Solar Myths, Nuclear Truths, and the Future of Energy

Jed Dorsheimer welcomes Doomberg for an in-depth discussion on the complexities of renewable energy integration and its impact on grid efficiency, exploring the challenges posed by the variability of renewables, the resurgence of nuclear power, and the critical role of natural gas in bridging the energy transition. The conversation also delves into the geopolitical implications of energy supply, the future of AI-driven energy demands, and the economic theories surrounding energy’s role in the global economy.

Podcast Transcript

00:05 – Jed Dorsheimer

All right. Well, welcome. My name is Jed Dorsheimer and I will be your host of the Plugged In Podcast, brought to you by William Blair. And I am, pleased to have with us what's quickly become really the go to for, energy analysis, which is Doomberg on Substack. I can say I'm a proud, pro subscriber myself and avidly look forward to your, pieces that come out.

And I think, you know, previously been on the podcast here. So, thank you for coming back. And, you know, it was the Burning Bridges report that you put out in September that I think, you know, caused me to reach back out and say, hey, let's get back on, particularly after we did this analysis on that gas in the role of AI, which I think changes pretty much, everything.

So, thank you for, for coming back.

01:01 – Doomberg

Jed. Great to be back. Always happy to talk to a pro subscriber. That's, so thank you for your business. And yes, we do think quite alike. And, and so when you sent the invitation to come back on, I was more than happy to, to accept it. Looking forward to another fantastic discussion.

01:16 – Jed D

Yeah. Thanks. I mean, I'd love to. You know, I'm not sure if you got a chance to read through our piece. One of the things that we did a meta-analysis. So, 471 peer reviewed, published pieces in scientific journals in terms of the basis and what we what we found, which is somewhat contrarian to the conventional narrative today, is that the variability of renewables being pushed on to RTOs, being pushed on to the grid in the US is causing the efficiency of the grid to come down, which is resulting in price increases.

And specifically, that happens over 5%. So, the grid is able to absorb less than 5% where you get the marginal benefit of the renewables and over 10% that the benefits where the asset is actually subsumed by the integration costs. I'm curious, you know, how that sits with you in terms of what we're seeing out there today in terms of price escalation as well as, you know, load growth demand that we haven't seen in quite some time.

02:31 – Doomberg

Yeah. I think first of all I did read that analysis and it was spot on. We came to a similar set of conclusions with perhaps a bit less analytical rigor. In a piece we published in July called No, Solar Isn't Cheap. And that issue is, as you explained it, there's a difference between the marginal cost to produce electricity at a point in time and the average cost charged to consumers integrated over time for the delivery of electricity when it is needed.

And we like to say that to compare electricity produced from solar to electricity produced from nuclear is akin to comparing a bag of potato chips to a banana. I mean, they're both food, but nobody would confuse the two as being substantially the same as it pertains to, you know, health benefits per calorie. And one of the big challenges, with intermittency is the need for a grid to perfectly match supply with demand.

And there's an all manner of incremental costs that have to be included in the overall cost of solar and wind in order to compensate for that inherent intermittency. And by the way, it's also true for hydro. You just have to extend the period of intermittency that you're measuring from hours of days to months and years. But eventually the intermittency of hydro will also make things more expensive because there's just extended periods of drought. There just are. All over the world, all the time, climate change or not. And so, what we see now is when you build too much solar onto a grid, first of all, you have to have all of that backup capacity, predominantly natural gas fired peaker plants, as I'm sure you know, and since these plants run rarely, you have to spread the full capital cost of maintaining them, building them, maintaining them, and operating them over, less, you know, kilowatt hours of power delivered.

But those expenses are still borne, and ultimately the customer has to pay them. And it actually gets worse as you get above, I think about 20%, because then you will experience vastly diminished returns for all of the solar players. So, when the sun is actually shining, everybody's solar panels are producing electricity, which drives prices negative.

And then when it's nighttime or cloudy day, prices become expensive, and the solar producers don't get to participate in that. That's sort of a crude you know, various markets have their own mechanisms to try to shave this stuff over. But at its core, solar makes the electricity grids more expensive, not cheap. And you could do an R² analysis of the major U.S. states as a function of their solar and wind penetration, and what their actual realized cost to consumers ends up being.

Now, of course, your R² is 1.99 because of politics and geography and various other variables that explain some of the variance. But on balance correcting for, you know, as many variables as you can. Once you get past a certain minimal amount, in most cases prices go up.

