0:24 – Robert Bryce 

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Power Hungry Podcast. I’m Robert. On this podcast, we talk about energy, power, innovation, and politics. And I’m pleased to welcome my friend, my good friend, Doug Sandridge. He is the President of Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear. Doug, welcome to the Power Hungry Podcast.

0:43 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

What a treat to be here with you today, Robert. Well, that’s that’s kind.

0:46 – Robert Bryce 

Now, I’ve introduced you. I know you work in the oil and gas sector, and that’s one of the reasons why you formed this new group. But I think you’ve listened to the podcast once or twice. And so, you know, all guests introduce themselves. So if you don’t mind, imagine you’ve arrived somewhere. You don’t know anyone. You have about seconds. Please tell us who you are. All right.

1:06 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I’m Doug Sandridge and I am an oil and gas executive. I live in Denver. I grew up in the oil business. My dad was a executive for Phillips Petroleum for almost years, retired as the vice president of international department. So I grew up following him around the world, and I’ve been in oil and gas myself for over years. Now that my kids are gone, I need something to do with my spare time. So I still earn my living as an oil and gas professional, but my nighttime and weekend, Advocation is advocating for nuclear energy, and so that’s how I got started into the nuclear space.

1:48 – Robert Bryce 

Sue, tell me, I want to obviously talk about your history in the business, or rather in nuclear, but I want to take a particular moment to talk about your background, how you came to it. You started then when you were in your 20s out of college, how did you get into the business?

2:11 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Yeah, actually, I never really intended to get the oil and gas business. You know, your parents always want their kids to follow in their footsteps. And I really didn’t have that that idea. I went to University of Oklahoma. And I went there because my parents were in the international department and had moved, were moving back overseas. And they wanted me to be close to family. I had family in Oklahoma. So I went to university. Of Oklahoma. The other reason I went to University of Oklahoma was, you know, if your parents live in, in Norway or Africa, how, how do you afford, I mean, what, how do you get in-state tuition?

2:44 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

You don’t live in any state. Right. But, um, but Oklahoma at that time had a program where they would allow anybody who worked for a international oil company like Permigee or Conoco or Phillips. If your parents lived overseas, they would consider you an in-state student. So I went to Oklahoma for that reason. I was originally going to Texas A&M, which is where all my friends were going, but ended up in Oklahoma. Freshman year, I was a architecture major and I still love architecture, but man, it was a lot of work and it just didn’t fit my schedule for what I wanted to do at college.

3:18 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So I was taking a lot of engineering classes. I didn’t really know what kind of engineering I was going to do. So kind of, this is really ironic, but I was a nuclear engineering major my sophomore year in college. Let’s be honest, I did not have a lifelong passion to be a nuclear engineer, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And since I was taking engineering classes, I just declared nuclear engineering as my major. But then shortly in my sophomore year, in the second semester, I think it was April of the Three Mile Island accident occurred.

3:51 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And of course, the nuclear industry had already been on a downward trajectory for several years following electricity demand and a lot of organizations trying to shut down nuclear energy. So it was already on a downward trajectory, but Three Mile Island was kind of the nail in the coffin at that time. And at that point, I decided to go into oil and gas. And so I’ve been working in oil and gas since that time. In college, I worked as a pumper and a roughneck and a roustabout. One day, my dad said, I know how much you love to roughneck, but Working on a drilling rig is no job for a family man, so you ought to look at something else.

4:32 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And so I became a petroleum landman, and I’ve been doing that for years.

4:38 – Robert Bryce 

I’ve heard this term, and I probably could describe it, but tell me, you got a degree in petroleum land management then?

4:46 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

That’s correct, yes.

4:49 – Robert Bryce 

For people who don’t know, and I probably could explain it, but you’re the professional here, what does a landman do?

4:57 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So it’s a hybrid degree. It comes out of the business school at the University of Oklahoma, but we took a lot of law classes, business classes, geology classes, even some petroleum engineering classes. But as a as a petroleum landman, what you do is you try and determine who has the right to who owns the property rights that you want to drill on. So, for instance, in the United States, we have a lot of private ownership of minerals. Which is not common. It’s common in Canada and the US.

5:25 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

But other than that, in most of the world, the government owns all the minerals. But in the United States, if you want to drill an oil well, and it’s on private property, well, you have to go get the right to drill from the person who owns it. Well, if you’re gonna spend million on a well, you wanna make sure who actually owns it, not just who you think owns it or whose house is on there because maybe somebody’s squatting or some, you know, so you have to do a lot of legal work and title work to figure out who owns the property first.

5:54 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Once you’ve determined who owns the property, then you have to go negotiate a lease with them to have them give you the right to drill on their property and negotiate a contract. If we drill a well, then how much of the oil do you get What kind of in-front cash do you get, that sort of thing. And then the last part of that is a lot of times when you’re doing drilling or looking for land to drill on, that land has already been leased by another company. So you may do the research and you’re wanting to buy a lease from this person in Oklahoma.

6:21 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And then you find out that Exxon’s already bought a lease from them. So then you have to contact Exxon and enter in negotiations with them. So you negotiate with the landowners. And also with the oil companies who may own the rights. And you have to have a strong legal background and then a broad knowledge in geology and engineering.

6:39 – Unidentified Speaker 

Right.

6:39 – Robert Bryce 

So you have to know the surface footprint, right? Which would require a lot. My friend of mine is a surveyor. My buddy Chris Cawthon is a surveyor. So you have to know where the drill pad might go. You have to know where the deposit of the shale or the target zone is and who owns the property above that, right?

7:00 – Unidentified Speaker 

Correct.

