Exxon has spent billions acquiring companies that drill for natural gas in the US. Now, Chevron is looking at similar acquisitions. Why are they doing this? Corporations like these deal in reality. Governments, particularly ours, invest in dreams. These companies realize that there is almost unlimited quantities of natural gas in this country. They realize that our best opportunity to wean ourselves from foreign crude is natural gas. It’s clean, it’s plentiful, and it is versatile. It can be used for transportation fuels as well as heat and to generate power.
The method oil companies use to get the natural gas is called fracking. They use water and chemicals to penetrate shale to get at the gas. This method is now under attack by the usual suspects. Far left liberal politicians, radical environmentalists, and Hollywood types. To emphasize the latter, the CSI Las Vegas show this week was based on people dying because their water sources were polluted by fracking and the gas company killed people to cover up the problem.
Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal ran a couple of articles about the great future of green energy. One featured a small town that began building a steam plant, ran out of money, and defaulted on the municipal bonds used to finance the fiasco.
The second was even more typical. It involved an 845 megawatt wind farm in Oregon called Shepherds Flat, a $1.9 billion installation of 338 General Electric turbines. When you consider stimulus money and other federal and state subsidies, the total taxpayer cost is $1.2 billion. But, it doesn’t end there. Then, GE went to Washington for the rest of the financing. It is going too slow.(bureaucracy) So, GE said they would go to the private sector for the money. This has the Obama administration and Larry Summers upset. They want to finance the rest. After all, the DOE has $6 billion to guarantee loans and they are way behind on spending that money.
But wait, the subsidies don’t end there. The residents of Oregon will pay “above market prices” for their power from this wind farm. Maybe as much as double “above market”. It will be necessary since Oregon, like most states is mandated by the federal government to buy a percentage of renewable power.
Not done yet, the government will give GE a 30% cash tax credit for the DOE loan. So, they will have about 11% invested in the project, and will have a guaranteed market to sell the power at double competitive rates.
Exxon and Chevron are betting this country will come to it’s senses and realize what this insane green energy stuff did to Spain and what it will do to this country. When that happens natural gas will come to our rescue.
In the meantime, the fools we elect will continue to spend money we don’t have, reward companies they are in bed with, like GE, and gouge the power consumers, who are broke, for electricity.
Wake up people. The inmates are running the asylum
