Daily Briefing - It's getting dark here
The costs of growing green keep growing.
I am still locked out of my Twitter account for a few days, and people still keep tagging me… kinda funny.
As per lots of my posts the last few weeks, there are no easy way out of this mess, and recovery is going to hurt a lot more than people think (even me). The first article about how Climate Action is now a hostage of Energy Crisis is quite interesting.
Because it is literally what I said for weeks, there is no Green Policy without cheap energy, otherwise governments will go back on their words, or collapse themselves, slowly but surely. Or perhaps open themselves to hybrid warfare disruptive tactics.
One big marker to write it down on your notebook is the French energy woes. Something a reader previously commented, Europe possess enough trained workforce to maintain nuclear going. Europe will keep importing LNG, energy prices will still be high for the entirety of 2022, possible for a portion of 2023.
This will affect factories, production, recovery, therefore will affect supplies of various necessary components, metals, fertilizer. I said it many times, but it bears repeating myself, we are barely in the middle of the cascade effects of the Nova Swan, not at the end.
As I wrote in Starts of Resource Nationalism, it would take a couple of weeks to start seeing the effects of that coal ban export would be felt a couple of weeks after, and here we are. Mapping the start of its cascade effect. After the Chinese holiday, recovery will hit them (and the world) hard, therefore the need for energy will bounce back hard. I expect a minor repeat of last time, higher energy cost affecting industry and production.
And here a surprising event to bear in mind. Indonesia just has suspended the operations of more than 1,000 miners of coal, tin and other minerals. Indonesia is the world’s top exporter of thermal coal and a major producer of nickel metals, copper and refined tin. We already have a shortage of nickel, copper.
Denmark follows Italy example and will attempt to subsidize energy costs for hundreds of thousands of families, which will impact not only supply, but prices. Between a rock and a hard place for a lot of countries.
One concerning trends you can research yourself rather quickly, is the fact that many many commodities, industries, and anything in between is often stating the same phrase. “This is a trend like 2008”. Anyone with a functional memory can put 2 and 2 together, even though circumstances are different.
One of the biggest supplier for restaurants, schools, now faces a worker’s strike. Already facing supply shortages, high prices, inflation lowering demand, this add fuel to the fire. And it is an angle national security people should keep in mind and be very aware. Any non-state or state actor could use this to disrupt an entirely brittle system.
Worker strikes will become sort of a norm in certain industries, as economies face ever-growing inflation, central banks can’t control it, and see their wages going down the drain.
One last addendum, as I kept saying for months, for a few different variables, the aluminum shortage goes strong, and by the article, it mostly affects small business, as everything else related to this pandemic, but soon it will affect big corporations prices too.
Austria will force its citizen to take a, literal, useless vaccine for 2 years, at this point the damage from this poorly designed product is self-evident, even if you don’t read my virus posts. A few other countries insist on the mistake. Short virus post coming soon, maybe.
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Climate Action Held Hostage by Energy Crisis
No one said that saving the planet was going to be easy.
But right now a toxic cocktail of political intransigence, an energy crisis and harsh economic reality is threatening to erode what progress has been made.
As the global economy sputters to life after its pandemic-induced slowdown, fossil fuels are staging a comeback.
Gas prices are hitting records, prompting some utilities to burn coal instead. Oil is nearing $100 a barrel, swelling the coffers and swagger of countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Suddenly, the prospects for speeding the shift to clean energy are looking grim.
EDF Flags Lasting Power Crunch as Atomic Woes Extend to 2023
Electricite de France SA made deep cuts to its forecast for French nuclear output next year, just days after slashing the estimate for 2022, as a heavy maintenance and repair schedule causes lasting disruption to European power supplies.
The revision means that the utility’s atomic production, which typically accounts for more than two-thirds of the France’s electricity output, may barely rebound from the three-decade low projected for this year.
French reactors are the backbone of the European power system, but the fleet is becoming more unreliable. The shortfall in domestic generation has forced the nation to import electricity at times, tightening supplies in neighboring countries used to relying on the nuclear giant to keep the lights on.
To make up for the shortfall in nuclear power, Europe is being forced to import liquefied natural gas to feed its power plants, driving prices to records amid lower shipments from the region’s biggest supplier, Russia. Governments across the continent have been forced to cut taxes or distribute subsidies as consumers and businesses grapple with inflation.
There will a “heavy” program of 43 reactor halts for maintenance and inspection, including six 10-yearly inspections and four scheduled outages starting this year that will continue into 2023, EDF said. The control and repair program “on the pipes potentially affected by the stress corrosion phenomenon” will also continue, it said.
China's regulators move to rein in renewed surge in coal prices
Caps proposed as supply-demand gap widens over holiday, Olympics, winter weather
Chinese regulators are ramping up efforts to rein in surging prices of coal for power generation as the gap between supply and demand widens following the Lunar New Year holiday.
Denmark Agrees to Energy Subsidies for Poorest Households
Denmark’s government will pay a subsidy totaling 1 billion kroner ($153 million) to some of the country’s poorest households in compensation for higher energy costs.
Under the Social Democrat minority cabinet’s deal with support from leftist parties, the Nordic country will pay the one-time subsidy to about 320,000 households with an annual income below 550,000 kroner to help pay the energy bill, the energy ministry said in a statement on Friday.
Analysis: After oil, gas and coal, global fuel shortage spreads to diesel
Global supplies of diesel are dwindling as refiners struggle to keep pace with rapid post-pandemic demand recovery, exacerbating an acute global energy shortage which has already sent the prices of gas, coal and crude oil soaring.
At a time when global central banks are fretting over inflation rates not seen for decades, diesel shortages would push up fuel and transportation costs further and add more upward pressure on retail prices.
The U.S. and Asian diesel imports on which Europe relies have been limited in recent weeks due to higher domestic consumption for manufacturing and road fuel purposes.
"A repeat of that is not our base case, but it is notable that diesel prices have been tracking the 2007-08 period closely in recent months," they said, adding that they expected crude prices to reach $100/bbl in the second half of this year.
Last week, a winter storm tested fuel availability in the U.S. with some utilities preparing to use more distillate fuel oil to meet demand, while South Korea and India have been unable to fill a supply gap left by China’s recent clampdown on refined product exports due to their own domestic needs.
Is another coal shortage crisis looming over India?
In December last year, the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (FIMI) shot off a letter to the Prime Minister claiming that the coal crisis was still prevailing, and was affecting the profitability of non-power industries.
It came three months after several states were hit by power outages due to coal shortage. And two months after finance secretary TV Somanathan assured the nation that the coal shortage was temporary.
Now, India is again seeing the emergence of a complex demand-supply mismatch in coal. Both the power generation and the non-power sectors are claiming that the supply is below optimum levels. They have also alleged that the national miner, Coal India Ltd, has been supplying bad quality coal. Non-power sector consists of a range of manufacturing units.
This one you can easily mark as a tipping point.
"No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future".
There is no such thing called mass-extracted Indian Coal, unless oil comes from the Middle East - in seas every hour - cheaper than water.
The voices 'interviewed' in the article - "we want more coal, we want more diesel, etc" - are indirectly calling for more wars in the Middle East to spare some of the oil supplies for export that would have been otherwise naturally consumed inside the Middle East - if peace there strengthens for longer time.
This is all no less than the struggle between nations over depleting oil - visualised, and a confirmation that our Western Civilisation is now hard on forcing the world into playing the Peak Oil Musical Chairs Game.
Wailing.
A vaccine mandate is unacceptable. I hope the Austrians overthrow their government and deal to those responsible as soon as possible.