"Just before the EU announced a price cap on Russian gas on Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin threatened to sever supplies if such limits were imposed, warning the West it would freeze like the wolf’s tail in a fairy tale... Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the West did not understand how such steps would ultimately impact their own countries, which would ultimately slip up. “The collective West does not understand: the introduction of a cap on prices for Russian energy resources will lead to a slippery floor under its own feet,” Zakharova said..." The above was 16 months ago. Putin and Zakharova did not age well.
Uranium. I watch this sector like a hawk, one of my favorites atm, besides copper, iron ore, crypto, aluminium, steel, building materials, raspberries, asphalt and coal. Oh marbles and rocks in head.... as well. Anyhow, Uranium, gonna flick up from here agin imo. So help me JESUS!
Illustration: Derek Abella Hydrogen Wildcatters Are Betting Big on Kansas to Strike It Rich A growing number of startups are searching for geologic hydrogen from the US Midwest to Australia and hoping for a “Spindletop moment.” By Michelle Ma and David R Baker November 16, 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...g-bets-on-striking-it-rich?srnd=homepage-asia A new Gold Rush is taking shape on a quiet stretch of Kansas prairie. There, a clutch of startups backed by the likes of Bill Gates are searching below the surface for naturally occurring hydrogen, a fuel that can generate power without adding to climate change. Finding it in vast quantities would revolutionize the energy transition. But the hunt is clean energy wildcatting, with a real possibility of failure — and the added risk of diverting limited climate venture capital at a time when the world needs proven emissions-cutting technologies. Kansas sits atop a geological quirk: The Midcontinent Rift is a subterranean scar a billion years old created when North America started to split down the middle and then stopped. Iron-rich rocks within the rift can produce hydrogen when exposed to water, pressure and heat. And records left over from several old oil exploration wells in the area decades ago show the gas is — or at least was — present. Other sites around the world also offer tantalizing hints of housing the lightest element in the universe, and the search is starting to attract money. One company, Koloma, has raised more than $300 million, including from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Mining giant Fortescue Ltd. recently spent $22 million to buy a 40% stake in Australia-based HyTerra, one of the startups looking in Kansas. All told, approximately 50 geologic hydrogen companies are in operation, including explorers, equipment makers, and oil and gas conglomerates funding research, according to BNEF. Naturally occurring hydrogen holds the potential for what Wood Mackenzie analyst Richard Hood calls a “Spindletop moment,” referring to the 1901 Texas oil gusher that helped create the modern world. If it exists in commercial quantities, pumping hydrogen from the ground would be cheaper than stripping it from water using electricity and cleaner than making it from natural gas, the most common method. “No question, there’s risk,” said Bruce Nurse, co-founder of PureWave Hydrogen, which has leased sites in three Kansas counties for exploration. “But it’s an energy source we need to go after here in the US, because manufactured hydrogen is not going to cut it.” Recently, scientists have begun earnestly attempting to answer how much hydrogen is under the Earth’s surface. Geoffrey Ellis is at the forefront of that work. A research geologist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Ellis spent two decades researching petroleum geochemistry. About five years ago, Ellis pivoted to hydrogen when he heard about Mali. Mali is the great origin story of the quest for geologic hydrogen, which industry refers to as “white” and sometimes “gold.” In the late 1980s, residents of a village drilling for water in the West African country stumbled upon a pocket of gas. Not knowing what it was, they plugged it back up. Decades later, workers heard of this discovery and drilled a new well to uncover what they had hoped was natural gas, only to find nearly pure hydrogen. Ellis’s group has been modeling the subsurface globally, drawing on oil and gas industry tools and methods. His estimate is wide-ranging: anywhere from billions of tons on the conservative end to trillions of tons. Tapping even a fraction of the estimated hydrogen would meet hundreds of years of demand, Ellis said. He ascribes the several orders of magnitude of uncertainty to the nature of the model he and his team built, based on what is known about hydrogen and better-understood resources like petroleum. The question for him — and investors and companies — isn’t whether it exists, but how much of it is accessible and accumulated in large, pure quantities. The only way to know for sure is to start drilling. “You have to operate in uncertainty,” said Koloma’s Chief Business Officer Paul Harraka. To maximize their chances of success, prospectors are leaning on paper records in dusty archives and oil and gas documents that have mentioned accidental hydrogen discoveries. But they’re also using tech like