Saudi Arabia's bypass pipeline is energy security insurance
“Right now in the in The Middle East, the most important piece of oil infrastructure in the world today is the East West pipeline. It's a pipeline that goes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea that bypassed the Strait Of Hormuz. Usually, that pipeline is not used. It was built for an emergency like this, and Saudi Arabia was willing to pay that premium for insurance. Energy security, it's a question of how much society is willing to pay for insurance through that kind of resilience redundancy in infrastructure.”
Using less oil is the most durable security strategy
“An oil shock is less harmful if oil is less a share of your economy. And so the most durable thing you can do for energy security is just to use less in the first place, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we often forget to pick up off the ground when it comes to energy efficiency.”
Swapping oil dependence for China dependence has nuance
“It's obviously different when you're talking about a supply chain. If China were to cut off the exports of solar panels, that would not affect the ability to turn the lights on today at all. It might affect your ability to deploy new technologies, and install new solar panels, but that's a much different, impact. We're not importing electricity from China. We're importing a manufactured product that makes electricity.”
US is unusually insulated from this global energy crisis
“And natural gas, we're really disconnected. I mean, the price of natural gas in Europe and Asia went to 15 or $20 per million BTU. In The US, it's below 3, and it's falling. So I was con I was interested in that because we've been reading these stories about how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington to try to encourage the Trump administration to take this military action.”
“But if you picture the same data, not from zero to a 100%, but just total amount of energy, which is what the world cares about and what the planet cares about from a carbon emission standpoint, we've never used less of anything. The shares are changing, but we're using more wood today for energy than we did in 1850. And when you take a population of billions of people and you grow that population and you grow GDP, what we have seen to date is an energy addition where clean energy and you see these headlines all the time about it's breaking every record you can imagine, which it is.”
Most oil shock fixes only help with the next shock
“Most of the things you would wanna do to deal with an oil shock don't help with this oil shock. They help with the next oil shock. And when the immediate crisis fades, the political urgency to do something for the next one tends to fade as well.”
This is the largest oil supply disruption in history
“This is the largest oil supply disruption the world has ever seen, somewhere on the order of 13 to 15,000,000 barrels a day of supply that otherwise would transit the Strait Of Hormuz offline. There are some measures to compensate for that, like strategic stocks, but there's no policy tool in the policy toolkit large enough to deal with a shock that large. You're talking about 10 to 15 of global energy demand, oil supply. The Arab oil embargo was 7% by comparison.”
This is the largest oil supply disruption in history
“This is the largest oil supply disruption the world has ever seen, somewhere on the order of 13 to 15,000,000 barrels a day of supply that otherwise would transit the Strait Of Hormuz offline. There are some measures to compensate for that, like strategic stocks, but there's no policy tool in the policy toolkit large enough to deal with a shock that large. You're talking about 10 to 15 of global energy demand, oil supply. The Arab oil embargo was 7% by comparison.”
Most oil shock fixes only help with the next shock
“Most of the things you would wanna do to deal with an oil shock don't help with this oil shock. They help with the next oil shock. And when the immediate crisis fades, the political urgency to do something for the next one tends to fade as well.”
US is unusually insulated from this global energy crisis
“And natural gas, we're really disconnected. I mean, the price of natural gas in Europe and Asia went to 15 or $20 per million BTU. In The US, it's below 3, and it's falling. So I was con I was interested in that because we've been reading these stories about how Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington to try to encourage the Trump administration to take this military action.”
Countries now view interconnection as risk, not security
“I think the point we were making in the article was a shock like this, particularly in a new world of fragmentation, geopolitical conflict, the, eroding world order that Mark Carney spoke so eloquently about at this year's meeting in Davos. In a world like that, countries don't view interconnection as security. They view it as a risk, and it's gonna lead to a, an impulse in a in a lure of autarky. Let's make everything at home.”
“But if you picture the same data, not from zero to a 100%, but just total amount of energy, which is what the world cares about and what the planet cares about from a carbon emission standpoint, we've never used less of anything. The shares are changing, but we're using more wood today for energy than we did in 1850. And when you take a population of billions of people and you grow that population and you grow GDP, what we have seen to date is an energy addition where clean energy and you see these headlines all the time about it's breaking every record you can imagine, which it is.”
Countries now view interconnection as risk, not security
“I think the point we were making in the article was a shock like this, particularly in a new world of fragmentation, geopolitical conflict, the, eroding world order that Mark Carney spoke so eloquently about at this year's meeting in Davos. In a world like that, countries don't view interconnection as security. They view it as a risk, and it's gonna lead to a, an impulse in a in a lure of autarky. Let's make everything at home.”
Using less oil is the most durable security strategy
“An oil shock is less harmful if oil is less a share of your economy. And so the most durable thing you can do for energy security is just to use less in the first place, and there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we often forget to pick up off the ground when it comes to energy efficiency.”
Saudi Arabia's bypass pipeline is energy security insurance
“Right now in the in The Middle East, the most important piece of oil infrastructure in the world today is the East West pipeline. It's a pipeline that goes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea that bypassed the Strait Of Hormuz. Usually, that pipeline is not used. It was built for an emergency like this, and Saudi Arabia was willing to pay that premium for insurance. Energy security, it's a question of how much society is willing to pay for insurance through that kind of resilience redundancy in infrastructure.”
Swapping oil dependence for China dependence has nuance
“It's obviously different when you're talking about a supply chain. If China were to cut off the exports of solar panels, that would not affect the ability to turn the lights on today at all. It might affect your ability to deploy new technologies, and install new solar panels, but that's a much different, impact. We're not importing electricity from China. We're importing a manufactured product that makes electricity.”
