Energy Secretary Chris Wright slammed the Biden administration’s climate policies on Monday, vowing to support natural gas production.
“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” Wright said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference. The energy secretary dismissed the previous administration’s focus on climate as “myopic.”
Natural gas is responsible for 43% of U.S. electricity production. There “is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” Wright said.
Advertisement
Hear, hear!
Common sense at last.
American liquid natural gas (nat gas/LNG) producers are at the beginning of a boom cycle right now, driven by two things. The first and most important was the November 5th election of Donald Trump. That allowed the brakes a fossil fuel-hostile Biden administration had put on the industry to fall away and for exports to resume, as well as nat gas plant expansions and new construction to resume.
The second reason is that demand is up after an unexpectedly cold winter in the States drew down our national reserves and had power companies and Independent Systems Operators (ISO) who rely on unreliable renewables for some of their power to have to draw nat gas generated electricity to make up shortfalls.
While the slowdown in U.S. oil production continues, rallying natural gas prices are setting the stage for a rebound in America’s gas output this year, following months of output curtailments in 2024.
Slowing natural gas production last year, fast-depleting inventories during the coldest winter in years, and record-high flows to LNG facilities and LNG exports have pushed the benchmark U.S. natural gas prices above the $4 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) level, up by 160% in one year.
U.S. gas producers, which curbed some output last year when prices were below $2 per MMBtu, are now adding gas rigs and boosting output as the price has more than doubled to $4.26 per MMBtu this week.
...At the start of the winter heating season in November, U.S. natural gas inventories were higher than average for the time of the year as America entered the season with stocks at their highest level since 2016.
These stocks, however, were quickly depleted during the coldest winter for six years, with demand for space heating and power generation soaring. A month before the end of the winter heating season, U.S. natural gas inventories have now slumped to below the five-year average and well below the levels from the same time in 2024, at the end of a mild winter.
The lower inventories and the higher demand – both for domestic consumption and LNG exports – have pushed prices higher, encouraging producers to boost gas output this year.
Advertisement
Those darn cold winters will mess up the best plans, won't they?
Or, even closer to home, you could ask the woke governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healy. She's been busy being a climate warrior - decommissioning reliable, traditional power generation methods while forcing her state into transitioning to electrical heating sources and moving to more renewables for power like offshore wind and solar.
It's sure been great for her citizens, that return on investment - you know, the cheap green energy one progressives always lie to you about when they're trying to sell you on it.
On average, Massachusetts residents spend about $340 per month on electricity. That adds up to $4,080 per year.
That’s 45% higher than the national average electric bill of $2,811. The average electric rates in Massachusetts cost 34 ¢/kilowatt-hour (kWh), so that means that the average electricity customer in Massachusetts is using 1,011.00 kWh of electricity per month, and 12132 kWh over the course of the year.
And the natural gas that keeps the lights on when Healy's wind turbines and solar can't? The natural gas that still heats some lucky MA residents home because they won't be bullied into heat pumps yet or just can't afford to switch over as the governor is demanding they do to save the plant?
Well, that natural gas is going to get much more expensive, mostly because of delivery charges going up, and Governor Healy is as mad as a hornet about it.
HOW DARE THEY - DPU MUST DO SOMETHING
Healey: DPU ‘must act immediately’ to relieve spike in natural gas prices
Bay State families are struggling to handle an “unexpected rate hike" that has sent their natural gas bills through the roof, and according to Healey it comes as they were already dealing with increased costs for groceries, gasoline, and other everyday goods. The governor says that she is “deeply troubled" by what she’s hearing.
...Healey has called on the DPU to “proactively identify ways to reduce future price volatility for natural gas customers and make rate changes more transparent and predictable,” similar to what she claimed the agency did just two years ago to address a spike in electricity costs.
“People did not plan for these extraordinary utility rate increases, and they can only do so much to stretch a budget. The DPU must act immediately to provide rate relief to customers in this heating season,” Healey said in a letter she sent to DPU Chairman Jamie Van Nostrand on Sunday.
DPU leaders are “engaged in high-level discussions” with gas companies that distribute to the state, exploring how their delivery charges can be “revised so that their customers do not experience further price volatility,” the agency spokesperson said.
That's very nice of her as, in retrospect, she brought this misery to the consumers of Massachusetts all by herself and bragged about it.
You see, it's 'delivery charges' that are spiking the cost of natural gas in the state because there are no pipelines. Why are there no pipelines?
