The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Uncertain Future of Oil: Energy Poverty, Depletion, and 'Green' Ambitions with Scott Tinker

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

(Conversation recorded on October 30th, 2024)     Human consumption of fossil fuels - especially oil - is a topic filled with complexity, tension, and uncertainty. Understanding this issue requires accounting for a wide range of factors - from dynamic global markets and widely dispersed reserves to ongoing innovation and geopolitical conflicts. Attempting to navigate this intricate landscape is no easy task. But in the midst of these challenges, are there fundamental truths about the future of energy that experts can agree on? Today, Nate is joined by geologist and energy expert, Scott Tinker, to delve into the complexities of global oil supply and demand, the concept of peak oil, and the future possibilities of energy production and transition. Together, they explore the decline rates of oil reservoirs, the physics behind oil extraction, and the role of technology in oil production. Can nations strike a balance between energy security, geopolitical considerations, and the pursuit of a "clean" energy future? How solid are concepts like peak oil demand in a world still grappling with energy poverty? And perhaps most crucially, why is it essential to foster open dialogue and educate the public on these issues, so that we can all play an informed role in shaping our energy future?   About Scott Tinker: Dr. Scott W. Tinker is a global energy explorer and educator bringing industry, government, academia, and nongovernmental organizations together to address major societal challenges in energy, the environment, and the economy. Following a 17-year career in the energy industry, Scott spent 24 years as an Endowed Professor and Director of the 250-person Bureau of Economic Geology at UT Austin. He is CEO of Tinker Energy Associates and Chairman and CEO of the nonprofit Switch Energy Alliance. With Director Harry Lynch, Scott co-produced and is featured in the award-winning documentary films Switch and Switch On, screened to millions of viewers globally. Scott is also the host of Energy Switch, an energy and climate point-counterpoint show on PBS.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the whole story of The Great Simplification? Watch our 30-minute Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

What humans do is we move stuff around, Nate. We move ourselves, we move our food, we move our pets around, we move our products around. It's all about movement. You start cranking up the price of that transportation fuel and the price of everything goes up. If you really can't move, you can't afford to move things around, everything stops. The gears of the global economy grind quickly to a halt. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future.

By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. This week I'm joined by Dr. Scott Tinker, who is an energy educator and geologist. for a wide-ranging overview on the state of energy and oil and the importance of energy literacy for everyone everywhere. Following a career in the energy industry, Scott became a professor of geology at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology and the state geologist for Texas. He is the CEO of Tinker Energy Associates as well as chairman and CEO of the educational nonprofits switch energy alliance. Additionally, he hosts the energy and climate talk show,

Energy Switch on PBS. While there are some areas where Scott and I disagree, which he and I touch on and unpack in this conversation, he and I are highly aligned on the importance of making discussions about the future of energy and our environment, widely available and understandable for the average person. So we all can have an informed say on what we've like for the future of our world and energy's role in it. With that, please welcome Professor Scott

Tinker. Scott Tinker, welcome to the program. Nate, it's great to be with you. How are you today? I am doing well. You know, there's a lot going on in the energy world, so it's a fun time. There's a lot going on in the world full stop. So we have a lot to talk about, even though we've recently just, uh, just been introduced to each other. Let me start with something I expect we fully agree on that our culture in the United States and globally generally misunderstands energy, uh,

let alone the foundational role that energy plays in the past current and future human societies. And this is a central theme of this channel, the great simplification, uh, but you're a long time energy educator. you have the energy switch show on PBS and you get presentations all over the world. I'd like you to give me your outlook or your explanation of how important energy is and why we neglect that fact in our culture. Yeah.

Well, we do agree on this. And it's probably a lot of reasons. I don't know certainly all of them, but we, We are undereducated when it comes to energy. And I think it starts with the, you know, kind of in the schools, Nate, where we really don't have a lot of energy education in schools. And what we get is fairly limited and reasonably biased, candidly, towards certain things and away from others.

And I'm talking about in the kind of, I'll call it the rich world, the developed world, as you push throughout the globe, when you said worldwide, we see, gosh, the need for, education at all in parts of the world. There's woefully lacking in the really poor world or the evolving world and emerging world. And then in the developing world, which is the big chunk of our planet today, education is a mixed bag for sure. So energy just doesn't surface there. And the challenge with that, I think, is we get educated with so many other things. And they're important. I mean, hell everybody learns about food.

We somehow, by the end of elementary school, I know what the food pyramid looks like. I know what I'm supposed to eat and not eat. It doesn't mean I do it, but at least I understand what calories are and sugars and breads and cheese and meat and protein and all these kinds of things. We don't get that with energy. And so it leaves us in a place where we all have strong opinions about it with very little knowledge. And that's, I think, the great challenge, that energy IQ. How do we raise that IQ to a point where we reach to have a base level that we can talk from? And if we can get there,

and that's one of my passions, is truly probably yours too, getting us to some base level of physics and economics, base knowledge, not emotion and passion. Then I think our leaders, both in corporate America and corporate world and political world would be better served and they'd probably be happier. If they had an energy educated public, they'd probably be able to do some things that they can't do now because their base doesn't understand what they're asking for. I think it helps everybody in the long run. And that's why I've pushed all in. I think just recently meeting you, as you say, but from doing a little quick look at you, it seems like you pushed into it. Seems like you pushed into that as well.

Well, the central thing, I mean, there is energy education that says this has a kilowatt hour worth of energy. And, you know, they talk about thermodynamics and electricity and wind turbines and coal. But the fact that our entire civilization is dependent on energy, 85% of which is fossil energy, which our culture is treating as if it were interest. but it's really a bank account that we're drawing down from geologic times. That's the thing that's not taught. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of terms out there, as you said them, but quite often your eyelids close when you,

what the hell is a kilowatt hour compared to a kilowatt, you know? And those are very different things. Or, you know, a barrel of oil compared to an exodule, etc. What's a TCEF of gas, etc? These are, we don't know. these and and I think there there is fossil energy as you said things that come from natural processes that form coal

or oil or natural gas through time and they're very different things by the way those three things are very different or but they're natural and they're free they're a free resource on the earth now it's expensive to get it okay the sun and the wind are natural too but it's expensive to get them. Okay, and this is where I think we need to begin to comprehend. Batteries are cool.

I have them and all my gadgets, but it's expensive to get the stuff, the metals to make the batteries, and it isn't without impact on the earth. So that's really what we have to start thinking about is the budget, if you will, of the earth to provide energy. Now, we may differ here. I don't think really there's any practical limits on so-called energy for human use. I think we're far from limits on those things.

And I think there's an interesting way to present that. And I'd love your input. But first, there's the recent graph from a couple months ago now, ExxonMobil showed their global oil supply forecast out to 2050. and it's roughly flat, but it shows a for the existing wells and fields in the world, there's a 15% annual decline rate, which means that if we stop drilling today in the world, we would drop by 90% in our production plus or minus in the next 20 or 30 years. So we have to make up for that with investment in existing fields and new resources and projects needed. So you, my understanding is you were the head of the American Association of

Petroleum Geologists. You were the head geologist for the state of Texas. So from a geologist perspective, how do you describe this graph? And what is your kind of middle of the road projection for the next 30 years? Sure. Yeah. Been involved with lots of different organizations. And that's always been that way. It just probably people don't know that. Physics determines the decline rates from the subsurface. So when you go down and drill a well into the subsurface, you start to release pressure because there's a lot of pressure from the rocks above the reservoir that push on that. And you poke a hole in that, like pop on a balloon almost. And that's what allows for fluids and gases to flow up to the surface through a well bore. And you immediately start to decline, pressure decline. And the energy to lift

that oil or those liquids and those gases begins to decline. And that's just natural. So you see a reservoir usually come on strong at the beginning and then decline through its life through some amount of time. Conventional reservoirs have big pores. They're not big. They're little pores, but they're big relatively that are reasonably well connected. So all those liquids and gases flow to the well bore along with a bunch of water, old salt water from old oceans. And the oil and gas business is a water handling business in it. And it gets some oil and gas along with it.

To be candid, they handle a lot more water than oil and gas. Hey, let me interject there. So you said it comes out with salty water. Is that literally water from the old oceans that's been sitting under the ground for as long as the oil has? Yes, longer. Because when those rocks, when those sediments are buried, and we're talking about, let's think about a beach sand or a turbidite sand out in the deeper abyss or carbonate reservoirs like reefs you might snorkel around, those are all deposited in oceans. And sometimes you have rivers or lakes, but most of these things that produce oil and gas are sedimentary rocks. Those sediments get buried, again, mostly oceans.

