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367. What's up, Mark? Paige, in all the years we've been coming to NAEP, I don't know if I've ever been to one that has this much excitement in the air. I mean, you can almost feel it is so palatable. It feels like pre-COVID.
Absolutely. Actually better. And of course, part of that's our new presidential administration. There's a lot of hopefulness in the oil and gas industry and the manufacturing industries as a whole. I think part of it also is we have so many new attendees here and a lot of them are. younger. Yes. Everybody that's coming here is coming to buy or sell something unlike any other conference we go to. So that adds another layer of energy. Oh, and it's just been a fun day. And huge shout out to Caleb.
Huge shout out to Caleb with Nape. Without him, we wouldn't be here. Or if we wouldn't be here, we'd be shoved in some corner. Some room closet somewhere. Which, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're a fellow podcaster.
Every year, we come to NAEP, North American Prospect Expo, and we invite other podcasters that are not part of OGG in to join us. We help you get your first press pass. We set up all the gear so you don't have to haul the gear. I mean, we've got podcasters here from Montreal. Montreal, yeah.
If this is you and you'd like to come to this conference and record with OGGN for free, meet everybody. Have a good time. Let me know. Now, it won't happen again until next February, so you got a little bit of time. But like I said, if you're a fellow podcaster, YouTuber, and you sort of touch energy in any space. and you want to come join us, reach out to us.
Yeah. Oh, we got reviews, Mark. We got reviews. Thank you, people. Yeah. Five stars. Important information. I absolutely love this podcast. My family owns Mountain West Energy Services, a small locally owned and operated oil and gas company. It's always insightful.
hear your expertise on major issues affecting the country. Many of these high-level topics eventually impact the work we're involved in, so your discussion are both relevant and valuable. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Mountain West Energy. Thank you, Mountain West Energy. And if you'd like to be... like Mountain West Energy and get a shout-out on the show, it's simple. Go to Apple Podcasts, go to Spotify, leave us a review, and we'll read it on the air and give you a big shout-out.
Yeah, so we've got a lot to cover this week. In fact, we're going to kind of go over all the Trump advance administration appointments and executive orders. So I'm going to be boring everyone with a five page document. Not really. But let's talk about who's been appointed. So as far as the cabinet goes, we've got Douglas Burgum, Secretary of the Interior. Christopher Wright. What's up, Chris? Secretary of Energy. Lee Zedlin, Administrator of the EPA.
Russell Vogt, Director of the Office of Management and Budget. And then subcabinet, Dario Gill, Undersecretary for Science Department of Energy, Preston Griffin. Under Secretary of Energy. And then sub-level positions. Ingrid Kolb, Secretary of Energy. Walter Cruikshank, Secretary of the Interior. James Payne, Administrator of the EPA. And then a chairman.
stage chairman of FERC. So then we have a bunch of executive orders we've kind of got to go over. I don't know, Mark, you haven't really looked at these. No, none of them. I'm going to give a brief summary of what has gone through as of the 20th of January. The first one is...
delivering emergency price relief for American families and defeating the cost of living crisis. So basically, it's a mandate for government departments to look for ways to bring down food prices for consumers, including ridding the climate policies that raise the cost of. and food next up we have putting america first in international environmental agreements basically that's the withdrawal of the paris climate agreement again this could take about a year or more
Next up, unleashing American energy. So basically, Trump declared a national energy emergency, ordering expedited deregulated drilling as he's repeatedly vowed to drill, baby, drill. Well... I just had to see that this morning, our buddy Chris Wright, first thing he did, he pulled a pin out and he got rid of all the net zero policies. Awesome. And I'm not laughing like I want to pollute the planet. I'm really not. No, no. Folks, we have been to.
other way for so long politically in this country that i can't help but smile when we get somebody in that position that is an engineer that understands energy that understands science and wants to make sure that all of us benefit from cheap reliable abundant energy
So the first day on the job, he started getting rid of stuff that keeps us from enjoyable, cheap, reliable energy. And he's going to do a lot of that sort of stuff. At the same time, even though he's getting rid of net zero policies, he's going to be a very huge steward of the environment. I just love what he's doing already. And it's only his first day on the job. It's awesome. It's so awesome. So speaking of energy emergency.
