World War II that we knew, they had PTSD, they just didn't talk about it.

16:37 Vietnam people were shamed, so they didn't talk about it, but now you have like Gulf War and now it's like a big thing.

16:43 But what I find curious when I was thinking about this protesting, are kids the millennials and Genziers, like are they gonna have climate PTSD?

16:54 I mean, they are living in a world every message to them is that the earth is gonna blow up, it's burning up, you're screwed, you're life's over.

17:05 I'm like, that's a big deal.

17:07 I mean, they clearly had it from COVID.

17:09 I mean, COVID scared it.

17:11 My kids got the shit scared out of them with COVID, literally thinking that people were gonna die.

17:18 I mean, I remember Charlie - People did I remember Charlie being so

17:27 scared that Mimi and grandpa were gonna die, and I said, well, call your grandpa and just talk to grandpa, 'cause grandpa was making jokes.

17:37 You know, blah, blah, blah.

17:39 And grandpa said, and very serious, hey, Charlie, look, I've been a doctor for the last 50 years.

17:47 Been in a hospital every day There have been 14 different coronaviruses during my career.

17:54 This is a, this is a new coronavirus, but it shares a lot of the attributes.

17:58 I built up an immune system because I got sick every day in the hospital from getting all these viruses up, brought them home to your MIMI.

18:07 We actually have the immune system that's gonna deal with this.

18:11 And so yeah, we're gonna go continue to eat out.

18:14 We're gonna go continue to see people.

18:17 We're gonna continue to be outside and get our sunshine.

18:21 And let's not be worried about it, but I mean, my kids were literally scared that their grandparents were gonna die at any moment because of COVID or their mom was gonna die 'cause of

18:35 Kim has asthma.

18:37 And we didn't know it in early days if that was actually a comorbidity for it.

18:43 It turns out actually there, it was very rare for folks with asthma 'cause they were always spraying without buty at all.

18:52 you know, which would kill the virus.

18:55 So they wound up not.

18:56 But anyway, yeah, I think it's, I think it's real.

18:59 And the continuous real time feedback loop of phones and social media have created.

19:08 Exacerbated it, yeah.

19:09 Elevated, I read somewhere that teenagers today have

19:16 the stress level of war veterans in the 50s Yeah, the, I've seen anxiety levels of the mental ward patients from the 30s and stuff, yeah.

19:28 Yeah, so, and just to put a historical point on it, I'm middle of the way through Alex Kershaw's first way book on D-Day.

19:37 I just picked that up to, in response to the CBOT that Bertson did with Alex.

19:47 In reading about things like, you know, the details of some of the landings, a commander on a mic.

19:52 about our landing craft

19:55 had one of his sergeants jump off thinking it was a way steep water, but there was a pool there created by a bomb crater underwater and he went in and over his head and then he gets shredded, he

20:09 sees us get shredded by the landing craft prop.

20:13 So that's something that never leaves you and coming back, you know, just multitudes of those stories So

20:24 those things do obviously have a lasting effect but this more, I don't know if it's fair to call it nebulous, just the constant messaging and the consciousness around things like climate anxiety and

20:39 what kind of systemic mental health issues it creates and, you know, we're still in a fairly active aftermath of what went down over the last 20 years.

20:53 in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, they're still, I think the number is 22, PTSD related suicides a day.

21:02 So particularly, I mean, if you look at those statistical data, the world's doing as well as it's ever done.

21:10 I mean, we've, we've gone from 10 of the world being in poverty or 10 of the world, 90 of the world being in poverty.

21:21 I think we're talking 10 to 15 of the world today is within poverty.

21:26 If you look at just by any measure, we are doing so well.

21:31 And we should be enjoying that and celebrating it.

21:35 And we're just so stressed out

21:39 that

21:41 not a good thing.

21:42 What do we got, Mark?

21:44 You want to go from lizards to whales?

21:46 Let's go.