And with time, they become rocks. They become lithified. So you start to bury those sediments and they go deeper into the earth. And they get cemented together, the little grains. And they mostly rock, but some little holes between those grains, just like on a beach. And the old ocean is buried with them, the old salt water. So you're producing old oceans when you tap into that. And it's just like the oceans of today, only it's had a lot of time to have a lot of time to have

things get into it as well. So they can be kind of nasty that produced waters there. But all of the sedimentary rocks in the earth are filled with old oceans. And when I actually looked for oil and gas back in the 80s and I found plenty of salt water, Nate, I was really good at it. But it qualified me to be a professor. I didn't find much oil and gas. So the oil and gas is only in some limited places, really. think about the oil and gas comes from organic rich sedimentary rocks. They're called shale. It's sediments that get buried with a bunch of plants. And deep into the earth and they get concentrated, the organics, and heated up.

So cooked, if you will. And they go from being old plants to hydrocarbons. The organics come off as cooked hydrocarbons, essentially. And just like when you drop oil or gasoline on, on water it floats. It's lighter. It's less dense. So in the subsurface, what happens is the oil and the natural gas, which are lighter than the water, tends to want to float up through those pores toward the surface, and that's what it does. It gets stuck along its path, trapped between kinds of rocks that it can't flow through. They're called seals. So you end up trapping oil and gas

in these hydrocarbon reservoirs. You have a reservoir with a little hole, that are open and some seal on top of it and and you have water, gas, and oil in an ideal sense, stratified like that. And it's quite interesting. You know, it's quite fun to think about all the physics of that, but it's all under pressure. So at the end of the day, when you poke a hole into that reservoir, you'll produce a bunch of the water and you produce some oil and you might produce some gas as well. And through time, the pressure declines. And that's happening all the time, that physics, and it is 10 to 15 percent annual decline. So in order to continue to produce the amount of oil we consume in the world today, let's call it whatever, 100 million barrel a day,

you have to keep finding it. You have to keep replacing it. And so you'll have people who don't really understand that very well, say, look at the decline, it's over. That's one extreme. And then on the other extreme, you have people saying, well, it's unlimited. And it's neither of those. So you see that natural decline through time in these reservoirs. And you have to replace it. So, you know, the reservoir is declining. I've got to find that next wedge and that next wedge. And if you do that effectively, you end up building a reserve curve that's always up. and to the right, okay, and the oil and gas industry globally, and by the way, so-called big oil, the Exxon, the BP, the shell, you know, the chevrons of the world, they're only a

small part of the global oil industry. They're not big oil. The big oil is Aramco in Saudi Arabia and Petra China, Petrobras and Brazil, the state-owned oil companies, right? So the state-owned oil companies are like 85, 87 percent of global oil. production, something like that. And they sit on on their own reserves. And so Exxon can't go into Saudi Arabia and explore, but Aramco can come to the U.S.

You know, there's just a lot of interesting dynamics with all that. We can go into it if you want to. But back to this thought. So, yes, always replacing the production and trying to grow it. The graph you have from Exxon shows that. And if we don't do it, if we don't invest in that, industry. If the industry is not allowed, I mean publicly, I don't have to invest, just let the private sector continue to do its work. And it needs to not only drill wells, but it needs to be able to

produce the oil and gas and then separate the gas at the surface and remove the oil and refine it in another location and get it to markets. It takes pipelines, refineries, tankers, all sorts of infrastructure needed that the private sector pays for, by the way, to very. It's a very, it. It's a very expensive business to get the oil and gas to markets. And so if you hinder that, if you don't allow for pipelines to be built or drilling on the offshore or onshore or refineries to be built, it's going to be tough to replace that, at least with the, quote, big oil companies. Now, don't kid yourselves to think that that means the oil and gas industry will go away in the world. It won't. It just will be done by others. And the state oil.

companies that I mentioned. So if you feel more comfortable with OPEC countries and companies and Asian companies and countries owning the oil and gas in the world and carry on, you know, but I'm kind of more comfortable with a diverse portfolio of companies that are at least publicly traded and SEC regulated being part of that game. So I have a ton of questions on this. So you mentioned pricking a balloon or drilling all over the United States. Is it true that the United States has more wells drilled than the rest of the world combined in history? It might be. It might be. I can give you some statistics that I'm reasonably confident in. Texas alone has plus or minus one million well bores drilled through time. And last time I checked, the whole country of Mexico had less than 50,000.

So if oil comes from ancient oceans and seabeds, which we know, I mean, there is a finite amount of ancient seabeds in the world. And in the United States, was particularly blessed with oil and gas resource. How do we know that the rest of the world isn't full of similar formations to the United States? Well, we know a lot these days. I think in the past we knew less. but it doesn't take too many oil and gas wells in seismic, which is a remote sensing approach, sending sound waves down to the earth and they bounce back and you can really resolve what the character of the rocks and fluids look like in the earth now.

Seismic is incredible. So we know a lot about the global sedimentary basins in the world now, even though they haven't been drilled as much. We understand pretty well where the mature source rocks are that I talked about. and the reservoirs, at least the conventional ones, and even the unconventional ones exist today. Now, they just haven't been developed nearly as much as have been the United States. So you go to the Middle East, and there's incredible reservoirs there. There's actually a much larger portfolio of, in the Middle East, of oil and natural gas.

Which is why we have military bases all around there. It's part of the reason. Yeah. It's part of the reason. security of supply and, you know, global partnerships. Russia has tremendous resources. The Siberian basin in Russia is larger than the state of Texas. Okay.

So from a biophysical standpoint, our current cultural conversations and narratives are about money and technology, but from a resource standpoint, energy and materials that are non-renewable on human timescales, Russia and other places have enormous, things in the bank account, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, and yes, and so does South America and Africa. When plate tectonics has been active for, you know, billions of years, actually, but when South America separated from Africa and formed the South Atlantic Ocean and the North Atlantic as well, you know, then South America fits right into the horn of Africa,

you pull those apart, you see identical rock sequences on both side of the oceans and paleo successions and similar sedimentary basins flooding in there and oil and gas. And there's tremendous production offshore Brazil on the east and in Africa on the west. And for those reasons. So there's quite a bit of oil and gas around the world. We have certainly not tapped the limits of it yet. Now that is driven by continuing to advance technologies and it's driven by price. And it's important when you hear the word resource, that is intended to describe the total amount of oil and gas and the tank in the earth.

And we do an okay job of estimating the total resources in the earth. When you hear the word reserve, that means what you could produce from that resource, what you could produce from that tank with today's technology and today's price. Technology changes. It improves. Price is volatile. So reserves kind of come and go. They go up and down. Quite often, go up reserve growth because of advanced technology. We're able to get oil and gas out of rocks that we couldn't get it out of before. And that's why when you hear this concept of this static thought of, well, the oil and gas, that's it. We're on decline and that's it. Well, that's it if we were to stop the technological evolution. But we don't. Well, at least we haven't today. And I don't think we will. that's not what drives that evolution.

What drives it is the demand for that product. So as long as there's a pull of demand for oil and natural gas, and there'll be an incentive to continue to push technology forward. And that could lead into a conversation if you want to go there now about production. Those are called conventional reservoirs, what we've been describing, and there are unconventional reservoirs. They call it unconventional oil and conventional gas. It's the same oil and gas.

It's just stuck in different kinds of rocks. and we are the leading producers of those unconventional reservoirs in United States or in shales. We lead that. Unconventional reservoirs deplete much more rapidly. So, and our, like, 50 to 60 percent of our oil right now is unconventional. The shale plays. So our average decline rate is much steeper than it was 20 years ago of the total amount of oil we produce. On a per well basis, that's true.

on all the 13 million barrels we produce spaces? It's steeper per well, and when you aggregate those wells, it would be steeper. Yes, so what you're saying is correct. You have to continue to drill wells more frequently and in a denser way than you would with conventional reservoirs. A conventional reservoir might last 20 years. Peaks starts to draw down, but it has a much gentler slope. and producing oil and gas well in a shale would be peak and then it comes down quickly two or three years and then has a long tail on it so you have to drill more wells but the flip side of that nate is important too

it used to be pretty hard to find the oil and gas we didn't have great seismic sensing and as many wells hard to find but once you found it you could produce it it came out of those bigger pores Now, let me just take a quick side trip. When I say pores, it's the holes between the grains. Conventional reservoirs, those holes might be about the size of the head of a pin, a little pinhead or smaller. But those are big, and they're connected. You know, room to room, hole to hole.

That's called permeability, that connection, porosity, permeability. In a shale, those holes are teeny. They are in the nanometer scale, and let me tell you, what would that be? The Barnett shale was one of the first shales to produce here in this country. You could fit 200 of those holes, nanopores, and the Barnett across the width of one human hair. Okay, that's how little they are. They're getting down to the molecular size. So it's hard to connect those little holes.