Trump declared a national energy emergency, a declaration of that giving the administration more powers to expedite approvals for infrastructure, for fossil fuels, biofuels, nuclear power, and critical minerals, but not solar and wind. So that's specific. Then we have temporary withdrawal of all areas on the outer continental shelf from offshore wind leasing and review the federal government's leasing and permitting practices for wind projects.
And that's basically offshore wind leasing in federal waters has been paused. Yeah. And if you've listened to us for any length of time, it's not like they're taking business away. Nobody wants, nobody's signing these leases for offshore wind. Right. And so they're going to take a break and they're going to reevaluate. Yeah. What? There was zero. There was zero. Yeah. And if you've heard me speak for any.
length of time, you know that I believe offshore wind is extremely viable and valuable, but the way that it was pushed upon The world's population, especially here in Europe, just doesn't make market sense. There's going to be consequences of that. And it's going to be unfortunate for the offshore wind industry. However, I think offshore wind 3.0 will happen in about 10 years. And when this happens.
It will come back for profit that will make business sense and it will stick around and stay. Like I said, this pause and offshore wind is just a chance for us to reevaluate what's going on, which basically nothing's going on.
and figuring out the right way to incentivize companies to build offshore wind platforms that make sense from a fiscal point of view. Right, exactly. I'm sure Doge had something to do with that, too. I'm sure, too. All right, and the final one, and this one I'm pretty excited about, and I was actually talking. with Elena earlier about unleashing Alaska's extraordinary resource potential.
It's in order to lift restrictions on oil, gas and mineral production in Alaska, opening areas for development, including parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and supporting the state's aspiration to revive its LNG industry. How proud.
are Alaskans right now. You and I have been talking about the need for this. It feels like 10 years. I know it hasn't been 10 years, but great that this is happening. Yeah, but January felt like 10 years, so. The other thing, though, Paige, is you have an industry mixer planned for the North Slope of Alaska.
I hope it's in the summer. Well, now we have no excuse for not going with the move that's happening in the oil and gas industry. It's exciting stuff. I'm really pumped for the future of our industry. Me too. All right. So let's actually get into news articles. And by the way, everything that I just spat off will be in the show notes directly to the whitehouse.gov thing. All right. First one up. The dust has not settled on Trump's Canadian oil threat.
Yeah. So if you read this article, which I think is in All Price, they talk about how all prices dipped a little bit because Trump backed off on the sanctions to Colombia and also to Canada and about the uncertainties that caused when he said he was going to implement the sanctions. Let's be real here, people. We didn't back off. Trump imposed tariffs. He did it as a negotiation tactic.
Mexico and Canada back down in less than 24 hours. Oh, less than 24 hours. Same way with Colombia. So in this article, they don't go deep into it, but basically what happened to Colombia is we had a bunch of their criminals.
that we're here illegally at our own cost and risk to our own law enforcement officers. We put them on a plane. We sent them back to Columbia. The Colombian president refused to take his own citizens back. Yeah, I'm pretty sure two planes. Two planes, right? And our current president, Trump, said...
You know what? That's fine. We're going to tax the crap out of everything that you do. And the Colombian president didn't last as long as the Mexican or the Canadian. Of course not. He caved in two hours, right? Yeah. And by the way, this isn't making countries and people do stuff they shouldn't do or make.
them do stuff that's unethical or hurts their country. This is about leveling the playing field. And like I said, regardless of what you think about our new administration and our new president, Trump is a businessman and he has.
decades of experience to negotiate business contracts, and that's all he's doing. He's using the tariff card as a negotiation tactic, and it's going to benefit everybody. It's kind of like, obviously, he was going to do this. Come on, it's Trump. He did it the first time. He's going to do it again.
Yeah. So anyway, when you read this article in Oil Price, they kind of skirt around what really happened. What really happened is we asked countries to do something. They said no. We imposed tariffs. And then they said, OK, we'll do it. Next article. Short and sweet. All right. Ukraine drones hit second Russian oil refinery in less than a week.