21:47 So latest Doomburg out this morning was called mission.

21:53 We've,

21:55 we'll attach a link to the sub stack.

21:56 It's a subscription sub stack.

21:58 And we've obviously discussed Demberg

22:03 quite frequently.

22:06 But apparently the US Fish and Wildlife Service, after a decade of the

22:15 Permian Dune lizard

22:17 being possibly on the endangered species list under the ESA, the Endangered Species Act, it almost got there in 2012 with the Obama administration.

22:28 Yeah, I've been following this one closely.

22:30 Yeah, it was fitting so fish and wildlife.

22:31 It's like, you're almost there.

22:32 And what really accelerated the private conservation efforts which have been quite successful between parties in New Mexico and Texas.

22:42 You have interest in the

22:45 Permian, have actually been measurably helpful in terms of the population increase, et cetera.

22:52 And, you know, the, the sub stack is all about kind of mission creep, scope creep using things like the Endangered Species Act to basically construct or prohibit development activity, in this

23:10 case, particularly the Permian oil and gas development.

23:13 And so after listing on the Endangered Species list, official wildlife has a year to designate critical habitat, which could certainly affect things like leases and locations, midstream, and

23:29 importantly, places where sand is mined in the Permian.

23:35 So worth a read, worth actually, I think a subscription, but

23:42 the contrasting point was in something you've talked about quite a bit, being a part-time resident and tuck it is what's going on in the east coast which has generated no political or regulatory,

23:55 essentially no political or regulatory motivation to study what's happening with the whales.

24:01 Speaking of trauma, let's just all bring this together.

24:05 We invested back in the day in a company in California and we were on

24:13 a sanctuary for the blunt nose of leopard lizard.

24:18 We had to hire a biologist who would come out and look at all of our practices as an oil and gas company, would look at all of our practices.

24:28 If a lizard ever died, we had to perform an autopsy on that lizard.

24:34 Smart, smart.

24:35 The reason that lizard was endangered is because it might be the dumbest thing on the planet.

24:40 It would literally go run and jump into the side of a truck.

24:44 Like you could see this happen.

24:48 And so anyway, we spent all this time, energy, effort, protecting the blunt nose leopard lizard until we finally figured out that agriculture was actually exempted from all of it.

25:03 And so the farmer, we went and bought him 500 cattle and they just went out there and trampled the blunt nose leopard lizard.

25:10 And we didn't have to mess with them again.

25:13 But yeah, it's absolutely insane the amount of money we spent.

25:18 Well, the precedent story that led into the current story around the dune lizard was there was an attempt to

25:28 constrict

25:31 water being pulled from the Edwards aquifer, which among its users counts the 17 or 8 million people in the San Antonio area.

25:42 Ted Cruz wrote a pretty scathing - And Austin, in response to that So

25:48 It's really about just the

25:52 over-reaching the expansion of some of these regulatory acts and these regulatory agencies to really affect.

26:01 Well, it's the backdoor nature of it.

26:03 It's the, it's the, let's not have a fair discussion on whether we should have oil and gas.

26:10 Let's do chicken shit things like say, oh, you can't drill there because of this cute little lizard You know, it's like, it's like what they did in Colorado where they created the map that said,

26:21 oh, you can't drill within so many feet of a school or whatever.

26:25 You look up and 88 of Colorado can't be drilled in.

26:29 Right.

26:29 I mean, if Permian shale was a country, it would rank third in terms of energy contribution and growth over the past decade, which not only affects people in the Permian or Texas in the US, but

26:45 also globally it's been.

26:48 a miracle with countless benefits.

26:50 And that's really

26:53 like how hurricanes form with some of these random, just seemingly

26:60 events off the West African coast.

27:02 A small stir turns into a

27:06 cat-five.

27:06 So you've got something that - an animal that should be protected from extinction, if possible, through sound conservation, an animal that's mostly no larger than a human index finger.