It's hard for molecules to flow out of them, a methane molecule, CH4, or hydrocarbon molecules, which are more like super tankers compared to the little, you know, smart car of a methane molecule and scale and size. So it's hard to flow out. You've got to crack the rocks to make the connections to create the permeability for that to flow. That said, the shale, we know where the shales are. We know when they're mature. And so there's a lot less risk of discovering oil and gas than there was in the past. The risk in the past was you could drill a very expensive well, go down there and you didn't find economic oil and gas. So the whole cost was sunk.

Zero came out. It's not like building a factory where you, oh, your margins aren't quite as good as you hope. No, it's all gone. As opposed to shale, you go down and you drill these wells, and you're pretty sure you're going to get production out of those. In fact, you kind of know you are. It's just whether or not you can produce it economically. It's more of a farming approach. And you can take, the technology now allows you to drill multiple wells.

dozens of wells from a single 10-acre pad on the surface, down a mile or two, horizontally, one, two, three miles horizontally. So you go down and you turn this piece of steel and go horizontally. You can steer it, remarkable technology, in multiple directions, and keep it within a 10-foot vertical window like this height of my ceiling here. And you can do that at multiple levels now. You can go down at one level and I can go down at another level. So you're literally farming or mining almost, but with well bores, whether than the open pit mines, the oil and gas out of these shale reservoirs.

It's a much, I think it's a much more predictable in that sense. You're absolutely right on a per well basis. They decline quicker, but you're aggregating a lot more of them together to build this supply curve, if you will, or this reserve curve. And I hope that makes sense, and I'm happy to say more if it doesn't. I have a lot of questions. I want to move back to the global macro and the concept of peak oil and how everything fits together. So this concept of peak oil, the idea that there will be an all-time high, and then a permanent decline in oil production, is come and gone in the mainstream energy conversations. From my perspective, peak oil has never been about predicting or naming a certain date, but rather acknowledging that at some point, there's going to be an inflection after which we're not going to be able to match such a scale of.

of infusion of ancient sunlight into human economies again. So what is your general take on the concept of peak oil and what is the Scott Tinker baseline forecast on below ground oil production base case the next 30 years globally? You know, big questions. I used to be invited to, I have good friends that were part of the peak oil societies and that kind of thing. And I would be invited to speak and they would, Ha ha, here's our guy who doesn't think peak oil is happening yet.

And it turns out it wasn't. But it did, you know, M. King Hubbard was a guy who worked at Shell. My dad worked at Shell. He worked with King at the research lab. He kind of called it right in the U.S. only in the early 70s for peaking and rolling over for those conventional reservoirs and those technologies. But what he didn't anticipate was the innovation of drilling and production and hydraulic fracturing and things that went on. So we created another whole

oil production peak, if you will, from shale in this country, higher than it was even back then. And so it's twin peaks. You could picture that. And will there be a third peak? I don't know. We're down in the source rocks now. What I want to be real clear here, we've only produced a very limited amount of the oil and gas from the shales in this country. Those well bores decline. And we might get 30, 40, 50 percent eventually out of a shale gas well bore. But out of the whole system, that shale system, we're probably in the 5 to 10 percent production range so far, Nate. And so that means we're leaving 90 percent of that down on the earth still. And that's a big number. It's a big target. It's hard to get. It's stuck down there in those little pores, but never underestimate

technology if there is a demand for it. So my concept or thought about peak. oil or peak gas is one more related to the demand for it. When will the demand for oil or natural gas? And they're very different. So let's talk about oil first. Oil is used for all sorts of products, not just transportation, but its largest use is refining it and putting it in motors, engines, engines really, combustion engines for all sorts of things to move ourselves around. Okay. You could argue if that's a good use of it or not, and I could argue both ways, but that's what we do with it. And a bunch of other stuff. Petrochemicals and fertilizers and everything.

So when will the demand for that slow down? In history, the demand for things changes when something better comes along. So I've often heard the cell phone analogy. You know, well, the cell phone came along and the developing nations don't need landlines anymore. They just use cell technology or space. correct because this is better. When I was in high school talking to my girlfriend, who is now my wife, through the one phone in our house with a curly cube cord coming out of the closet where I was hiding, you know,

this is better. It did replace that technology. What's better than dense gasoline and jet fuel and diesel? Really. We'll talk about EVs, but what's better than that? And this is why the demand, you put, I put 20 gallons of gasoline in a car, I can go four, you know, 400 miles, more, 500, depending on your miles per gallon. One fill up, three minutes. And when it's done, I go to a gas station.

In three minutes, I fill it up and do it again. And the, the emission is CO2, not good for climate, but not a lot else coming out of there. It's remarkable, really. So what's better? And that's the big challenge is when the demand for oil and the demand for natural gas, which has a whole suite of other uses, when it's replaced by something better. I think that's the struggle we're feeling, the dynamic we're feeling. The EV world is suffering mightily right now in case people don't know it. But, but, you know, so the demand is going to drive that.

And at some point, if the demand continues to pull too hard and there's nothing better, yeah, we're going to see. tension between supply, ability to supply, and demand. And when that tension happens, good old economics kicks in. And the price goes up. And it doesn't just go up a little. It's not just OPEC screwing around or blah, blah, blah. By the way, big oil companies don't set the price of oil. The U.S. ones, they don't control it. They live with it, but they don't set it contrary to what Congress wants to say when they bring them up there as witnesses. They don't. That's a whole different suite of things. So, but when you, if you start to see demand continuing to pull because there's nothing better and we can't supply it, price goes way up. And then, then invention happens,

Nate, you're paying, let's say you're paying $10, $12, $15 a gallon for gasoline at the pump. Other options are going to really accelerate and new technologies that will be as good or better are going to happen. And that's the classic driver of, uh, of kind of economics, technology, and resource supply. So I don't think people understand the magnitude if gasoline was $10, $12, $15 a barrel, the crushing impact that would have on society. A gallon, $10 to $12, $15 a gallon. Oh, yeah.

It's crushing. Europe is paying, what, $6, $7, $8. A lot of that's just taxes in order to support those kinds of, of government approaches to economies. A lot of taxes in there. California pays more than we do in Texas or the Midwest. But, no, you start cranking up the price of that transportation fuel and the price of everything goes up. Exactly.

Because everything in the world, what humans do is we move stuff around. We move ourselves, we move our food, we move our plants and our gardens, we move our pets around, we move our products around. I get something delivered on an Amazon truck, a toothbrush. You know, hey, I got a toothbrush today. It's all about movement. And if you're not able to move, society just comes to a grinding halt. Look at COVID. COVID-19.

We shut down the world economy for a little while. Things weren't moving as well, although I still expected my groceries to be delivered in the rich world. Okay. Now, who's doing that? But if you really can't move, you can't afford to move things around. everything stops. Just the gears of the global economy grind quickly to a halt. So I want to eventually get back to the discussion about the geologic limits and also the above ground limits, which we haven't really brought up here.

But on the demand. So you said that technology, at least historically, has shown up via market forces to develop alternatives. when the price signals are high enough. But there is a growing theme, especially with the International Energy Agency, that calls that oil, the end of the oil age will not be because of reservoir depletion, but because we won't need it anymore. The peak demand thesis. So maybe you could give me your thoughts on that whole line of thinking. Yeah, IEA is an interesting group, quite good.

historically has become a little bit more of an activist organization candidly under Fatibiral, and he works for Western Europe leaders. That's who pays the bills in the U.S. So they are putting out some fascinating reports. A lot of my friends around the world who I consider really truly energy agnostic, but energy experts are questioning some of those reports these days to be candid with you and your viewers. So, yes, demand the fossil energy age. For example, China. China has been a growing economy, more vehicles on gasoline. China doesn't have a lot of oil and gas that it produces itself. It's trying. It's looked hard, but they don't own a lot of resource. They aren't blessed with that like their neighbors to the north and Russia or in the Middle East or even Southeast Asia.

Africa, etc. So they need options to oil. And same with natural gas. So what have China done? And it's brilliant, by the way. I think it took a lot of foresight and a lot of investment. Through the belts and roads initiative and other initiatives ahead of that one, China went out in the world and started investing in buying the rights to the access for metals.

In Africa, particularly, but all over the world. lithium, cobalt, copper, polysilicate, other kinds of things for building wind turbines and solar panels and batteries. And all of those things require a tremendous amount of mining to build the collection systems, to collect the sun and the wind, the heat and the light from the sun and the motion of the wind, and to make the batteries in giant chemical manufacturing plants, and then to put them into vehicles.

All right? So China is moving towards a more quote, those solar and wind are called renewable. They're not for the reasons I just described. All the stuff to collect the sun and the wind comes from the earth. We make it into collection systems, and we dump it back into the earth when it wears out, and it wears out in about 10 to 15 years.

