Recorded on May 7, 2025 and January 16, 2025
Episode 131 of the PetroNerds podcast is a true PetroNerds special. This podcast is the lecture Trisha Curtis gave at the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy on January 23, 2025.
In this lecture Trisha explains that energy is power, literally and figuratively, and she spends time putting energy in the context of geopolitics getting into the weeds on the US, China, and Russia.
This introduction is special in and of itself. Trisha explains what is happening in oil prices and why they are oversold and gets into OPEC output increases and why this actually makes sense right now. In this heavy hitting geopolitical lecture Trisha covers Iran, Saudi Arabia, demand for power generation, energy realities and geopolitics, coal, natural gas, and oil, and net zero being a fantasy. She discusses US energy leverage and dominance that has not been leaned into and used, energy implications for auto manufacturing and military capacity, ammunition supply, implications for the global economy of traditional fuels, getting real on the energy transition, lack of information in the market place and the lack of appropriately evaluating traditional fuels.
Trisha also covers the onerous regulations and aggressive green policies in Europe and their lack of participation in AI, their deindustrialization, and their inability to defend themselves. Trisha gets into oil prices, the health of the US and global economy, the role of natural gas prices and the impact to hurting US manufacturing, resiliency of US shale, natural gas prices and US oil and gas production, OPEC spare capacity and global spare capacity and Saudi production.
She further discusses Germany’s unhealthy economy, stagflation, high electricity prices, rising unemployment, and increasing manufacturing capacity sitting idle, and their exposure to China, the SPR and the actual use cases for it and selling off, Ford and CATL, climate change and the techolongs of wind, solar, and batteries in extreme temperatures, She covers the importance of infrastructure and pipelines, the US leaving the Paris Climate Accords, the US exporting more LNG and increasing global energy security, Chinese auto dumping and undercutting global manufacturing, and China’s fictitious GDP growth.
Trisha spends a lot of time in the Q&A talking about electricity, wind and solar, Chinese coal and competition, the US SPR and refilling it, US shale and execution during and coming out of COVID, longer laterals and less wells and less rigs, global primary energy consumption, AI and electricity demand, Chris Wright, LNG, and America being open for business.
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