27:23 But these are the small trigger points that you're going to start seeing

27:30 a lot more front line headlines about

27:35 one more front of things like just stop oil I don't really know who the primary activist coalition is behind this, but -

27:47 It's really a

27:49 pretty good end-around way of getting to a larger objective.

27:53 When you get a research team on this, let's report back.

27:57 And I bet they don't even taste very good.

28:01 Probably not.

28:03 All right, so what are we doing with the Russ Keys now?

28:06 Well, the EU voted for another sanction to be added to the list of hundreds that have been

28:18 passed since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine.

28:23 And this basically is aimed at

28:28 crimping

28:31 Russia's revenues from LNG exports.

28:34 And so what it does in the way it's designed is to prohibit transshipment of cargoes.

28:43 any U ports that are bound for other destinations outside of the EU, for example, going to Asia, Russian gas going to Asia.

28:50 Now, there is a nine month transition period.

28:54 There are exemptions.

28:55 I didn't have time to read all the detail around the exemptions.

28:59 And by and large, Ukrainian transited pipeline flows into Europe are not at all impacted.

29:08 And so this notion that the Russians are going to suffer billions and billions of dollars in revenue loss because of these new LNG sanctions or LNG related sanctions.

29:20 You know, one EU observer said it's, you know, it's likely in handful of millions.

29:25 And it's those trans shipment LNG revenues are about 10

29:32 of Russian gas export revenues.

29:35 So

29:37 like with the crude sanctions, I predict that we're going to see kind of the unintended upset.

29:43 consequence of what they're trying to do here.

29:48 Especially if, you know, we get a moderation of, of gas production worldwide and contrasting that with what we've been talking about over the past few months with the LNG pause in the US, the

30:04 difficulty of sustaining the capital projects of the new builds like the Zachary Bankruptcy.

30:11 You know, could we run into a situation where all of a sudden we've got gas exports that are priced at a much higher level, just because of

30:21 the structural crimping of supply.

30:24 Don't know, there's a lot of gas out there, but this looks to me like to be another kind of window dressing around sanctions as things have escalated pretty significantly.

30:35 A political move, but not a huge.

30:38 Yeah, and the look,, EU is faced with.

30:42 another energy crunch,

30:45 they're going to want as much gas to flow in.

30:48 There's no notion that the acceleration of the ramp up of LNG up import capability for EU countries is going to be affected.

30:58 Is this gonna stop?

30:60 It's a bit toothless.

31:01 Is this gonna stop Massachusetts from importing Russian LNG?

31:08 It was only like one - That's a great question It was only like one tank or whatever

31:14 10 years ago or something.

31:16 Who's tracking this?

31:16 Who knows, man.

31:16 But they did take Russian LNG at - I don't know.

31:19 I'm sure VTOL and Trafiger and all those guys.

31:22 I mean, they're the ones that actually move all this shit and make things happen.

31:26 Who knows what we're getting at?

31:28 I don't know the LNG infrastructure as well as I know oil infrastructure, but my take always on the whole Russian thing, and we talked about this million times, is just chips go a different

31:39 direction, and there's a price, and it just sorts it.

31:42 out and these sanctions aren't really going to do anything.

31:47 I got to think you're right, Mark, that's going to be the same thing with LNG. This

31:53 ship will go here, unload here, load here, boom.

31:56 There'll be a discount on Russian LNG and where it settles out.

32:02 It won't be material.

32:05 The price effect of

32:08 the Russian crude sanctions have only benefited the Russian economy Yeah, because the Russian economy has been sailing through this.

32:15 Yeah, it's very exciting to have some energy.

32:18 Well, they also, you know, product and in feedstock finds its way into those who have their self-interest in mind first, like India.

32:29 You know, we've talked a little bit about that as well.

32:32 So the barrels will find their way and it's, you know, the way to do it is to really flood the market.

32:42 on the supply side, yet here we are plateauing

32:46 things like US production.

