Actor Billy Bob Thornton portraying the character Tommy Norris in an official trailer for the Paramount Plus series “Landman.” (Screen Capture/Landman, Official Trailer, Paramount+)

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Oil companies have always presented easy targets for demonization by the news and entertainment industries. Their operations are highly visible — the flares from a shale well can be seen from many miles distant — the prices they charge for their products can strain family budgets, and they have generally done a lousy job of engaging with the media and defending themselves.

Thus, they typically present the proverbial low-hanging fruit to be exploited by lazy script writers in Hollywood. Those who were in the industry in the early years of the Obama presidency will well remember that pretty much every TV drama series aired at least one episode centered on some highly improbable, often impossible, scenario in which people were killed by a hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — accident. Such stuff never happened in real life, but it sure made for compelling entertainment for audiences who did not know that to be the case.

Given this history, it came as no small surprise when the lead character in the new Paramount series “Landman”, the newest offering from “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan, delivered a stirring 2-minute monologue in defense of America’s oil and gas producers in Episode 3 of the show’s first season. Set in the aftermath of a tragic, fatal Permian Basin oilfield accident that actually could happen in real life, the scene features lead character Tommy Norris, played to near perfection by Billy Bob Thornton, schooling a young, environmentally conscious lawyer who is looking for someone to blame for the accident on the reasons why oil and gas are highly unlikely to be replaced by wind energy in her lifetime.

“You have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete or make that steel and hold this **** out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane,” Norris says, pointing to a nearby group of 400 ft. wind turbines. “You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that ****ing thing or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery.”

The monologue goes on for another minute and a half, with Norris detailing all the myriad products made with oil and natural gas, and the fact that, “if Exxon thought them ****ing things right there were the future, they’d be putting them all over the ***damn place.” He isn’t wrong about that last part, by the way. ExxonMobil and its fellow major oil companies like Shell and BP have proven themselves to be pretty much agnostic about the nature of the energy-related projects they’re willing to pursue in recent years.

Those companies and many other traditional oil companies are willing to invest in most any project they believe to be profitable, sustainable and able to deliver strong rates of return to investors. Where wind energy is concerned, both Shell and BP spent years investing heavily in such projects but have been backing away from such investments over the last year as they have failed to produce adequate returns. ExxonMobil, meanwhile, is investing heavily in carbon capture, hydrogen, and even lithium production as part of a growing portfolio of projects in its Low Carbon Solutions business unit.

Back to the Tommy Norris monologue: When I re-posted the clip on LinkedIn and at my Substack newsletter, it went viral, indicating a high level of interest in what Thornton’s character had to say. That may be indicative of a rising recognition of the reality that the US government and global community have in recent years thrown away trillions of dollars in failing attempts to subsidize non-viable, unsustainable, and unprofitable alternatives to oil and natural gas to scale.

Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that Episode 3 of “Landman” aired on the same day when the media widely reported the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan had ended in failure. It also came amid continuing reports that the Trump transition team is developing detailed plans to refocus US energy policy back to Trump’s promised “drill, baby, drill” orientation.

The times are a-changing, and guys like Tommy Norris will look like prophets soon.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Ian Madsen

To store twelve hours worth of the 1.6 TW total installed global solar power capacity would cost about 12.9 trillion Canadian dollars

Solar energy’s promise of a green, abundant future is captivating—but beneath the shiny panels lies a story of unreliability, hidden costs, and grid instability.

Green enthusiasts endorse solar energy to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from traditional energy sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The source of solar power, the sun, is free, abundant, and always available somewhere. However, these claims are misleading. Solar energy is costly and unreliable in ways its proponents commonly disguise. If adopted extensively, solar energy will generally make energy and electric power grids more unreliable and expensive.

The solar industry has burgeoned remarkably, with an estimated average compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 39 percent from 2021 to 2024. Earlier this century, the growth rate was even faster. As a result, global installed solar capacity has reached 1.6 terawatts (TW), according to the U.S. Energy Department. This capacity is theoretically sufficient to power a billion homes at 1.5 kilowatts per home. However, the term “theoretically” poses a significant challenge. Solar power, without affordable energy storage solutions, is only available during daylight hours.

The minimum amount of storage required to make global solar power truly “dispatchable”—i.e., independent of other backup energy sources—would be twelve hours of storage. Options include batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, or other technologies. Since batteries are today’s standard method, the following calculation estimates the cost of the minimum amount of battery storage to ensure reliable solar power.

Twelve hours per day multiplied by 1.6 terawatts and dividing the result by one kilowatt-hour (kWh), we arrive at a final requirement of 19.2 billion kWh of storage. According to a meta-study by the National Renewable Energy Lab, the utility-grade cost of battery storage is C$670.99 per kWh.

To store twelve hours worth of the 1.6 TW total installed global solar power capacity would cost about 12.9 trillion Canadian dollars; a safer twenty-four hours’ storage would be double that. Total storage available in 2023 was, the International Energy Agency notes, approximately two hundred and sixty gigawatts (GW) of power – a tiny fraction of power production of 3.2 million GW in 2022, using figures from Statista.

No firms or governments can have the necessary storage to make solar viable even if the entire globe was involved, as the total global GDP was about C$148 trillion in 2023, according to World Bank figures. That is not solar’s only problem. The most harmful effect is how it undermines power grids. The misleading, ‘levelized’ near-zero cost undercuts traditional, reliable on-demand energy sources such as coal, natural gas and nuclear power.

Importantly, high solar and wind power output can make prices turn negative, as an Institute for Energy Research article noted, but can swiftly revert to high prices when winds calm or the sun sets, as the fixed costs of traditional power plants are spread over lower production.  Baseload traditional energy sources are essential because the frequent unavailability of renewables can be dangerous. Consequently, overall costs for customers are higher when renewables are included in the energy mix. Solar mandates in California made its power supply wildly erratic.

Without affordable energy storage, solar is a seductive illusion; its unchecked adoption risks turning power grids into unreliable, costly experiments at the expense of energy stability.

Ian Madsen is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.