sophisticated machine learning to identify what are known as “fairy circles” in satellite images. These circular depressions on the Earth’s surface sometimes emit hydrogen and could point to subsurface reservoirs. Viacheslav Zgonnik is the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Denver-based Natural Hydrogen Energy, which went prospecting in 2023 near Geneva, Nebraska. Drilling more than 11,000 feet into the ground, they found hydrogen, though Zgonnik declined to say how much. But he left the company this year to create a startup to provide software to companies looking for hydrogen deposits. “When there is a gold rush, you sell picks and shovels,” Zgonnik said. Most of the exploration happening today is in the US and Australia, not just because there’s evidence hydrogen could exist underground but because of the two countries’ supportive regulatory environments. In the US, landowners have the rights to exploration permits rather than the state, a stark contrast to other countries where government-controlled licenses can result in long delays. As a result of all these factors, many wildcatters are concentrated in Kansas and other states along the Midcontinent Rift. “It's expensive, and you can't just go digging random holes in the ground,” said Mark Gudiksen, a managing partner at venture firm Piva Capital, which invested in Koloma. “So you have to be thoughtful about using all of the tricks of the trade.” Even if prospectors hit hydrogen, its commercial prospects are highly uncertain. The reason green hydrogen produced by renewable energy hasn’t taken off yet is because of its high cost. The Department of Energy has set a goal for hydrogen producers and prospectors to get costs down to $1 per kilogram. That would unlock a wave of demand critical to growing the hydrogen industry, which is currently lacking. The world currently uses about 94 million metric tons of hydrogen per year, according to BloombergNEF. The research firm forecasts that for the global economy to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, hydrogen use will rise slowly, hitting 118 million metric tons in 2030, before entering a period of rapid growth. Worldwide use could reach 234 million metric tons in 2040 and 390 million metric tons in 2050, according to BNEF's New Energy Outlook 2024. “The market is really, really, really big if the unit economics work,” said Mark Daly, head of technology and innovation at BloombergNEF. But that’s a big “if.” One critical cost factor: purity. The well in Mali is nearly 100% pure hydrogen. But hydrogen is often co-located with other gasses, including helium. Australian company Gold Hydrogen, for example, said it found hydrogen as well as high levels of helium in initial drill tests conducted in 2023 on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula and is now working to drill its first new wells. While helium is a valuable product, separating the two gasses adds expense. One of the biggest complications to bringing down costs is transport, which involves compressing the gas into a liquid and trucking it or moving it through underground pipelines. Both are expensive and in the case of pipelines, closer to fantasy than reality. At high pressure, hydrogen can react with steel pipes, causing them to become brittle and crack. There’s also the potential for hydrogen leakage, an issue that scientists and startups haven’t yet properly confronted. Hydrogen “is a very promiscuous gas. It diffuses all over the place,” said Douglas Wicks, a program director at the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA‑E) who’s in charge of two geologic hydrogen research programs. Transporting hydrogen makes sense economically within a 100-kilometer radius, said Daly. He pointed out that raising enough money to build a pipeline requires evidence that the resource it’s transporting will exist for 20 to 40 years. Many startups exploring in Kansas and Nebraska could overcome transportation issues by selling it locally. The states are two top agricultural producers, and companies see farmers as their biggest potential customers. Hydrogen discovered in the region could be converted to ammonia, which is widely used to make fertilizer. “There’s absolutely a chance we may lose all our money.” The myriad unknowns are not stopping wildcatters. They’re also not stopping venture capitalists and large corporate investors alike from placing big bets. One of the industry’s biggest boosters is also one of the most influential climate tech investors in Breakthrough Energy Ventures. “The discovery of geologic hydrogen could be one of the single most important events in our lifetimes, and perhaps the lifetimes of our children,” said the firm’s technical lead Eric Toone in a speech at the Breakthrough Energy Summit in London in June. “It offers the possibility of limitless zero-carbon reactive chemical energy.” That’s part of the reason the firm participated in Koloma’s $245 million Series B round, making it one of the biggest startups on the hydrogen frontier. Still, investors acknowledge that the territory still comes with many unanswered questions, enough to give many others pause. If Koloma succeeds, “that changes the cost structure of hydrogen,” said Gudiksen. But he also sounded a cautionary note: “There's absolutely a chance we may lose all our money.”