7:01 – Robert Bryce 

So you may be able to drill on my property because I give you the rights, but Doesn’t necessarily mean I have oil and gas underneath my land but my neighbor might have it is that is that fair.

7:10 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

That’s true too and it’s not as simple as just drilling a well on this property because there’s a concept known as spacing. And so let’s let’s backtrack all the way to Beaumont. And the spindle top field.

7:23 – Robert Bryce 

If you’ve seen pictures of that, at that time, there was no rules regarding the spacing of wells apart.

7:30 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So if you’ve seen pictures, those wells were literally drilled in people’s backyards and you could step from the rig floor of one rig onto the rig floor of the next rig because somebody else was drilling in the next backyard. It quickly became clear that that was not an efficient way to develop land because you’re drilling too many wells and releasing too much of the natural pressure too quickly. So quickly, and actually Oklahoma was the pioneer of this concept, but they said, we’re going to say that only so many wells can be drilled in such and such an area.

8:04 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So one well every acres or one well every acres. Oklahoma pioneered this concept, which still holds today. So even if I went to talk to Robert to lease his five acres in Oklahoma, if the well spacing is for acres, which means that everyone within a 40-acre shares that, I not only have to lease Robert where the actual well will be located, but I also have to lease all the other acres around that.

8:29 – Robert Bryce 

So it’s a lot more complicated than we might think. Right. So as you’re talking about that, I’m thinking, you know, one of the parts of this that to me is so interesting is that people think, oh, well, the oil and gas industry is Exxon Chevron, right, the supermajors, and they just got sued, in fact, by the city of Chicago, right, as well as the American Petroleum Institute. And so they’re viewed as the industry. Well, when in fact, the industry is very diffused. And there are a lot of very small operators.

9:00 – Robert Bryce 

But in addition, there is a vast, I will use I think the right word here, bureaucracy, that manages all of this mineral wealth. And it’s just an enormous amount of mineral wealth. But you have to have people who understand the legal part. They have to understand geology, as you just said. Um, okay. So, and, and you traveled around the world when you, when your father was at, with Phillips in based in Bartlesville. Um, and, oh, by the way, so what is it, what are you called? If you live in Bartlesville, what is the name for a Bartlesville resident?

9:32 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

You’re going to tell me, I don’t know. A Bartian.

9:34 – Robert Bryce 

You didn’t know this? No, I didn’t even know that.

9:39 – Multiple Speakers 

You don’t know your own known town.

9:41 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Wow.

9:43 – Robert Bryce 

Barshin, yes, that is true. That is a real fact. Okay, so you’re a lifelong oil and gas guy. You’re, in fact, second generation oil and gas guy. So it was two years ago, if I recall, or roughly, no, I’m sorry, a year ago, you drafted this letter signed by now over oil and gas executives declaring that, in fact, we’re in favor of nuclear. Walk me back through that. You called it the Declaration of Oil and Gas Executives in Support of Nuclear Energy, dated March Walk me through your decision-making in getting this deal done in the way that you did.

10:26 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

All right. If you’ll allow me, I’m going to even go back just a little bit further than that because that set the table. As you know, I’ve been working oil and gas my entire career, and I do also teach some classes at the University of Oklahoma. And so I’m always very eager to read as much as I can about oil and gas and study and a lot of podcasts. Never missed an episode of your podcast because I have to be smarter than the kids when I get into the class. And, you know, they’re sharp. Right.

10:54 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And so while we’re all sitting at home with COVID, I decided I’d go through the exercise of trying to figure out or to read and study the policy positions of all of the plus candidates for president, for Democrat candidates for president. And as you might imagine, a lot of those candidates did not have energy policies. And then some of them had energy policies, which were not necessarily coherent. But you can’t blame Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, for not having a comprehensive energy policy.

11:29 – Robert Bryce 

But I read Michael Bloomberg’s energy policy. It was on his website.

11:33 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And it really made my head explode, because one of the statements he made was, if you elect me president, by the end of my second term, we will have percent renewable energy. The United States. And my head exploded because I know that was not possible. It wasn’t a matter of not committing enough money. It wasn’t a lack of will. It was just not possible. And it made me angry that somebody like Michael Bloomberg, who’s obviously a smart guy, would patronize people by saying something that he knew was untrue.

12:05 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And so anyway, part of that, along that journey, I finally came to the conclusion that we really were not going to meet We were really not going to make any serious decarbonization strides without nuclear energy. You can put wind and solar, but wind and solar are not going to solve our climate issues.

12:24 – Multiple Speakers 

So if you’re serious about it, we need more nuclear. So that’s how I first got back into nuclear after my sophomore year of college, you know, fast forward years. But then fast forward. It was anger at Michael Bloomberg is what you’re doing.

12:37 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Anger at Michael Bloomberg. But then you are going to be credited with really getting me back into nuclear advocacy. Because like I said, I listen to every episode. And in, I guess it was April they closed Indian Point Power Plant.

12:53 – Robert Bryce 

Which still just grills my teeth now. Almost three years later, I’m still pissed and still credulous that that asshole Andrew Cuomo did the bidding of Riverkeeper and NRDC to close Indian Point. I’m sorry, I had to interject that.

13:10 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Yeah, no, you inspired me. So I, as you know, you always normally do one podcast a week, but that week you were so mad that you did four podcasts and call it Indian Point Blackout Week.

13:22 – Robert Bryce 

Right. And so I listened to those four podcasts.

13:26 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And by the time I listened to your fourth podcast, I was ready to run through a wall to to save nuclear power plants. I was I was outraged. And you you inspired me to that outrage. And then the other fortuitous part of that was one of the four people you interviewed was Mark Nelson. I had no idea who Mark Nelson was, but I reached out to him and we became really good friends. And it’s funny how that happened. I just called him out of the blue. And it turns out we have a lot in common. His parents live in Oklahoma City.

