Energy Fantasy Versus Reality In Woke-Land -- Part III

March 16, 2025/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

JP Morgan Chase — that’s the largest bank in the country. It has been headed for almost 20 years by celebrity CEO Jamie Dimon. For much of the 20 years, Chase and Dimon have been known for their fealty to woke orthodoxies, at least in their official pronouncements. For example, here is a Forbes piece from October 2020 citing Dimon on the subject of “systemic racism.” 

 

(Pithy quote: “Systemic racism is a tragic part of America’s history. . . . It’s long past time that society addresses racial inequities in a more tangible, meaningful way.”)

The fealty to woke orthodoxies has in the past extended in particular to the subject of “climate change.” In April 2021 JPM put out a big announcement of plans to facilitate investment of some $2.5 trillion in what they called “climate action and sustainable development.” In October 2021, JPM joined the so-called Net Zero Banking Alliance, then being organized by the UN (led by Mark Carney), promising to starve fossil fuels of investment capital in order to reduce CO2 emissions.

But meanwhile, over at J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, they have a guy named Michael Cembalest, who currently has the title Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy. For some 15 years, Cembalest has put out an annual Report called the Annual Energy Paper. I have covered a couple of Cembalest’s prior reports, here for 2021, and here for 2022. The titles of both those posts included the words “Fantasy Versus Reality In Woke-Land.” Cembalest is just out with the 2025 version of his Annual Energy Paper, so consider this to be Part III of this series.

These Reports by Cembalest are far from perfect. At a basic level, the Reports accept the ideas that there is a real energy transition going on, that it is somehow important, and that use of fossil fuels must eventually be eliminated. I don’t know if Cembalest really believes those things himself, or if accepting them for purposes of your public reports is the price of holding a highly-paid job at JPM. Either way, while I consider the failure to question those ideas to be a major flaw of these Reports, that failure does not prevent Cembalest from taking a serious and realistic look at many aspects of the supposed energy transition that are completely failing.

I’ll start with a couple of sections of this year’s Report that I consider to be the strongest: those covering hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Hydrogen

Cembalest’s section on hydrogen, beginning at page 45, is titled “Frydrogen: the cancellation of green hydrogen projects when exposed to the sunlight of energy math.” The reason for use of the word “fry”: 

“[M]any hydrogen projects are being fried (terminated) since the energy math didn’t work.”

Cembalest quotes Hanns Neubert in the June 2024 German MIT Technology Review:

“Electrolyzers, which do not exist, are supposed to use surplus electricity, which does not exist, to feed hydrogen into a network that does not exist in order to operate power plants that do not exist. Alternatively, the hydrogen is to be transported via ships and harbors, which do not exist, from supplier countries, which - you guessed it - also do not exist.”

There is a long list of some 12 insurmountable obstacles standing in the way of a green hydrogen economy. My favorite:

The green hydrogen economy barely exists despite mountains of taxpayer subsidies promoting supply. In the US, for example: a production tax credit of $3 per kg is equivalent to $91 per MWh based on the energy content of hydrogen (i.e., greater than wholesale electricity prices which averaged between $30 and $50 per MWh in 2024).

(Note that the $91/MWh tax credit for green hydrogen is just the subsidized portion of the cost of making the fuel; the $30-50/MWh wholesale cost of electricity includes all elements of making the electricity, not just the fuel.)

CCS

In a section on CCS on page 19 of the Report, Cembalest correctly takes note of the fact that after decades of hype, CCS has gone absolutely nowhere. He calls the CCS “citation-to-usage ratio” (that is, the number of citations of CCS in academic papers divided by the actual operating capacity of CCS facilities) “the highest ratio in the history of science.” A chart shows current U.S. capacity of operating CCS facilities at about 0.1% of CO2 emissions. If all planned facilities actually get built (highly unlikely based on experience), then the percent of emissions captured would go to around 0.8% of emissions.

Another interesting chart shows that CCS facilities that have been built capture far from all of the CO2 emissions from the plant in question, despite consuming substantial portions of the energy production of the plant. Here is a portion of that chart:

Capturing 55-75% of the emissions of a coal power plant is never going to satisfy the environmental zealots. So what’s the point?

OK, those were the strong parts of the Report. Let’s get to the fundamental flaw.

Solar power

The biggest theme of this year’s Report is “Heliocentrism.” The title of the Executive Summary of the Report is “Heliocentrism and the speed of the energy transition.” Why the term “heliocentrism”?  

“For purposes of this paper, heliocentrism refers to the view that rapid growth in solar power and energy storage are at the heart of the energy transition, and that new investment in complementary thermal power generation is no longer required.”