32:50 Russians got a lot of leverage to elevated prices and

32:55 have a robust economy because of it.

32:57 Yep, agreed.

32:59 So let's go back to ERCOT real quick.

33:01 Yeah.

33:03 What's your take?

33:04 And the forecast of, look, we may be in a bind here in August of August, I mean, I think we're streaming each other.

33:14 Hasn't been any structural changes to ERCOT, so it's gonna be another, if it's a hot summer, we don't, we're not producing enough power.

33:24 So they're gonna have to roll, roll blackouts.

33:26 I mean, that's just as easy as it gets.

33:28 I mean, last summer, we were set up for a big blackout, rolling brownouts, whatever you wanna call 'em, except we got an unexpected, did rainstorm and central Texas cool it just enough to let us

33:44 roll through there, but you gotta feel like we're still on the edge there.

33:47 So the cause is, is a red Blackman summary, right?

33:51 Is insufficient thermal generation reserve capacity, which has been a chronic and growing issue.

33:60 And points out that we are not aligning things like storage Right.

34:06 The capacity at scale to deliver.

34:09 And so we're decreasing the safety margin.

34:14 You know, we're living through,

34:17 I would say amplified examples and demonstrations of that, that intermittency or lack of reliability and certainly lack of storage capability, so.

34:27 And you're seeing storage of natural gas or - Storage of electricity, like grid scale battery storage.

34:32 I know we're, I know we're installing a lot of - I mean, that just takes time better storage, but it takes time.

34:37 Yeah, it takes so.

34:41 I mean, politically in Texas, we've had this big call for natural gas generation projects.

34:46 And I think they got five times over subscribed to put it in a

34:51 kind of a market terminology.

34:53 But

34:54 and what ultimately this, I think comes down to as we increase the frequency of these threats, if not actual experiences of things like black outwards, something you didn't think about most of the

35:08 last

35:10 several decades,

35:14 politically, as I like to say, there is no,

35:19 there is no long term in politics ever, right?

35:22 So we'll see, hopefully it doesn't happen, but

35:27 you know, this is this is the kind of dirty secret of the incentive incentivizing way out ahead of the grid's delivery capability and backup.

35:39 particularly as it relates to reserve margin, dispatchable on demand before we've got the grid fully

35:49 overhauled in the storage in place.

35:51 Do you know where we are in the interconnects?

35:53 I mean,

35:55 Texas has kind of traditionally been an island.

35:58 What's the, I mean, not only do it, putting

36:02 grid scale batteries in place, but what about also connecting to the other grids?

36:08 So,

36:10 who'd you have on the podcast that talked about this?

36:11 Yeah, and I'm looking it up 'cause I'm blanking on his name.

36:14 He's a great man.

36:15 And when we say the podcast, we mean Chuck Gates needs a job.

36:19 The anchor show for one day, we will be the podcast.

36:23 Yeah, good luck guys, good luck catching me.

36:27 Yeah, let me look up as name, I can't believe I'm blanking on his name.

36:30 We're really good dude.

36:31 Why your name and what was his take?

36:33 His take on it was,

36:38 his it was Campbell Faulkner.

36:40 Okay.

36:41 It was it was a year ago that we did the podcast.

36:46 And

36:49 basically I had him on and I said, okay, why why can't we just since since we have this free market system, why can't we export power just like we do oil and gas.

37:02 Yeah

37:04 And anyway, his take on it and he's smart dude.

37:09 I don't know anything about electricity is just the engineering complexity and money to be able to interconnect on kind of a real time full basis where we could send power to other people.

37:25 He said, he said number one, way prohibitively too expensive that wouldn't make any economic sense.

37:33 He said, number two, the second you connect, though, you're importing all their problems onto you as well.

37:41 Because it's a circuit at the end of the day.

37:46 And so his take was, Urkhod actually is not managed poorly.

37:52 It's because it's small and it's isolated.

