Wednesday’s blog, Energy Transfer’s Weak Governance Costs Them drew a record number of pageviews within a few hours of being posted. It’s not just because Energy Transfer (ET) is a large, widely held MLP. Much of the writing in the sector is from cheerleaders who don’t criticize the companies they follow, because it’ll hurt their business model. Commentary is largely anodyne, and useless. Running an investment firm that doesn’t have a complex web of relationships with its portfolio companies provides a wonderfully liberating writing environment.

Sometimes readers ask why we own a stock if we’ve just been critical of its management. It’s possible to find a stock attractively cheap, and yet lament prior actions of its executives. That’s often why it’s cheap. ET is a well-run company. CEO Kelcy Warren has assembled a team that knows how to execute. If investors trusted him more, the stock would be higher. It’s worth pointing out.

Pageviews on our blog reveal that investors find criticism far more helpful than sycophantic platitudes. For those who desire an irreverent spin on the energy sector delivered with rapier-like wit, follow @Mrs_Skilling, an anonymous and astute energy insider who will simultaneously educate and amuse you. Often, posts are laugh out loud funny.

In case it gets lost in the cut and thrust of calling out bad management behavior, U.S. midstream energy infrastructure is a compelling investment opportunity. The Shale Revolution is almost entirely an American success story (see Why the Shale Revolution Could Only Happen in America). The technology behind fracking was developed in America because new business formation, access to capital and constant striving for success are more present here than anywhere. Add to those advantages an already substantial energy sector with thousands of skilled workers supported by extensive infrastructure.

Privately-owned mineral rights are an additional unique feature that allows landowners to negotiate with energy companies to extract what lies beneath on mutually beneficial terms. Mineral rights belong to the government all over the world, including in the UK, whose legal system is the basis for much of ours.

The result has been an American energy renaissance that has released new supplies of oil and gas, and made the U.S. the world’s biggest producer. Ten years ago few thought such an outcome possible.

Moreover, shale production is short cycle (see Shale Cycles Faster, Boosting Returns). Because the deployment of capital is more synchronized with production than conventional projects (think years and $BNs spent before production emerges as the traditional model), it’s less risky. Capital is recycled more rapidly, allowing production to be more responsive to price changes.

This is why it’s attracting the world’s biggest oil and gas companies. Exxon Mobil (XOM) is the most active driller in the Permian basin in Texas, where it is targeting one million barrels per day (MMB/D) of output in five years. Chevron (CVX) is close behind, with a 0.9 MMB/D goal.

Warren Buffett famously quipped that, had he been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 he could have shot down the Wright Brothers’ plane, thereby saving future airline investors from losing $BNs over the following decades. History is full of great ideas that didn’t immediately profit their inventors, often because too much capital followed the opportunity.

U.S. shale production of oil, gas and natural gas liquids will find a level at which returns on invested capital are adequate. It may already be there. It’s not always clear whose investment in upstream production will be most profitable. In the Barnett Shale, where the shale boom began, production peaked in late 2011 and only a handful of rigs remain active today.

Output will ultimately calibrate to a sustainable level of capital investment. Countless companies have provided proof of concept, although investment returns have been frustratingly disappointing. The growing presence of XOM and CVX is substantial confirmation that this is a permanent piece of the world’s energy markets.

Shale production has performed far better than investments in it. Midstream infrastructure, the pipelines, storage assets and processing facilities that sit between the wellhead and the customer, remains out of favor despite record volumes. This is also largely an issue of capital allocation, with the original income-seeking investors understandably alienated as the sector cut distributions to pay for new growth projects (see It’s the Distributions, Stupid!). But capex is falling, finally setting the stage for a surge in free cash flow (see The Coming Pipeline Cash Gusher).

Criticism of individual companies is intended to draw attention to ways they could improve their behavior, lifting stock prices to the benefit of all investors. The Shale Revolution remains a huge success story for production, highlighting much that is great about America.  The companies that own these critical pipelines linking producers to consumers will continue to benefit from these growing volumes. Those who focus on valuations rather than past performance are likely to realize commensurate returns in the midstream.

