Nick Deluliis is the CEO of CNX Resources Corporation, a Pittsburgh-based natural gas producer. In this episode, Deluliis talks with Robert about how shale gas has boosted the Pennsylvania economy, the “façade” of ESG, why low-cost energy has given the United States an “epic strategic advantage” over the rest of the world, and the themes in his upcoming book, The Leech: An Indictment of the Evil Sapping America, Depleting Free Enterprise, and Bleeding Producers. 

Episode Transcript

Robert Bryce 0:04
Hello, and welcome to the power hungry podcast. I’m Robert Bryce. On this podcast, we talk about energy, power, innovation and politics. And I’m happy to introduce my guest, Nick ulis. He is the CEO of CNS resources Corporation. Nick, welcome to the power hungry podcast.

Nick DeIuliis 0:20
Hey, Robert, it’s great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Robert Bryce 0:23
So Nick, I warned you, I’m gonna ask you to introduce yourself. This is the customer on this podcast. And I’ve given your title but I’m sure if you have a few other things that you want to talk about. Yeah. Imagine you’ve arrived at a at a dinner party and you have a 45 seconds or a minute to introduce yourself.

Nick DeIuliis 0:42
Go. Yeah, again, as you said, I’m an official capacity, the the CEO president of CNS resources, which is a company that’s a natural gas producer, one of the largest in the Appalachian basin, Marcellus, Utica shales, we also operate our midstream pipeline infrastructure, but at heart, you know, beyond the official capacity, I’m a western Pennsylvania guy, pittsburgher, lifelong, lived my entire life in the region, and really had the chance to to observe complete metamorphosis of the region from what it was, which was classical manufacturing, and an energy went through a big downturn, it was very painful. For many in the region, I experienced that through my childhood and young adult life, and now saw sort of this resurrection of traditional manufacturing and energy largely brought about by the natural gas revolution. So it’s been an interesting journey as a lifelong western Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh to see that.

Robert Bryce 1:40
Okay, well, great. That’s so see you next I want to talk about the Marcellus. But what it didn’t tell me, you gave me a bit about the CNS. I looked up your market caps about three and a half billion dollars. So you’re not you’re not among the biggest your your mid size gas producer. Is that a fair assessment?

Nick DeIuliis 2:00
Yeah, our focus has always been exactly that not necessarily looking at scale or production level or ranking with respect to that, but more importantly, how impactful our footprint and our operations are. So our attention has always been on things like being a low cost producer within the basin, which is the low cost basin of natural gas in the United States, being the highest margin producer. And being able to put forth what we call a sustainable business model, a lot of talk about sustainability these days in different circles and stakeholder groups. But defining sustainable from a business perspective is one that can demonstrate profitable and efficient operations under any sort of part of the commodity cycle.

Robert Bryce 2:44
Sure. And you have about 400 employees, is that right? I’m remembering off the top of my head.

Nick DeIuliis 2:49
Yeah, we’re somewhere in the 450 range, and probably 1000 to 2500 contractors at any given time in the field.

Robert Bryce 2:58
Okay, so one of the things I know that well, I want to talk to you about is what you mentioned it briefly in your in your, in your introduction, you’re where you introduced yourself. When I want to talk about how the Marcellus Shale and the shale revolution changed, Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania economy, what it means more broadly for the US economy, and then I want to talk about the, you know, the broader outlook for natural gas because there’s a big push now, as you know, to electrify everything. There’s a big push to ban natural gas, and it’s underway in California and other states. But let’s start with the Marcellus Shale. Rick smead, who’s now with rbn energy once called the Marcellus Pruett obey under Pittsburgh, which I thought was a pretty interesting description. How important has the Marcellus been to Pennsylvania as, as a whole and to the Pittsburgh area specifically,

Nick DeIuliis 3:53
absolutely fundamental and vital, I refer to it often, half jokingly, unfortunately, because there’s a lot of truth to it is the Greatest Story NEVER Told, and what you’ve seen, whether it’s the Marcellus, specifically here in Appalachia, in western Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh area, or whether it’s just natural gas and shale revolution, United States, you basically have seen the examplar Classic textbook case of innovative and disruptive technology apply. So we’ve seen this story play out with Henry Ford and manufacturing line, we’ve seen it play out with microchips and software and social media platforms, all kinds of different technologies. But here we are in what was primarily an old line industry. And you saw American innovation ingenuity brought to bear where we always knew that the methane was in sort of enclosed in the shale deposits. But the technology didn’t exist, to basically liberated at efficient and prolific rates where you’d have an economic rate of return and growing technologies, completion technologies, through trial and error and as I said, The free market sort of bringing those those experiences and technologies to bear found a way to do that. And once that was achieved, and it could be demonstrated on a replicable consistent basis, everything fundamentally changed. And you seen a change and evolve from the very local to the the macro geopolitical. So if you look at Western Pennsylvania, on the local side of things, you talk about the middle class and the need to sustain and grow the middle class. This has been the single biggest contributor to bringing back the middle class to the for this region, since the steel industry. And that was decades and decades ago. So you see that with respect to just the family sustaining wages that the industry brings to bear, just use my company’s example, the all in compensation package for the average employee across the company, when you add in 401k, and benefits, and the rest is somewhere around $250,000 per year. That’s not an outlier with respect to this industry that’s fairly common throughout the space. And you’ve also seen it with respect to the resurrection of manufacturing. So whether it’s shell with their announcement of building a petrochemical cracker facility, just outside of Pittsburgh, that’s because of where that sits, literally right on top of a very reliable, prolific source of their feedstock items and energy and materials.

Robert Bryce 6:21
So let me interrupt you there just to make that clear. So you’re talking about Royal Dutch Shell, in a recent show, the US Army of Royal Dutch building as an ethylene cracker, is that the is that the the plant that you’re talking? You’re referring to? Yep. And in round terms, what’s that investment that shell is making in Shell is making in shale gas in the region? what’s the what’s the in round numbers, what’s that investment

Nick DeIuliis 6:45
is a great microcosm of his virtuous circle. So what you’ve seen is billions of dollars of investment in the aggregate, but you saw each cycle of the investment chain come to bear. So you saw the initial construction phase of this, where literally 1000s of building trades employees throughout the region, are working there to construct the facility itself, you’re going to see, of course, the longer term permanent job positions with respect to running and maintaining the facility. But then the most important and exciting phase of this, I think, is still yet to come, which will be all the downstream manufacturing and advanced manufacturing, that’s going to come into play, where they are going to want to locate those facilities close to their feedstock, which would be what the cracker facility is producing. So you’ve seen it from the development of the interrupt there, Nick, I’m

Robert Bryce 7:35
good at interrupting. That’s one of the features in this podcast. But so they’re going to they’re going to take shell we’ll take the methane from Marcellus and then produce plastic products, right? And then so you’re, you’re talking about the downstream of that plant will be plastic manufacturers or people that will use that to make to make consumer goods, is that right?