Cembalest says that there are “believers in heliocentrism,” apparently lots of them, and lays out their case for them:

Believers in heliocentrism point to rapid growth in global solar capacity which more than doubled over the last three years. If BNEF projections are correct, solar capacity will double again from 2024 to 2027. Solar is now the dominant form of global capacity additions, comprising 60% of new capacity in 2024 and by our estimates ~75% in 2027. According to Carbon Brief, the International Energy Agency underestimated solar capacity growth for years and has been trying to catch up as shown below. Globally, the combination of wind and solar power generation has soared past nuclear and should surpass hydropower in 2025.

Cembalest then states that “there are a couple of ‘buts’ to keep in mind.” That’s putting it mildly! As the “buts,” Cembalest mentions that solar facilities have annual capacity factors in the range of 15-20%, and that producing electricity from solar panels does not solve the issue of non-electrified uses of energy, like transportation, industry, and most space heating. Fair enough. But he never gets to the biggest problem, which is dealing with the problem of intermittency as the penetration of solar generation into the grid increases.

The problem of energy storage is barely mentioned. There is this on page 5:

EIA analysts I spoke with cite a “staggering” amount of battery storage being added to the US grid: another 38 GW by 2027 on top of 22.5 GW already in place. This suggests that some natural gas peaker and baseload plants could eventually be displaced.

Well, how “staggering” is that? It’s really discouraging that Cembalest does not even use the correct units for describing battery capacity (which are watt-hours rather than watts). But assume that we are talking about standard 4-hour lithium-ion batteries. A few minutes of simple arithmetic would show that this “staggering” amount of storage is a tiny fraction of what would be needed to back up a predominantly solar electrical grid. The U.S. used 4,086 TWh, or 4,086,000 GWh, of electricity in 2024. Dividing by 8760 (hours in a year), that’s 466 GWh every hour. 38 + 22.5 GW of batteries would total 60.5 GW, times 4 hours’ duration would come to 242 GWh of storage. So, about half an hour’s worth. Full backup of a predominantly solar grid would take about 500 to 1000 hours of storage. So the “staggering” 242 GWh is around 0.05% - 0.1% of the storage that would be needed. An almost meaningless amount.

Cembalest’s conclusion is that while solar generation is increasing rapidly, it is only increasing “linearly,” which is not nearly fast enough to overtake all fossil fuel generation in any short number of years. Thus, “[A]s a general principle, . . . the US and Europe are a long way off from no longer needing both baseload and backup thermal capacity.”

Well, sorry Mike, but you’ve missed the big picture. If you had done the arithmetic, you could easily have seen that solar is not just “a long way off” from powering the grid without thermal backup; solar is never going to be the main source energy for a developed economy. You owed it to your clients to tell them that this can’t work, and there is a Green Energy Wall coming; but you failed.

Meanwhile, there is at least some reason to think that JPM at the highest levels has finally started to see reality and re-think its green energy commitments. Just in January, JPM quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance. Maybe by the time next year’s Report rolls around, the shackles will have been taken off Mr. Cembalest, and he can give his readers a dose of the truth.

Comments to EPA on the proposed mercury and air toxics (MATS) rule

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.   May 14th, 2023 36 Comments @ CFACT

My name is Bonner Cohen, and I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the agency’s proposed MATS rulemaking on behalf of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

I will confine my remarks to one key aspect of the proposal. This is the first time EPA has updated its MATS standards since 2012. Those standards, which were part of the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) were subsequently overturned in a landmark Supreme Court Case, Michigan v. EPA. In its decision, the Supreme Court faulted the agency for proposing a rule in which EPA’s estimate of the costs far exceeded the agency’s estimate of the benefits. The benefits were put at $4-6 million a year while the costs were pegged at as high as $9.6 billion a year. Noting this enormous difference in its decision to overturn the 2012 rule, the court said “[n]o regulation is ‘appropriate’ if it does significantly more harm than good.”

Now, 11 years later, EPA is putting forward another MATS rulemaking, only this time the agency has not offered any estimate of the direct benefits of its proposal. Instead, the agency cites Section 112 of the Clean Air Act (CAA), which deals with Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) for its statutory authority for the MATS rule, but fails to provide a HAPs-related justification for its rulemaking.

This is an end-run around the law. Congress passed Section 112 to deal specifically with HAPs. EPA is now using Section 112 to address non-HAPs issues. Instead, the agency cites alleged ancillary benefits, such as PM2.5 ancillary benefits, to justify the rule. Whereas is the 2012 rule, EPA did identify a small amount of mercury emissions reduction to justify its action, in the current rulemaking proposal, it did not identify a single dollar of direct benefits from reducing mercury emissions from power plants.

As such, today’s proposal is on even shakier legal ground that the 2012 MATS rulemaking the Supreme Court struck down.