We are invested in ET

Five years ago Russell Gold published The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World, one of several books that chronicled the Shale Revolution. Gold provided first-hand descriptions of fracking after persuading Marathon Oil to let him visit a site in North Dakota. He offers a fascinating description of the process that has transformed America’s energy production. We reviewed his book here. Gold displays his green credentials as he wrestles with the tradeoffs he perceives between abundant natural gas and the renewables growth it impedes. But on balance, he concludes that Shale has been good for America.

Russell Gold’s latest book, Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy seems at first to challenge the supremacy of the Shale Revolution and America’s energy renaissance. It follows Michael Skelly in his quest to harness wind power across the south eastern U.S. to provide electricity.

Gold recounts the early use of electricity, back in 1881 when J. P. Morgan’s New York townhouse was one of the first installations. The house was lit every day at 4pm, powered by a coal-burning steam generator whose noise and smoke upset the neighbors.

Highlighting the advantages of wind power may have been Gold’s intent, but after following Michael’s Skelly’s frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to transform power generation, this reader found the challenges more substantial than the opportunity.

The impediments Michael Skelly encountered were not technical. Texas produces a quarter of America’s wind powered electricity. On March 17, 2017 50% of all the electricity used in Texas came from wind. Renewables such as solar and wind suffer from intermittency (i.e. it’s not always sunny and windy). This can play havoc with grids juggling multiple sources of power. But ERCOT, the grid that covers Texas, has figured out how to maintain consistent power while allowing wind to increase its share beyond what many thought possible.

Size brings economies of scale, but with it comes concentrated power generation in wind areas with delivery over hundreds of miles of high voltage lines to those than need it. Skelly’s vision was to invest in extensive, large windmills that would sell their power across several states. But erecting huge electricity pylons to connect with users generated local opposition that often proved insurmountable.

Michael Skelly’s company, Clean Line, applied to Arkansas to operate as a public utility, since his fledgling company needed to build power lines linking Oklahoma and Tennessee. Back in 1935, Arkansas Power had been granted a monopoly by the state in return for building out the state’s grid.

It was a cleverly designed Catch 22 type regulatory structure designed by then-CEO of Arkansas Power, Harvey Couch – in order to be granted a public utility license, a company had to be a utility “owning or operating” power equipment serving customers. But you couldn’t be a utility without first having customers. The legislation had never contemplated the entry of a new company into the state’s power business. Nonetheless, the Public Service Commission denied Clean Line a license. The beneficiary was Entergy Arkansas, a descendent of Arkansas Power.

Clean Line’s frustration in Arkansas showed the fragmented nature of the U.S. electricity grid. Although it operates as three regions covering the eastern U.S., western U.S. and Texas, in reality each state approves local construction. Utilities in Oklahoma opposed Clean Line’s plans to construct transmission lines across the state, relying on a similar statute.  Whereas the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission oversees inter-state pipelines, there is no equivalent Federal agency responsible for inter-state transmission lines.

Political opposition arose in surprising places. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, who might have been expected to favor clean, cheap wind power for his state, instead came out publicly against the “…giant fifty-story wind turbines that they want to string along the Appalachian mountaintops…” Alexander had also opposed offshore wind turbines that threatened the view from his home in Nantucket.

Superpower sets out to show that technology exists, and that entrenched interests are the only barrier to far greater use of wind power. This glass half full interpretation sits alongside the half empty one – large scale construction of wind turbines and the high voltage power lines to connect windy, remote regions with population centers faces endless NIMBY opposition and barriers from entrenched interests. Arkansas didn’t care to allow power lines moving clean energy across its state with little in-state benefit. Wind power clearly works, as Texas has shown, and will continue to grow. Despite passionate employees, hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade of work a single HVDC line couldn’t even connect economic wind power from Oklahoma to Tennessee. The institutional barriers, large required investment in physical infrastructure and local opposition mean a national grid is unlikely to replicate the U.S. pipeline system anytime soon.

Superpower is an absorbing read, and well worthwhile to anyone interested in the development of renewal energy.

Greta Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations may have grabbed the climate change headlines. But for those who find policy prescriptions from someone not yet out of high school a publicity stunt, the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) 2019 International Energy Outlook was more interesting.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wants the world to reduce man-made net CO2 emissions to zero by 2050, in order to limit global warming to a further 1.5 degrees C. By contrast, the EIA expects energy-related CO2 emissions to grow at 0.6% annually, a third of the 1990-2018 rate but nonetheless in the wrong direction. This is because the EIA forecasts world energy use to increase by nearly 50%, with virtually all that growth in non-OECD Asia (often referred to as Asia ex-Japan).

