Big Digital Energy

0:00 This is very humbling for me to be here today, Mark. Was that seems that BDE set a record for most downloads in a week. And it's actually download numbers. Rivaling Chuck Yates needs a job. And I

0:18 was not here last week. I was not part of BDE. You were off on, uh, you have a PSA related to your absence

0:29 World Women's Poker Tournament in Vegas. So what, why don't we, uh, any, any recap or interesting? What, what size of Vegas happens in Vegas? I will say this to some degree, you know how nape,

0:44 the vibe at nape tracks the price oil, um, you know, the industry kind of felt healthier on Vegas. They had record turnout for the tournament this year. vibe was really good, so. 85 TI will do

1:01 that. Yes, it will. Yes, it will. And

1:06 you got back when? I got back Friday night. Yeah. And took a little while to recover. Completely unresponsive. Yeah, no. To show prep, to show prep. I've you asked for a phone call this

1:19 weekend. I didn't call you and I'm sorry about that, but I was a little worn out. I was a little worn out I'm tuning in thinking maybe this is the genesis of where is Chuck Yates. Ooh, there we

1:33 go. That'd actually be a fun podcast. So what's going on today? Anything of note?

1:41 The Eclipse. Did you see the thing I tweeted out? Yes, your ass stole this from someplace and I wish I could give credit. I'm gonna go fill a bunch of blow up women with helium. I let them go in

1:51 the Eclipse absent. Says this is the Rapture I just got a pretty funny eclipse video. meme that I can't share, but I was looking last night, I have family in the in the Hill Country area and right

2:05 around Fredericksburg, Comfort, Bernie, Kerville area is prime watching. In fact, my elderly father has been on the local citizen community response committee meetings for the last, where does

2:20 that have to be chairs, right, and how to secure your property? But I went on Expedia yesterday and was just looking around for hotels that I'm familiar with. And occasionally, I'll stay in one

2:37 down in Bernie, which is a few miles down the road. But I call it a Hampton's Plus. So it's not, this is not five-star resort. Right That's what a one-night stay at the double tree, Bevy Hotel,

2:53 and Bernie would cost you

2:56 I'm gonna say299 and that is shockingly high in my mind. 1, 300. No way. I checked back last night for availability. All those hotels were sold out. You know, it's crazy is Airbnb published,

3:10 the direct line of the eclipse and all their Airbnb's in there. And it's 92 at occupancy in the direct line. Almost Houston's

3:22 totality of 94, which we can't see, by the way, because we have a double thick cloud dome over the entire Houston area today. My whole thing is they say this stuff happens like once every 200

3:35 years, but it feels like about every three years. Well, last one was in 2017. Yeah, I was talking to John earlier this morning and

3:43 had picked up some new snippets. Of course, most of the mainstream media is focused on these, you know, we take it to the civil extremes about all the other pop culture stuff going on around it.

3:56 you know, these eclipse weddings and, you know, stuff that might make a good next episode of Chuck Yates needs a job. Perfect. But one of the interesting stats and it's not funny. In fact, it's

4:12 tragic is that because of the obvious rush of people to certain areas to observe the eclipse, I think the stat was from 2017 event and there weren't nearly as many densely populated areas like I

4:29 think the biggest cities on the total eclipse path or Cleveland and Buffalo. But there was something like 10 traffic fatalities per hour during the kind of the relevant period of the eclipse

4:47 viewing. So yeah, I remember in '17 you had to fly somewhere basically. As I recall, when we researched how do we do this, take the kids out of school. It was, you got to go fly someplace.

4:59 It's cutting a pretty,

5:02 pretty direct swath through the central part of Texas and up through the northwest part of the state on up into the northeast anyway. So what else happened today? You tell me, 'cause this is

5:15 totally your jam. So you stumped me with

5:22 it to be fair this morning Yeah, today is the 50th anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home run record. He hit number 715 at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and another interesting piece of

5:35 baseball trivia that at least it is to me, Tom House was in the bullpen. He caught the 715th home run and greeted Aaron at the plate after the game was over with. And I have vague recollections of

5:48 it when it happened And I think the most famous footage from that is. Aaron's rounding the bases in between shortstop and third base. These two knucklehead fans flanking him on either side. And if

6:01 you really think about what was going on leading up to that, he was receiving death threats. Yeah, and just all kinds of heads. Yeah, and so. Level racial time. Yeah, here's a couple of papers.

