Newsom is attacking high gas prices his own legislation caused. He mocks the special legislative session and Newsom's claim that oil companies charge Californians more, contrasting about $2.50 gas in Oklahoma with about $5 in California.
Newsom's refinery storage mandate would take a decade to build. California uses over 900,000 barrels of gasoline a day. Catherine Boyd of the Western States Petroleum Association put each tank at $35 million, with land, environmental studies and permits taking about 10 years, by which time Newsom says gas cars will be gone.
Utilities raise rates to fund capital spending, not fuel costs. His example is Alliant Energy in Iowa, serving about half a million people, which seeks higher natural gas rates despite near two-year historic-low gas prices. It earned $700 million last year, about $1,400 per customer, raised dividends 21 straight years, and wants grid, line-burial and renewables costs covered.
Taxpayers already subsidize the same buildout. He cites federal data as of 2022, before the full effect of the Inflation Reduction Act, showing renewables get over seven times oil and gas subsidies. The second-largest energy subsidy is end-use help with utility bills. He expects bills to keep rising.
Trump's fraud liability came from false statements, not high valuations. Answering a viewer about the Jon Stewart comparison, he says Stewart merely sold a house. Trump's problem was lying to reach his valuations: claiming an apartment was 30,000 square feet when it was 10,000, and omitting a conservation deed restriction on Mar-a-Lago. Truthful statements reaching the same values, he says, would likely have been fine.
For a whole generation, birth dates sum to their ages. He noticed a viewer turning 57 on 3/30/24, where 3 + 30 + 24 = 57, and worked out that a roughly 30-year age band, about 28 to 58 in 2024, shares the pattern. He says it holds for them for the rest of the century and resets in 2100.
He sees Trump's bond as a trap with no clean exit. Reporting that Trump's bond was rejected for lacking a financial statement, he asks attorneys whether drastically lowering the figures could be read as an admission of guilt on appeal, or whether resubmitting the old figures would be fresh fraud. He says plainly he is not a lawyer and offers no answer.
Mr. GlobalOil and Gas Under The Next Administration
Oil prices will barely move whoever wins the election. He argues OPEC, OPEC+ and Russia set the market and are content where it is; if anything he expects prices to drift up long term. Both candidates' playbooks are known to them, and either winner would be a lame-duck president.
The coming US production record will reflect timing, not growth. He expects another annual output record only because production started the year high, giving a full 12 months at that level, not because daily production rises much if at all.
Trump cannot repeat his 2018 OPEC win. In his account Trump got OPEC to raise output in 2018, then spent all of 2019 asking again as prices recovered and was refused every time; he expects OPEC, allied with Russia, to refuse again.
Natural gas is the one market he expects to change sharply. Prices are at historic lows, production is falling drastically in response, and LNG terminals under construction will add demand. He predicts a big rebound over the next couple of years, noting even a doubling would only reach about $3.40 and still not be high.
This upload holds a different clip than its title names. The video posted as "The Power Grid" is a copy of the 2024-03-22 "EPA Mandates" clip on Ford's F-150 volumes: their captions are identical and never mention the grid. The 2024-03-22 summary covers what the video says.
Ford physically cannot meet the EPA mandate at current pickup volumes. Ford sold 750,000 F-150s last year and has capacity for 150,000 electric ones; at two EVs per gas truck by 2027 that allows 75,000 gas F-150s, and even doubled EV capacity allows only 150,000. He expects gas pickup prices to soar as demand outruns permitted supply.
Hybrids and extra EV cars do not close the gap. He says hybrids cut F-150 emissions only about 20%, still requiring 1.8 EVs per truck, rising to four by 2032. Offsetting with EV cars would take six per F-150 because the truck emits more than a car.
Forcing EV production does not force buyers to take them. He says Ford sold only about a third of the Lightnings it built last year, so trade-ins fetch about a third of the price paid. He expects pickups to resist most, leaving buyers to pay far more for gas trucks, buy EVs, or face a soaring used-pickup market.
The new EPA tailpipe rule is an EV production mandate. Reporting the rule announced that day, he says meeting the grams-per-mile limits forces Ford to build two electric F-150s per gas one by 2027 and four by 2032; it binds manufacturers, not buyers.
He predicts gas pickup sticker prices will roughly double. Automakers already finance EV losses by marking up gas vehicles, and with the F-150 still the top seller he expects that markup to steepen as gas-truck supply is constrained.
He expects electric pickups to flood the market and crash. Ford cannot sell the Lightning now, so forced output will oversupply EV pickups; he guesses a Ford EV pickup could sell for about $30,000 within a couple of years.