According to Climate Tracker, only two countries (Morocco and Gambia) are on track to meet their goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which turned the IPCC’s recommendations into governmental commitments.

The goal of lowering emissions is at conflict with many other UN goals, such as eliminating poverty and hunger, and ensuring access to clean water and sanitation. Non-OECD countries are generally where these goals need to be met, and their pursuit is increasing energy consumption. The rich-country OECD world wants reduced CO2 emissions while poorer non-OECD countries additionally want higher living standards.

The charts in the EIA’s outlook provide a sobering picture of the incompatibility of these objectives. Rising non-OECD living standards will by 2050 remain still 25% less than in the OECD today, and less than half the 2050 rich world level. This is in spite of growth in world energy consumption being fully taken up by non-OECD countries. Indian per capita residential energy consumption is still expected to be less than a quarter of U.S. by 2050.

Emerging Asia is the major source of this growth. India’s population is projected to surpass China’s over the next couple of decades, driving India’s faster GDP growth and also making India the fastest growing user of coal. China will remain biggest overall.

Growth in Indian electricity demand will be primarily met with renewables. It’s easier to shift your mix of power generation when consumption is growing. Yet India will still double its output from coal-fired power plants.

The reason almost none of the signatories to the Paris Agreement are on track to achieve their emission goals is that public support is broad but shallow. One survey found most U.S. households wouldn’t spend more than $10 per month to fight climate change.

Yet, dramatic reductions in emissions require substantial lifestyle changes with more expensive energy. Renewables are slowly gaining market share, but regardless of the promises of environmental extremists, all serious forecasts show fossil fuels remaining the world’s dominant source of energy. The EIA projects that we’ll be using more of all sources of energy. Consumption of petroleum and other liquid fuels will grow by 20%; natural gas by 40%. Renewables are expected to almost double their share of world energy, to around 28% by 2050, but satisfying growing global energy demand will require substantial growth in hydrocarbons.

Few Americans realize that the U.S. would need to reduce its CO2 emissions by around 15% over the next decade to meet its pledge, and that we’re generating 3.5X the amount that’s scientists believe is consistent with 1.5 degree planetary warming. If the U.S. had a plan to meet its pledge on emissions reduction, cost would quickly become an issue.

A big shift to renewables in the U.S. would raise the cost of energy. This is indisputable, because otherwise renewables would already be dominant. Climate extremists rarely discuss the costs, whereas we’ll need to make informed decisions about costs versus benefits.

Moreover, those most exposed to rising sea levels live in poor countries where emissions will continue to increase in order to raise living standards. Rich countries are far better able to manage the effects of changing climate. No U.S. politician has yet had to explain why Americans should pay more for energy in order to protect other countries from rising sea levels, even while those countries increase CO2 emissions. Trump’s planned withdrawal from the Paris Agreement next year is grounded in domestic political reality.

Paris pledges allow India, China and other non-OECD countries to continue increasing their emissions, acknowledging that increased living standards require more energy. While there is a moral argument in support of higher CO2 emissions from poorer countries, U.S. public opinion is untested on the issue of expensively curtailing domestic emissions to accommodate more output elsewhere. This will eventually be a significant political problem. Domestic environmental extremists are completely mis-directed. Growth in emissions is coming from Asia.

How will the world resolve its conflicting goals?

There are some sensible solutions: Federal standards and fast-track approval process for nuclear energy, which is clean and safe; phase-out coal with its harmful emissions in favor of cleaner natural gas; a carbon tax; Federal R&D into cleaner use of what works, which is fossil fuels.

All these steps and more will be needed to tackle the problem. Unfortunately, Democrat solutions such as the Green New Deal (see The Bovine Green Dream) and banning fracking are hopelessly impractical. Because their ideas have little prospect of implementation, Republicans aren’t pressured to offer alternative ideas.

The EIA’s report shows what world energy consumption will look like without significant changes in policies. Practical, centrist solutions that acknowledge trade-offs will be needed to develop deeper support for combating climate change. Voters will want to understand what they’re paying for. Until that happens, fringe policy prescriptions will scare people away. Greta Thunberg’s political grandstanding isn’t helping.