The agency’s current rulemaking faces the near certainty of a court challenge, one that is likely to end the same way as EPA’s ill-fated 2012 proposal. Playing it fast and loose with the Clean Air Act is not sound environmental policy.

Thank you very much.

Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D.

Senior Analyst

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

Author

• Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

  Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Busines Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country. He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.

The practical impossibility of large-scale carbon capture and storage

By Steve Goreham May 3rd, 20233 Comments @ CFACT

The Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would set stringent limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from US power plants. Utilities would be required to retrofit existing plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or to switch to hydrogen fuel. Others call for the use of CCS to decarbonize heavy industry. But the cost of capture and the amount of CO₂ that proponents say needs to be captured crush any ideas about feasibility.

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from an industrial plant before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and storing it for centuries to millennia. Capture may be accomplished by filtering it from combustion exhaust streams. Pipelines are proposed to transport the captured CO₂. Underground reservoirs could be used for storage. For the last two decades, advocates have proposed CCS to reduce emissions from coal plants and steel, chemical, and other hard-to-decarbonize industries in order to fight human-caused climate change.

CCS has been slow to take off due to the cost of capture and the limited salability of carbon dioxide as a product. Thirty-nine CCS facilities capture CO₂ around the world today, totaling 45 million tons per year, or about 0.1 percent of industrial emissions produced globally. Of these, 20 reside in the US or Canada, six in Europe, and five in China. Twenty-four of these facilities use captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery. Captured CO₂ is injected into oil wells to boost oil output,

The news from these facilities is mixed. Many are not meeting their carbon-capture goals or are incurring costs well over budget. Nevertheless, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, the US, and nations of Europe now offer billions in direct subsidies or tax breaks to firms for capture of CO₂ emissions and to build pipelines and storage. Over 300 large and small capture projects are in planning around the world which, after completion, may be able to boost capture to 0.5 percent of man-made emissions.

Illinois, Iowa, and other states are struggling with issues involving plans for CO₂ pipelines. Ethanol plants and other facilities propose to capture CO₂ and need a new network of pipelines to transport the gas to underground storage sites. These pipelines face strong opposition from local communities over farmland use and safety concerns in the case of a pipeline rupture.

Carbon capture and storage is very expensive. An example concerns plans for CCS in Wyoming, the leading US coal state. Wyoming mined 41 percent of US coal in 2020 and coal-fired plants produced about 85 percent of the state’s electricity. With abundant coal resources and good opportunities to store CO₂ underground, Wyoming appeared to be an excellent candidate to use CCS. The state passed House Bill 200 in March 2020, directing utilities to produce 20 percent of electricity from coal plants fitted with CCS by 2030.

In response to the statute, Rocky Mountain Power and Black Hills Energy, Wyoming’s two major power companies, analyzed alternatives for their operations and provided comments to the Wyoming Public Service Commission in March 2022. But the comments were not favorable for CCS. Black Hills Energy determined that adding CCS to two existing coal plants would cost an estimated $980 million, or three times the capital cost expended to build the plants. Rocky Mountain Power stated that adding CCS to its existing plants was “not economically feasible at this time.”

Beyond cost, the amount of carbon dioxide that advocates say must be captured is vast. The amount of CO₂ produced by industry is small in global terms, only about five percent of what nature releases into and absorbs from the atmosphere every day. But the amount of industrial CO₂ produced is still huge in human terms.

For example, an empty Boeing 747 jumbo jet weighs 412,300 pounds (187,000 kg). Its maximum fuel weight is 433,195 pounds (196,494 kg), more than the empty weight of the aircraft. During fuel combustion, two oxygen atoms are taken from the atmosphere and combined with each carbon atom. For each kilogram of jet fuel burned, 3.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide are created.

Consider the Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire, England, the third-largest power plant in Europe, which has been converted to using two-thirds biomass fuel. The plant is experimenting with CCS to reduce emissions. Each day, the plant uses about 20,000 tons of wood pellets delivered by 475 railroad cars. Picture the volume that these railroad cars would carry and then more than double it to get an idea of the amount of CO₂ to be captured and stored each day.

The world’s heavy industries use vast amounts of coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Ammonia, cement, plastics, steel, and other industries produce billions of tons of materials each year for agriculture, construction, health care, industry, and transportation. Capturing, transporting, and storing CO₂ from these processes would involve trillions of dollars and many decades of investment.

The International Energy Agency calls for 9 percent of the world’s CO₂ emissions to be captured and stored by 2050. Today we have a mix of 39 major and minor capture facilities in operation. The IEA estimates that 70 to 100 major capture facilities will need to come online each year until 2050 to achieve this goal. It’s unlikely that even 20 percent of the goal will be achieved, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.