37:54 It's a leading indicator of what's happening everywhere

37:58 else.

37:58 Everybody else is gonna catch up.

38:00 It was actually Russell Gold, the Texas monthly rider who suggested that to me.

38:08 He's like, Why aren't we exporting electricity?

38:10 So I had Campbell on it, Campbell's like, You can't do it.

38:13 Yeah, you should have one.

38:15 If you can get her, Meredith Angwin.

38:17 Who's Meredith?

38:18 She wrote shorting the grid.

38:20 She just started a podcast.

38:23 I learned I haven't listened to it yet, but I bet it's great.

38:26 She calls herself the Electric Granny.

38:29 Oh yeah, she and I tweet back and forth.

38:31 Yeah, so is she gonna come on before Mark Andreessen?

38:34 We should get her on the podcast.

38:36 Of course.

38:42 Meredith, come down.

38:42 We'll chat that.

38:42 All right, so in more impressing news, University of Texas coaches got fired.

38:48 David Pierce.

38:50 David Pierce got fired.

38:51 David Pierce is - And Aggie Land just got a little more nervous post tonight's game.

38:56 Yeah, let's talk about it.

38:57 I don't hear about the College World Series.

38:58 Okay, real quick on David Pierce.

38:60 So he was kind of Wayne Graham at Rice's right hand man.

39:04 He was the heir apparent - Rice For Rice John.

39:08 As soon as - Came out of Sam Houston.

39:10 And then Sam Houston came along, said we want you tons of success at Sam Houston.

39:17 And then Chris Del Conte, the ex Rice Athletic Director, who is now - Are you gonna also tell me that the Texas tower was designed by Rice grads so that the allies are always looking towards Houston?

39:30 That's actually not true, although I wish it was.

39:32 I know, but you're about to throw it out.

39:34 I mean, I'm sure that was.

39:35 I wish it was.

39:37 But we owe homage to the rice house.

39:40 So anyway, I wound up after eight years, supposedly David Pierce is being let go at Texas.

39:48 So Schloss Nagel at AM just got his, I think dream approved, which is an expansion unprecedented, I think in college baseball, but 80 million was recently approved by the Board of Regents.

40:02 And so he wanted a new stadium, but this is gonna be a major expansion and upgrade.

40:08 What's your stadium that was called?

40:11 What's that?

40:11 What's the Aggie Stadium called now?

40:13 Olson Field at Bluebell Park.

40:15 Okay, all right.

40:17 Who doesn't like Bluebell?

40:19 Well, that's unfair to throw Bluebell in, but if I - I think when it was originally built, this may be urban legend that it was one seat, greater capacity than dish fog.

40:29 You know, I heard this guy tell me the story about, I was like, oh, he was talking about his wife about with Sheena's in a.

40:36 sorority at UT and she's like, no, but she grew up in Brenham and like all that.

40:42 She's invited all the parties because everyone from Houston and Dallas, like they know like Brenham society and being just a seven generation Texan.

40:51 That has no idea about society.

40:53 Clearly I was like, Oh, it's interesting.

40:55 Did you know that that Brenham brings it's like some big, especially if you're a blue bell air, like it brings some street cred

41:04 So that's not called stations, but it's pretty close.

41:08 So a little update on college world series, and I'm played Tennessee.

41:13 And this is the championship best of three on

41:18 Friday night.

41:21 And I was in

41:23 a pretty remote location in Ontario on Lake of the woods.

41:26 And I was able to get in a pontine through my personal hotspot connected to my laptop, my direct TV app to work So I will watch game one.

41:36 in a 15 hour travel odyssey, which ended with a flight from Minneapolis to Houston Saturday night,

41:44 actually flying Delta, they featured direct TV live, which had ESPN.

41:48 So I was able to watch the game Saturday night.

41:53 Wait,

41:55 yeah, today's Monday, just check on a lost.

41:59 They started on Saturday They advanced on whatever night we watched.