13:56 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

My parents lived in Oklahoma City. And he went to Cambridge on a scholarship that was given to him by my mom and dad’s, one of my mom and dad’s best friends at Phillips Petroleum.

14:08 – Multiple Speakers 

So he went to study nuclear energy on a scholarship from an oil and gas executive. He was the CEO at Phillips Petroleum.

14:16 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And the other the last kind of synergy there was I found out that his great-uncle Worked in the North Sea with my dad in the 1960s together Wow, so mark and I got to be a small world Absolutely, and then mark I think he saw it as he saw I got a hot one here I got an oil and gas guy that I can pull into the nuclear fold. So he starts involving me in all these groups and You know, save Byron and Dresden, save Palisades, save Diablo Canyon, got me involved in a lot of those groups. And, you know, I wasn’t overly involved at that point.

14:49 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I was trying to learn the ropes, trying to figure out what, you know, what the policies are and how advocacy works and so on and so forth. And later that year, he invited me. He said, hey, if you’re serious about nuclear advocacy, you need to come with me to Berlin and we’re going to go protest the shutdown of those nuclear power plants. So in in November, I went with him and a bunch of other people from around the world to, I don’t want to say protest, we went to rally in support of keeping the nuclear power plants open, which of course we knew was not going to happen, but we made a statement.

15:19 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And that was really the beginning of my advocacy, my serious advocacy for nuclear energy. So then fast forward to the fall of 2022, I was involved with the Save Diablo Canyon group. Again, not living in California, I was not overtly involved all the time, but I listened in to weekly calls and sent a small check every once in a while and tried to help that advocacy as much as I can. And that’s a great story, the saving of Diablo Canyon, because when I first got involved with that group, I really had no no thoughts in my mind, and I doubt very many people did, that they were really going to save Diablo Canyon.

15:56 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I think it seemed to me to be a lot of older people who had retired and needed a cause, or a lot of young people who didn’t have a job and they needed a cause. There were some nuclear engineering employees. You know, there’s a whole broad spectrum of people involved in that effort. But I never really got the idea that they were going to save Diablo Canyon, but they did an unbelievable job of advocating and And so anyway, fast forward, I’m with you, by the way, just to interject, I thought in

16:22 – Robert Bryce 

California, they’re just not going to work. You know, I was I was skeptical. And I guess it was just born of my, you know, experience with Indian Point, you know, being, you know, pessimistic about the prospects for nuclear, that if they would close Indian Point, such a critical piece of infrastructure in New York City, I thought, well, California is even worse than New York from a political standpoint, I thought, You know, it may be the dumb thing to do, but somehow rationality prevailed.

16:48 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Well, here’s the difference between New York and California. In California, they had blackouts.

16:52 – Multiple Speakers 

And blackouts scared Gavin Newsom.

16:55 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

He had presidential aspirations or political aspirations beyond being governor. And I believe that He could not think about future political aspirations if his state continued to have blackouts I think that was it. It’s not the only factor, but it was a factor So anyway, I think I think that’s an accurate way to think about it. Yeah fast forward to the fall I was still involved with the say diablo canyon group But again, they had rebranded from save diablo canyon to save Diablo canyon because there’s still lots of work to do in california I know they’re trying to extend the life of diablo canyon beyond the five years for at least another years, 20 they’re trying to lift the moratorium on new nuclear.

17:36 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So there’s still a lot of activity in that group trying to do good things in California with nuclear energy. So I continue to be involved with the group on the periphery and I would listen in weekly calls, but I’d very rarely say very much. But one day, you know, Heather Hoff.

17:53 – Robert Bryce 

Yes. President, co-founder of Mothers for Nuclear.

17:56 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

She made a statement that And she’s not a mean person. She’s a lovely, lovely person, but she made a statement on this meeting in front of everybody. Well, we know that all you oil and gas people hate nuclear, and we also know that you oil and gas companies are actively undermining the nuclear industry. And I had to take myself off of mute and say, Heather, that is just not true. I don’t I’ve never heard of that. I think oil and gas people intuitively support nuclear energy because oil and gas people believe in good, reliable, energy-dense fuels.

18:29 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

We appreciate nuclear energy for what it is. And I said, I frankly don’t know a single person in my industry. I’m not saying there’s not. I mean, there’s million oil and gas employees in the US. I’m not saying none of them do, but the vast, vast majority of us do not object to nuclear energy, but we support it. So that’s what gave me the idea. So I was thinking, what can I do for this cause? And one thing I could do is dispel this myth that oil and gas executives hate nuclear energy and that oil and gas companies are undermining nuclear energy.

19:02 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So I thought, well, we should just come out and sign a letter in support. And at first I thought, well, I could just get anybody in the oil and gas industry, but I thought it might be more effective to just get signatures of executives. So I didn’t know if I had the gravitas to pull this off. So I texted Chris Wright over at Liberty. And Chris is a wonderful person and a busy man, and didn’t necessarily assume that he would respond to me immediately but almost immediately. He sent me a text back and says I love this idea let’s do it so we decided that we would draft this declaration of links as a gas executives in support of nuclear energy.

19:40 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And we would kind of explain the importance of energy, the importance of safe, reliable, affordable energy, and then explain why nuclear needs to be part of that. And then talk about the things that we need to do to make nuclear better and more accessible, how we can build new nuclear in the US. And so this is a process that took several months because that declaration ranged from one paragraph to six pages at one point. And in the end, after talking to a lot of people, refined it down to a two-page declaration.