Nick DeIuliis 7:57
Exactly. So when you’re looking at whether or not you want to build something like a petrochemical cracker facility, one of the most important inputs is what is the cost. And the supply going to be at that time, sort of one of the primary feedstocks of that, that endeavor, and locating that plant, on top of one of the most prolific locations for epi and production, over the long haul, which is the Appalachian basin and in western Pennsylvania, more than West Virginia, Eastern Ohio, that became a big rate of return driver for the location of that facility. And then, as you said, once that facilities installed, when it starts to produce its products for the plastics, industry, etc. and polymers, then the downstream manufacturing facilities that look to utilize that and to convert it into something else along the supply chain in the value chain, they’re going to want to locate those facilities as close as they can to their primary feeds. So it’s this it’s another example another cycle of how location and proximity to reliable affordable energy production is an absolute driver of regional economies that then creates offshoot opportunities for other economies close by.

Robert Bryce 9:10
So when you’re talking about ethane, just for people listening, so ethane is a natural gas liquid like propane like butane xylene with their eight of them, right? The the light ends is so they’re produced in I guess they’re a byproduct of gas production, a byproduct of oil production as well, but then they’re used in petrochemical summer use directly on propane, but ethane is much more of a chemical feedstock that is that, is that right?

Nick DeIuliis 9:35
Right. So the Marcellus and Utica fields that we have in Appalachia, some of them produce exclusively methane natural gas in some of the horizons or the geographic surface area also produces what we call the letter gas which will include ethane, propane, butane, etc. And both of those areas of the footprint or the place so to speak, offer a very low cost and wrap lickable supply sources for years and decades to come.

Robert Bryce 10:04
So when so when you’re producing wet gas, you strip out those liquids because you want to sell those. And that’s not what we we’re not going to get propane in my getting my burner tip in my on my stove here, that’s not gonna that’s not helpful to me or the it’s not good for the system, right? You don’t want to put that kind of gas into the pipeline, is that right?

Nick DeIuliis 10:22
Exactly not not good for the system with respect to natural gas for home heating and electricity generation, but very useful for other manufacturing or energy utilization efforts. Like, like the cracker facilities, cracker facilities feed off of that that’s their feedstock, whereas the the natural gas system for home eating or for electricity generation prefers not to have it in the system because of the need to want to exclusively methane ch for

Robert Bryce 10:48
sure. Okay, so let me let me play a little devil’s advocate, um, you know, I’m pro natural gas, I’m pro nuclear, I’m pro energy pro human. But somebody listening to this Well, okay, so he’s got Nick de leus, on the on the and Yulia is just going to talk his book, right, he’s see next gen CEO, and he’s talking about his hometown. And I understand that argument, right? How, if I was deposed that day, well, you’re just talking your book, you know, you’re talking to you’re promoting your company? How would you respond to that?

Nick DeIuliis 11:17
I go back to the facts, the science and engineering of how our world and our economy works. So the way I would phrase that or respond to that would be that if you think about a typical worker or company, in the Appalachian basin today, that is in the natural gas industry, when they go to work each day to liberate the methane molecule, whether you’re working in the industry or not, there are going to be inevitable and substantial consequences of that, and they’re going to be positive. So what do I mean by that? One consequence is going to be that that methane molecule may end up staying within this region and being utilized within this region. So an example of that would be the electricity grid, which largely saw conversion from a coal based electricity grid not long ago in this region to one its natural gas based, that’s reduced the cost of electricity, that’s improved reliability, and it’s improved the air quality as well as the co2 footprint, it’s reduced the carbon dioxide footprint of the region the state substantially. So if you’re a ratepayer, which is everyone doesn’t matter if you’re a small business owner, or a large manufacturer, or a homeowner, or no matter what socio economic level you sit in, in fact, I would argue, more impactful right for for middle class and in the poor communities. That’s been a huge benefit from environmental quality to the cost of affordability of homes. But there are other sort of other consequences to that. You look at the United States, broadly, Southeast United States, as an example, has basically retooled their economy to feed off of Appalachia natural gas. And you see that in everything from pipeline projects that have been constructed or being built to get that molecule from Appalachia down to the southeast United States, to what’s going on with capitalization and capital investment in those economies in the Carolinas and the southeast, again, to basically feed off of the low cost and reliable natural gas that we’re producing. You’ve also seen it globally, when you look at LNG, liquefied natural gas, and what it’s doing, or the thing that we’re producing that we spoke about earlier, we talked about the ethane being utilized at the cracker in Pennsylvania, outside of it for that’s being built, but ethane and natural gas produced here is being deployed and shipped to everywhere in the case of ethane to Scotland and Norway, in the case of natural gas and LNG to Poland, to India, to Japan, to world over. So the individual that’s going to work in this region today. In basically manufacturing, we think of it very much as manufacturing the methane molecule or the methane molecule is having implications on society, the world over from the local economy, to regional national economy to global economy. In fact, we think the people of this region are basically redrawing the geopolitical map when it comes to geopolitics and how the United States approaches things.

Robert Bryce 14:20
So when you’re talking about manufacturing, Nick, I want to be clear and tell you listening. I’m talking to Nick de Yulia. He’s the CEO of CNS resources Corporation. They’re on the web see index.com and Nick has his own website, Nick, do you leus.com and that his last name is DIULW i s Nick the alias.com. So when you’re talking about manufacturing, though, in the in, you’re talking about your own company and how you deploy drill rigs. Your reference there just to be clear, and correct me if I’m wrong is that a lot of the geopolitical or a lot of the geological risk or the geological risk of drilling a well has had has gone away. And then now the industry in the shale gas business has gone to your what your reference, I correct me if I’m wrong is a manufacturing model where you’re just you’re you know that the methane molecules are down there, you know how to get them. And it’s a matter of reducing your cost and getting in and deploying those drill rigs to make it smaller, faster, lighter, denser, cheaper to use the title of my, my, my fifth book, is that is that what you’re referring to?