And then we need to rebuild another one. You do it over and over. It's not renewable. Okay. Sun and the wind are, but not the stuff. But, but neither. Oil and gas aren't renewable either on human timescales. No, there's nothing renewable in human timescales in that sense. Maybe that's upsetting.

I said in a TED talk to 1,100 kids. There's no renewable energy after building Y, and they've got the big eyes. You know. The sun and the wind are renewable. Well, so are, you know, yes. But you can't put them in your car. Right. Right.

Right. So all the stuff to collect the sun and the wind, and by the way, it takes a tremendous amount more stuff to collect the sun and the wind. And this isn't a judgment statement. It's just the physics. We're going off a little tangent here, but this is a really important concept about energy density. So if you look at the, let's call it the energy per unit area, that's called surface power density, watts per meter square, how many watts on a square meter? of Earth, the sun and the wind are on the lowest end of that, other than biomass and batteries are way over there somewhere. So compared to, say, oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear, hundreds and hundreds to thousands of times denser. So it takes a lot more stuff to collect

the sun and get a unit of energy than it does to collect 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas for the equivalent amount of energy, just more stuff. And that's not just. judgment. That's physics. So when you when you look at creating an electric car, for example, electric vehicle, it's about 600% more metal than in a combustion engine vehicle. It's not the vehicle,

it's the fuel, the batteries themselves, just more. Solar and wind take 500% more metals than coal and natural gas to make electricity on a kilogram per megawatt generation basis. So it's a lot. These are big

numbers and mining and manufacturing and then moving all the stuff to where it's collecting and then dumping it and doing it over and over as it wears out. So this is the reality of the impacts of all forms of energy. I'm not judging one of the other. They just have impacts on the earth. Humans impact the earth. Not a renewable process. And I'm a geologist. I don't mind mining. I really don't. It's not green. Nobody in my audiences, and I speak to thousands and thousands every year. I've ever said, mining's green. It's not.

But we have to do it for so many other kinds of things. So back to China, they've brilliantly, they don't own those metals because those are all over the world, but what they've done is bought the rights to process them. So those things get shipped to China or China's in the country with their own processing facilities as part of the investment agreement. China now controls 80% of the world's processing. of all these key metals for solar wind and batteries. 80% Nate.

So this is a security discussion. I lectured recently at the Naval Academy and blah, blah, blah, talking about security of supply or energy security. We have to recognize that OPEC isn't real secure for oil, but we're going to move our, and that's for transportation. Are we going to move our transportation dependency to China for bad, 80%? And is that secure? Because we don't mind here in the U.S. much. We don't open new mines, and we certainly don't open these big processing facilities and all the other kinds of things

that nobody wants to do. So this is the challenge. China and the EU don't have as much oil and gas. Part of it is they won't develop it in Europe, and part of it is they don't have it, naturally. So they need these options. And that's why China and the EU alone, just the EU and China, are building 85% of the world's electric vehicles. 85%. Just those two regions. The rest of the world, 15%. They need them.

And that's fine. I get it. But we got to, again, is it better? Is it worse? We can talk about that I'm happy to. Is an electric car better or worse than a gasoline engine? There's pros and cons to both. as you start to think about that. So what happened with the IEA is they looked at China and said their demand

for gasoline is going to go down. And it is starting to plateau because they are going in the EV world and they're really good at it. They make them very cheap. And they're putting them out there on the global markets and we're having to put tariffs on them here in the U.S. 100% tariff because they make them so much cheaper than we can. So the IEA correctly said, hey, the demand in China is going to be a little less. and OPEC, for the first time Saudi Arabia and OPEC had to kind of downgrade their oil demand forecasts. They haven't ever done that before. It's happened a couple times now.

That's a very interesting dynamic going on in the world. But I don't think that we should read that to be the whole world is going to electrify their vehicles. Some parts of the world are doing it for reasons I've just tried to explain, and others aren't. So it might be, it might not be growing as aggressively. what are the upsides of that? The upsides are that companies, not just the national oil companies, but the international, publicly traded companies, can work to replace their reserves, as we were talking about earlier,

at a little bit different pace, perhaps, trying to make that work for a longer time frame, and it buys time. I think your question continues, I think I'm hearing, won't we eventually run out of oil and gas? No, that's not my question at all. That's not my question at all. Let me, let me, uh, let me ask one thing about your point right now and I'll get back to the, the peak oil question. So the IEA reduced their forecast for oil demand because they saw a little bit of a change

in trend in, in China, uh, for gasoline demand. However, internal combustion and electric vehicles are made with metal and plastic. they drive on cars made from asphalt, both plastic and asphalt precursors also come from oil. Gasoline is just one of 6,000 products from oil. Tires. And tires. So they're just looking at the gasoline component

and maybe with some really expensive refinery switches, we could shift some of the gasoline fraction into the other fractions. But an increase in our, a decrease in demand for gasoline doesn't really mean a less demand for oil globally. Not necessarily. It might be a rate of growth because transportation is a big piece of the demand for refined oil products. But you're right. It could be slowing rate of growth demand or using oil for things that are, it's harder to use other products for, you know,

refined products, petrochemicals, plastics, as you've mentioned, and other kinds of things. as well. So it might be a little more intelligent use and just burning it as a fuel. And we could slow that down a little bit and that would help with emissions. Well, let me ask you that. You know, we are a clever, ambitious, curious, driven species. But if we knew now, if we knew 200 years ago or in 1850s what we know now about the unbelievable magical powers on human time scales that are in the embodied dense carbon energy and oil and gas and the environmental impact, I wonder if we would have done something different.

So would we have done something different if we knew in 1850? Could we have? Or was this just all momentum and metabolism of a social species finding this bolus of energy dense stuff? I mean, the first grand discovery, the one that really changed the world from being agrarian and a fairly slow growth rate was coal.

You know, coal is the thing that the carbon embodied in coal, that nature cooked up on its own and made into a largely carbon solid fuel, is so much more dense than wood or hay or, or, you know, cow dung, which people were burning, et cetera. So that's really, when we figured out we could harvest coal and burn it and create a bunch of heat for a variety of things, including boiling water, making steam, turning a turbine, running a generator, and making electricity, that changed the world. And that was early 1800s.

We started to see the big ships were coal. The trains were feeding coal into them, et cetera, et cetera, transportation, as well as other kinds of things. So that's the first carbon-based fuel, so-called fossil fuel, if you will, that changed the world. And it wasn't until later we found hydrocarbons or oil, let's say, liquid hydrogen and carbon. 190, spindle top, early 1900s in Texas and earlier than that in Pennsylvania. You know, that's when those liquids came along and we said, wow, there's a lot of embodied energy there, as you call it, fossil sun because it had to grow the organics and good description. And those were even denser. those liquids, we could refine those and put them in vehicles on a per unit weight basis,

specific density there. That's different from surface power density, the area, but on a per unit weight basis. And then along came natural gas, and it seems like gas wouldn't be dense, but on a weight basis, gas is even denser. Why, it has more hydrogen in it. Methane, what we call natural gas, is CH4, one carbon four hydrogens. And that hydrogen is a very impressive fuel. You know, think of the Hindenburg. It burns. And so natural gas became the next big fuel, and it has grown tremendously in the world.

It has about, it's about to replace coal as the world's leading fuel. Nadia, it was about 40% gas to coal ratio 60 years ago, and today it's 90-something percent gas to coal, and it'll pass coal. And so that's been a pretty interesting carbon coal, hydrocarbons, oil, carbon and methane, you know, hydrogen, I mean carbon, hydrogen, methane transition. And that's been happening naturally because it's a better fuel. And it doesn't have as many other bad things as sulfur and the nitrogen, the mercury, the particulates, and other kinds of things that solid fuels or liquid fuels have. So let's not kill gas because it's a, quote, fossil fuel.

There are a lot of benefits to natural gas. It's not perfect. it makes CO2 when you burn it and it itself is a greenhouse gas so on a climate basis got to work for that but it has a lot of other environmental impact things that are much better so I take it your answer is no we wouldn't have left it in the ground

I don't think we would have left it in the ground no I mean the minute we found something yeah my answers are paragraphs sorry but we wouldn't have left it in the ground because it is just a better fuel that allowed for a human civilization to do what it has done. And the great advances, the great industrial advances have come in the last couple hundred years. Prior to that, we were basically limited to things that animals could do for us.

Right. Well, my thesis, which I think you agree with, is the finding of carbon and eventually hydrocarbons lifted the ceiling on what we were able to do. Oh, completely. Combining them with machines. Yeah, it wasn't limited to one person or one animal thing, right? Now we can do useful work at a scale that doesn't require a one-for-one with a human being. So I don't believe that the issue is that we're going to run out of oil and gas. I believe the issue is that we're going to run out of affordable enough oil at the scale that the global economic and financial system is dependent on.