Yeah, so this is interesting from a strategic point of view, from a military strategy point of view. Ukraine and Russia both are literally just worn out. They're out of soldiers. They're out of ammunition. They're out of armament. They're out of money.
Their top troops are either exhausted or unfortunately not with us anymore. This thing is just kind of a mess. So what Ukraine is doing with what their limited resources that they have available to them is they're being extremely strategic. There's a bunch of refineries they could have attacked that would have been.
an easier target for them. No, they target the refinery that's supplying jet fuel for the few Russian fighters that are still flying out there. So this is a very strategic move. Now, the interesting thing to me... is that the Russian defense ministry said they intercepted and destroyed 104 Ukraine drones, but they had 70 strikes, which means almost 200 drones were launched by the Ukraine. And these are not the level of drones you think of when you think of the U.S.
military these are almost consumer drones that have been converted so they're cheaper i wonder who paid for that but still if you launch 200 drones and they cost you a thousand dollars each and you don't have any money so this is also a war of who has any money left yeah so we'll keep an eye on this but super
strategic move. The refinery actually took significant damage. They had a shutdown production. As far as I know, what is today's date? Today is the 6th of February. The fire is still going on. They haven't got control of the fire. Whether this helps Hurry up and close this chapter between Russia and Ukraine. I don't know. But the Ukraine definitely targeted the right refineries. And these attacks absolutely are affecting the fuel supply for the Russian military.
Okay. Next up, we have soaring tanker costs stall Russian oil trade in Asia after U.S. sanctions. I should have saw this coming. But I didn't. But it makes total sense. Remember when our Biden administration, right before they walked out the door, placed some more sanctions on Russian oil? And remember me saying that's too much? They're pushing too hard and it might accelerate the war and cause it to escalate?
The side effect of that is that a lot of the tankers that were being used to ship Russian oil. because of the fear of those sanctions that we just announced, quit running Russian cargo and started running other cargos of crude oil, which means all the tankers then were used. Their utilization rate was very high, which means there's no tanker sitting empty, which now means...
Russia can't afford. That drove the tanker rates up, which means now Russia can't afford to use the tankers. Didn't see that coming. I don't think our last administration saw that coming either. That unexpected consequence of raising those sanctions would increase the day rates for super tankers.
But it did. So now Russia is struggling to get their crude in the market. That crude, we all know where it's going. It's going to Asia and India. There's only two countries still buying sanctioned crude. But now... They're not selling as much of it. And remember, this war costs money. And this war is being funded from the Russian side by the revenue they generate from oil and gas. Right. And the reason that we had sanctions on Russia is to help.
reduce that revenue so that we could make this war end. But what we didn't want to do is reduce it so much that Russians starved to death, which would cause things to escalate. We've got to wait and see what this does. The tanker rates are going to continue to stay up. I'm really interested in seeing what that gap is between the buyers and sellers, between China and Russia. It's going to take another week to figure out what that's going on.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next up, we have protest shuts to oil terminals in Libya. People? Huh. I don't even know what to say to this. This is one of the most unique news articles I think we've ever covered on the show. It doesn't sound like it's unique. It doesn't sound very exciting. But basically, there's two export terminals in Libya.
The Libyan country is basically divided up between the side of the country that's still run by the government and the side of the government that's run by the side that hates the government is protesting, fighting the government. So basically think of it as.
government and rebels. The country is split up between the two. And the oil crescent region movement, which is part of the rebel side, has threatened to block production, export at all the terminals in the region unless they're given to control. of the terminals. So basically this is a
Almost proxy threat by both sides that if you don't give me control of the terminals, we're going to shut them down and then none of us make any money. And Libya needs to boost production. If they don't, at some point relatively soon, they're going to run out of money. The government's planning on – producing crude production. I think they want to increase the production by 2 million bales a year.