There are a few exceptions. So, for example, if you have a huge amount of hydroelectricity and you're during the periods of relatively normal rainfall, a hydroelectric plant is better able to act as a giant battery and is able to sort of, absorb solar and wind more efficiently. But that's pretty rare. And hydroelectricity comes with its own set of tradeoffs as well. So, I totally share your view. It was a great piece to read, and I think it's very clear what goes on. There's just a complete mismanagement of the propaganda around this where people claim all prices are negative. Look how cheap solar is.

Well, negative prices are bad for grids. They cause the entire grid to go up the price, and that's what we see.

06:19 – Jed D

Yeah. I mean, it took us a little bit to...it wasn't until we started getting real time hourly data in terms of, within the grid to see what was actually happening and what we found. So if you look at PJM, the start stop of peakers is actually, according to our data, the greatest on, PJM, which is the largest, ISO or balancing authority in the, in the US.

And so, what we found is happening is that variability is causing more start stops. And you need that so you don't blow up your substations. And so, you know, it would it's probably best described as, you know, moving from driving an ice vehicle on the highway to then going to city driving, your fuel economy comes down. These peakers, natural gas turbines, you know, the jet engines are acting in a very similar way. And so the more balancing that has to occur. Small increments of generation that are pushing that variability are actually causing the entire system to be less efficient. You know, curious your thoughts on that.

07:31 – Doomberg

So, I think that’s a primary driver. There's also a few secondary drivers that are just as important. Well, not just as important, but certainly important enough to realize which is with more intermittent renewables like solar in particular, you lose total grid inertia. And so, you have to actually invest in, mechanisms to ensure grid stability. So, because the manner in which solar generates electricity, direct current, you're not spinning these turbines. And so, you don't you can't absorb these tiny glitches. And we see increasing number of widescale power outages caused by tiny glitches somewhere in the grid that we wouldn't have experienced if it weren't for the decaying of the of the overall inertia of the grid. And so, to compensate for that, there are there are things you can do, and we wrote about this, but those things come with an expense as well. And so, what we're seeing, actually a booming business, is people who require high quality baseload for their manufacturing are investing, within their own fence lines, on into all manner of, of backup. It's valuable to have 6 to 9 hours of backup on your industrial facility to catch those glitches and so surges and power outages, and don't forget like grids are classic non-linear systems, it's a miracle that we can operate them in the way that we do. But if you have like something that would have been easily absorbed by the grid happening in a faraway county in Texas, and then all of a sudden you get a blackout in Houston, like the weather, the mechanism by which these events spread is often very difficult to model.

But overall, more inertia lacking sources of electricity, the more instability you have in the grid. And the whole point of the grid is to provide artificially cheap, very stable baseload power because it's a public good.

Electricity is actually worth much more than the average person pays for it, which is something you find out when you lose it.

And we're seeing that now across industries, especially those that are sensitive to blips in the grid, they're taking action, doing it themselves to sort of insulate themselves from the grid. And those expenses, since the public doesn't pay for them, are also off the books, but they do make the country less competitive, which is why we're seeing what's happening in Europe and in the UK.

We can lie to ourselves and say that point in time, negative prices is a sign of a cheap grid. But in reality, the physics bill will be paid by somebody. And we're seeing that today. This is why we're seeing the de-industrialization of Germany, for example.

09:56 – Jed D

Let me take the opposing side and, and kind of put my steelman hat for renewables on right now and say, well yes, all of these issues that we're, that we're talking about are largely a function of a legacy grid that has not been modernized and that nuclear, either fission or fusion, are not needed because we already have fusion, which is the sun showering down enough energy to power the world's needs.

If we just capture 2% of that and that the marginal cost should go to zero, because you're getting an exact, you know, from the laws of thermodynamics, we're going to remove the waste heat, which is about 66% of the thermal generation. I'm curious because that seems to be the and it's this sort of technology cornucopia and viewed that marginal cost of energy is going to asymptotically approach zero with renewables.

11:00 – Doomberg

Let's run the experiment. This is the greatest counter to this argument that I that we can conceive of it. We didn't conceive of it. We stole it from a blogger by the name of Manhattan Contrarian who writes pretty passionately on these subjects as well. Let's take a city of 10,000 people. Let's take the grid out that exists and build a new one from scratch with only solar, wind and batteries. And let's see how we do. Let's see what it costs.

It's amazing to me that we would spend trillions to run this experiment without actually taking the state utopian state and seeing whether it would work, and the true cost of storage and the amount that you would need would be very interesting variables to learn. You know, when you take a new product to market, in the material space, for example, which is where I come from, you do a pilot plant, then you do a market development plant, and then you build your first commercial facility.