Nick DeIuliis 15:26
Yeah, the title of your book, which was a great book, I had a chance to read it is absolutely applicable to what’s going on in natural gas in the Appalachian basin, if you look at, you can look at sort of EMP and natural gas industry, very centric metrics, like well, productivity, or you can just simply look at cost. But that transition, that’s cycling and continuous improvement, we’ve seen where the cost of providing natural gas has dropped drastically, because the efficiencies have grown tremendously. So in many ways, when I talk about sort of,

Robert Bryce 16:02
give me an example with CNS, I mean, in five years ago, how long would it take you to drill a well, and what is it? What’s the number of days and what is it today,

Nick DeIuliis 16:10
and when you’re looking at even just simple, well, productivities, and the dollar per sort of MCF liberated under a well, the Marcellus has basically seen a tripling of that in a seven to 10 year period. And you take that across the entire natural gas space, we become a victim of our own success, this is exactly what we had hoped for, whether we, we realize that at the start of this or not, when when you bring disruptive, innovative technology to the fore, and it is as successful as it has been, in the case of natural gas, the cost of that widget is going to decline, and the supply of that widget is going to go up. And what happens, of course, in the intermediate term, is that the demand is it grows for that product is going to take some time to catch up to supply in the low cost. And you will have periods where supply and demand are not imbalanced and some painful times for the industry that innovated. So again, we saw that with things like car manufacturing, once Henry Ford appeared on scene, at one point in time, there were hundreds of auto manufacturers. And now there’s a much lower number, right? We saw with software, we saw with social, we’re seeing it with social media, and you’re seeing it with natural gas, the technology comes to the fore, it completely changes the game board on cost and supply of the product. Demand starts to grow in response to that. But it takes some time for the band, especially for something like demand of natural gas, where you have big capitalization projects that need to occur, like the cracker facility, like electricity, generating plants, etc. pipelines and so on, it takes some time for that demand to catch up to the supply. But it will if you allow, again, science engineering in the free market to dictate where that falls out.

Robert Bryce 17:57
Let’s go back to what you just said about the issue of victim of your own success. So I think it was late last year and memory serves it was Deloitte that estimated that the amount of free cash flow that was lost or destroyed in the upstream shale business in the previous decade in the United States was on the order of three and a half. Want to say it’s trillion dollars, maybe that’s too much. But three and a half, there were billions of dollars lost. I’m struggling to get that number in my head. But that as you as you pointed out that the industry was in 300 billion, that’s right. $300 billion dollars just was drilled away, right that the industry lost that much money, because they couldn’t they produce so much gas, so much oil, they they they weren’t profitable, is it that 300 billion a night is that number in the ballpark to your recollection.

Nick DeIuliis 18:52
So a couple of ways to to look at this because this is a very important topic, right? This is economic reality. And these are economic endeavors. So first, whenever you’ve got, again, disruptive technology that fundamentally changes things coming on the scene, there is going to be inevitable Fallout that is a natural byproduct of that success. And we are seeing that we have seen that within the natural gas space, that’s to be expected. That’s to be welcomed. That’s the Darwinian market at play. The biggest beneficiaries of that are the consumers of natural gas and the societies that are building their economies around natural gas. So while there’s pain in sort of the the gas field, so to speak, the manufacturers of natural gas, that is good news, right for consumers of natural gas and consumers of energy, which is basically everyone. So small business owners, ratepayers, economies, societies have benefited greatly. An example I can give you is our home state here of Pennsylvania. If you look at Pennsylvania, and you look at what the benefits have been to the sort of statewide economy, I think we can look at it from two perspectives. One is from an environmental perspective, Pennsylvania, if you look at a short 12 year period from 2005, to say 2017, natural gas went from about 5% electricity grid in state to about 34%. So just over a third in co2 dropped 39% across the state. In fact, people don’t realize this. But if Pennsylvania was a developed nation of its own, it would be the only developed nation that would have ever met the Paris Climate accord targets. And it didn’t do that, because of government policy, or government intervention or renewables. It did that, because of what natural gas did with respect to growing its share of the Pennsylvania grid and the Pennsylvania economy. Another way of looking at this in state as an example, is with respect to tax revenues and tax dollars. So Pennsylvania has an impact fee. And an impact fee is basically levied on a per well basis. And it tracks and follows as you might expect gas prices and production volumes of the well. But since the implementation of the impact fee, which was created in 2012, we’re going to approach this summer as an industry $2 billion that will be paid into the the Pennsylvania sort of call it ecosystem 60% of that 2 billion goes to local communities where the activity is occurring, the drilling is occurring, and 40% goes to the general budget or the general fund. And that’s not including corporate tax, payroll tax, etc. So these benefits, right are sort of superimposed or a mirror image of what’s going on with some of the pain and the twists and turns that occur with those that are manufacturing widgets, so to speak, or the natural gas producers themselves. And it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting comparison,

Robert Bryce 21:44
the pain and the drilling sector. In nobodies, one’s going to hold a bake sale for the oil and gas guys, right? That’s not they’re not they’re not very politically popular. But your your your overall point is it all, you know, yes, many billions of dollars were lost, but consumers benefited. And that’s the way the market should work is that your point?

Nick DeIuliis 22:03
Everyone benefited because everyone utilizes carbon, everyone utilizes energy. And it’s a very stark contrast to what you see when you net out the map with respect to renewables. So that example that I just laid out when it comes to natural gas, and the carbon based side of things, it’s in stark contrast to what happens when you look at almost opposite policies when it comes to wind and solar, which are sucking up huge amounts of subsidy off the backs inevitably, indirectly, one way or another, off the backs of those consumers of those people that use energy, which is all of us, and then either repacking it into corporations that are looking to, to basically game the system via the subsidy or design themselves to maximize that or other entities. So it’s an interesting contrast in my mind, where on one hand, you’ve got free market, innovation, disruptive technology, bringing to bear a much cheaper, more prolific opportunity via energy, and all the benefits that are derived from it for everyone outside of that industry that utilizes it, despite the short term pain to the industry, versus the other side of this, which is, you know, the subsidized sort of state mandated model that is costing for sure, right, hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions depending on which package and how wide you want to draw your map that consumers and everyday people in the end are going to end up paying for. And you look at what the the net benefit is, across these, these different sort of metrics, you start to wonder, where exactly is the benefit.

Robert Bryce 23:38
So back up just one second, because you talked about Pennsylvania as a whole. And you haven’t, I didn’t check these numbers just today or the last in the last week. But if memory serves Pennsylvania is now producing something on the order of 20 billion cubic feet a day of gas is that in the neighborhood

Nick DeIuliis 23:52
of Pennsylvania, in total on an annual basis is probably producing about 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year. Just to put that in context, 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is somewhere around enough energy to heat 15 million homes for a year. And the the export of the 7 trillion I think Pennsylvania, in terms of its total consumption of natural gas is maybe around 1.6 trillion cubic feet. So we’re producing seven, and we’re only utilizing in state about 1.6. So the net of that would be exported. And again, it’s export to other regions within the United States. It’s exported internationally. To those countries like Poland and Japan and India. It’s exploited basically all across the map.

Robert Bryce 24:36
Sure. So you you put it in annual figure seven TCF a year. I had a daily figure but if memory serves Pennsylvania is producing now more getting natural gas than the entire country of Canada. Is that is that right?