42:05 Anyway, an M's down, two of its top players, Braden Montgomery broke his ankle on a slide into home plate during the super regionals.

42:14 Dude, that's why they teach you to Pete Rose at what the F he is.

42:17 He is a top 10 draft picker in a few weeks.

42:24 Shane's today, Al, who's their number two starter went down

42:29 in the super regionals, maybe even in the regionals, and then they're a big slugger from Katie.

42:36 Chase Lavelet tweaked a hamstring in the first, but he's playing.

42:41 So a lot of good stories and a good Brenham related story.

42:44 Brenham native who played a couple of years at Blen, Evan Ashenbach, who is their absolute stud closer.

42:51 Despite being surrounded by everyone that seemingly comes into the game, either in a relief or a starter role throwing 95 to 100, he makes a living with a top end of 90 on his fastball, but this is

43:04 gut It's, it's, it's classic pitching.

43:07 It's been great to watch.

43:08 So, um, quite a bit of chirping going on between these two fan bases.

43:13 I've been watching some chirping.

43:14 It's crazy.

43:15 And I love when, I mean, again, when you have Yell leaders doing stuff, it's just pure comedy for the rest of us.

43:24 It is so good to watch because it's so easy to make fun of.

43:27 Yeah.

43:28 I mean, it's great.

43:29 It's just great humor.

43:30 Somebody tweeze.

43:31 I'm not even making fun of it.

43:32 I'm just saying, it's so funny.

43:33 Somebody tweeze out.

43:34 Please, Tennessee, do the rest of the world of favor so these goons don't win a national championship.

43:39 I've seen this.

43:41 But let's get back to that.

43:42 I went to baseball camp, Mark.

43:44 I mean, I was a baseball player.

43:46 They taught me at camp, like you slide head first so you don't break an ankle.

43:50 That was their, that was like, oh, okay.

43:54 So we learned how to Pete Rose, man.

43:55 And you didn't have sliding mutes And when you dive, you kind of do the one hand and then come up.

44:01 Well, I thought you had to have handfuls of darts and you don't break a finger.

44:06 No, that's a throw in the guy's eyes.

44:08 Well, in the old days, you held your batting gloves in either hand.

44:14 Yeah, we were always taught to have your toes closed.

44:16 Now they have those oven mutes.

44:18 Dude, you guys are such wusses, man.

44:21 If you watch my hands out, like Superman.

44:24 If you break a finger, it is what it is, man If you watch Major League Baseball.

44:28 Now they increased the base sizes last year, which look like Willie Mays Hayes, pizza boxes.

44:36 You've got all kinds of obstruction rules that you can't block the base.

44:40 And now some of these sliding mitts I've seen are getting longer and longer.

44:46 Nice and really fluffy.

44:48 So you have a larger base and you've got these Willie Mays Hayes cartoonishly extended,

44:55 but it makes a difference I mean, when they're tens of a second on a play, dude, baseball's done a great job of keeping game times down.

45:03 So I mean, I'm really, I mean, major league baseball's done a great job with that.

45:07 But yeah, anyway, so good luck to your Aggies.

45:09 I mean, six o'clock tonight ESPN

45:14 winner, winner take all game.

45:17 I just love how the horns just shaded you guys by firing their coach just to take some of the, some of the,

45:23 some of the press.

45:25 Well, I think it's producing some anxiety too, because Slosha's name has been bandied about it.

45:31 Dude, and who, I mean, what's the best school in state of Texas to coach at?

45:36 University of Texas, it's not even a question.

45:38 Well, I think it's just that, I would think Rice is a close second, 'cause I think it would be kind of a cool environment, not a stressful one.

45:45 Texas.

45:46 I mean, AM came after Wayne Graham.

45:48 Graham said no.

45:50 Texas has the money away.

45:51 That's the thing.

45:52 Oh, Austin, I mean, come on If you're not biased, where do you want to live lakes?