6:13 Obviously drunk one-haired looking dudes, one I think was in the leather suede jacket. And you can see him gently kind of elbow those guys off of him But can't imagine just the whole psychological

6:28 and emotional pressure of that moment. It took him a while, I think. I don't remember the complete sequence leading up to that, but it was early in the season, obviously, because there was a

6:38 chance he could have done at the season before. We used to open Major League Baseball Stadium, Baseball season in early April. And now it's kind of pushed earlier in March. In fact, they opened

6:50 the season with a two-game series. in Seoul, Korea with the Dodgers and the Padres this year. So

6:57 what else happened on April the 8th? Well, one other thing about that, and I hate to do this, I grew up Houston Astros fan as, you know, and the announcer was Milo Hamilton, was the Astros

7:08 announcer. He came from Atlanta, he called that for the, I think, Atlanta radio, or it may have been TV. I can't remember. I think Vin Scully was doing the TV And then Hamilton was doing the

7:24 worst call ever. He talked all the way through that moment. Anyway, but Kudos to Hank Aaron. Amazing, amazing baseball player. So what else happened on April the 8th?

7:41 This is your jam. Okay, okay audience, I'll let you out on this. I just Googled what happened on it We had all obscure popes that were excommunicated and this and that. But Venus de Milo, the

7:55 famous sculpture in the Louvre and France was discovered in 1820. And the secret thing there is supposedly it's not that great, a piece of sculpture, but the Louvre really needed something to sell.

8:11 So they promoted the hell out of that thing as if it was the greatest find ever. Marketing versus true art, I think

8:22 Good, what's our first item?

8:27 Let's do this. Dunberg did a piece on the nuclear facility, jump into that and then we'll tie our buddies at Diamondback into that story. Yeah, it was a piece week four last called The Last

8:43 Palisades, which is in reference to the

8:49 shutdown nuclear facility in Michigan

8:53 designated for a restart,

8:57 and really the heart of the article gets

9:03 to the inertia that is inherently in the system when it comes to approvals of technology and permitting and approval of new nuclear facilities. If you think back to mid-70s to mid-90s in a 20-year

9:18 period,

9:22 France was able to build and bring online, I think something on the order of 65

9:30 gigawatts of the equivalent was stated in number of palisades facilities. I think it was the equivalent of 75 palisades nuclear facilities. The other interesting comparative is that palisades has

9:45 generated a cumulative energy equivalent to all of the solar capacity in the US. combined has generated today.

9:58 But getting back to the NRC is being that rampart, I guess, of delay inertia. There's been a political shift where,

10:11 I didn't notice this, but President Biden had nominated a new commissioner and then quietly withdrew that commissioner's nomination. The background of that commissioner, I think his last name was

10:24 Barran, B-A-R-A-N, was Sierra Club, et cetera. So I started looking into the NRC. Don't pay much attention to the NRC commissioner's makeup.

10:37 Only one of the four has any

10:43 engineering background,

10:47 which given the technical challenges the risks and things that we want to evaluate in terms of the body that makes rulings and is the final authority on certainly new nuclear technology.

11:05 It sparked a thought that

11:08 we had had some experience in oil field operations with a group called the high reliability group. Bob Kuntz founded that and he was a former 20-year nuclear submarine veteran. I can tell you just

11:25 from that experience that you think of the kind of the risk of being subsea within arm's length of a nuclear reactor,

11:40 the engineering, the safety protocols, the risk management, the operating, the tightness of the operating procedures. Those are quite applicable to high risk and hazardous operations. And so my

11:57 thought was, well, seems like that would make a good really foundation or philosophy for those that are making decisions on deploying nuclear technology. If there is a resumption of growth and

12:10 adopting new technology like SMRs, which we're getting ready to talk about, where you have a track record in the nuclear Navy that spans, I think we talked about it a little bit last week in a

12:23 preview, essentially 6, 000 reactor years of accident-free operation. Seems like

12:32 there's - The ocean's much rougher than potentially thunderstorms and stuff, and you're being shot at by German subs, potentially, you know, etc, Russian subs. I mean, you got to be prepared

12:47 for everything there. And the fact we can't look at that and say, you know what, I'm pretty sure we can make this safe is just ridiculous. Yeah. And that's a great point because the nuclear power