This article originally appeared at Master Resource

Author

• Steve Goreham

  Steve Goreham is a speaker, author, and independent columnist on energy, sustainability, climate change, and public policy. More than 100,000 copies of his books are now in print, including his latest, Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.

  
  

Biden's New EPA Rule May Double Power Bills

By Daniel Greenfield April 27, 2023 @ Sultan Knish  Blog

Americans can’t afford to buy food, so Biden decided that they also shouldn’t be able to heat their homes during the winter. After an “environmental” measure that would prevent a majority of the country from being able to afford new cars, Biden is now going after their power bills.

The latest EPA proposal would mandate ‘carbon capture’ at power plants. A study by MIT showed that carbon capture raises the cost of electricity from 30% to 50% depending on the type of plant. Another study by Australia’s Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis however showed that prices could actually climb as high as 95% to 175%.

Imagine your power bills doubling? That will be the final blow for millions of Americans.

Biden’s corrupt inflationary spending broke the economy and sent prices soaring. State environmental regulations in California, New York and other leftist areas increased the cost of electricity. Last year, 1 in 6 homes had fallen behind on their utility bills. A survey found that a third of households were cutting back on food and medicine to be able to heat their homes.

With more than 20 million households struggling, Biden decided to deliver the killing blow.

His administration’s illegal carbon capture mandates would hike electricity costs 30% to 175% and utilities will be forced to pass the cost of this expensive ‘green’ tech to their customers just as they are already being crushed under the burden of expensive and unreliable solar and wind systems. How many Americans can afford to pay twice as much for their utilities?

Not only would Americans pay more for the privilege of ‘carbon capture’ power, but the power plants would produce less power. Louisiana’s Cleco utility warned that its carbon capture experiment would cut power production by 30%. Pay more, get less: that’s carbon capture.

But that’s also all ‘green energy’.

Like most ‘green’ technologies, carbon capture is a scam. That’s not just a conservative position. Even the most fervent environmentalists, including Greenpeace, which calls it the “Great Carbon Capture Scam”, and the Sierra Club, have said it doesn’t work.

A Stanford study found that carbon capture actually increases air pollution.

A UC Berkeley study found that carbon capture would double water use which would be environmentally catastrophic in Southern California and other water-poor areas.

If carbon capture is unpopular with both conservatives and environmentalists, why is Biden so determined to impoverish Americans using a plan that both sides agree is a bad idea?

While carbon capture is a hypothetical technology that, like most green tech, doesn’t work, it does fulfill its primary purpose of making it too expensive for consumers to use power. Carbon capture technology doesn’t actually change anything about the environment, but it makes conventional gas and coal plants too expensive to operate.

And that is the whole point.

After being shut down by the Supreme Court which struck down the EPA’s power grab of regulating ‘carbon emissions’ , which is not a pollutant, the new move is meant to force power plants out of business so that they can be replaced with even more expensive and unreliable wind and solar. As expensive and inefficient as carbon capture is, wind and solar are monumentally more expensive and inefficient. A carbon capture mandate for power plants might hike power bills by 30% to 175%, but would in the long run be far more expensive than that when those plants are shut down and everyone is forced to depend on wind and solar.

While carbon capture is unpopular with environmentalists, some top Democrat donors have heavily invested in it including Bill Gates and George Soros. Carbon capture startups scored $882 million in capital last year so there’s a lot of Democrat donor money riding on it.

Millions of Americans will get poorer and freeze in the winter so Biden’s donors can get richer.

In the UK, which has even more fanatical environmental regulations than America, 50,000 people die every year because of “fuel poverty”. In December 2022, an estimated 1,000 people died because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes. Most of them were senior citizens.

This is the nightmare that Biden and his advisers want to bring to America.

France suffered its deadliest summer in a decade with thousands of deaths last year because of a lack of air conditioning. (The Biden administration has also been working to make air conditioners too expensive for working class Americans to afford.)

The EPA has tracked a growing increase in heat and cold-related deaths in America while falsely blaming them on its invented bogeyman of ‘climate change’ rather than environmental regulations that have made it too expensive for people to heat and cool their homes.

With a third of Americans struggling to pay their power bills, how many will die if Biden succeeds in illegally forcing carbon capture through and doubling power bills? With a population that is five times that of the UK and areas even colder, we could see as many as 250,000 deaths.

That is an outcome which environmentalists, who want a drastic reduction in the human population to ‘save the planet’, have enabled in the UK and which they are implementing here.

The Biden administration has destroyed our standard of living, is taking away our cars, our gas stoves and now wants us to freeze in the winter and suffer heat stroke in the summer. This brutal purge will enrich his donors and eliminate many of the elderly more likely to vote GOP.

The only thing carbon capture really ‘captures’ are our lives. 

 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.