Nick DeIuliis 24:53
Yes. And the Appalachian basin when you start to include beyond Pennsylvania, Northern West Virginia and Eastern Ohio, which falls within the basin footprint, the numbers even more impressive. We’re sitting basically upon the largest and the lowest cost. So it’s one thing to be the largest. It’s another thing to be the lowest cost. But to be the largest and the lowest cost, sort of feedstock or source of natural gas in the world, is certainly an epic strategic advantage that we would be foolish not to take full advantage of and utilize to our benefit, whether us is the United States or the state of Pennsylvania, or the the region here in the Pittsburgh area and western Pennsylvania itself.

Robert Bryce 25:35
So I want to talk about your I just looked on Amazon, you’ve written a new book called The leech. And that is going to be released next year, I think, in January 2022. Is that right?

Nick DeIuliis 25:49
looks like it’ll, it’ll be towards the end of this year, early next year. But I’ll tell you, what I really am thinking through is a way to get that message out sooner. So stay tuned on on timing. But yeah, we’re working out the timing of when, when the release of that might be

Robert Bryce 26:02
let me come back to the book in just a moment that I want to talk first about you’ve been on your website, Nick de leus, calm, you’ve been writing a lot and posting your, your own ideas about the state of the economy. Let’s talk about ESG. Because one of the things that’s been interesting how and in my view is how quickly this environmental, social and governance call for better environmental, social and governance rules within corporations. has, has rocked the boat, the financial markets, and I would say the oil and gas industry more than any other recent I don’t know what to call it a social movement, a financial movement. Give me just a very quick rundown of how you see this push for ESG. And what Larry Fink at BlackRock has said we’re gonna we’re not going to support a new coal fired power plants, we’re not the bilateral lenders are saying we’re not going to invest in hydrocarbon projects. But what’s your view on this? Because this is something that seems to me in terms of the oil and gas industry in particular, is going to be a big issue and maybe the dominant issue for oil and gas producers for a long time to come. How do you see it?

Nick DeIuliis 27:14
Well, as he said, he has she is front and center to a lot of a lot of attention in the corporate world, including the energy space, no doubt about it. And ESG is another piece of the broader discussion. Sometimes it’s with respect to sustainability, and what that means and what it doesn’t mean, sometimes the social purpose of a business, stakeholder capitalism, we’ve seen these different terms, ESG is one is certainly rising to the fore among that group, over recent times. And I think there’s a like anything else that’s complicated, there is a good facet of it, there’s a bad facet of it. And frankly, there can be an ugly facet of it. And that’s sort of the way I think about that and break that down. So on the good side, the good vsga is that, typically, when you look at industries, and certainly natural gas is an industry that, that this correlates to the safest and most compliant operators are also the lowest cost and most profitable. So there is certainly a case to be made that good stewardship, when it comes to safe operation, environmentally compliant operation, it cetera, correlates to strong financial performance. And that’s a good investment opportunity. Okay, so that that is clearly something that we’ve seen time again, across a range of industries, most of them, including manufacturing energy, those types of endeavors. And figuring out which one of those entities fits that mold. That’s a lot of hard work, a lot of details, a lot of constant monitoring. And it doesn’t lend itself to a quick and easy screening way to assess that, that sort of that sort of performance. So when you get into the bad of ESG, it’s typically when you take this premise, which is a solid premise of good environmental performance, solid safety, performance, good community relations with respect to the areas that you operate within, taking the long view, long term ism versus short termism that translates to good investment opportunities, and then trying to boil it down into a very simple, easy to apply formula on a spreadsheet. That’s where sort of the bad falls into it. Because when you do that, you’re basically losing the ability to effectively screen and assess companies, these entities, these industries, because it’s very complicated requires constant work to be able to do that. So when you look at Big

Robert Bryce 29:49
One of the things that it seems, you know, if you say ESG, the good, the bad and the ugly, the part that to me seems that it’s from what I’ve seen is that the the the the one of the defining mechanisms are defining criteria in the whole ESG rubric is co2, and that that more than any other thing is at play is that how do you see it.

Nick DeIuliis 30:11
So co2 is certainly a big piece of the EA. But we can get into co2 discussions, because the fact of the matter is some entities that are deemed to be sort of co2 friendly or carbon free, or zero carbon sources, they’re not that, that there’s simply not that. And examples there, of course, are wind and solar, where if you look at the life cycle, carbon intensity of wind at scale, or solar at scale, it has a tremendous, or they have a tremendous carbon footprint and a co2 impact. But that’s looking at across the the true lifecycle versus looking at what the carbon footprint might be at just a point. And that development chain,

Robert Bryce 30:55
interrupted there. Because you’re you’re saying if you because I can already hear people’s hearing that and saying, Yeah, you know, he’s, you know, again, here’s the Uli is talking his book, but you’re saying wind and solar, if you count the backup generation that’s required behind them and that co2 footprint or what, how are you? Because you made kind of a broad statement they’re

Unknown Speaker 31:15
doing Yep.

Nick DeIuliis 31:17
So let’s take an example. And I’m specifically talking to the sort of apples to apples comparison at scale. So if you look at the state of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, has incentives to look at things like wind power, and wind generation, I wouldn’t use solar because Pennsylvania is not exactly the sunniest place in the nation. So let’s make it easier. Let’s look at wind. If you wanted to replace a natural gas combined cycle term and say 650 megawatts of natural gas fired generation, you would need a couple 102 to 300, state of the art large wind turbines to do that. Okay, let’s assume that you’ve got the ridge lines in Pennsylvania to put them in the locations that they need to be to perform in an acceptable manner. That’s there’s only so many of those Ridge lines, but let’s assume that we’ve got those to do that type of a an endeavor when it comes to wind generation to the tune of 650 megawatts and call it 300 turbans, it first you have to go mine, all the materials that you need to construct the turbines. And most of those materials do not reside in the United States. So the mining of those materials are going to have a tremendous carbon footprint, basically surface mining, extractive mining, very carbon intensive, then you’ve got to go process all those materials. And typically, you’re going to process them close to the mining location, which again, is typically going to be offshore, that processing is going to be done on the back of carbon, it’s going to be carbon powered, to get that done, then you’re going to manufacture the facilities. And or the I’m sorry, the components and those manufacturing facilities are going to be powered by carbon. Electricity, typically, it’s going to be carbon back, whether it’s in China, or whether it’s somewhere else, then you got to ship the components for the turbans to the United States. I don’t care if you’re using ships, planes, trains, whatever you’re using carbon based. When you get them here, you’ve got to clear the trees, you got to pour the concrete for the pads for these hundreds of turbans, and then you’ve got to install them. And then you’ve got to build transmission lines to basically link up all the transmission distribution network, okay, to the system with you know, and then when the wind doesn’t blow, you know, to your point, what do you do? Well, the answer is you got to go with something that’s instantly reliable. What’s that going to be? That’s gonna be natural gas fired generation. So the carbon footprint on a lifecycle basis. And by the way, wind turbines typically have what a seven to 10 year life before they need to be replaced and recycled. Or if they can be recycled, the life cycle intensity on a carbon basis, something like wind at scale, is tremendously large. It is not, quote unquote, renewable energy, there is no such thing as truly renewable energy. Everything at the end of the day has a carbon footprint. And the carbon footprint of something like wind at scale, when you look at the realities is quite large. So when you get into ESG, and you start talking about co2, again, the easy way of looking at it is to say, well, natural gas fired generation or natural gas itself has a co2 footprint of this and wind zeros easy. Let’s put zero in for wind. That’s, that’s quick, that’s easy, and that’s flawed. And to do the work properly to assess that is a really complicated endeavor. But we do know, qualitatively the carbon footprints very large for something like wind or solar. So okay, good.

