AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis
Biden’s obsession with so-called “green” energy policies is thus costing the United States on two fronts. At home, American producers are struggling under a regulatory onslaught and open hostility from the White House – despite literally keeping the country’s lights on this winter. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are taking full advantage of this weakness abroad, as China in particular seeks to step in and fill the void left by decreased U.S. energy exports.
Amid the cold snap that gripped the nation in early January and sent temperatures plummeting below zero for millions of Americans, the country’s power grid largely held up – barely – thanks to natural gas and other traditional sources of energy. Just after the new year, much of the country saw temperatures that were up to 25 degrees below normal, along with bone-chilling winds that made some places in states such as North Dakota feel like 70 below zero.
In Texas, the cold snap evoked fears of a similar winter storm as the infamous one in 2021 that caused the state’s power grid – largely reliant on wind and solar energy – to collapse, leading to more than 240 deaths. Many tragically froze in their homes.
Following the disaster, energy companies in Texas devoted significant resources to “hardening” the state’s power grid – primarily by ensuring a steady supply of natural gas and other fossil fuels to power stations.
As David Blackmon, a 40-year energy industry veteran, wrote shortly after this year’s deep freeze hit, the added investment in fossil fuels proved crucial for Texas. The morning of the first day of cold temperatures, fossil fuels “were kicking in 84.9 per cent of total [power] generation, with a whopping 67.2 per cent coming from the state’s natural gas industry.”
Although it went largely unremarked on by the corporate media, this was a shining moment for natural gas and the fossil fuels industry. Without them, Texas might well have seen a repeat of 2021.
Joe Biden appears not to have gotten the message either. On January 26, the White House bowed to demands from environmental groups and paused all natural gas exports – a major blow to the U.S. natural gas industry, which has already been hampered by three years of Biden administration policies.
The move is expected to send energy and gas prices in the United States even higher, with Reuters predicting that gas prices may hit their highest level since December 2022.
A German senior energy analyst, Dr. Rolf Werner, who advised Texaco in the 1980s, told me that scarce investment in gas infrastructure means coming price hikes could be here to stay. “They are long term,” he said.
Biden’s decision to stop natural gas exports comes as the latest broadside in his war on American energy, ranking alongside other decisions such as revoking key permits for the Keystone XL pipeline and pausing oil and gas leases on federal lands.
While American companies can make their own decisions, Biden’s regulatory agenda and hostility toward fossil fuels companies have hamstrung the industry and even caused some insurers and banks to withdraw their involvement from fossil fuels projects.
Meanwhile, as Biden continues to target domestic energy suppliers, countries in Africa and Asia – primarily China – are sensing an opportunity.
One of the most prominent petroleum-producing countries in Africa is Uganda, with an estimated 6.5 billion barrels of oil reserves. Chinese companies control about eight percent of all of Uganda’s oil projects, and last month Uganda granted the China National Offshore Oil Corporation a license to construct a new facility in the western part of the country that will ship natural gas to the coast in Tanzania.
Professor Otieno Sekibo, a retired Tanzanian economist who advised the International Energy Agency in the 1990s, told me that China had won a double victory in securing this contract to build a new facility and export natural gas. “It boosted the job market at home [in China] weakened by a high youth unemployment rate,” he said. “It also won jobs for Chinese nationals who would fill all positions from top managers to medium-skilled employees.”
Moreover, as the World Bank reported this month, even as the global economy is headed for its weakest five-year performance in three decades, “Uganda will benefit from infrastructure investment ahead of new oil production,” with growth expected to be relatively strong at six percent this year.
Elsewhere in the world, while Biden was harassing U.S. energy producers, Russian and Chinese companies were engaging with top Iraqi government officials to extract oil and natural gas. On January 1 of this year, Exxon Mobil handed over to PetroChina operations of the world’s largest oil field, West Qurna 1, in southern Iraq, which produces around 550,000 barrels per day.
An Iraqi subsidiary of PetroChina also recently took control over the massive Nahr bin Umar liquid gas field with the capacity to produce 150 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
It is now clear that, both at home and abroad, Joe Biden’s energy policies are failing. The only questions is if it will take a disaster on an even larger scale than the 2021 Texas blackouts to force a course correction.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