Carbon credits make Tesla and Rivian the winners. He reads the rule as market manipulation: Ford, GM and Stellantis can buy credits instead of building EVs, which he says will earn Tesla and Rivian billions and explains Elon Musk's support for the mandate.
Refiner margins today match 2010, not exceed it. Reading historical crack-spread charts, he puts the gasoline crack at about 50 cents a gallon in both 2010 and January 2024, after near zero (under 10 cents) in December; margins were far wider early in the Obama years.
The 2022 margin peak was real but set by traders. The crack reached about 90 cents a gallon in 2022; a big refinery making 4–5 million gallons a day would earn over $4 million daily. He stresses wholesale gasoline trades as a commodity, so refiners do not set its price.
Losses on both gasoline and diesel closed US refineries. Through much of 2016–2018 and again during Covid, he says the gasoline crack was negative, and unusually the diesel crack was too, removing the usual offset. He ties this to the loss of a million barrels a day of refining capacity.
Cheap imported heavy crude kept 2010 gasoline lower. He corrects the viewer: with oil near $80 in 2010 gasoline averaged $2.79 a gallon, versus $3.31 today. The US then imported about 11.7 million barrels a day, mostly heavy sour crude at roughly a $20 discount to WTI, versus about 6.5 million today; he argues more imports meant cheaper gas.
Gas taxes add about 10 cents of the difference. Averaged across states, combined state and federal gas taxes are up roughly 10 cents a gallon since 2010.
Lost refining capacity magnifies every outage. He says the US has lost a million barrels a day of refining capacity, so inventories cannot be rebuilt; the Whiting, Indiana refinery outage of over 400,000 barrels a day makes the effective loss 1.4 million and is pushing prices up now.
Record US output cannot lower prices while OPEC offsets it. Oil trades globally, so if the US adds 2 million barrels a day OPEC, with 40% of world output, can cut the same amount to hold its $80 target. He attributes low prices under late Obama and Trump to OPEC pumping about 3 million barrels a day more than now, not to US production.
Gasoline has its own supply and demand, apart from crude. Over the past month he puts oil up about 8% and gasoline up over 11%, the gap caused by the Whiting, Indiana refinery outage removing over 400,000 barrels a day.
A record-warm winter kept demand high and drained inventories. Demand ran above the prior winter almost throughout, so gasoline never fell below the $3 a gallon he had predicted; inventories are about to drop out of the five-year average and the national average is $3.41.
He expects gasoline to keep rising through summer. Beyond seasonal spring increases, he cites reports that Ukrainian strikes on three Russian refineries may force Russia to import gasoline, adding upward pressure.
OPEC's control rests on cheap, slow-declining oil, not reserves. OPEC produces 40% of world oil against 13% for the US, and its wells barely decline, while US producers must add almost 2 million barrels a day each year just to hold output flat.
Saudi oil costs a fraction of US oil to produce. He contrasts a Saudi rig count of 29 producing about 9 million barrels a day with a US count of 622, and says Saudi Arabia profits at $20 a barrel where US producers go broke.
US producers would bankrupt themselves trying to compete. Mostly nationalized OPEC oil companies face different incentives than US public and private firms, and US offshore wells take years and great expense to match what a Saudi well yields after a month's drilling.
Trump's 2020 OPEC deal was a trap that he lost. After a clip of Trump describing a three-way call with Russia and the Saudi king to cut output, he argues Trump was drawn into a game of chicken and made "the worst deal ever in American history."
Saudi Arabia and Russia were the deal's real beneficiaries. He cites headlines that Russia earned $20 billion a month and had its record oil year in 2022, and that Saudi Aramco overtook Apple as most valuable company; Aramco earned $121 billion in 2023, down from a 2022 record, as the cuts ended mid-year.
US producers took the blame OPEC and Russia earned. He says Democrats blamed US producers, at 13% of world output, for high prices rather than OPEC and Russia at 40%.
The Saudi-owned refinery never shut down before the 2022 election. Answering a political host's clip, he says Motiva's Port Arthur, Texas refinery took a single crude distillation unit down in September, not the whole plant.
September and January are simply the best maintenance months. Demand and gasoline prices drop most then, so refiner margins are thinnest; he says 2022 prices had already fallen about $1.40 a gallon when the work was done.
Motiva's 2024 schedule confirms the motive is margins, not politics. Crude unit and coker maintenance planned for March 2024 was pulled forward to January because demand picks up in March. He calls this standard practice at every US refinery.