45:57 And you're going to be able to play Gart Barton Creek Country Club every day.

46:01 Then Austin lately.

46:02 Oh, I hate Austin for that reason.

46:04 Yeah, you get your car keyed if it's not electric.

46:07 I mean, yeah, okay, I get that.

46:09 So, recent report showed cities that experienced the most

46:14 move-ins or migration to.

46:16 Houston was in, I think, ranked number two or three.

46:20 The car tells are great at the move-outs Austin was in the top five.

46:24 I know they're people are leaving because they can't afford it.

46:26 And it people are all Ipster.

46:29 Does that does that include like George Town, though?

46:32 I mean, George Town is.

46:33 Is you really saving Austin or are you includes round rock?

46:37 Dude, I worked in round rock for a decade.

46:40 And I'm telling you that was a drive from hell.

46:43 And people live in Georgetown.

46:44 I was like, I'd go up there and it's like the quaint little town.

46:47 But now when you go to from Austin to Georgetown is one big parking lot.

46:53 It's crazy He's not a small town anymore.

46:56 Cause it's great.

46:57 Yeah.

46:57 Cause I was just wondering is are people leaving the Austin area in that statistic?

47:03 Are they leaving the city of Austin to move out to the suburbs?

47:08 Good question.

47:08 Is that, that's kind of what I've heard.

47:10 I think those are Metroplexes or Metroplex.

47:13 I like whatever the plural is.

47:14 I, yeah.

47:15 Metroplex.

47:16 I like Lexi is it is.

47:20 All right So yesterday, the 23rd.

47:24 anniversary?

47:25 No, hold on.

47:26 The 21st anniversary of Rice winning the College World Series.

47:31 And the single greatest athletic play in Rice's history was in Game 1 of that series.

47:36 Rice first Stanford.

47:37 Chris Cole course went up against the wall, caught the ball, tumbled to the ground.

47:44 And I was up there, saw it.

47:46 What was cool is I had recorded all the games on ESPN and I came back and watched him.

47:51 What was cool is he makes this catch.

47:53 He tears his ACL, but he kept playing just because he's a badass.

47:58 Anyway, he's running back in.

47:59 He tossed the ball to the omp as you're watching it on TV in the omp.

48:03 Nice catch, son.

48:04 That was kind of cool.

48:05 Nice catch, Hayes.

48:06 Don't ever effing do it again.

48:11 All right, folks, travels ahead.

48:14 Good luck.

48:14 Oh, yeah.

48:15 Now I'm going to Australia So I will come back with tons of information on the Beetaloo basin.

48:23 Awesome.

48:24 I'll be in and tuck it and I'm gonna do a deep dive into what's happening to the well-colon is there.

48:30 Now they actually get that out for us.

48:30 I'm gonna go talk to the fishermen and

48:36 some of the experts on island, so.

48:37 Interview a whale.

48:39 And I'm gonna try to interview a whale as well.

48:40 I'll be on the continent.

48:43 Nice.

48:43 Following a baseball tour around and trying to do some sightseeing at the same time.

48:47 But the most interesting part of those trips as it was last year was having bar and restaurant and man on the street conversations about kind of the state of everything, not the least of which is

49:00 energy.

49:01 Why don't we do that?

49:02 That's the three of us jobs is to interview the man on the street and the one man of the street.

49:07 I may or may not have Jacob with me.

49:09 It's teasing that out there a little bit.

49:12 I may have Jacob, our technical guru with me in Australia.

49:17 Awesome.

49:17 You got to record a Chuck job while you're there there will be a lot of recording, be a celebrity.

49:24 So I'm using Australia.

49:26 Some Australia.

49:26 Exactly.

49:28 Great show guys, good to see you guys.

49:30 Good to see you.

49:32 So potentially you won't see us for a couple of weeks.

49:36 Happy

49:38 July 4th, or as the girlfriend likes to say, treasonous colony day.