Steve Bannon: The Saudi minister, I think he’s the energy minister, so he’s like the grand poobah in all this. He just called out the ridiculousness that you’ve been doing in a much more professorial way. He just came out and said, hey, fossil fuel is not going to go away. It’s not going to come close to going away. All these plans that we’re making to do transition, particularly the rapid transition that the elites in Western Europe and the United States are doing, is absurd. He says it makes no scientific sense. It’s not going to happen. But you’re destroying the economy. And when they say that you’re destroying working class people both in Western Europe and the United States. Can you put in perspective what he said and how meaningful it is?
Dave Walsh: Amin Nasser is the CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil enterprise and oil and gas enterprise went public a couple of years ago. A piece of it still the majority owned by the Royal family. But he’s appearing at the CERA conference. The CERA conference is the annual largest oil and gas show in the world. It’s held in Houston. Recently, everybody there out with pom poms on figuring out how to deal with and expand their renewables footprint and talking about net zero and decarb at that conference. Even though it’s the world’s major oil and gas event, it’s been held for over 20 years now. Dan Yergin started it. He’s a guy that wrote the famous book about the history of oil and Saudis, specifically Aramco.
But what he’s presented yesterday in his opening remarks, Nasser, were basically that this transition is not working. And he reminded everybody once again that less than 4% of the world’s all in energy is provided by wind and solar. After 40 years of this movement to wind and solar, and particularly the heavy subsidization of the last 15 years in Western Europe and the United States, Australia, New Zealand, very specifically, that the total energy impact, and for example, here in the US since 1976, renewables in the solar and wind form have moved the needle on total renewables as a content of US energy by a grand total of 4% since 1976.
And that’s after years and years and years now of nearly a trillion dollars in subsidies. Subsidizing wind and solar and battery storage now have had a relatively nominal to meaningless effect on the all in energy supply for transportation, home heating, fuel and electricity. Nominal supply because they’re very trivial outcomes energy wise. They’re very small, intermittent, part time, small quantity energy creation devices.
And he’s going on to indicate also that he’s exactly right. Major, major efficiency gains in combustion turbines, in automobiles, in fuel use over the years have provided much, much more real energy Delta. That’s more efficiency from gas and oil fired engines, be it jet engines, gas urbans, car engines over the last 20 years have provided much more absolute energy, the efficiency gains in this technology, than have wind and solar all in across the world. So he’s forecasting no end in sight to the demand for oil and gas, but specifically harping on the fact that the BRICS nations in the global south will lead the way. They’ve got 80% of the global population and they’re going to keep moving on a continuous duty conventional energy modality, which includes heavy, heavy use of oil and gas.