OPEC's extension continues existing cuts rather than adding new ones. Citing a New York Times report that OPEC extended production cuts through June, he notes they have run almost 18 months and serve the $80 price floor OPEC set then; he had half-expected an extension to end-2024.
The price floor funds Saudi diversification, not a Trump campaign. Rejecting Thom Hartmann's claim that OPEC is helping Trump, he says Saudi Arabia's grown population and its 2030 diversification plan require $80 oil whoever is president, and Trump pressed hardest to sink prices.
Higher crude reflects Red Sea disruption and weak Chinese demand. He attributes the modest rise, with Brent around $83, to Middle East conflict forcing shipping around the Cape of Good Hope; slow Chinese demand growth means extra OPEC output could sink prices.
He expects cuts extended again in June, then reassessed. He predicts an extension to September, with OPEC then judging whether interest-rate cuts lift demand enough to raise output without breaking the floor.
Owning service equipment and operating wells is the core advantage. His company bought Covid-era equipment for under 10 cents on the dollar, such as a $400,000 e-line truck for about $25,000, with no debt. As operator it bills other interest owners for work, which can zero out its own cost.
Take wells free for plugging and abandonment liability rather than buying them. Majors shed this liability to clean up balance sheets. He favors small locations with intact surface equipment, avoids H2S wells and large remediation sites, and says equipment salvage can exceed plugging cost.
Neglected wells hide cheap recompletion upside. Big companies ignore 5–15 barrel-a-day wells; well records often reveal errors or uphole zones, and a 10 barrel-a-day well is roughly $800 a day.
Proving a zone attracts others to drill your acreage. He says operators now have three years of contracts to drill horizontals on his acreage for a royalty cut, avoiding $15 million per well; newcomers can find wells and partner with firms like his.
The approach scaled his company quickly. He says it grew from 14 wells two years ago to 160 wells, a large acreage position, a gas plant and saltwater disposal, along with a management deal taking 80% of reworked wells.
Biden backing a TikTok ban is a self-inflicted campaign wound. He mocks Biden's statement that he would sign a ban, mid-campaign, as alienating already angry young voters and handing Trump an opening; Trump, despite having supported a ban before, publicly pushed back.
Recompleting an old vertical well uphole produced a "company maker." His firm isolated the original producing zone and fracked two shallower zones identified from log interpretation. Initial production is about 2.5 million cubic feet of gas a day and about 150 barrels of oil a day, on a heavily restricted choke because surface equipment cannot handle more.
He expects about a 4,000% first-year return. Even leaving the well choked back, which he says extends its life, and with gas prices low, he projects roughly that return on the investment in the first year of production.
Owning the gathering and treating system makes marginal wells economic. His company bought an amine plant that sweetens sour gas, removing H2S and CO2, before compression to an interstate pipeline. About 90% of its throughput was already theirs, and he says controlling gathering is the first step in developing a field.
The company has grown rapidly from a small base. He says it went from 14 wells a little over two years ago to about 160 wells, a gas plant, one saltwater disposal with a second being added, and drilling about to start across its acreage.
Taxpayers overpaid for Panasonic's plant, with the surplus unexplained. He says Panasonic received $6.8 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money for a $4 billion EV battery plant and he cannot find where the other $2.8 billion goes.
The battery plant will run on coal, then natural gas. It needs about 250 megawatts, a small city's worth; the coal plant supplying it will emit 6 million tons of CO2 a year, and the planned switch is to natural gas, the fuel whose projects Biden just paused.
Local ratepayers subsidize the plant's power. He reports Evergy is seeking a rate hike for local customers to cover the added load while Panasonic gets a 40% developer discount on its electricity.
The plant barely offsets its own electricity emissions. By his figures it must produce over 2 million EV batteries a year, about 5,500 a day, just to offset the coal power, before construction, steel or mineral mining.
Trump's sub-$2 gas pledge is as undeliverable as Biden's. Reading his own Substack piece, he likens it to Biden's "no more drilling" promise and calls the LNG pause an attempt to appease those voters; both promises, he argues, cost the industry later.
Voters misremember why gas was cheap under Trump. He says Trump inherited low prices after the 2015 crash, prices rose in his first two years, and fell only after a late-2018 crash and then Covid.
A second term cannot reproduce first-term prices. He cites producer capital discipline, OPEC's unwillingness to repeat its 2018 output increase, and lost refining capacity, so lower gasoline would need even lower crude than before. He expects gas to stay above $3 a gallon, with US producers blamed.
The promise is politically "great" precisely because it is broken safely. With no reelection to face, and supporters concentrated in low-price states such as Texas, he expects Trump to claim victory if local prices near $2 even with the national average around $2.79.