13:01 is both on the surface and more hazardously below the surface. And you're traversing the globe. We don't know where. We don't know for how long. I was really compelled by the

13:15 the exposure

13:18 limits, the federal exposure limit for radiation workers. I don't know the units, but the nuclear Navy has turned in a cumulative of one one thousandth of that. And you think about proximity to

13:32 the nuclear reactor on a suburb on a ship

13:36 seems to me they Yeah, like way safer than an X-ray technician working in a doctor's office in it. And it, as we think about

13:48 SMRs, what is the prime mover on a nuclear sub or an aircraft carrier? It is, I guess, essentially an SMR. Right. And so we've seen some things pop up in the headlines around the adoption of a

14:03 nuclear - I think Tracy tweeted out the Bloomberg article last week that Diamondback had signed a letter of intent with, I think it's Auklo. Auklo. To how to pronounce it, for development of,

14:18 they're targeting a 15 megawatt

14:23 reactor to use out in the oil field. And if you think about it, I mean, West Texas, Permian Basin, yeah, the Texas grid is out there, but it's not the most reliable We have the small

14:36 municipality type. uh, grit, uh, electric systems, you have to hook into co-op type, type stuff. And so, I mean, this is an ideal application for that. I have heard from a friend that was

14:52 talking to Mark Andreessen and, uh, I love bringing up his name. You know, Mark, buddy, old pal, as we give back to my, uh, direct messaging him on Twitter that he's never responded to, But

15:03 Mark publicly says that's eventually how we're going to run all the data centers is micro nuclear type stuff. And we're just going to build it inside a big cement blocks or big concrete blocks. And

15:19 then if something happens, the door is shut and boom. That's it. So there's no external type type damage is done. So it's just crazy to me. We say this all the time on BDE. If we invented

15:36 nuclear today, we'd be talking about we solved climate. change, you know, and it's just the baggage. I mean, you know, yes, we've had some accidents, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island,

15:51 but the damage done there has been minimal. And if you think about Japan having a major event within the last, I think it was 2011 when the tsunami did the damage to Fukushima, you know, you're

16:03 now because of their energy security, restarting facilities in Japan. So they're back on a path to more adoption of nuclear energy as a solution as, you know, uncertainty surrounding things like

16:20 natural gas imports and being really an island of

16:27 virtually no natural resources, at least in terms of hydrocarbons, is, you know, I think is a somewhat urgent reality as you think about the next. a few decades of where the power is going to

16:42 come from, and I'm sure Japan is as impacted as anywhere else in the world in terms of the

16:49 demand growth related to things like AI and high-end computing. And I'll say this, the biggest thing I took away when we broke down all the European countries and power usage, power demands and

17:05 where they were getting their energy from, et cetera, the biggest shocker to me was France had built all the nuclear and I knew that. I mean, everybody kind of knows they'd gone all in nuclear in

17:18 the 70s, but I didn't recognize that they were importing as much of a third of what they were producing on any given day to Germany, Great Britain. Guess what? Germany got to build all the

17:32 renewables. They got to build, Britain got to build renewables. because of that base load power sitting there in France. And so if solar and wind people really wanna have a long-term presence as

17:45 part of the grid, being part of the solution, I mean, it may be the bastard cousin, but they need to make friends with nuclear 'cause that's having that base load dispatchable power, potentially,

18:01 you know, in a back, even in a backup capacity is essential for renewables 'cause they're just not gonna do it without it, right? Or we're always gonna have, we're always gonna be burning a

18:11 hundred. Well, I think the other push is, we've seen early signs of most notably in Amazon and its data center with the nuclear option is going to be the kind of the juggernaut

18:28 behind turning the tide on getting back attractive growing nuclear. So I've got scheduled towards the end of this month or if he comes to Houston for my parents

18:41 60th

18:43 wedding anniversary. And we're having a big party for them on May 18th and Zane may come into it. But Zane Ball has had standing as the 58th's brother historically 'cause we all met at Rice. He

18:56 works at Intel and he's now in charge of data power or a power for data systems centers He watches BD, he's gonna come on Chuck job and we're gonna deep dive all that stuff. So be interesting to

19:12 hear what he says. All right, is US oil production going up or down Mark? Let's say you. Don't know.