But they only do about 1.3 million barrels as of now. And if they don't have the ability to export this, it will kill their business completely. We need to see where this thing is going. If the rebels, if the All Crescent regional movement gets control of these terminals, I actually. think it would be good for the people in Libya. Unfortunately,
I've been wrong before in that part of the world about who's really the air quote good guys. Right now, it looks like the rebel side is actually the ones that are doing more for taking care of the local population, making sure war crimes aren't happening, really doing things that are. different than what the Libyan government does. However, like I said, I've been wrong before, so we're going to watch this and we'll see where it goes. For once, it's not just stop oil.
Just stop all people who wouldn't know what to do in Libya right now. Actually, I would love to get all of them and just drop them off in Libya. There you go. Okay, next we have USFIRC confirms approval for Transco pipeline expansion in remanded case. Read that again. USFIRC affirms approval for Transco... Pipeline expansion, a remanded case. And the reason I'm laughing...
This is a whole news article, what is this in, in RigZone, about how FERC has re-evaluated a case and decided to overrule a ruling. Let me break this down for you folks. FERC says that Transco couldn't do this pipeline because of environmental reasons. President Trump gets elected.
FERC is scared they're going to lose their jobs. FERC says, oh, wait, we were wrong. You can build a pipeline. That's literally what really happened. My bad. I'm just kidding. I love how they try to say something else happened. And we all know this is exactly what happened. Now. This is a good thing. This pipeline needs to be built. FERC had no grounds to deny the expansion of this pipeline.
They did it anyway based upon climate risk. And now they don't care about that. I think they're more worried about keeping their jobs, which is good. In the real world, people... should be worried about keeping their jobs, right? They should be worried about doing good work. In public service especially, you work for us. You don't work for the government.
But this is great. This new phase of pipeline is going to get rid of the capacity constraint that's existing right now in the region, which will then lower transport prices, which will then lower the cost of energy for everybody. And add more money to Transco so they can hire more people. So this is great. But I just love how they danced around what really happened. Okay. Enquest to acquire Harbour's Vietnam assets.
Yeah, this is interesting. So if you listen to me in length of time, you know, I always talk about supply and demand and the demand in the world, the increase in demand, I should say. A lot of that's being driven by Asia, specifically China. But India is starting to increase that demand as well. But we never think of countries like Vietnam.
Cambodia, all those Asia Pacific area of Hong Kong, but some of them actually have good hydrocarbon reserves, good recoverable reserves. So what's happening is the country of Vietnam population slowly moves over to more a Western lifestyle. more modern lifestyle. They need more energy.
And then you need more petrochemical products, right? And so what they're doing is they're tapping into their own hydrocarbons and starting to produce them. And what's happening here is these two companies, Harbor has been around for a very long time doing a lot of work in Vietnam, but Inquest is basically buying them.
because they see the market potential in the future in Vietnam. So the market potential is not there today. Give it three or four years and you'll have much more crude production, much more natural gas production. You'll have refining capacity and inquest is just getting ahead of the curve. I think this is a. very smart move by inquest and these fields that they're operating in have been proven so it's not like they're doing wildcatting they know how much hydrocarbons are there now
The one thing is one of these fields is what I would consider a little bit late in life. There's also seven more to having been tapped into. It's all the same geology. So I think this is great, smooth move by Inquest. And I suspect they're going to be super successful.
Right on. Argentina logs biggest energy trade surplus since 2006. Yeah, and if you don't know this, the process of fracking takes a very specific type of geology. You're basically getting the hydrocarbons at almost the source rock. But that geology is not unique to the U.S. It is all over the world, including Argentina. And Chevron must have been at least 10 years ago.
invested time and money and resources to help the Argentinian government tap into those hydrocarbons using fracking, just like we do here. The problem was 10 years ago, they didn't have the infrastructure, the pipelines or the roads or the export terminals to bring it to market. Well, now they do.