Robert Bryce 34:37
So I’m glad to walk through that and I see your point. And so the good is that you’re rewarding performance safe and compliant operation. The bad is that you’re saying it’s it’s, it’s the an analyzing what what fits is what would qualify as good is complex. So what’s the ugly Give me the brief on On the ugly part of ESG.

Nick DeIuliis 35:03
So what typically will happen, in many instances under this type of a situation is that the corporations, and you can pick an industry, let’s pick the the utility industry is one and specificity here for this discussion. They know that ESG is a concern of investors. And they know I’m sure that legitimate, tangible, ESG performance on those measurables, like safety and emissions that you can measure and track on a day in and day out basis correlates to strong financial performance. But then they also know there’s this tremendous attention on it. So what many corporations do and what many companies do is they turn it into a public relations effort. So what you’ll see is you’ll see annual reports that the talk and sort of the happy bromides and the aspirational, you’ll see pledges that typically have a 1015 2025 year horizon, to them, where the person that’s making the pledge, probably won’t even be working or plan to be working in that position, when the time comes due to see if you hit the hit the target or not. And you start to basically turn it into a big PRF. And when you do that, that sort of placates in some instances, the investment houses that are trying to make these quick and easy screening decisions. And then you’ve got other entities that rank these and give awards out for who’s the most sustainable, or the most ESG friendly in the utility space, or the manufacturing space, or whatever the case might be. And everything on the surface looks very, very good. So you’re getting corporations getting awards. It’s passing scrutiny under sort of ESG filters that are quick and easy. And everybody thinks that all as well. And that’s exactly what an entity like Pacific Gas and Electric in California, had been doing for years. I mean, they were sort of the belle of the ball. And they were getting awards left and right, for all the great things that they were doing and how ESG friendly they were. And then when you look at what was happening underneath all of that, it brought forth a really ugly situation, because what was happening was that the utility, so you got that PR effort on one side, you’ve also got a PVC sitting over the Public Utilities Commission sitting over it, that is basically mandating the billions of dollars that used to go into maintenance of grid reliability, there’s transmission and distribution towers, etc, is being re shifted reallocated to things like charging stations and the promotional efforts for ESG. And in solar, wind, all these other things, right. And what was happening was the infrastructure and the resiliency of that infrastructure was degrading year after year after year, to the point where we all know what happened. But what people don’t realize beyond the wildfires and the death and the destruction that occurred, was it what caused that initial campfire to start was it was a 90 plus year old hook on a transmission tower that broke and the hook broke 90, some years old, almost 100 year old hook, and the transmission line fell to the ground sparked some brush. It was a windy day. And before you know it, tragedy on an epic scale ensue. And then you put on top of it, what the fallout was with respect to that these rolling blackouts. And looking at the price that’s going to be paid by effectively everyone, no matter if you’re elderly and retired, small business owner, large manufacturer, homeowner doesn’t matter. Everybody’s paying the price right now in the pg&e footprint and rate base, and the bankruptcy that ensued because of it. So what you saw there was what happens when a couple of sort of myths come to bear. One is the myth of zero carbon. And how you can do that on a reliable and on an actual basis to is the the focus on sort of the facade of ESG instead of the substance of ESG, you know, sort of running toward what is easier and sort of shiny or from a promotional perspective, instead of the hard day to day work, the good ESG performance demands. And you accumulate that over the course of yours to the tune of billions of dollars of capital, Miss allocation malinvestment, okay, what you get is a situation like pg&e, and what’s happened on a macro scale in California is that you took a first rate utility grid, and you turn it into a third world utility grid by design by design.

Robert Bryce 39:32
Well, let me let me let me let me follow that because it’s so if I’m gonna paraphrase what you said that the ugly is this, this too narrow focus on what would qualify and would what satisfied the PR approach or the public facing thing and then in attention to the core of the business and making the business run as well as it possibly can as safely as it can because I agree with you, it is the malinvestment, and I would argue one of the Reasons for the blackouts in in Texas was massive malinvestment too much focus on on wind and solar and not enough on on resilient and reliable sources of generation. But let’s follow up on the net zero part of this because I know you’ve written about that as well. And I don’t know, I can’t tell you how many pledges I’ve seen excuse me from from corporations from you know, cities that were going to be net zero. And, and I want to want to ask you, you know why, you know, what motivates you on this? But what are the fundamental flaws in this in this thinking about net zero what you’ve been, you’ve written about it on your, on Nick de leus.com. In said, essentially, that there’s no, you said, there’s no such thing as zero carbon net zero future. You said, this is true for companies, a state and household, the net zero carbon myth defies science and the laws of thermodynamics. So

Nick DeIuliis 40:56
so we gave the example of a company like Pacific Gas and Electric, but all of this and we’ll talk through maybe some some examples beyond companies. But all this really comes down to sort of a fan of the literary world. I’m a big Ernest Hemingway fan. And the last line of the Sun Also Rises is a really famous line in the literature, right? It’s the last line of the novel, was one of the main characters saying, isn’t it pretty to think so? Okay, and people always have debated What did he mean by that? Isn’t that just a, an epic statement? But that that line from Hemingway, isn’t it pretty to think so? That basically sums up this concept of net zero carbon beautifully. It is a wonderful concept. Unfortunately, it cannot happen. It just cannot happen under the laws of science and with engineering. So when you look at net zero pledges, I would go to a couple of comments, one, oftentimes, net right, what does that mean? Like show me the formula of what net means when as soon as I seen that, I get a little suspicious about sort of some gamesmanship going on about well, I’ll take this. It’s sort of like in the public company world, not a big fan of some financial metrics. But whenever you hear someone say, our cash flow was this, but instead they say, our adjusted cash flow, is this Be on the lookout that Oh, why do you need to adjust it? Why not just tell us what your cash flow or your earnings were? Why adjusted this or adjusted that? So net, makes me suspicious that there’s some creative math going on within that network. So why didn’t he take