19:21 I, last week, Gary and Rosen Swag published as part of their investor communication in their blog on US oil production, basically challenging. the notion that US wall production grew, a million

19:40 barrels a day, the philosophy or the basis fundamentally is, we're

19:49 not

19:52 going to avoid, essentially, what has happened in the Bakken and the Eagle for once high grading is done, et cetera You got big surges that are notable,

20:07 quite a fair bit of high grading going on, particularly during stress periods and the down cycles over the last 10, 15 years. But just a level set here, the IA showed year over year for all of 20,

20:21 23, about a million barrels a day of growth. We've talked about that, surprises to the upside

20:29 Their adjustments suggest, GR's adjustments suggest that it was likely only a. 600, 000 barrels a day in 23 and so they look at the endpoints of January or

20:45 the entry point to 23 of January, year over year growth was about 14 million barrels a day. By December, their estimate is we were down to 311, 000 barrels a day and furthermore that

21:03 there could be signs of apply towing showing up in the adjusted numbers as early as right now. So March, April of 24. So year over year growth, they contend is slowing the culprits in the EIA data

21:23 or the errors that they believe that are in the EIA data are primarily related to what's happened to what's called the adjustment factor, which there's a nifty little graph in there. And if we can

21:36 post that, you can see

21:40 a long-term trend from 1981 when the adjustment factor came into being through about mid teens, the real step up actually didn't occur until 2018. And this was tens of thousands of barrels a day to,

21:56 you know,

21:59 long-term peak of, I'd say, 200 or 300, 000 barrels a day. Well, July of last year, it spiked to 840, 000 barrels a day. And the, I mean, that's almost 10 of US production. Yeah, on the

22:13 margin, it makes a huge difference. So it's a big freaking knife. Two factors in the middle of that is there has been always a chronic under-reporting and field-level production because the AI

22:27 collects its data from more aggregated points. And then two, they've started breaking out. and it made an immediate, I think 50 reduction in the adjustment factor, what they call crude transfers.

22:41 I think of them as blending components that come from the refinery back to the field and then find their way back into the refinery. So you're essentially the way I think about recycling barrels and

22:54 double counting those barrels. So the net net of all that is when you make those adjustments and they've done a lot of their own sophisticated neural network modeling on well performance production

23:11 and analysis.

23:13 They're quite on the other end of the spectrum of answering that question in the affirmative. So looking for

23:27 an evidence sign of Permian, which is constituted most or US jails, primarily constituted most of the global non-OPEC growth wedge over the last few years. That sets up a pretty

23:45 different set of fundamentals as it relates to keeping an eye on stock draws as we move in further into the year. So if it is happening, it's going to show up in steeper than expected inventory

23:57 draws. Yeah, three things came to mind when I was reading this

24:04 And I've said the tech cross and I've talked about this on Chuck job. You know, if you look back from kind of 2016 to 2018,

24:14 well, let's go back to call it 2010.

24:19 2010 to 2016, individual well productivity was up 40 each year. And that was all better horizontals, better completion technology, et cetera, right? and in 16 and. to 18, it was up 20 a year.

24:37 So people were talking about plateauing. What was really interesting though, if you peeled it out is if you took Exxon and Chevron Wells out of 2016 to

24:51 2018 drilling,

24:53 individual wells were down kind of three to 5 each year. Meaning the growth in all the wells going up was because Chevron and Exxon were late to drilling horizontals, and they had the best rock in

25:08 the Permian. So they're showing up with the best technology, the best rock, and that's what kept

25:17 it going. So the peak in technology was called 2015, 2016. Now stuff's gotten better. I don't mean to dismiss that, but the big huge ramps. Another thing that I found pretty interesting is if

25:29 you look at kind of like '08 to 2016.

25:34 this big huge ramp of growth. If you took US, Saudi, and Russia production out of the mix, and that was, what's that? Call it a third of world oil production. You take that out of the mix. The

25:49 remaining two thirds oil production during that time was actually oil had130 you And. 1 like, down

25:59 in the middle of that. So you had every incentive on the planet So whatever the rest of the world could not add barrels during that period. And then kind of the final thing I'll throw in that I

26:12 think stews into this is 2020, we have a pandemic, we shut in stuff. And a lot of those shut ends were the United States 'cause we're the marginal barrel.

26:25 And worldwide production in 2019 was about 100 million barrels a day, something like that And we only produced 88 million. perils a day in 2020. So let's say we were down 10 to 15.