20:12 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And I called Chris and said, hey, I’ve got something I’d like you to look at. And I fully expected him to want to edit it or change it or add or subtract things. But I took it over. And a few hours later, his executive assistant called me and said, Chris signed it. And he was the first one to sign it, as is. He didn’t want to make a single change. So we were off to the races. And we’ve got, as you said, executives who signed it so far, and I’m not actively seeking new signatures, but usually once or twice a week I’ll get an email from some executive who’s seen it on a podcast or somewhere and said, hey, how can I sign?

20:47 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So there we have it. Right.

20:49 – Robert Bryce 

So you recommend specific policies and actions here and say political parties shouldn’t unite. You don’t say Democrats and Republicans. You also say public-private utilities, regulators should do everything reasonably possible to extend the life of existing reactors. The ones that caught my attention, though, and let’s talk about this one. Well, I like what you said here. Federal and state governments should collaborate to develop centralized storage sites for spent nuclear fuel.

21:17 – Robert Bryce 

You don’t call it nuclear waste, spent nuclear fuel. I like the way you phrased that. But this is the one that I’ve given a lot of thought to. And this is, look, as you know, I’m adamantly pro-nuclear and have been for a long time. But I’m very sober about the prospects for nuclear in the United States in particular. But you say that regional transmission organizations and independent system operators should develop strategies that do not disadvantage the use of nuclear power, such as adequate compensation for their continuous availability and reliability.

21:51 – Robert Bryce 

Now there’s the burub, isn’t it? I mean, and this is the one I had, Edgardo Sepulveda. Edgardo Sepulveda is a Canadian economist. He’s actually Chilean, now lives in Toronto. He was on the podcast a few weeks ago. And we talked about this very issue, about the difficulty of trying to get new nuclear into these restructured, as Ken Lay called them at Enron, restructured markets or deregulated markets. That he and Edgardo in fact went to the data and found that nuclear has been declining in these Restructured or deregulated markets and it’s kind of treading water trining slightly upward in the regulated markets So you say adequate compensation?

22:30 – Robert Bryce 

I hear subsidy, right? So I’m not gigging you here, but let’s talk through if you don’t mind how Because I think this is one of the key challenges for new nuclear in America, broadly. There are a lot. Cheap natural gas is one of them. Federal support is another, but adequate compensation for continuous availability and reliability. I hear that and I say, whoa, here’s a bunch of oil and gas guys saying we need to subsidize nuclear. I don’t necessarily disagree, but how did you come to that?

22:59 – Robert Bryce 

Because as I read all of these, I’m thinking, OK, well, this is all right, but that one is problematic from a policy standpoint.

23:06 – Multiple Speakers 

Am I hitting the right one here? I mean, let’s talk about that one. How do you see it?

23:10 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Let’s talk about it. And I would like to congratulate you and Edgardo for that interview because he did some really great work on identifying the differences between how nuclear is being developed in the US in a restructured electricity market and in a traditional market. And I think it was really good work. And so that’s great. I don’t want to say a subsidy is not really what I had in mind, because when you’re buying power, there’s more there’s more value to buying power than just.

23:44 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

The actual kilowatt hour, megawatt hour. There is reliability, whether it’s resilient, whether it’s available at all times of the day. And so, you know, I guess what I was thinking to say is in these restructured markets, I don’t like to say unregulated, but these restructured markets, we’ve put such an emphasis on just sheer price.

24:07 – Robert Bryce 

Right.

24:08 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Price is only one component of the value of that. And so we need to assess value to an energy source like nuclear that’s available for days in a row, you know, without refueling. We need to assess value to a source like nuclear that can withstand water storm Yuri and continue operating. So when I say that, we need to change the pricing mechanism and we need to say, we need to give value to those other attributes And so in the restructured markets, we need to rethink that we’re not putting any emphasis on reliability or resilience in these restructured markets.

24:46 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And so we need to value that. And so I don’t really look at that as a subsidy. I look at that as paying them for the full value of what they’re providing.

24:55 – Robert Bryce 

And I like the way you phrase that, because what is the value? And I remember, this is a couple of years ago, I testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and I finished. And Martin Heinrich, who’s the senator from New Mexico, after I’d done, didn’t ask me a question, but he held up this big sign, this big placard that said, levelized cost of energy and wind and solar. See, they’re so cheap. This is why we should do it. And because he didn’t ask me a question, I thought, well, could I be rude here and just say, well, Senator, you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

25:26 – Robert Bryce 

But of course, I didn’t have that. I do it now, right? Because I’m like, well, you invited me here. You’re going to talk about this stuff, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. What would be the adequate response? Okay, so you’re saying that wind and solar are cheaper than these other forms of generation. I could also say that a pup tent is cheaper housing than my brick house, right? And which would you rather have during a windstorm? You want your little pup tent or do you want a brick house or a cinder block house?

25:54 – Robert Bryce 

But your points are well taken. But therein lies one of the problems, is that policymakers don’t think about that resilience, reliability, consistency, baseload. Oh, let’s talk about grid inertia and gigawatt seconds. I mean, they’re like, well, we don’t want to talk about that. We just want to talk about price, right? So I’m not, again, not arguing with you here, but that seems to me to be one of the key issues facing new nuclear on that grid value issue, which is a hard concept to make people understand.

26:24 – Robert Bryce 

They think a watt-hour of electricity is equal to a gallon of gasoline. It’s not.

26:29 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

No, I agree. And I think I’ve heard you say before, when you write an article, you always start with the title of the article.

26:36 – Robert Bryce 

The headline, yeah. Or the headline.

26:38 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And I have a headline in mind for an article that I’m hoping to write when I get enough time. But my headline is the big lie. The big lie about wind and solar being the cheapest.