Trump reimposes 'maximum pressure' on Iran, aims to drive oil exports to zero By Steve Holland and Jeff Mason February 5, 2025 https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-set-reimpose-maximum-pressure-iran-official-says-2025-02-04/ Summary Move brings back tough US policy on Iran from Trump's first term Trump to hold talks with Israeli PM Netanyahu on Tuesday Campaign 'aimed at driving Iran's oil exports to zero' WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trumpon Tuesday restored his "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran that includes efforts to drive its oil exports down to zero in order to stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Ahead of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump signed the presidential memorandum reimposing Washington's tough policy on Iran that was practiced throughout his first term. As he signed the memo, Trump described it as very tough and said he was torn on whether to make the move. He said he was open to a deal with Iran and expressed a willingness to talk to the Iranian leader. "With me, it's very simple: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon," Trump said. Asked how close Tehran is to a weapon, Trump said: "They're too close." Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump has accused former President Joe Biden of failing to rigorously enforce oil-export sanctions, which Trump says emboldened Tehran by allowing it to sell oil to fund a nuclear weapons program and armed militias in the Middle East. Iran is "dramatically" accelerating enrichment of uranium to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% weapons-grade level, the U.N. nuclear watchdog chief told Reuters in December. Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump's memo, among other things, orders the U.S. Treasury secretary to impose "maximum economic pressure" on Iran, including sanctions and enforcement mechanisms on those violating existing sanctions. It also directs the Treasury and State Department to implement a campaign aimed at "driving Iran's oil exports to zero." U.S. oil prices pared losses on Tuesday on the news that Trump planned to sign the memo, which offset some weakness from the tariff drama between Washington and Beijing. Tehran's oil exports brought in $53 billion in 2023 and $54 billion a year earlier, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates. Output during 2024 was running at its highest level since 2018, based on OPEC data. Trump had driven Iran's oil exports to near-zero during part of his first term after re-imposing sanctions. They rose under Biden's tenure as Iran succeeded in evading sanctions. The Paris-based International Energy Agency believes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other OPEC members have spare capacity to make up for any lost exports from Iran, also an OPEC member. PUSH FOR SANCTIONS SNAPBACK China does not recognize U.S. sanctions and Chinese firms buy the most Iranian oil. China and Iran have also built a trading system that uses mostly Chinese yuan and a network of middlemen, avoiding the dollar and exposure to U.S. regulators. Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy, said the Trump administration could enforce the 2024 Stop Harboring Iranian Petroleum (SHIP) law to curtail some Iranian barrels. SHIP, which the Biden administration did not enforce strictly, allows measures on foreign ports and refineries that process petroleum exported from Iran in violation of sanctions. Book said a move last month by the Shandong Port Group to ban U.S.-sanctioned tankers from calling into its ports in the eastern Chinese province signals the impact SHIP could have. Trump also directed his U.N. ambassador to work with allies to "complete the snapback of international sanctions and restrictions on Iran," under a 2015 deal between Iran and key world powers that lifted sanctions on Tehran in return for restrictions on its nuclear program. The U.S. quit the agreement in 2018, during Trump's first term, and Iran began moving away from its nuclear-related commitments under the deal. The Trump administration had also tried to trigger a snapback of sanctions under the deal in 2020, but the move was dismissed by the U.N. Security Council. Britain, France and Germany told the United Nations Security Council in December that they are ready - if necessary - to trigger a snapback of all international sanctions on Iran to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon. They will lose the ability to take such action on Oct. 18 when a 2015 U.N. resolution expires. The resolution enshrines Iran's deal with Britain, Germany, France, the United States, Russia and China that lifted sanctions on Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program. Iran's U.N. ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, has said that invoking the "snap-back" of sanctions on Tehran would be "unlawful and counterproductive." European and Iranian diplomats met in November and January to discuss if they could work to defuse regional tensions, including over Tehran's nuclear program, before Trump returned.