26:39 We turned that stuff back on. There was some pressure built up. So we kind of had a pop, at least some of that. And you're the reservoir engineer, tell me the dumb finance guy if I'm wrong. But

26:53 turning that stuff back on, you kind of felt artificially high as well. I'm throwing all this stuff out here 'cause you basically drilled down on the Permian and said it's split towing. I'm sitting

27:05 here going, the whole rest of the world is more of the same. So if we are heading to a cliff, it's a big fucking cliff. Well, if you're not in periods where you pull hard back on the capital

27:18 budget, you tend to find creative things to do under the expense budget. Yeah. Like workovers, production optimization, things like that. Golden screwdriver is what we used to call it Yep, and

27:32 so. And Conoco back in the mid teens when

27:40 immediately on the heels of the OPEC Thanksgiving surprise, I remember going to their investor day in New York and Ryan Lance talking about the backlog of what I would call golden screwdriver

27:52 projects. I didn't think it had the life or the duration on it that it does. But that stuff that happens below the water line can certainly create that. You know, shutting in wells, I think we

28:05 generally agree from a reservoir technical perspective doesn't hurt them. So the fact that production came back after the COVID dip in temporary shut-in period. Scariest thing Mike kinds ever said

28:19 to me. We were sitting there shutting in all those wells and Mike goes, you know, theoretically it shouldn't hurt. It should come back. But you know, we don't know that. We haven't tried that

28:30 on a massive scale. We haven't tried that with these. huge fracks we've done. And he goes, I'm sure they're going to come back and this is the right thing to do, but we don't know that. So

28:43 we talked about this few weeks ago, this very same subject. And

28:51 over the long history, large

28:55 high-quality, high-perosity, high permeability, conventional reservoirs, tend to nothing but benefit from, I don't like the term resting period. When you talk about ultra-tight rock and stuff at

29:09 a micro and nano scale in terms of flow capacity, permeability, or flow potential, then who knows what happens in specific areas relative to changing the things like relative permeability dynamics.

29:28 So if we have somebody who has

29:31 is in the process of writing a book on that. We'd love to, we'd love to hear from you. 'Cause it was crazy, we, with Grenadier, we had Appalachia Basin stuff doing the Marcellas and we, you

29:46 know, generally the thesis was, you get in there, you drill a horizontal, massive frack, get the produce the water off as quick as possible, get it off formation. We went in, did that,

29:58 something happened and we weren't able to produce the well back for like 90 to 120 days. And it wound up being the best well we ever had and we produced back 25, 35

30:13 of the frack fluid and that became our standard operating practice. Drill, frack, wait 90 days before turning it on and it increased, you know, 25, 30 well productivity but we didn't know that

30:26 going in Prudoh had this thing called MER, maximum. efficient rate, produce a big world-class high quality from a geologic standpoint, reservoir or series of reservoirs. And the two major

30:43 problems part of the field was depletion driver, gas cap expansion, part of it was water drive and a lot of in between stuff too. But we always thought about, you know, the real risk of how you

30:56 manage your production, shut in versus pulling too hard on them was always about, we don't want to pull too hard because you create this, either a gas cone, when the gas cap gets closer to your

31:08 producing interval, your perforations, you can create a bit of a, what we used to call a smearing effect. And that ultimately makes the oil inaccessible. So you're doing way more damage by

31:22 pulling on those types of wells too hard than you are by shutting them in Yeah, in fact, maybe benefiting. And we had to work over programs where we were working. trying to move perforated

31:32 intervals around to get further away from the problem fluid whether it was water or gas. So, interesting. The, yeah, no, although any time I start believing, you know,

31:47 this time it's at. One point on

31:53 this whole debate if there is a debate, Domburg did put out a piece, I think back in December, maybe early January called peak cheap oil as a myth. They think the march of a very high capability,

32:09 oil and gas, technical workforce, technology, et cetera,

32:14 over the very long run is going to, you know, going to continue to translate into global hydrocarbon production growth And

32:28 at least specific to the Permian and Unconventionals in the US, GNR talking

32:35 about just a natural end of high grading and plateau and then decline.