26:50 – Multiple Speakers 

Because it’s only part of the story.

26:53 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

It’s intellectually dishonest to say that without talking about the rest of the story. Unfortunately, you’re right. We have policymakers, decision makers. ISO operators who are incentivized incorrectly, incentivized to do the wrong thing. They’re incentivized only by price, not by reliability. And I don’t know how to change that, except that people like you and me and others need to keep pounding the turf and saying, here are the facts. And electricity is more than just the price.

27:27 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

It’s the all in cost of service. Which includes transmission and storage and reliability and everything else. And so a lot of times you can’t get change until you have educated these people. I mean, there’s a lot of people in our industry who don’t fully understand these concepts. So it’s completely understandable why these policymakers who don’t have no idea what the real story is. So I think the first step is we have to do a better job of educating the policymakers about the reality of the cost of energy and the full value chain of the various forms of energy.

28:04 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And then once we get them to understand that, then we can start to assert pressure on them to place more emphasis on a total value chain, rather than just the marginal cost of an additional kilowatt.

28:16 – Robert Bryce 

Yeah, I agree. I think it’s going to take a sustained effort. And by sustained, I mean decadal. And that’s one of the things I’ve testified before Congress. Look, we need decadal support. We need bipartisan decadal support to make nuclear work. Because Gardo and I talked about this as well. Where is new nuclear flourishing. Well, it’s in places where there is strong government intervention. And that’s just a fact. That’s not opinion. I mean, look at what Chris Kiefer has done in Canada.

28:48 – Robert Bryce 

You’ve seen remarkable progress there. Well, Ontario is now going to expand Bruce Power. They’re going to refurbish Pickering. They’re expanding Darlington. They’re adding to BWRX 300s, I think, at Darlington. But who owns a big share in OPG? The retirement system of the Ontario workers, right? There’s a very strong government backing, government influence over Ontario power generation. And they’re taking the long-term look here. So let’s talk about that. So I talked about the challenges here.

29:21 – Robert Bryce 

And I read your two-page letter, and I think you’re right on target. But let’s talk about the challenges, because let’s be very sober here. So if you look at the new nuclear in the US, we’ve done a pretty good job at saving existing nuclear, Indian Point being the obvious fatality. Palisades in Michigan might be saved. We’ll see. What do you see as the big hurdles, then, for new nuclear in America?

29:48 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Well, I think I see him the same way as you do. And let’s be clear that we’ve made so much, so many strides the last few years in nuclear advocacy. The conversation around nuclear today is so much better than it was just three years ago.

30:04 – Multiple Speakers 

And you see all the things that are happening in Europe, set aside what’s happening in Spain and Germany, the rest of Europe is moving forward.

30:13 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I mean, you look at France is looking at adding Maybe another reactors, 14 Spain, Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Poland, a lot in Poland, Great Britain. So there’s so much moving forward around the world and in the US. So the conversation has moved. That’s great. But the problem is now we have to move from a great feel-good conversation, this declaration in Dubai that now countries 25 are going to triple their production. That’s great headlines, but now we’ve got to actually construct something.

30:51 – Multiple Speakers 

I mean, and that’s where it’s really hard, is finding a way to construct it.

30:57 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So I see it the same way I think you do, is that I have one A and one B is regulatory issues and financing. How do you get these projects financed? Those are the top two things that I could argue either one is most important. I mean, we definitely have to have a better regulatory environment. But it doesn’t matter how good the regulatory environment is, we’ve got to solve the financing problem with these. Now, a better regulatory environment does help some of the financing issues because, as you know, it’s extremely expensive to get a new nuclear power plant license.

31:37 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

You probably know these numbers better than me, but I’ve heard at one point where I don’t remember which company it was, maybe it was Newscale, somebody their application to the NRC was pages long.

31:49 – Robert Bryce 

Just the application. And then the backup materials was however many millions of pages long.

31:55 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And I don’t know how people, there’s enough people at the NRC to even read it, much less comprehend it, much less act on it. And then throw on top of that, you’ve got plus new advanced nuclear technologies that are being developed in the US or North America alone. And how are they going to evaluate those? So we have a huge, regulatory challenge. I think regulatory is 1A. We have to solve that. Now it’s funny when we started I wanted feedback from other people about this nuclear declaration.

32:27 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So I called everyone I knew and got opinions. And a lot of people, when I would ask them, well, what should we do about the NRC? Because what I had originally intended was to do a whole page of specific action items for the NRC. And about half the people I called, their answer was, well, what do we do about the NRC? And their answer was, well, get a pound of C4. And a couple of detonators.

And Brett Kugelmas, of course, he’s not ashamed to say that because he’s pretty much made the decision that Last Energy is going to operate overseas. At least that’s my understanding.

33:03 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

But there are a lot of other people privately who would say that, but they didn’t want me to say it in this declaration. And actually, let’s give credit to Mark Nelson. He talked me off the ledge and he said, As bad as things are at the NRC, we are going to have to live with them and let’s work with them and let’s be constructive. So we decided not to put any C4 into the nuclear declaration. But we do have and I hear a lot of positive things coming out of the NRC, and that’s fortunate, because I think that the Biden administration actually, one of the things that they have done good for energy is that they have put a greater emphasis behind the scenes.

33:45 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Into nuclear and have put an emphasis on making the NRC more functional. But it’s far from functional if you’re going to be able to license reactor after reactor after reactor and new technology after new technology. So that’s the one. And then the second part is, like you said, we’ve got to figure out the financing. And I think it’s going to be very hard, at least for the large scale AP gigawatt scale plants. I think it’s going to be very difficult still, even in the next decade. To build those in the restructured markets.