And once that becomes an issue, there is a phase shift in international agreements, in geopolitics, in bricks versus unipolar world and all those things. And the other aspect, what you described with the different shales and the depletion rates and the below ground resources, that if everything else is kept stable, you believe that we won't have limits because technology will continue to get a higher percentage of the original oil in place out of the ground for human consumption. Let me correct myself if I said that. There will be limits, but I don't think they're going to be in the timeframes that people are concerned about. I think we'll see what you see already, let me say it this way, the shales that we're producing from in the U.S. were not the only country with mature source rocks. shales. You find mature source rocks wherever you find conventional oil and gas. That's the source

of the migration in the Middle East, in Russia, in South America, and Africa. So there are mature source rocks in all these places in the world. They are quietly testing all of those with our developed technology here. And I know this. And so we haven't even opened up the tap on the source rocks in the Middle East and Russia yet. The shale's there. They haven't even come to market yet, Nate. And why? Well, because they're more expensive to

develop. So Russia and the Middle East would love to see be able to sell their cheaper to produce oil and gas at a good margin, a good arbitrage for as long as they can before they bring these other sources on to

the global market. In fact, if you go back to the early fracking day, you know, a lot of films, so-called documentaries, which were not 70% false and even dramas like Matt Damon was in. You go chase the money. Russia was funding some of those, so was the Middle East, to scare people from fracking. And, you know, it worked, a very powerful movement to get people worried about hydraulic fracturing, which had been happening for five or six decades, but all a sudden it became mainstream. So it's going to be a while before oil and natural gas, globally, including from the source rocks, are not available.

But I think what it does in my head, a little slightly different take than yours, there's a time, there's five to ten decades of time in here where other things that are better will come along. And what will those be? There's other kinds of ways to move ourselves around besides just batteries or hydrocarbon source fuels. There are some pretty interesting things. Nuclear for big movement. You know, we do them in ships and submarines. Why not other places?

Fuel cells with hydrogen in them, sort of electricity carriers, if you will, compress natural gas. A pretty interesting combustion engine for certain kinds of uses. There's other technologies for the transportation sector that can become part of that blend. And I think that's what's going to start, I'm an optimist,

I think that's going to start to happen over the next, again, five to ten decades of time. There are going to be volatility within that. Don't get me wrong. There always is for a lot of reasons. The price of oil really fluctuates not so much because of fundamentals, but because of all these superpositions of things that humans do in the world from wars, etc. Yeah.

So it's there. The resource base is there. The reserves will be there. The technology evolution. And then nuclear, to put the electricity into some of those vehicles, Nuclear is, just look and say what's happening in the U.S. Nuclear is coming back. Every week there's a new old plant that's going to be put back into production,

whether it's Microsoft and Three Mile Island, in Iowa they've announced one, Michigan they're announcing. But that's because we have this huge demand for AI and power, but that's electricity. It's not liquid fuels that transport heavy ships and airlines and cars. So it's an energy quality argument. there. Yeah. Yes. Maybe cars. You know, you can do, you can electrify cars at some level, but you're right. On the bigger things, you don't want to be electrifying those. So let me, let me get back to this original premise. So you had, you said that the reserves, that historically, there's always been roughly a 10-year reserve to production available, like at today's technology and

today's price, we always have at least 10 years ahead of us. But what's happened is during that time, we've grown our debt to be almost 400% of GDP globally. So we have more and more monetary claims on around 10 years of reserves. And so all these above-ground factors of geopolitics of debt, of war between NATO and Russia, between Israel and Iran and others. So the perception is all the rising tide of global growth and adding more and more of this fossil hydrocarbon to the global economy to power our machines over the last 40 years, that as soon as that musical chairs moment shifts, all this stuff of what's technically capable of the shale and source rock in the Middle East or in Russia

is not necessarily going to be purchasable by the global economy in the peaceful letters of credit, dollar as the reserve, as it has been in the last 40 years. And then the other aspect that I'm curious is what do you think is, yes, there's a huge amount of energy resource out there. For instance, oil shale still exists, but that has about the energy density of a baked potato And if we get to $200 oil, we'll be able to develop that or when we get to $300 oil,

but the global cultural and institutional arrangements that we have today do not function at $200 oil. So we can imagine these things that can be developed if the price gets high enough. Yet if the price gets high enough, it will destroy our current cultural arrangements. This is why I did my PhD on measuring the cost of energy in energy and water and other natural resource terms. Yeah. Instead of money terms, because as you're aware, we're printing money and going further into debt, even in a growing economy, that all of that dollar bills and the digits in

your bank account, when they're spent, they're spent on things that require hydrocarbons and other energy. So I'm worried about the above ground implications of once we even stop to grow oil, because as you've indicated how potent and incredibly important is to the global economy. What are your thoughts on all that? Well, they're all, I agree. Nate, I think what you just said is very complicated and complex. And I agree with a lot of that. It's, I don't know if I said there's a 10 year reserve. I think I was saying you have to continue every year to replace these reserves or you start to fall off on a global basis. If you shut down big oil companies, the so-called international

oil companies. I think the national oil companies will do that for a while. They won't do it as efficiently. So we'll be okay there for a little while, maybe a decade, it may be less or more than that. I think we have longer than that if we are willing to build the infrastructure and stop trying to essentially set them down for philosophical or emotional reasons. The complexities of the above surface, I couldn't agree more. I struggle. I've got three, four kids, they're adults and grandkids now, but I worry about the world in the U.S. We're leaving. We add a trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there to our national debt and act like it's

just something. You know, it's incredible to me. And for the first time since the Second World War, our debt is as high as our GDP again, 100. It used to be 100. It went down to the 30s and 40s for 70s. seven, eight decades. It's back up there again. So, you know, we're pushing the limits of that. And how good is our currency, global currency, if you will, when energy is such an important piece of that, it's a very, it's a very worrisome thing. And wars have been fought over energy

for a long time, both overtly and covertly and subtly. Energy has been weaponized many times. You know, don't kid yourself when Russia and Germany who used to trade a lot of gas or move a lot of gas, stop. That was a big deal. If it wasn't for US-LNG going into Europe, Europe would have been in a much tougher place the last couple of years. People attack nuclear power plants. There was a lot of agreements that had to be made to keep Israel from going after Iran's oil facilities, right? And we'll see what happens there. The story, I think, is still unfolding. So, yes, energy is a massive, of massive importance to our global economy and all that goes into it.

Superimposed on that is the reality that somewhere around 6 billion people out of 8.4 now don't have secure energy. And I said 6 billion, that might shock some of our listeners here. And not the one billion that don't have any, that exists. And we've made films about that. Switch on, we went in to look at energy poverty around the world at different levels. But there's this whole group of four to five billion who don't have secure energy. It comes and goes. The power comes and goes.

The fuels are coming and going. We have a, this is a really neat, just happen. We're conducting right now our annual international case competition at Switch Energy Alliance. with college students around the world, 30 countries looking at energy poverty, impaired countries. How do you define that energy poverty? Energy poverty means you don't have affordable, reliable energy consistently. And so that's different from no energy.

So that's on a country basis. So the United States doesn't have energy poverty, even though a lot of people in the United States have energy poverty. There are on an individual basis, there are people with energy poverty all over the world, living in energy poverty. As you start to aggregate into geographical systems, does the country or some region have access to affordable, reliable energy? And by the way, the individual matters the most in all of this, of course. But some countries are living, let me give you an example, about a quarter of the countries in the world on average, the individual, the per capita average and about a quarter of the countries in the world

consume less energy than my refrigerator every year. Right. It's amazing. It's mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling. This is the thing that people in our country don't understand. Correct. Is the absolute magnitude of energy riches that we take for granted? Oh, yeah. So, you know, 500 megawatt. We're up in the 9 to 10,000. per person, the rich world and us. So there's this... Kilawatt, not megawatt. Kilawatt.

So then there's this big group in between there that ranges in kilowatt, and that's tied so closely to economic wealth and economic poverty. It's not causative necessarily, but there's a really tight correlation between access to energy, affordable, liable, and your economic well-being. So you see this big group of... countries in the world that are trying, let's call them the developing, and they're trying to become developed, rich like us. And struggling to do that, it takes so much to get there. And that's where I think we are missing this whole sector of the global populace that are speaking now

with a pretty consistent voice saying, hey, we're going to have energy. It may come from coal, look at China, India, it may come from oil, some natural gas, we might build some dams like in Africa, sure, we'll put up some wind turbines and solar panels, maybe some nuclear, if they have the wherewithal. But whatever it is, they are going to get it, and they should. This is the thing, this isn't, oh, no, this is absolutely should grow the global energy wealth and economic wealth. we have to accelerate into that. And the reason for that, this is to me fundamentally important and something that's taken me a long time to understand.