32:42 Adam Rosenswag of Gary and Rosenswag and Doomburg did an interesting debate pod on thoughtful money, which is worth going to take a look at if you haven't. Our Berman was on the other side of that

32:56 too He was saying that, and I tried to get art to come on the podcast, and we just missed, but maybe go back to, I've thought a lot actually, about this, 'cause we've talked about a lot of this

33:09 on BDE. And my positional on all of this is set politics, set rock, set technology, kind of a side And that's not really the focus of thinking through this, it's tell me what the price oil is.

33:30 Right. If it's 150, we're going to find a lot more of it because of all the aforementioned thing. And if it's at 50, we're just not. We're not running out of oil. We're running out of oil at a

33:42 certain price. Exactly. And we have tighter feedback loops today because of shale. And so I'm kind of in - In social media. Yeah, I'm in Doomburg's camp on it so long as you give me the price

33:56 incentive to do it. So,

33:60 all right, let's do this real quick. Let's do these rapid fire 'cause then I got something not on the list that we forgot to talk about it that we have to. Shell, scope three appeal. What's the

34:10 great update there? It's, there's a hearing for the appeal that in response to a lawsuit from a group that is

34:26 opposed to shell. ratcheting back on its scope three emissions reduction targets, and there's a pretty substantial difference between the adjusted shell targets and where they believe they need to

34:45 go. It's in front of a court in the Hague. And if the appeal and the appeals obviously made by shell, if the appeal is rejected, then it affects shell's worldwide operations. It's not just in the

35:02 Netherlands. So it's being heard in the Netherlands in an international court. A decision on the appeal, the appeal arguments are going to be made, I think over four days in the second half of

35:14 April. And the decision is likely to come down sometime in the second half of the year If this is

35:24 if it's upheld and she'll has to pivot and go to much more aggressive emissions reductions targets by 2030. 95 of Shell's operational emissions are emissions related to its business, our Scope 3

35:41 related. So that gets into the very ambiguous and slippery slope of

35:48 doing things to mitigate emissions ultimately

35:54 produced by people who are using your product. And we've had this discussion before. And I've mentioned in the past that the European domiciled majors are under much more scrutiny as it relates to

36:09 governmental and social pressures to do these things. But it's also, I think, the reason that Exxon was not pushed into adopting a Scope 3 target This was back during the engine one activist

36:22 campaign that got two or three of their nominees So by the way, Exxon board member Andy Carsner, who was one of their, let me guess, he went to rice. He went to rice. He was one of the board

36:37 nominees that wound up winning. Happy birthday, Andy. It was Andy's birthday three days ago. So just something to keep an eye on for the coming months, but it's, you know,

36:49 an adverse ruling is going to. Yeah, I still think, and maybe I'm being

36:57 a little Pollyanna here, I still think Scope 3 is going to help ultimately energy companies, despite what Shell's going through, it is going to highlight the fact of, hey, guys, it's the Amazon

37:09 vans running around being delivered to your house three times a day that's doing this. Not the fact that I'm running, you know, I've reduced methane emissions X percent over the last, so. Which

37:21 is, you know, a great fit for things like repeat route. high frequency route, deployment of EVs or EV technology and delivery vans and inside the fence of industrial facilities where there's a lot

37:27 of distance traveled in vehicles that run the same route. I'm interested in a company that does inductive type charging and there's a lot of potential there in the

37:58 market. Gotcha. Let's hit the Permium pipeline stuff. I just saw the FERC filings because God knows we've got to be able to get gas out of the

38:10 Permium with Waja trading at I think minus 220. Yeah. Amalgamated sludge posted in response to I think a question that

38:24 was related to his operation in New Mexico. And he said, I think for two days this year, Wauhaus traded positive, and that was at009 in M.

38:39 TPH had an infrastructure update this morning and just talked about some FERC filings that they saw last week. There's a

38:50 proposal in with the FERC for a wet gas pipeline that would evacuate gas from the Permian to essentially Hackberry and Louisiana. And that's notable because it's the first of its kind. So let's take

39:08 the wet gas stream, move it to processing and export centers on the Gulf Coast as opposed to building these complex and expensive

39:21 processing plants in the Permian I'm Ian. of which there are a few, but there's a group called Moss Lake Partners. Moss Lake is the terminus essentially of this proposed pipeline in Louisiana near

39:36 Hackberry. And really twofold in that you've got obviously growing in GLX sports, but you also have the LNG situation, export situation really centered there And so you've got one way which is to

39:57 process the gas in the region or in the basin. And then you gotta do something with the NGLs. There are why great NGL pipelines that transport down here to Houston ship, for example. But I just