Maura Healy forgot that in 2022, she'd bragged about canceling two of them herself, even as she whined just a few weeks ago about not having any.
D'OH
Gov. Maura Healey admits that part of our energy crisis is because natural gas is now hard to get to Massachusetts. But back in 2022, she bragged about blocking the pipelines that would have solved this problem. Now, MA families are stuck paying the price for her failed energy policies.
And, SURPRISE! Those delivery charges are also more expensive in MA than elsewhere because of *checks notes* Governor Maura Healy.
Advertisement
...Delivery charges carry most of the weight behind the dramatic increases, upping bills for some Bay Staters by $500 or more. They cover “costs for essential services to ensure the gas for heating is provided safely while satisfying legislative mandates” and the Mass Save rebate program” which Healey has increased to align with her decarbonization agenda.
Paul Diego Craney, spokesman for watchdog Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, told the Herald on Tuesday that the high utility prices should come as no surprise under the Healey administration. He highlighted how the governor “stopped more natural gas from entering Massachusetts” as attorney general, a feat she “bragged about” on the campaign trail.
“The Healey administration is ideologically hostile to natural gas,” Craney said, “and her administration will continue to pursue policies that lead to more expensive natural gas costs in hopes that ratepayers will be comfortable with very expensive renewable energy costs.”
So, the LNG that Massachusetts has and does deliver has to come from somewhere, right? If not from a pipeline - thanks, Governor Healy - where is that?
Just north of Boston in Everett, Massachusetts sits the poster child for irrational energy permitting in the United States. The Everett Marine Terminal is a facility that connects imported liquefied natural gas (LNG)—often from Trinidad, more than 2,200 miles away—to natural gas delivery networks in New England. This is an absurd outcome for at least three reasons:
New England demands natural gas, which generated 55 percent of the electricity on the New England power grid in 2023 and heats about half of the homes in Massachusetts,
Abundant natural gas resources are being developed nearby. However, states like New York can abuse environmental statutes like the Clean Water Act to block any new pipeline that would move shale gas to New England. The Marcellus shale gas play (the most productive formation in the country) extends through Pennsylvania into New York, which shares a long border with Massachusetts, and
Even if no new pipelines were built through New York state from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, several American LNG export terminals (in Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) could supply New England if not for arcane laws like the Jones Act. As my Cato colleague Colin Grabow explains, the Jones Act “restricts domestic shipping to vessels that are US-flagged, built, owned, and crewed,” which effectively bans LNG shipments between US ports.
Advertisement
Now, the governor knows this. She's merely an unapologetic, authoritarian climate cultist and shameless hustler.
As an ideological class, progressives are quick to assign blame elsewhere but always seem prone to selective and convenient amnesia when it comes to responsibility for something failing on an epic scale. Or being caught red-handed as the lying charlatans they are.
It's the oddest thing.
The Trump administration is not only reopening the LNG spigots the Biden administration had plugged, they are actively encouraging new investments for moving it by helping to bring the first offshore LNG terminal online.
Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Chris Wright said that the Trump administration is continuing its strategy of accelerating U.S. LNG development with a new federal authorization for the proposed Delfin LNG project.
Delfin LNG LLC has been working for more than a decade to construct the first floating LNG (FLNG) export terminal in the United States. The 13 million ton/year (Mt/y) capacity project design consists of a deepwater port about 50 miles south of the Louisiana coast that would connect four FLNG units to existing onshore pipeline infrastructure.
Delfin Midstream, the US developer of a floating #LNG export project offshore Louisiana, has secured a permit extension from the US Department of Energy, granting additional time to start exports from the #FLNG project. #lngprimehttps://t.co/LGQIeAfYpWpic.twitter.com/yygda4pXYG
Ripping up old alliances and turning the post-World War II axis on its head would have been impossible for any previous American president because of the insatiable US thirst for imported energy. But the Trump White House is able to lean on an increasingly critical made-in-America commodity to exert new levels of geopolitical leverage: liquefied natural gas.
The US, which in the span of about seven years transformed itself from an irrelevant supplier of LNG into the world’s largest, is set to expand its production capacity by 60% in the first half of Donald Trump’s second presidency, according to an estimate from BloombergNEF.By the end of the decade, almost 1 in every 3 tankers carrying the superchilled fuel will originate in the US, giving Trump his best chance to attain the energy dominance his campaign promised.
... then tied at the end of the sled team.
The view's much better when you're in front of the pack.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member