Robert Bryce 42:33
some Enron accounting? Yes, yeah. So let me interrupt for just one second here, because my first book was on Enron, and your point about ESG, and Pacific Gas and Electric. Just one quick point, it just in the year that it failed, Enron was the most admired company in America, right. And it’s right had been the most admired company in America in Fortune Magazine’s rankings for several years in a row seven or eight years in a row. So here was the company that had a lot of public press, you know, is very praised for all of its operations. And yet they weren’t making any money, and which was, was what came out to be a real problem. But anyway, so you’re saying it back to the Enron accounting around net zero, you’re saying you just don’t believe that the accounting, it will work, because they’re not in the net is the key word there,

Nick DeIuliis 43:21
then that is the key word. And you’re being disingenuous when you’re doing the carbon ledger, the carbon tabulation, you’re only looking at what the wind turbine, let’s say is doing when it’s spinning and already installed and not at scale, you’re not looking at the true life cycle, carbon footprint of that turban, because from a co2 perspective, right, if we’re concerned about co2 levels in the atmosphere, it doesn’t matter where the co2 molecule was emitted from, I mean, the fact that if you put a windmill and the fact that when the windmill is turning, it may not be emitting carbon or carbon dioxide is irrelevant. If prior to that point, you had to emit a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to get it to that point. So take a city and we talked about companies take a city like Boston, which is another great example of this. Now Boston and its leadership is as progressive as it comes when you look at ESG and, and net zero carbon and the like. So right now, basically, Boston, Massachusetts, New England, New York State, basically have prohibited through various means any pipeline infrastructure, its new from being built from the Appalachian basin again, the largest lowest cost reserve of natural gas in the world right next door into say, Boston city gate. And when you do that, right,

Robert Bryce 44:42
and we’ve seen this by the way in New York as well, where Governor Cuomo has repeatedly blocked new pipeline capacity into into Long Island into the city of New York, even though the city mandated a move away from fuel oil toward natural gas, so a similar blockade on new pipe infrastructure. Please go ahead.

Nick DeIuliis 45:01
That’s right. So why did they do it? Well, they applaud themselves with that sort of enlightened leadership because he or she, they’ll hide behind netzero carbon climate change, the green future and a zero carbon economy. But the reality today in Boston, I think, is a pretty interesting one. So you stop those pipeline capitalization projects and what we would call infrastructure, ironically, projects from being built. You don’t want the natural gas or the methane from the Pennsylvania worker. So what did you end up with in Boston, we end up with in Boston is a you’re getting, you’re still using natural gas, and you’re getting your natural gas via LNG, liquefied natural gas is being imported from Russia. So in the dead of winter, when it’s freezing cold in Boston, and they need natural gas, basically, to keep the lights on and to heat the homes. The LNG tanker that’s out in Boston Harbor is coming from Russia. So basically, this policy by design, has shunned the Pennsylvania worker right next door in the lower cost form of methane via Pennsylvania, and is embraced someone like pueden. And someone who, frankly, is not afraid to use energy as a geopolitical weapon, their supply chain, their supply line for energy development, went from a couple 100 miles within its own country, to 4000 plus miles. And on the other end of that, right started with, with someone who strategically views us as the enemy, not not a friend. And then on top of it, if you’re also relying on wind and solar, the wind and the solar components, as we discussed, have a tremendous carbon footprint, and on top of it, highly unlikely that they’re manufactured in any material way, shape, or form in the United States. So strategically, effectively. And from a resiliency and reliability perspective, you have basically turned your back on the closest, most like, lowest cost, most reliable option, and embrace the exact opposite of that. And who’s going to pay the price of that the people and the individuals or the stakeholders that will pay the price are going to be again, homeowners, citizens, those that are in socio economic deprived areas within Boston, anything and everything that uses energy, and it’s going to be one of the most regressive taxes that you can imagine. So you can look at this from a company or a corporate perspective and utility industry and Pacific Gas and Electric. But you can also look at this with respect to government. And we’re just again, using Boston as an example. But unfortunately, you brought up Texas, but there are many, many examples to choose from that are out there today. And I think, Texas and what happened there with our cod and freeze, Boston and what will inevitably happen in Boston, when it gets really hot in the summer, or really cold in the winter. And pg&e in California. I fear that those examples are turning from exceptions into common occurrences across our country.

Robert Bryce 48:06
It’s interesting you bring that up because just yesterday was looking at a study that was done by a survey of commercial and industrial electricity users and they were commenting in fact that they’d seen a significant decrease in the in the quality of the power that they’re getting from the grid and and higher incidence incidences of outages that was costing them real money. So there’s, there’s these knock on effects that you you mentioned here, I think are really interesting. And I’ll just add a quick point there because the one of the things that I was talking to some Oklahoma cooperatives now this is three or four months ago and one of the guys that you know we were talking and he commented he said, well if you don’t have reliability or affordability goes down the tubes right if you don’t have reliable energy then the affordability issue becomes a real problem when we’ve seen that here in the in the black in the wake of the blackouts here in Texas, where solar and battery vendors are saying hey, you want reliable power here put solar panels on the roof of your house and get a generator your battery pack other people are buying generators, that’s essentially a new tax that’s being imposed because of the lack of reliability and I have a friend of mine is in the utility business in California he’s his his coworkers are buying generators because they can’t rely there. They work for the utility and their cost of power effectively has gone up dramatically because they can’t be sure of reliable grid power. Anyway, so that’s just a quick observation.

Nick DeIuliis 49:32
Well, you the other interesting comparison there too and jumping back over to Boston on the other coast. Many people in New England in the Boston area right they heat homes in the winter based off of propane or home heating oil. They’re the biggest proportional user consumer of that an entire nation and to your point right just like the the generator comment with the utility workers in California, that’s that’s because of the lack of confidence in the Unreal liability of what’s going on with with Boston and Massachusetts and New England’s energy policy. So ironically, in the age of 2021, you got a lot of homeowners in New England, they’re basically heating our homes very much the same way that throw did when he was writing well, and that seems to be ridiculous in 2021. But but there you go with the unintended consequences and frankly, the reality of how you know, some of these policies that are aimed at it certain environmental ideologies or, or aspirations end up playing out.

Robert Bryce 50:37
I’m a fan of Joel kotkin has a demographer. And he lives in Los Angeles writes a lot about the class issues in California. And he published something recently about the the, the big divide in America is yes, it’s left, right. It’s blue, red, urban, rural, but he said it’s a division between the energy producing states and the energy consuming states. And what’s your comment on that, but I also want this, it seems to me as well, that there’s there’s a there’s a cultural battle at play here in between the and I think this is one of the points that you make in in your upcoming book, The leech, and the subtitle is a mouthful, and I’m going to read it here, and indictment of the evil sapping America depleting free enterprise and bleeding producers. Now, that’s, that’s a, that’s a, it’s a potent title. But it seems to me you’re in your book, you’re addressing this divide, aren’t you? I mean, that this divide between the producers and the consumers, but the consumers want to condemn the producers. That seems to me there’s a, there’s a cultural battle here that I would even frame as the coastal elites, and I don’t like that term. But that’s how I’m increasingly convinced that that’s what we’re facing. overstating or? Let me ask the direct question. So is this a culture war? And how does your book address this?