Energy underpins healthy economies, and it's healthy economies that invest in the environment, not poor economies. Unless you have to burn hydrocarbon energy in order to be a rich economy and the atmosphere is running out of sink capacity and we're already running into massive climate, impacts around the world already today.

Let's come back to that. Okay. I want to talk about that, but let's just talk about the land, the air, and the water to start. Okay. The environment where people who don't have much energy are living, polluted waters, polluted soils, local air pollution. Got it. You know, and they can't afford to clean it up.

Well, I would argue that rich countries are also enabled to have an environmental ethic. If the United States wasn't as wealthy as we were, I don't think we'd have as many climate activists. Probably so. Probably so. But if you look at the particulate matter, say, for not the climate, not atmospheric emissions, but local air, the local air, the lowest particulate matter countries in the world that best air to breathe are where it's rich. There's maps of this. Yeah. Rich countries have the best, cleanest water, because we can afford the systems and we regulate it and we find people who.

don't, you know, do it right and they're always bad actors. But in our soils, we used to dump stuff in the rivers and soils in this country, but we've largely stopped doing that. We're regulated now. You've got to accelerate these poor economies into that kind of wealth to a point where they can afford to clean up their environments as well. And we can talk about the atmospheric emissions. Given what you just said, if you were in the role hypothetically of leading a developing

country's energy development, how would you begin? begin to approach that project. How would you frame it while keeping environmental constraints in mind? And this is what our competition does, and it's fun to watch these teams of four students. They pick a pair of countries, and it's not ferried us. It's real. What are the resources? What's the current political system? How educated is it? You know, what access did they have in terms of economic wealth? Where are they tied to shipping land? or oceans or are they land bound, etc. They start to dig into this. And the quick story I want to tell before I come back to that, this week, their final projects were due. And we have 200

volunteered judges. It's just a phenomenally, emotionally, emotionally powerful thing. I think you would love judging it or being a mentor. We have mentors for each team. The Nigerian teams kept losing power the last two weeks. They literally couldn't keep their energy systems going long enough to record their, their answers, the little video they have to make. Which is ironic, given how much oil they have in that country, but go on. Boom. And so they wrote downhearted because they had missed the deadline. We extended it three days.

Last night at 1130, I could show you this email, came in from one of the team leads, and he was so upset because the power, they had been seven hours without energy and he couldn't upload their thing. and we of course let him. So the irony is we're studying energy poverty and countries living in energy poverty, even though they may be a resource, rich, some are not. And yet we don't get that many teams participating

from the rich world because we, as you said early in our dialogue here, we just don't understand. We do not have a clue how lucky, spoiled, entitled we are to affordable or liable, secure energy. Everything we do depends on it and we always have it. So this is the great dilemma I think in the world today is accelerating into that so that everyone in the world, energy access for all and energy poverty can begin to do the kinds of things, the environmental protection as well as the human flourishing. It's together and and and they got to both happen

or they will both fail. We've been talking mostly about the energy supply side. But don't you think a critical part of the energy transition, which so far has not been an energy transition, it's been an energy addition, will actually come from a change in demand. In effect, the expectations and consumption and habits of people in our country in the United States and the global north, can you imagine us in the coming, decades consciously using less or not. I could imagine it, but I don't think it'll happen.

I don't either. Yeah. So, and I don't know that it has to happen. I mean, energy efficiency I like in the sense of doing more with less on a per unit basis. We waste so much energy. That'll be swamped by the backfire effect. Yeah, the rebound effect. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, gosh, in the mid-1850s, an economist figured that out. And so I don't have one refrigerator anymore, you know. And yes, my computer chip is more efficient, but how many chips do I have now? And how many cars are the rich world? It just, the rebound effect is so real. So I can't imagine us in a world where we have tried it, parts of Europe and where, you know, you've kind of gone into these austerity. measures, and it doesn't last very long. I don't think it has to. Again, I think if we go away from

this idea that the transition, and this is really important probably for us to define, and this won't make maybe listeners very happy. By the way, there's nothing that makes my listeners happy, but go on. Yeah, well, I won't. But the transition isn't from coal oil and gas to solar and wind and batteries. I think a lot of people think that's the transition. And that's not the transition. That's going from dense to less dense. That's going backwards in time of physics. And in many ways, economics. And I mean that solar and wind, you hear are cheaper, they're not. The levelized cost of energy or electricity, the number that's quoted, the Lazard number, is incredible, by the way, solar and wind have come way down in price, like way down. But that's again where the,

where the electron is generated. It's not to get it to you or me. To get it to you and me, because we want it 24-7, 365, always on. And unfortunately, solar and wind are not always on. That's just physics again. So you've got to have something sitting there ready to come on, redundant, expensive, to partner reliability is expensive. So it's not cheaper. So it's not cheaper. and it's not more reliable because of, again, the challenges of intermittency. So we're not going, the transition isn't from dense to less dense. The transition is from dense to more dense. Solar and wind have a role to play.

I have installed solar. I think electric vehicles have a role to play in some settings, but we shouldn't mandate them. More options is good. I like diverse options in a healthy portfolio of energy. So again, options are good. but we're headed toward away from carbon-only coal, hydrocarbons even,

to methane and hydrogen and uranium and thorium and nuclear. These are really dense. On a weight basis, nuclear is a million times denser than wood. A million on a weight basis. So that's where the environment is headed is generating a lot of energy from a little input, if you will.

And an example of that would be, I use this sometimes, a uranium pellet that you stuff into a fuel rod, a nuclear reactor is about a centimeter tall and a half a centimeter wide. It's a little cylindrical thing. You push them in there. The energy in that uranium pellet, the energy equivalent, could drive a car from New York to L.A. and back to Dallas. One pellet. Okay. Now, we don't have nuclear. reactors in our car. I don't want to have people go, what's this guy talking about? Just talking about the energy equivalent. That would take a lot of gallons of gasoline, and gasoline is really dense, okay? So we're headed toward a dense world of energy, which, by the way, happens to help when it comes to environmental impacts, including emissions. Nuclear has no emissions at the source, and actually not that many even along the full supply chain. Hydrogen, etc. Expensive, we can talk about hydrogen. But that's kind of this transition that we're on and have been for a long time, from hay, all the way to nuclear. And a diverse portfolio of that, depending on where you live and what your resources are and what your government economy is like and your access to moving things.

etc. So they're going to be, you can't mandate a solution. It's going to be all sorts of things that are messy around that in the world, but in a general sense, that's where the world is headed. I think if the above ground factors somehow hold together and we don't have war or an economic collapse, I agree with you, we will go from from dense to more dense. But I also think for the average human being, we're going to go from more to less energy use per person is my kind of base case. But let me just ask you this because... Hold on.

Before that, you say that, you're talking about a human in a rich world. No. Average in the world. The 8 billion people and the 19 terawatt global metabolism, I don't really see us being able to go to 25 terawatts. Yeah, but you would agree that more than half the world has to come up to some level. That is in the category of should versus should not. as opposed to what will have to happen.

And I think the systemic reality is that that probably won't happen is, I agree with you that ethically that should happen. I just don't really think it's going to happen. Well, that will probably be, if we don't see several billion people in the world rise economically from severe economic and energy poverty, I think we'll have a different set of challenges. And the environment won't be it. Well, the environment is already it, though.

for people that are going through these heat waves and floods, and we haven't even hit one and a half above pre-industrial yet, technically. Let me bring one thing up, and I think it's an important thing. The IPCC in a governmental panel on climate change is the leading authority. I think most would agree on climate-related issues. Their AR-6, their most recent report, Working Group 1, they have several working groups. Working Group 1 really looks at the impacts, probably the least political of the working groups. Chapter 12, table 12.12. Go look at that table.

And I'm just shocked at how little this has talked about. Because the IPCC itself has shown a table. And in that table, it talks about the climate impacts that have happened already. have left, let's call it, the chatter of what's normal in the last several hundreds of years. Okay, the things that have left that. And then it has, that's a column. And then it has another column of things that haven't left that yet. And then there's two more columns that show what could happen in 50 years and 100 years in different scenarios. It was shocking to me when I finally looked at and studied this table a little bit.

There's very few things that have left their historical window other than the temperature, both ocean and air, and CO2. There's a couple of the things in that table, but they're not at the 90% competence level, or 50% or below, which the IPCC requires for, but they put them in there anyway. Everything in the next column that hasn't left it yet is everything we're hearing about. Floods, droughts, typhoons, hurricanes, sea level rise. fires, win. No, I generally exceed that point,

but I will say that there's a lag from the warming in the pipeline, so we don't see those things. Yeah, but their next two columns are showing, and here's what could happen, given our models, with that lag. Here's what he thinks coming in 50. Here's what he thinks coming in 100. This is the IPCC.