40:12 thought it was notable that we're now talking about building. I think it's a two BCF a day pipeline. We'll have five laterals I don't remember, I think eight compressor stations, but just the

40:23 notion of it being the first of, and we know the significant bulk, if not virtually all of Permium gas, it's coming with oil production is pretty rich. Yeah. So the thing we didn't put on the run

40:42 a show that we have to talk about just really quick, somebody running for Senate and New Jersey, I think, it's made it to the view I think AOC has tweeted it out, that climate change caused the

41:01 earthquake in New York. Seriously? Does that surprise you? It doesn't surprise me, but I did like somebody's response with, okay, well, we need to shut New York down till we study it and find

41:15 out what caused it.

41:19 But how ridiculous is that? Yeah, I think there were some political commentators

41:25 predicting this ahead of other, you know, there might even be some that would correlate the the eclipse with climate change. I would equate it to the fact that there's this cloud dome over Houston

41:39 today and we can't see it. Yeah. So there's got to be something there. Yeah, just just absolutely ridiculous. But like

41:49 we've been doing each week on BDE, we've been talking about an election. This is a year of the election, potentially billions of people are voting. We had an election April 4th last week. So

42:00 Kuwait and the punch line from the Kuwait parliament elections is nothing really changed. But I did study Kuwait a little bit and their government and I found this interesting since they have so much

42:14 in the way of resources, maybe we'll spend a minute on it. You have the Amir. That's the royal family and the Amir. which was established in the 1962 constitution, gets to appoint the prime

42:30 minister, and the prime minister appoints a cabinet. The mayor also appoints all the judges, and most of the judges are actually Egyptian nationals that have been brought over to be judges. Then

42:46 you have the National Assembly, which has 50 members, that's parliament, and they're actually popularly elected. So the opposition party in this election retained 29 out of the 50 seats, which

43:01 was kind of status quo from the beginning. Only 11 people lost their seats, and so it's kind of status quo. But it was interesting reading about the Kuwaiti government and how it got set up. The

43:14 royal family, in effect, owns the minerals, the oil, the merchant class. in effect, had a veto over policies of the Emir by, well, we'll just leave, dude. We don't have to be here. And they

43:31 both figured out getting together, we need to provide health care, education, participation, ie. employment, direct the to elections

43:44 people. And so that's actually how they balanced the government. So Kuwait's one of the more liberal governments in the Middle East It's a monarchy with the Constitution that I think was created in

43:58 1962. Every Prime Minister appointee by the Emir is connected by blood to the royal family. And what I could tell, there's

44:12 quite a bit of free speech and civil disobedience and

44:18 discourse that's tolerated. You can criticize the government you've got. universal voting rights. You've got a number of other things. But I was,

44:30 I don't know if you amused as the right word, there seems to be a pretty high frequency of just dissolving parliament, whatever. Just because. Yeah, just because. But it's a system that's worked

44:42 pretty well. It's created

44:46 of one of the more progressive examples in the region. And so I think that as we think about the landscape of change politically in parts of the world and countries that don't don't practice our form

45:03 of representative republic democracy and have our kind of legacy of rebellion starting with the American Revolution. I just think it's it's interesting to see within the context of their own

45:14 sovereign situation what what works well and relative to some other surrounding. nations in the region that have much more problematic politics and conflict, Kuwait's a pretty good example of

45:30 political stability. So my favorite professor, favorite teacher I've ever had in my life, Gilbert Cuthberts and Doc C, when we went to Monterey, Mexico, because he would always take a group of

45:41 us students down through Mexico, Guatemala, all that. When we were in the city of Monterey, he said, and Doc was partially death, so he talked funny and Doc's like, The city of Monterey, the

45:55 highway system and the street system, is just like life. Constitution? Good. Revolution? Bad. And so there you go. All right, we enjoyed having everybody. Sorry we missed Kirk and Colin, no

46:12 gratuitous prostate joke on either one of them. We played it straight. It was much more fun talking about it. We're going to get Kirk to report back from his his absence. Yeah, he's going to have

46:23 a pretty interesting week. He's yeah, he's having a good time. If you like the show, please pass it to a friend, give us some comments. Hopefully you didn't miss Colin and Kirk too much. If you

46:36 actually liked it better, please say that as well. See you next week.