Nick DeIuliis 52:04
I think there’s definitely a war that is brewing. And it’s one that to your point, it’s not Democrat, Republican, it’s not rich, poor, urban, rural, there’s different, different dividing lines that we’ve seen throughout our history, I think the big dividing line today is one group, that is what I’ll call the doers, right? The producers, the the individuals, the businesses, the people that go out, and basically create value, they create value, they take on risk, they create value, they might be fantastically successful, they might be a complete failure, but they’re out there creating value each and every day. And their net contributors, whether it’s taxes, whether it’s value, whether it’s economic growth, or net contributors to the engine. And then there’s a group on the other side, that is increasingly growing, that is structured and built upon a growing array and complexity of bureaucracy, rules, regulations, policies, right, some of them very altruistic in nature, right, they sound really good on the surface. But in the end, they’re all designed to create complexity that those individuals entities and organizations can feed off of. And what you’re seeing is a net zero sum game, where every widget dollar GDP point that’s created a value by that first group is increasingly being consumed by the second group.

Robert Bryce 53:34
So So just to be clear, let me interrupt sir, is it is it that Stark? And is that really what your books about the the divide between the doers and the leeches? Because it is a pretty strong label?

Nick DeIuliis 53:48
Yeah, and looking at the nature of what’s going on, it really is the difference between creating value and appropriating value. So again, going to something like environmental policy and green subsidy or green mandates or renewable credits, etc. and Texas, I think was a wonderful example of this, if left to science and engineering in the free market, okay, you would not see anything that closely resembles what the Texas grid is today, or more importantly, where it’s heading. Okay. And the reason it’s where it’s at today and where it’s heading, ie the the emphasis and the weighting that it has on wind and solar. And the rest is because of rules, regulations, policies and complexities that were created to allow for lack of a better term, I call it rent seeking. And when you look at the rent seeking now you’ve got on top of it, these are not necessarily small entities or, or individuals. These are very large multibillion dollar corporations whose entire business model is built off of optimizing off of the regulation or the credit or the subsidy or the mandate. If you look across our economy, and you look across our society, that is a very fast growing segment of the total to the point where, again, there’s only so much value, or it was it Margaret Thatcher that said, at some point, socialism fails, because you run out of other people’s money, right? There’s only so much that you can reprocess or basically appropriate before, you know, things under under the laws of math start to to not compute in collapse. And I fear because, you know,

Robert Bryce 55:32
we’re right about an hour and I don’t want to go too much over an hour here, Nick. And just a reminder, I’m talking to Nick de leus. He’s the CEO of CNS resources Corporation, they’re on the web@cnn.com. Nick’s own website is Nick de yulia.com. It’s Nick de IU l wi s. So let me let me cut to the end point here, because your book isn’t going to come out for several months. And it’s in I hear in your tone and your argument that there’s an there’s an anger that if I’m reading you, right, that is motivated you to to do this, right, we are being very outspoken and using some, frankly, some fairly an inflammatory label, but a very unflattering label, the leech is not a is not a flattering term. So why did you write the book and why now? I mean, we can talk about it later, when you you know, come back on the podcast when the book comes out. But you’re leveling some very strong charges that you don’t see out of corporate leaders very often. So you’re Are you going out on a limb here? And why did you write it

Nick DeIuliis 56:41
goes back to where we started. And again, I’m writing this definitely from the perspective of a passion, a passion for the the energy industry, a passion for the region that I’m from, and basically, a passion for the middle class, got a love for those groups and those entities and anything I can do to support them, promote them, protect them, highlight them, I think there’s a duty to do that, it goes back to what we discussed at the beginning, you hear again, a lot of talk today, in the business world, in the corporate world, about the social purpose of a business and stakeholder capitalism, and the need to lead beyond sort of profit and loss. And that, I guess, conveniently has been described one way, but I view it a different way I view it as duty and ethical duty to speak truth. And if you’ve got, as I said, the math or the science or the engineering behind you, or you see what’s occurring on a day in and day out basis, it’s hurting, or damaging a region or your customer base, or the stakeholders that, that you’re there to serve. There’s a duty that goes with it, to not sort of subscribe to what I used to subscribe to, which is more of I guess you’d call it political quietism. And instead, to take a leadership role and speak from from a position of logic and rational thought. So there’s definitely a passion there. With respect to to what is at stake. And I think energy in many ways is ground zero for a lot of us. I think you see some of this in other industries. I think you’re starting to see this in the tech industry, but ground zero for the battle,

Robert Bryce 58:21
the ground zero for the outlook on what society should how society should be, should be focused. I mean, how do you mean Ground Zero?

Nick DeIuliis 58:30
So back to your comment about what was his one potential dividing line between sort of energy producing states and those that consume energy? I think the reason you see a lot of this debate in it centers around the energy industry and energy producing states is that those endeavors are largely endeavors of doers, those are those are endeavors of producers that are taking on the risk, the workers are putting everything they’ve got into it. Thus, you know, there’s there’s a tradition, and a history and a reality, that these are the producers of society. And when you look at some of the policies, and regulations and situations that increasingly we are finding ourselves in, many of them are designed in some way, shape or form to appropriate that opportunity. And that has big implications not just in the energy space, but in areas like western Pennsylvania, where there’s a whole generation of kids out there in high school right now, many of which don’t want to go get a four year college degree in our industry, along with manufacturing is their best and brightest hope for immediate career and immediate profession with family sustaining jobs and wages. So there’s a lot at stake here. It’s a it goes beyond just sort of the methane molecule or where you’re getting your kilowatt hour from. And that’s because energy touches and drives everything that you can imagine in society. So getting it right is paramount. getting it wrong will be tragic. So I want to make sure that the We get it right. And I think energy sort of is one of those pillars under the foundation to make sure that this ends up on the right side of things.

Robert Bryce 1:00:07
So then what’s the cure? Let me let me finish with this. There were like two more questions after this. But what’s the cure? Nick, then you, you’ve diagnosed the problem and your your, your, your identification? And I think, you know, I agree with many of the points you’re making, that the energy issue is fundamental to how America sees itself. And the shale revolution has fundamentally changed America’s stance in the world in terms of geopolitics of energy, we’ve gone from a net energy importer, or a major importer of oil and gas to a major exporter of both of those commodities as well as natural gas liquids. So what’s the cure? Your book, which I haven’t read, but I’m familiar with the title, what? What’s the cure here? What is the what’s the way we’ve go forward?