So I think this is really cool. Argentina traditionally has always been a very poor country, and they're booming right now. They actually have, what does the survey say? Biggest energy trade surplus since 2006. That literally means they've produced more energy, read hydrocarbons.
than they've used since 2006. And that trend is going to continue. And that delta between what they use and what they export comes to tune at almost $6 billion. Now, $6 billion in the U.S. economy or $6 billion in the United States. Kingdom's economy doesn't sound like a lot, but Argentina, that's half of their GDP. So I love this. This is great for the people of Argentina. President Javier Mali's efforts to make this work is the reason this is happening. I expect to see much more investment.
capital investment in Argentina's frack fields. I'm going to expect this to continue to grow. And congratulations to everybody who played a role in this. And congratulations to Argentinian people who are going to benefit from all of this. Alright, last one. Recon Africa announces the results of the first Damara Fold Belt exploration well at Nain Gopo.
Yeah, and if you hear people cheering in the background, it's because they see us recording a podcast. So Recon Africa, we love these people. Probably one of my top feel-good stories ever I've learned in the industry. When they first got permission from the Nambia government to go and do some exploration.
because they thought there were some hydrocarbons that were recoverable. When the government granted them the drilling permits and their licenses, when they went to that area to drill, they realized that area was full of villages that were extremely impoverished people, extremely poor.
Dirt floor, grassroot huts. They were burning cattle dung for fuel to heat their food because all the wood had been gone because they had used that years ago. And because they used all the wood to burn for fuel, they chopped down the forest. And because they chopped down the forest.
It was harder on the animals. Plus, they killed all the animals to sell for bushmeat. So it was literally like a desert, which should have been a subtropical area. And the people had no money, no job, poor, no health care. So what did Recon Africa do? Did they drill oil well?
Nope. The first thing they did, excuse me while I choke up. The first thing they did is they drilled 12 water wells so that the local population could have clean water, which helped with your health. What did they do second? Drill all well? No. They bought fertilizer. They brought that fertilizer.
Now with water and fertilizer, you can grow your own crops so you can feed your people. So now the villagers started growing crops. They could feed their people. Guess what? They didn't have to kill bushmeat to sell to make money. So the animals came back. Oh, and when they drilled their first oil well,
they do with the nat gas they piped it off and gave it to the villagers so they could use that for fuel so they didn't have to burn cattle dung or wood which guess what that means the forest is coming back you want to see reclamation of land by the oil and gas industry this is a problem
example. Now it's thriving. There's trees, there's grasslands, there's animals. The people have jobs, they have health care, they have clean water. Then they start drilling wells. And so this article, if you get into it...
They're talking about the net reserves they discovered is about twice as much as what they thought they had. And what they thought they had was enormous. And there's indications that same amount of hydrocarbon is at the same depth level and abrasive field right next to them. So this is just a. boom for them when recon africa first came out they got a lot of flack in public for drilling in africa yeah i remember that
It was horrible. They did more for Africa than most people and most organizations have done for Africa. And it's just a small upstream operator. So big shout out to Recon Africa for making this world a better place and making a dollar. Love it. All right, that's about it. I got a recount if you want me to talk about that. Yeah, let's talk about the recount. What's it looking like? It's actually looking pretty good. U.S. up six at 582.
Canada's up 13 at 258, but internationally we're down 10 at 909. You know what's not down, Paige? What? Artificial intelligence. Really? Everybody's talking about AI, right? But AI, we can make a huge difference in energy because it can boost production and safety across the board. But getting AI up can make a difference.
Only if you know what you're doing. So getting AI up running is not easy, especially if you run a large operation. So born from the industry for the industry, Cognite helps you improve troubleshooting, turnarounds, field operations, and more. with AI faster and more effectively than you could do building it yourself. So remember, if you need help with your next AI win, visit www.cognite.com forward slash E-N-O-G podcast to see why the industry trusts Cognite. power digital transformation.
Normally, this is where I read off the URL again. People, it's just easier. Go in the show notes. Just click on the link. But seriously, if your department or if your company is looking to deploy AI to help you compete, and if you're not, you better be doing it soon, reach out to Cognite. They won't try to sell you anything. They just try to help you.
Yep. Speaking of trying to help, we're trying to help besides being at NAEP. So if you'd like to sign up for our two newsletters, the links are in the show notes. And everybody, I know our Sunday update has not went out in a while. We're having internal marketing team issues. Nothing for you to worry about, but I promise it will be out soon.
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