Oil Drillers Are Caving to Environmentalists and Going Electric, And It's Proving Troublesome
Oil companies can never totally appease the environmentalists, but that doesn’t stop them from trying — even if those attempts yield disastrous results.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, U.S. oil drillers are attempting to go electric, but they keep running into significant problems.
Namely, they keep running out of electricity.
While we could go ahead and point out the irony of this whole situation, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What exactly is happening with these oil companies trying to go electric?
According to the Journal, in Martin County, Texas, home of the country’s “busiest oil fields, frackers are devouring nearly as much electricity as four Seattles every day — and they are clamoring for more.”
The major problem, as Diamondback Energy told the Journal, is that, in their bid to reduce carbon emissions, the company “has increasingly relied on the electric grid to power its crude harvesting. But as the driller’s oil production has grown nearly 50 times in the past 10 years, the grid has struggled to handle this new demand, prompting Diamondback to set up its own power network to cut its use of natural-gas-fired generators.”
Therefore, in the major oil producing states, many oil companies are having to create their own power grids to keep up, and the problem is only going to get worse.
As Diamondback’s Vice President of Completions Hunter Landers said, “The grid has to catch up with the industrials and what’s going on here.”
According to analyst Curtis Smith, if these oil companies “are to meet their emissions targets, they will need to receive grid-provided power more than three times the amount New York City uses in a day by 2032,” and “[s]ome analysts doubt that this much new capacity can be brought online that quickly.”
Even worse for these environmentally conscious oil companies, “the congested power network is falling further behind ballooning crude production, threatening to stall companies’ progress on curbing emissions.”
Amazingly, though the Journal expended so much time and effort in describing and reporting on this problem facing the oil industry, they never so much as touch on the crowning irony of the whole ideal.
These are oil companies.
They’re still supplying the world with the oil that the environmentalists claim is responsible for those evil “carbon emissions” they crusade so mightily against.
Were this report not found in such a prestigious newspaper, you could justifiably wonder if this were a Babylon Bee headline.
For all the talk about infrastructure, and overextended power grids, that oxymoron at the center of the dilemma is never addressed.
Clearly, the oil companies are fighting a losing battle.
In their effort to win the environmental brownie points of “reducing carbon emissions” by an arbitrary date, they’re consuming exponentially more electricity than they did just using traditional drilling methods.
Innovation is all well and good, but this doesn’t seem to be innovation to make the process cheaper, more efficient, and more productive.
Instead, this seems to be a much more laborious and expensive process to achieve the same results.
Is it even worth the carbon emission brownie points at this point?
The sad truth is, this flaccid attempt to appease the climate activists is not going to work, yet these companies are attempting to anyway, to their own financial detriment.
It’s the textbook definition of virtue-signaling.
And the reality is, the power grid is simply not set up for this massive expenditure of electricity — and it won’t for a be long time yet.
These companies would be better off sticking to the methods that they know work, instead of creating problems in trying to satisfy the unsatisfiable climate activists.
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