This isn't... I know, but there's a lot of other... scientists that, you know, that that's a least common denominator on something that they can agree on. And my critique historically in the IPCC is they believe there's way more fossil resources than will be affordably accessed. And I thought they were overly conservative there or overly aggressive. But on the flip side, we're already reaching a point where biological emissions from wetlands and permafrost and all kinds of other things are about to exceed human emissions. In other words, it's no longer in our control, even if we were to have a climate-friendly

policy. So I'm far less sanguine than you are on climate. And I think that is going to actually impact our energy infrastructure and the minerals and materials that we need to get from the global south to help with decarbonization and nuclear plants and all the complexity of our global challenges. Yeah. And we're different. We have. We have. We have. We have different sanguinity. I would say there's been that kind of worry for decades and decades and decades and it's always 10 years. I'm not being cynical there either. I just take that at face value because we take so much of the other IPCC at face value and use it to say. So what I'm trying to do there is give us a little bit more hope that even that body, which is a bunch of scientists that

work on that are saying we have a little more time than the exe existential threat of 10 to 15 years and humans are gone. Oh, I never said that. No, no, I'm not talking to you do. But when I poll students, I speak at a lot of universities, sometimes I'll get half the hands in a classroom going up saying humans are gone in 15 years, Nate. Yeah, that's shocking. That's shocking to me too. Yeah. But I'm telling you in those classrooms, it happens. And it's in the ritual. It's shocking to me too. So the fear factor, so why are, well, you know, we're in a whole other land here, but why are kids more depressed? Why are they sometimes suicidal? Why are they not wanting to have children? Even in Asia. I have some answers to that. I think climate's a piece of it,

but I think it's mostly social media and comparing themselves to others and all that. It's a complex world for sure. Climate's a piece. And you're exactly right. But I come back to that and say, let's come to the middle, you and I a little bit. And again, I'm not inventing climate stuff isn't a worry. I'm just going to the report that we all look towards, and a new one will come out at some point, and say, maybe we have some more time than we think we do. And so that's a hopeful thing to me.

And if what it does is it says, depending on where you are and that worry, I want to accelerate to things that will help decrease our emissions yet not keep or capture them, but yet not keep half the world in poverty. It's a really thin, thin answer set to solution set to that. Let me ask you this. A couple personal questions, Scott. And then to be followed by more personal questions.

Why is it? So in my network, I know hundreds of scientists, lots of Earth scientists, scientists of all types. Why is it that petroleum geologists generally, almost predictably, are the people who are most sanguine about climate change and the most that don't believe climate change is one of our top ten threats? Why is that? I don't know. You know, I think there's conflict probably of interest. Petroleum geologists produce oil and gas. Okay.

So it might be that simple. There's part of it. I would say you could flip it and say, why are climate scientists some, not all, some, the most worried about it. And because they say climate and solar and wind. You know, a lot of climate scientists giving lectures leave their world of expertise and start talking about energy. Yeah.

I totally agree with you on that. Okay. So if I, I'm not a climate scientist. That's why I quote the IPCC. Okay. But the climate scientists shouldn't start pretending to be energy scientists. Maybe I want to talk to energy scientists, okay? Well, here's the issue, though.

You're, you're an energy expert. You're a petroleum geologist, but. Well, I'm not, I've been studying 20 years all energy. I used to be in petroleum, but not for the last couple decades. It's hard to have people that can fly up high enough and look down at how all the pieces interconnect. And you're absolutely right that I think there's an empty set or close to it on how we can protect the environment and the stability of the Holocene on our planet and provide

the energy and resources to the energy, poverty demographics of Earth. I don't know what to do, which is why I have this podcast. to talk about pathways. If we only come into it with a binary framing, what says climate and solar and wind. Okay, that's quite often what happens is climate change is real and the answer is solar, wind, and batteries. That's where the link breaks.

Climate change is real. So is we got to protect the land, the air, and the water, too. I'm not going to ever leave that behind. And solar and wind aren't that friendly on the land, to be honest with you. The mining, the sprawl, the burying when they wear out, etc. But they make sense in some places. But climate is real. And there are some really dense forms of energy that would accelerate us into no emissions.

Why are we not doing that? The exciting thing to me is young people, again, where they might say existential threat, 15 years, very few young people I've ever met are worried about nuclear. They're very supportive of it. They said, let's go. Most of them support accelerating to nuclear. Real quickly, could you give us the base case and the wildly optimistic case of nuclear, let's just say, in the United States, in the coming 20, 30 years? I think base case we're at now. I think we're probably at our nuclear power generation low right now. We've been coming off it for decades after Three Mile Island and then compounded by Chernobyl a little bit, effect there in Fukushima Daiachi. But we were able to make,

so we were shutting down reactors, but we were able to extend the life of them and make them more efficient. But now we're seeing them reopen. So when places like Michigan and Three Mile Island start to reopen and then small modger reactors and some maybe in between, underpinned by a pull from who, Nate, the tech sector. So when the tech sector, who has a lot of sway for a couple reasons, one, it's tech, we all need it, two, there are some leaders there that are very well respected, the Bill Gates and the Jeff Bezos and all those guys, are pulling on it because they know they are the largest consumers of electricity by far of any industry. and you want to talk about where to really think about impacts.

It's not so much the production, it's the consumption side. And they're saying we need reliable electricity to power all this stuff. And it isn't just AI and data centers. I mean, take a look at Amazon, okay? They're driving trucks all over the planet, delivering things, and some of them are being electrified now. So when those folks, those industries are pulling saying, we need nuclear. I think we're going to accelerate back into nuclear growth again. The U.S. is

behind. Europe is behind. China and Russia are building 70% of today's large nuclear reactors. 70%. And they are building plenty of them, by the way. There's four nuclear reactors in the UAE. Okay? The oil and gas center of the world. Nuclear. So I think it's coming. I really do, Nate. I think we're going to see that renaissance of nuclear again. And I'm not a nuclear. guy. I'm not conflicted here in any way. I think it's just, it just makes so much sense from an energy density and emissions, a low land use perspective, a reliability and affordability perspective, etc. When I get people that say climate, no nuclear, I think, well, really? You know, where's your real framing here? If this is your biggest concern, And here's a pretty good chunk of an answer.

What are we really talking about? Okay. And the same with, they can flip it on its ear and say the same. They're all coal all day people. Really? What do you really talk about? Well, it's affordable and reliable. Yeah, but it has all these other things.

Aren't there options to that? So I think nuke theor is coming. I think we're seeing it grow in places that need it a bunch. And I think we're going to start to see it coming back pretty quickly. in the so-called Western world, or you said global north, I call it the rich countries, you know, the top billion or two billion of us. And I want to move on to another topic because of our time constraint. My caveat there is nuclear is a cost issue and that we use fossil energy to, you know,

we get 10,000 units or 5 to 10,000 units of fossil energy combined with the machine to replace things that we used to do manually. And if the cost doubles or triples, we get massively fewer economic benefits. And I think that's going to be the limit of scaling nuclear dramatically. But I could be wrong. It could be. I mean, real quick on that, though, Nate, the cost to build, yes, if it takes 10 years to get permitting and building and then you might still get it killed, very expensive.

And a lot of CEOs won't do it. But it's getting built very quickly. China and Russia. There's communism works in some places. Part of the cost problem is our permutation and our red tape here in the U.S. is what you're implying? Some. Yeah, some. And just we haven't done it in a while. We don't have the expertise anymore. We don't have the supply chains like we used to have. It takes a while to get all that ramp back up again. When it does, though, and there's a lot of young people going into nuclear energy. We had Grace Stanky on our PBS show two seasons ago, nuclear engineering, major University Wisconsin, and she was Miss America that year,

you know, and she was out for a year as Miss America talking about the pros of nuclear. So it really is, it's a mindset and a perception, and I think that is changing. Okay. Let me, let me ask you a personal question. So I, in preparation for this interview, I know actually six or seven people who know you, personally and have worked with you. I think you know one of them, but they all hold you in incredibly high regard, your intellect, your ethics, your integrity and such. But to a man, and yes, they're all men, they told me that your temperament and your personality, just your natural self is so optimistic and hopeful as a human being that sometimes that bleeds into your analysis. What are your thoughts on that. Well, I don't take that as a criticism, but I'm a scientist and I am a skeptic. So I think scientists

by definition are skeptical. And if you were asked to people that really know me, I'm a skeptic. I'm not a cynicism is corrosive. But I'm quite skeptical of many things. I'm not defending my optimism. But I am optimistic. If I look at the, I think the thing we haven't really talked much about, Nate, is what seems to be in short supply right now is, well, common sense, but the ideas, the human ideas, the drive towards invention, the drive towards creation, thinking new thoughts, we're really, we're really fear. We've been, we've been encased with fear the last decade or two by some very powerful forces and voices, are young people particularly scared of the future?