34:19 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I think you’re going to only see those in places like Georgia or other places that did not restructure. They’re still the old traditional style. I think that’s one of the appeals of the SMRs or the microreactors is that possibly those may be easier to license and maybe a little more flexible And maybe we can see some inroads there into the restructured markets. But I think that the restructured markets, again, you can’t have a restructured market that takes all the wind First, before they take anything else, when can underbid everybody else’s price because they get production tax credit?

34:57 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So they can bid a negative price for their product and still get paid by the federal government. You can have a market where that is incentivized. And then they pay no consequences when they don’t deliver. And then you can’t expect a nuclear plant or a gas plant to sit on standby and not make any money just waiting there, hoping that they’ll sell some electricity when the wind’s down. That is not fair. So these restructured markets have to be re-restructured to give more value to the entire value chain of the megawatt.

35:32 – Unidentified Speaker 

Re-restructured. Re-restructured.

35:39 – Robert Bryce 

So let’s talk about spent fuel. And I’ve thought about this, I think it was now Gosh, years ago, I was in the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. And the Mescaleros were saying, well, we’ll take that spent fuel. We’ll store it here on a temporary basis. Sure, pay us. Now, that went nowhere. But this is the other part where you have now how many states in the country that have moratoriums on moratoria, on new nuclear, until they solve the waste issue, right? So this is where these NGOs that, you know, The climate industrial complex, climate industrial congressional corporate complex, all comes together.

36:21 – Robert Bryce 

Oh, well, you can’t build it if you don’t have a place for the spent fuel. And then those same groups do everything they can to try and prevent any solution on spent fuel. So do we need one? I mean, this is just your opinion, right? Mine as well. But do we need one, or could we just have several across the country? What’s the easiest way to make that happen?

36:42 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Well, first of all, you’re correct, because these NGOs, they don’t want nuclear energy. And so one of their strategies is to convince lawmakers in these states that you can’t allow nuclear energy as long as there’s no centralized repository for it. And then they oppose all centralized repository, so which leads into their… complete anti-nuclear, you know, it’s a circular.

37:06 – Robert Bryce 

So you’re absolutely correct about that.

37:08 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And of course, I think the whole spit fuel argument is kind of overblown because, I mean, I love when knowledgeable people say nuclear waste is not a problem. It’s an asset because it’s so little compared to, you know, the waste that comes from coal. Or from other forms of energy. But to answer your question, back to your question, I think we are going to have to find some permanent repositories. But what I would like to look to, I think we’ve gone about it all the wrong way. We’ve allowed people to be scared by this.

37:46 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

We’ve made it the boogeyman, and so nobody wants it in their backyard. And you know what they did in Finland? They went out and they said, we need a permanent repository. And we’re going to have a competition among communities to determine who gets that repository. So we need to flip it on its head and turn it around and say, OK, here’s a contest. Here’s the money you’re going to get. Here’s the generational funds you’re going to get for your schools. Here’s the generational funds you’re going to get for your community, your tax base, and so forth.

38:16 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And going out across the country, OK, if they don’t want it out in Nevada, fine. But I think we should incentivize it in such a way that people are actually competing for the right to take the spent fuel. And I think we’ve just completely botched it and we need to flip it on its head and do it the other way.

38:33 – Robert Bryce 

I like that idea. The other part of that, the way I’ve thought about it is, you also have all these other federal labs around the country. You got Los Alamos, you have Oak Ridge, you have Hanford. There’s one on Long Island. What’s it called? I’m trying to remember. Anyway, there’s a nuclear lab out there. I don’t know, too. Brookhaven, I think it is. Anyway, so you have a bunch of places across the country that are already nuclear focused federal reservations. Federal land, we’ll put it out there.

39:03 – Robert Bryce 

I mean, there’s plenty of space. Or the WIP place, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico. They’re storing defense related radioactive material. A spent fuel, if we can use that term. Why couldn’t we just use that? Why couldn’t we use whip? But there’s no payoff, I guess, from the political standpoint, or very little payoff for someone in Congress to want to take this on, right? Let’s just leave it alone. And so I see a lot of hurdles, and I’m not trying to- You know, this, but we have to, you know, it’s that old line.

39:38 – Robert Bryce 

What’s the best time to plant a tree years ago? What’s the next best time now? And so we have to get started. And as you know, in our new docuseries, that’s what we try to do is look, we got to get, we got to get serious here. We got to get cracking and make this happen somehow. And that’s the key. And so what do you want to see happen next? You know, Doug, if I, if I gave you, you know, the, ability to talk to Congress people or the president or who, who, you know, it’s great that you have oil and gas people, you know, pushing this out.

40:10 – Robert Bryce 

But what’s the, you know, give me your ideal scenario about what happens next.

40:15 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Well, I do. I do know some people who are working on some utility scale, gigawatt scale projects. You know, it’s not public and I’m not at liberty to say, but I know some of these things are going on behind the scenes and I have been told, I haven’t been able to do the math and figure it out, but I’ve been told, you know, that Of course, one of the hardest parts about building new nuclear in the US, because we don’t have supply chains and we don’t have a workforce anymore that builds these, is the cost.

40:46 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

But I have been told that under the IRA, there are various provisions which could get you to or more of the cost of a plant. If you can build a nuclear power plant and get cost recovery through IRA, that I think that is, I’m not sure I believe it, but I’ve been told that. And if that’s true, then I think there is some hope for some gigawatt scale activity. But I think that, you know, people ask me, are you for the old-fashioned gigawatt scale, utility scale power plants, or are you for the new micro-reactors, the new SMRs?

