(the short version: fossil fuel companies' problems are bigger than politics alone, so politics alone won't be enough to get them back on the right track)

Thanks for sharing! Glad you found our work interesting :)

Thanks Dave!!

Thanks for sharing our work! Glad you found it interesting.

Every energy source has trade-offs/nuances, and the DOE has a lot of perspectives to consider when determining what's in the public interest. But to end with Sec. Granholm’s point: uncritical embrace of unfettered export growth is hardly a good way to go about this.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/c...

So why does this matter? The US — and world’s — LNG export capacity is poised to surge even more dramatically in the coming years. Policymakers need the tools to understand what impacts this might have.

It’s sometimes claimed that LNG expansion is unequivocally necessary for global energy security. But here, too, the report paints a nuanced picture. LNG is “unlikely to be the most cost-competitive source of energy for many countries”, while demand uncertainties cloud its overseas market outlook:

Second, re the economic case: the report provides further evidence that expansion of exports puts upward pressure on domestic prices, increasing costs for households and industry. This too is hardly a surprise: ieefa.org/resources/us...

This aligns with some of IEEFA’s past research finding little evidence to support the idea that LNG is seriously displacing coal in key markets like China. ieefa.org/resources/ln...

In none of the scenarios, it turns out, do new LNG exports meaningfully decrease emissions. By competing with low-carbon energy and enabling new demand, exports raise global GHGs vs baseline across a range of conditions.

First, re the climate case: LNG advocates claim that it reduces emissions by displacing coal. The report notes that this can be true — but that it does the opposite if it crowds out renewables or nuclear. So how do these countervailing forces interact in practice?

The study is finally out. First, a note on what it isn’t: global energy markets are uncertain, so it doesn’t purport to be a forecast. Rather, it seeks to test what LNG exports look like under different ranges of policy/market conditions. And across scenarios, some big picture conclusions emerge…

In light of this mismatch, the DOE announced that it was pausing new approval while it brought its toolkit up to date. Pundits framed the pause as a concession to climate hawks — but many industrial interests, too, celebrated the move. grist.org/energy/biden... (h/t @zteirstein.bsky.social et al)

First, why was the study necessary? In the past decade, the US has gone from exporting basically no LNG to being the world’s top exporter, and the structure of LNG markets has changed dramatically. Many of the tools used to evaluate LNG’s economic/climate/other impacts were increasingly out of date.

Ooh fun will read. I’d come across the concept in Latour and so on, but was fascinating to me to see it in the mouth of modeling practitioners back then

Reminds me of a fascinating internal volume I once came across in IEA archives about the ways GHG/energy system modeling reflects the assumptions and mindsets of the modelers (and how that can be good, so long as we're conscious of it)... from 1997.

And a classic case of how demand-side factors alone didn't drive a shift from whaling; indeed, cheaper fossil fuels initially made whaling more efficient than ever (a reminder that demand-side substitution isn't as predictable a process as we might presume)

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Looking back further, a great read on how markets had to soak up expanded oil capacity after WWII (spurring further proliferation of automotivity, petchem, etc): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...