And I think that is not only devastating, I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong to do that. And I try to work with young people and say, yeah, there's a big challenge. It's not simple, but it is solvable when you understand the complexities of some of these things. But the power of our analysis,

our analytical capabilities today, we mentioned AI from electricity demand side, but the power of our abilities to take disparate things that we could never combine and put them together today and begin to address some of these challenges is phenomenal. And I have a great faith and hope and promise for this generation, mid-career and younger career to address these things once they can peel away the fear that has been imposed on them and get after it. So yes, in that sense, I'm an optimist. I'm a believer in humans,

and humans to not ruin our own nature because we want to survive and live, but also in humans to work together and quit doing such great false battle almost. It's not natural gas against solar and wind. It's not coal against nuclear. Parts of the world still need coal to accelerate through where they're going. These things are all needed.

Let's bring them together. And it's not peak everything and we've got to use half of what we use today. I don't believe that. On the other hand, we can't just keep consuming ourselves into oblivion. So it's that radical middle. It's finding the tradeoffs and the compromises and the common ground to move forward. And we won't always be right and we won't always win. And that's okay.

You know, because there are a lot of people out there way smarter than I am, like everybody. And, and, but let's work together. Let's think through these things in a way that we can address them. And that's, in that sense, I guess, guilty is charged. I'm optimistic that we'll do it. So what can someone listening to this episode now, and my listeners are not energy blind. they understand the importance of energy to our lives and the environment. What can someone listening to this episode do today, this week, this month, to help address some of the issues brought up on this podcast, or is it all up to politicians and leaders?

I think your listeners are the leaders. Politicians are followers. They follow the vote. It's happening in this country right now. So the leaders have to allow the politicians to do the right things. So your listeners, your leaders, we need to start to speak up. You're not going to agree with everything I say. That's fine.

You know, Aristotle, the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Wouldn't that be great? Just entertain some thoughts. Don't accept everything. That's fine. But your listeners, they probably already are, but get engaged. You know, that's why I do what I do with Switch. Everything is free. Our films, our slides, our PBS show, the stuff in the classrooms and Switch Classroom. All this stuff are there and available. Go to a classroom. Talk to kids, a scout troop, a church group, a civic group. You know, begin to speak. The multiplier effect about that is phenomenal. And do it to the extent. we can in a way that that looks at, as I said to Joe Manchin's climate hearing,

under testimony a couple years ago, not just completely factual, but factually complete. Try to be as factually complete as we can, the pros and cons of things, those tradeoffs. When you start to share that with people, they trust you. They say, well, God, this guy's, yeah, he was in an oil business and he kind of likes oil. There's a lot of good reasons for that, but he's not just an oil person. You know, he sees the downsides and the climate impacts, share those things. Let's get out there, the people with the expertise, and start to share it. Otherwise, the voices that are carrying these messages, Nate, are very passionate.

They're very emotional. And they're overwhelmingly undereducated with regard to what it's going to take. And that's where we all have to lean in and step up. I agree with all of that. So you mentioned your Switch Energy Alliance classroom. More broadly, what specific recommendations do you have for young humans in their late teens, early 20s, who become aware of the stakes and all the chaos in our political system, in the environment and in our economies? What sort of advice do you give to that age group? stay positive, keep learning.

Whatever industries or careers or educational systems you're in say yes a lot. I look back at my life and I said yes, yes, yes. Oh, yeah, I'll try that. Let's do that. And you might learn something you don't want to do and that's okay. But when you say yes enough, pretty soon you end up with a camera in your face and a coal mine 3,000 feet down in Vietnam. and you're seeing why Cole exists still in Vietnam. And I say that actually, but metaphorically.

So don't think today that you are fully aware of where your career is going to take you. You're not. And that's exciting. Say yes to a lot of things. Try a lot of things and keep learning. And then you'll be a lot more equipped younger people, younger listeners to that future. And you'll be pulling these things back in throughout. your career, the experiences that you've gained in that. The other thing I would say is, I know it's

really hard. It's hard to, especially in social media, in the online world, to speak up. It can be frightening. It takes a lot of courage to say what you understand because you could get attacked, but you got to do it. You have to start. to speak up. You and thousands like you are kind of quiet because you don't want to get canceled or attacked online. But the more that collect and do that, again, with this kind of radical middle thinking, not all the answers, but hey, look at all the components to this. It's more complicated than you might think. And here are some of the solutions. The more you do that, then we can take the fear and push it out to the edges and let the real voices that are just passionate about one thing only,

whatever that might be, do their thing. But let's grow that middle where all the real challenges lie, the big problems of the day, and where the solutions are going to happen, the complicated economic, environmental energy spaces there where the solutions are going to happen. Get in there, join that group, join that radical middle. And there are plenty of folks. places you can do that. Switch is one of them. We have a growing, you know, group of young people around the world that are joining the Switch Alliance, if you will, and all sorts of places you can begin to do that. But I would say, do that. You know, it's remarkably empowering. It can be a little terrifying, but a lot of fun, too, as you build those networks. So, and, you know, let us

hear from you. I'm happy to help point you in some good directions. What do you care most about in the world, Scott Tinker. Oh, my family. Right. And so I bring it right back home, but I don't think that makes me unusual. I think we all care about our families. And then what's their future going to look like? I've got a couple grandkids now and what's their future going to look like? I do care, because I've been fortunate, Nate, to go into 60 countries and not airports, into them. to see people who are living in circumstances that you and I wouldn't think possible today. You might, you know about them, but many wouldn't think possible. And yet there they are.

And I worry, I care about that because that's not sustained. That kind of disparity in economic well-being is just not sustainable. Every time it's happened on different scales in the world, there have been revolutions. And they are not pretty. So we have to begin to address that in a very real way. And I see them so hopeful. You know, I get in Kibra, the large slum outside Nairobi,

and I'm with these little kids who have been in, they're in this church that doubles as a school with two lightbulbed dangling in uniform coming across mounds of pollution to school every day, but they're hopeful they see their future in front of them. And that I care about that. And then on the flip side, I care about young people in the rich world protesting capitalism or democracy or things. They're conflating things that upset them with the systems that have allowed for this to flourish and happen.

So I really care about getting those groups together. I'd love to see young people in the rich world began to create movements like they've done with climate around energy poverty. and energy poverty and economic poverty. It would be so powerful if Greta Thunberg would lead that because not only would address the human condition, it would help with emissions. It would have another consequence to it. So I really care for my kids' future in a selfish sense

about the kids in the world and what their future looks like. If you could wave a magic wand, and this is a question I ask all my, guest and there was no personal recourse to your situation or reputation. What is one thing that you would hypothetically with this magical wand do to improve human and planetary futures? This is going to sound a little fairy taleish, but I think I've been to, like I say, all over the world, I was in the Soviet Union in 1982. You know, this is pre-breaking up of the Soviet Union, spent several weeks there after college.

And I've never been in a country where on an individual basis, people were just not good people. They were good people. They had similar dreams and desires for their families and their countries. And so if I could wave that wand, it would be to have all the young people in the world have some mechanism for getting together and having these conversations.

conversations about their futures, their economic and energy futures, the environmental future of the world, their educational futures, world health. And having them able to do that in an unconstrained way, a way that got all the old grumpy folks like me out of the way and the political leaders and industry leaders and everybody else that kind of constrains those things, I think they, I think unconstrained we can address so many issues. So that would be my magic wand is to be able to transport somehow this global dialogue. And in the small way, I'm trying to help do that, but it's impossible. But I'd love to see that happen, Nate, because I think the solution set that would come out of that would be phenomenal. Thank you for your time and your continued work on energy awareness with your PBS program, Energy Switch, and all the other work you're doing. Do you have any closing thoughts for our viewers today, Scott? Boy, we've covered a lot of turf, and I appreciate you. We've covered a lot of turf, but only briefly on each piece.

Yeah, there's a lot more to say for sure. But again, you know, be hopeful. I would say my last thoughts are don't be down. Don't try not to be, try not to have despair. You know, be hopeful about the future. It's a remarkable world we live in, a remarkable opportunity that we all have to make a difference and and as you do you know again in every little thing that you do do it do it as well as you can and it will become part of that global whole and who knows where it ends up taking you i think i think

that's the only way to address all this is working together in that way so that's my last thought um again and reach out i'm available to people and to you Nate and look forward to carrying this dialogue forward we can we can do it if we work on it together Thanks so much, Scott. Great to talk to you. You too, Nate. Thanks. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit The Great Simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel.

This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, and Lizzie Siriani.