41:21 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And I hate to say it, it sounds like a cop-out, but I think there’s a place for all of it. I think there’s going to still be a place for some gigawatt scale, utility scale construction here in the U.S., but I also think the SMRs are going to be great. But they’re going to take time. We got to get them through the regulatory process actually build one and actually prove it works. And the same for the micro reactors. But this does bring me to bring me around to what’s going on in the oil field a little bit because I jumped on this bandwagon a year and a half ago with the idea that I was going to be a representative of the oil and gas business, and I was going to show support for our brothers and sisters in nuclear energy.

But now I’m finding the oil and gas business right now is really moving towards… nuclear energy in a big way.

42:14 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I mean, I’m surprised. And we’ve been saying for years, why don’t the oil and gas companies build more wind and solar? And they always want the oil and gas companies to be something that they’re not. But I think they haven’t because they haven’t seen the business case for doing those things. But I see several oil and gas companies right now building the business case for nuclear in the oil field. And as you know, our good friend Chris Wright, his company, Liberty Energy, has recently invested in Oklo.

42:45 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And I don’t know if you saw the announcement recently that NOV, National Oil Well Varga, one of the titans of oil and gas service companies, they just opened a new division, just announced a new division, a nuclear division, that’s a wholly owned subsidiary. It’s called Shepard Power. Which is a wholly owned division, wholly owned by NOV, but they’re going into nuclear power. So I know that companies like Shell and Equinor and Chevron are all investing in nuclear energy. So I see we’re going to be pushing on.

43:24 – Unidentified Speaker 

This isn’t going to be one silver bullet. We’ve got to push all levers.

43:28 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

We’ve got to push the regulatory levers. We got to push the financing levers. We need to take advantage of the advantage of the IRA. We need oil and gas companies pushing this. I mean, actually, I think having companies like Liberty and NOV in this game, they’re such astute business people and they’re so smart and so good at building things and doing things. I think they’re going to assert pressure on the nuclear regulators to push forward in a way that maybe the nuclear industry itself hasn’t been able to do.

44:01 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I may be wrong. Maybe I’m just dreaming, but that’s what I’m seeing.

44:05 – Robert Bryce 

Well, that’s interesting because I’ve heard the same about particularly the Permian Basin in West Texas, right? There’s just enormous power demand out there that’s not being met. And Pioneer, I’ve had Scott Sheffield, the CEO of Pioneer, now merging with Exxon, saying they want to electrify their entire operation, their drilling rigs, all of their stuff. But if you’re going to do that, you need a reliable grid, and they don’t have enough juice out there. But what about the tech industry?

44:29 – Robert Bryce 

This is the other area where I think you know Brian Gitt at Oklo. Other people have talked about it. Microsoft just hired a nuclear lead to look at nuclear power for Microsoft. It seems to me that the data centers in the tech industry, with their enormous power demands for AI, et cetera, crypto data centers in general, they would be the maybe more likely early adopter in terms of industry. Does that rhyme with you? I mean, the chemical refining upstream, yes, but the tech guys, they have more money and maybe more patient money.

45:07 – Robert Bryce 

Have you thought about that at all?

45:09 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

I think you’re absolutely right. I’m trying to think who it is. There is a, it’s already happening. I think it’s a Talon Energy, you know, Talon Energy East Coast.

45:19 – Robert Bryce 

They’re the ones that are based in Houston. Is that right?

45:22 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

No, I think that maybe they are based in Houston, but they do operate a nuclear power plant over in Virginia or Maryland, somewhere over on the Eastern seaboard. And they’re building a huge data center right next to the plant. And so their idea is we now have this nuclear power plant. How can we best leverage that?

And so they’re building data centers next to the nuclear power plant.

45:51 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And we do see, you know, we haven’t seen a great deal of growth in electricity in the U.S. For decades.

45:59 – Robert Bryce 

But we now are going to see it.

46:01 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Of course, electric vehicles, if that ever takes off, that’s going to be a lot. The more we try and electrify everything, including industry, that’s going to be big demand. But set aside those things, just the electric demand for AI and cloud computing is going to be a huge driver of energy. And so we’re going to see electricity growth higher than we have seen it for probably years. And I think that it would make sense that companies that have a lot of money, like you said, Amazon or Google, if they could get into it and buy some of these micro reactors and co-locate those reactors with their data centers, that makes more sense.

46:38 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And maybe we get them and the world people together to leverage and push the NRC towards some quicker solutions.

46:45 – Robert Bryce 

Right, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense to me. But it all comes back to that regulatory part. And I think they would have the patient capital. And this is one of the things I talked about with Edgardo Sepulveda, which is you’ve got to have patient capital. And you’ve got to have people with a lot of money who are patient. And he said, usually that’s governments. But the tech sector might be the ones that have the patient money and have some skill at the regulatory part of it that they could push this across the line.

47:11 – Robert Bryce 

So now I know I usually talk an hour, but we’ve covered a lot of the things that I wanted to talk about. And I don’t I’m sure we could discuss keep going for a long time. But in the interest of your preserving your time and mine, because I’m actually leaving in the morning and I got to get ready. But let’s talk about what you know, if you listen to the podcast, I always ask the same questions at the end. What are you reading these days? What are the books that are on the top of your pile these days?

47:37 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Oh, okay. I’m reading actually two books right now. One is Game Changer, which is Harold Ham’s biography. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it, but regardless of what you think about Harold Ham, he has been very influential in the oil and gas world. The last years. And so there’s a lot of interesting stuff in his book that I find very interesting, kind of as an aside, of course, you know, he’s an Okie from Enid.

48:11 – Robert Bryce 

That’s right. My mother’s hometown.