Nick DeIuliis 1:00:50
I think, first things first, we have to go back and look at things very logically. So you take something like the climate change, discussion and debate is a very complicated situation with many sub texts and sub issues within it. And I think the most fundamental misunderstanding that’s been placed out there and people just accepted that aren’t familiar with it, is that there is such a thing as truly renewable or zero carbon energy forms of production. I think once people understand what the true carbon footprint is of wind, or of solar, what it really means at scale, whether it’s for Texas, or Boston, or California, I think the light ball pun intended, will go off in people’s heads saying, oh, wait a minute, that is not a truly zero carbon or zero co2 form of electricity or of energy. Therefore, what is its footprint? And then to if it’s not all that different, or maybe in some instances worse than natural gas higher than natural gas? Let’s get back to the basics of reliability, resiliency, and affordability of energy. And if we could do that,

Robert Bryce 1:01:57
you’re you’re arguing we need, we need a better understanding of what I guess I put it this way, we need to better see where the energy is coming from and what that what that energy balance, energy balance is, is that is that what you’re saying? Is that a fair? I’m rephrasing what you said, but it’s, we need a more honest accounting of what where the energy is coming from and what those sunk costs are those those that the all in accounting is for those energy forms, land use, resource intensity, etc.

Nick DeIuliis 1:02:27
That’s right. If If a Texan or a Californian or a Bostonian thinks or is told that if you can tirely go to wind and solar, and the light switch will go on whenever you need it. And the cost is going to be as low if not lower than the alternative. And it’s going to be zero carbon zero co2 footprint, well, then why wouldn’t you be for that, right. But if the reality, if the math and the science dictate almost the exact opposite of that, that the co2 footprint is quite large, it’s not improving the co2 concentration in the atmosphere, the cost net net, when you account for all the subsidies and the shuffling of different credits and whatnot, back and forth, that the net cost to your community to your checkbook, to the society is higher than it was, and that the reliability of that power that is in that energy that is basically the bedrock of everything you’d want to do, whether you’re a restaurant owner, or you’re running a steel plant, the reliability and the resiliency have gone down, then suddenly, a totally different perspective, and outlook on where you’d want to head. So I think this gets back first and foremost, to just facts, rational logic, data, and science. And if you do that, you’re going to want some form of an all of the above type of a portfolio of energy, you know, creation, and you’re going to want things like the free market, ingenuity, innovation to drive advancements and continuous improvement. What we’ve got right now, and what we’re talking about in Washington, are very different than that. And I suspect that that’s going to lead to some serious consequences. And to say that there are unintended consequences at this point, based on what we’ve seen so far. And those three examples we’ve been talking about. I think that’s a bit of a stretch. I think at this point, they’re sort of morphing into they should be anticipated consequences versus unintended consequences.

Robert Bryce 1:04:21
Last two things, Nick. So what are you reading you you obviously you’ve spent a lot of time in your in your job it’s no it’s you’re busy but what do you read when you’re not working your fiction guy nonfiction.

Nick DeIuliis 1:04:36
I’m both I got a lot of rice on my bookshelves. So I got I got a few of your, your your work products up there. I enjoy them tremendously. Also, I’ve been reading quite a bit frankly, on sort of the classic economics and economists side of things. So whether it’s Friedman, Milton Friedman more recently or hyack, or the line I think today, they resonate louder than ever, I think it would be a really good exercise, whether it’s in high school or college economics courses, or, frankly, a lot of our policymakers to give those individuals a read and a refresh. Because a lot of the things that we’re trying right now and some of the paths we’re heading down, they’ve been tried and we’ve headed down those or societies have ended down those before. And we know how it ends. So I think that’s sort of a timely, sort of area of study.

Robert Bryce 1:05:31
Sure. Last question, then Nick, what gives you hope?

Nick DeIuliis 1:05:36
What, what gives me hope? A couple things one, this this nation is blessed with an abundance of energy innovation, energy resource, energy ingenuity. So when you look at what I call it, the potential right the potential energy of the energy industry within the United States, it is at an all time high, it’s never been higher. And that, that people think that I’m anti wind anti solar, I’m anti Miss truth. So I’m, I’m for wind and solar development, as much as any other form of energies that are out there.

Robert Bryce 1:06:08
Your anti Miss truth is that what Yes,

Nick DeIuliis 1:06:10
nantai Miss truth. So, you know, I’m against thinking that wind and solar are zero carbon, or zero co2, I am all for wind and the appropriate applications of it, where it makes sense or solar solar in Arizona, to me seems like a good idea, right? solar in Pennsylvania doesn’t make much sense to me. But, so we’ve got that going for us. We’ve got a culture of free enterprise, we’ve got a culture of capitalism, a culture of doing, that’s good. And really, if you allow those two things to ferment, really good things are gonna happen for this nation. Because today, again, sitting at an all time high with that first thing, the potential energy of the energy industry, we’ve got the chance not just to improve our standing, and quality of life, but we’ve got the chance I think of you asked about why write the book and the passion. There’s a billions of poor on the planet earth that have no access to electricity right now. they desperately need it, they desperately deserve it. I think the energy industry and things like natural gas can get that to them quicker and cheaper than anything else. There are a lot of geo political positioning and saber rattling going on right now. When I think of the Chinese Communist Party, and I think of what’s going on in Russia, and how we can help our friends in those neighborhoods, like a Poland or an India or Japan, nothing can help them more, I think, then the American energy industry, I think it’s as big of a geopolitical lever as an aircraft carrier fleet. I really do. And you start to look at the externality benefits and what this can do on the environmental front, when it comes to air quality and everything else. I think the potential for us, is the best it’s ever been. We just have to get it right, when it comes to policy. And what I’m thinking through on this and what gives me hope is that these examples of we’re running into with Texas and Boston in California, at some point soon again, I keep using that pun, the light bulb goes off with the American public, and we get to a more rational position on how we embark on energy policy. Good.

Robert Bryce 1:08:13
Well, let’s stop there. My guest Nick de Yulia, CEO of scenics resources Corporation, they’re at cnn.com. He’s on the web at Nick de leus.com. His book, The leech will be published I think, in early 2021 or early 2022. Rather, or possibly prior to that, but you’ll keep us posted on that. Once you Nick.

Nick DeIuliis 1:08:34
Stay tuned. Yeah, news to come shortly on that. Okay,

Robert Bryce 1:08:37
good. Well, thanks, Nick, for the alias for being on the power hungry podcast. Thanks to all you out there in podcast land for tuning in to this episode of the power hungry podcast Tune in next time for an even Well, hopefully be even better, we’ll hope is even better than the one today. So thanks again to all of you. Until next time.

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