48:13 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And when I first broke into the oil industry in the late 70s, I was working in Northwest Oklahoma near Enid and Woodward in those areas. And the company I worked for operated a lot of marginal gas wells up in Northwestern Oklahoma. And, you know, gas prices fell really low And it was hard to keep those wells producing and you really needed compression, compressors to pull the gas out of the ground. And a lot of operators couldn’t afford the compression. And so my first contact with Harold Hamm was, he had a really interesting business plan at the time.

48:54 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Continental Resources, as it’s called now, was originally Continental Compressor Corp. And he would go to small operators in Northwest Oklahoma, and he would offer to bring in the compressor and install it and pay for the cost of the compressor for a working interest, for a share of the oil and gas that came out of that well. So that’s how I knew him, you know, years ago. He’s come a long way. So his book is very interesting. I just finished reading a book by Larry McMurtry. I mean, a biography wasn’t an autobiography, but, you know, he was from Archer City.

I think a lot of people consider him to be one of the greatest authors from Texas.

49:33 – Robert Bryce 

Right.

49:33 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And he wrote Lonesome Dove. And I think he did the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain and and The Last Picture Show.

49:42 – Robert Bryce 

Right. And I lived a long time in Wichita Falls.

49:45 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And it’s not very far from there. My family owned a restaurant there at one time. And Larry McMurtry used to used to come to the restaurant. He loved catfish. And it’s funny because when people would see him come in, all the waitresses were scrambling.

They wanted his table because his standard tip was one hundred dollars.

50:04 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

for him and his date. And that was a lot of money back then. So we went on kind of a draw system where, you know, we draw lots for which waitress got to have this table because it was an automatic hundred dollars. So anyway, it’s a very interesting story for me. And I like to read Westerns and he’s one of my favorites. And then I’m also co-reading right now a book about Sicily, years of history in Sicily. My mom and my wife and one of my daughters are going to Sicily later in March. And so I’m trying to learn all I can about Cicely.

50:33 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

So that’s what’s on my list right now.

50:36 – Robert Bryce 

That’s a good list. And a wide-ranging one, by the way. So that’s great. Well, I think that’s good with you. Unless there’s something else you want to add, we can call it a podcast. And is there something else you want to discuss here, Doug?

50:51 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Well, you’re not going to ask me what gives me hope?

50:54 – Robert Bryce 

Oh. Maybe you should be the host here. It’s been, I’ve had a long day.

51:00 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Sorry, Doug. Yes.

51:03 – Robert Bryce 

It’s right here on my, see, it says right there on the thing. I’ve got the question there. You can see what it’s on the paper. Wait a minute. Let me do the station break first. Doug Sandridge, President of Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear, which is not It’s not a nonprofit. You’re not collecting any money. It’s your own entity. You can find out more about it at executives for nuclear. I haven’t done this plug. I’ve been just falling down on the job here all day.

51:32 – Robert Bryce 

OK. So what gives you hope? 

51:34 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And I’m also just to be respectful to my employer, since I do make my living. I work for Fulcrum Energy Capital Funds. That’s an oil and gas company in Denver.

It’s easy to malign young people and we think, oh, those millennials, what are they doing? But the more I teach, the more I’m around the young

So that’s my daytime job when I’m not advocating for nuclear.

51:49 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

It’s easy to malign young people and we think, oh, those millennials, what are they doing? But the more I teach, the more I’m around the young

I guess there’s two things that give me hope. One is my kids and young people.

particularly the more I’m around my own kids. They’re smart. They’re, you know, in many ways more sober than we are. And I do have some hope, at least here in the U.S., that our young people are going to carry on after we’re gone. So I do have hope from them, but I also have a lot of hope from all the energy sober people. We have a lot of truth tellers now, I would say five years ago, it wasn’t fashionable to tell the truth about energy.

52:33 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

And you are one of the original truth tellers, let’s be honest. I mean, you’ve been doing this longer than most, but I mean, Chris Wright is unbelievable what he’s done for telling the truth about energy. And he’s made me, able to be proud to stand up and speak about the good things about oil and gas and to stop being ashamed and to stop hiding the fact that I work in oil and gas. You know, Michael Schellenberger, Mark Nelson, Steve Coonan, Meredith Angwin, Maynard Holt. Gosh, who am I forgetting?

53:07 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

David Blackman.

53:11 – Robert Bryce 

Alex Epstein.

53:12 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Emmett Penney, Alex Epstein, Meredith Englund, Bjorn Lomberg. I mean, we have so many really powerful voices out there that have said to heck with it. We’re not going to be shamed. We’re going to step up and say the truth. And this is what we need, because I can say the truth. Not many people are listening to me. Steve Coonan, or Michael Schellenberg or Robert, when you go out there and speak the truth, then it’s a large audience and we are moving the needle towards energy sobriety. I really believe that.

53:41 – Robert Bryce 

Well, as my friend Richard Grant would say, from your lips to God’s ears. That’s the hope. Well, my guest, I’ve asked all the questions now. What are you reading? What gives you hope? I told you I had it on the list here. I have them printed out. I don’t know. I’m going to figure out this podcast thing here sooner or later, Doug. My guest has been my friend, Doug Sandridge. He is the president of Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear. He’s a senior vice president at Fulcrum Energy Funds in Denver, a landman and the just all-around good guy, I think, is the other summary here, advocate for nuclear energy and energy in general.

54:20 – Robert Bryce 

So, Doug, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you.

54:22 – Doug Sandridge (Fulcrum Energy Operating) 

Thank you for all you do. And it’s been a, it’s been my pleasure to be able to be on with you. So let’s do it again sometime.

54:28 – Robert Bryce 

Thank you. Awesome. And thanks to all you out there in podcast land, uh, tune into the next episode of the power hungry podcast. It might be as good as this one until then. See ya.