And all along the way, as you go from the lab to a giant billion pound a year plant, you're learning. Why don't we pilot this idea? Let's take a city if that doesn't need to be a million, because, oh well you're going to disrupt the procurement of these critical supplies. But you know let's just take a city of 10,000 people. There's enough solar capacity in the world. There's enough battery capacity in the world. There's enough wind turbines in the world to make that happen and forbid them from using any fossil fuels across their economy, industrial transportation, home heating, you name it. Let's do it all with wind, solar and batteries and let's see how much it costs. I can guarantee you, A, it won't work and B, to force it to work would be prohibitively expensive, because you would need days and days and days of battery backup. You would get an unstable grid rolling blackouts, and no ability to have heavy industry in the city. But I'm open minded. Let's do it. Let's run the experiment.

12:47 – Jed D

Have you run some of those numbers?

12:49 – Doomberg

I mean, you don't really have to, but people don't take spreadsheet projections as seriously as they take with the demonstration. So, and by the way, the rules are yours. Set them as you see fit. Demonstrate to the world that the end state is worth the pain of the transition. Let's build a city from scratch. The homes are built now we’ve got to electrify it. Let's just get the grid that that wouldn't cost all that much. It certainly would cost less than the money we're wasting chasing this dream. Let's build it. How? You could run the math yourself. How much in true battery storage would you need for it?

13:24 – Jed D

So, I think that's the key question, because we’ve run the math. And so, you know, when you look at the conversion efficiency on, you know, when the sun is shining, then if you look at that as, I think PPAs for solar are sold at about $60 a megawatt. So, if we look at 100-megawatt type installation, I think some of the numbers that we came up with is that’s about, so that's going to be $60 million. And so really it comes back to storage. So, for every four hours of storage that's going to add about 30 million today to the project cost. So, if you only need four hours of that storage you're looking at, you know, 30MW, you're at $90 a megawatt hour, which is not which is not terrible.

The issue comes do you need to add 12 hours? You're adding 12 hours. By my math, you're now at $180, a megawatt. And so, as you start to compare with other technologies, you know, the beauty of fossils is they're dispatchable, and the capacity factor is much higher. I think that really comes back to what are your thoughts on how much storage is needed?

And if you start to go out, the longer you go out, the more you're going to escalate the costs.

14:41 – Doomberg

I think you need more than 120 hours, let alone 12 hours. That's the whole point of the of the demonstration like, especially which is insane to me, places like Germany and the UK and Michigan where for long periods of time in the winter you get almost no sun at all. The capacity factor, you could look it up. The capacity factor in the UK is 9% for solar. The capacity factor for solar in Germany is 11%. I'll even let you pick California. But in Arizona, an enormous amount of storage that you would need to make this work. And it's not going to be 12 hours because the minimum you need is 12 hours overnight. Right? I mean, like on average the sun shines 12 hours a day integrated across Europe roughly.

Right. But if you want to do it in like the northeast or you want to do it in Michigan or Minnesota or Wisconsin, they all need electricity too, Jed. And once you get down to like 10% capacity factors, which, by the way, is basically zero for much of the winter, then you need months, months of battery storage to make that work.

So, if you did it in the middle of the country, to be fair, where the capacity factors, you know, 18 to 20%, you're going to need 100 hours of battery storage, at a minimum, and even then you're going to have extended period of time where you're going to have a power outage.

15:55 – Jed D

So, I want to come back to something that's been very topical in the news. I know I talked to you about, natural gas, but I want to come back to your passion around, nuclear. You know, we're seeing big tech largely from a data center. The calculations. You know, I think it's safe to say that that we’ve been in a maintenance we've been blessed with the fact that the grid and our energy systems have largely been able to be in a maintenance mode for the past 40 years.

And so, we're now seeing levels of load growth from a combination of reshoring and AI and crypto. So, data center and migration patterns that that really you have to go back to the mid-70s to kind of see this level of, projected growth and, and perhaps even further based on, some of the estimates out there.

So, we're seeing kind of a resurgence on, nuclear. And I know you've been a passionate advocate of nuclear power for the electrical grid. I'm curious your thoughts on, what you're seeing, in how much is real versus more hand-wavy in the, in the markets.

17:03 – Doomberg

I think it's very real. It's going to take some time, but I think the Three Mile Island announcement was really a watershed. I think big tech funds, a lot of the environmental organizations that are the strongest opponents to nuclear, and they will be brought in line by big tech. Big tech will not be denied. So, we wrote a piece last November, almost a year ago, now called Fission Chips, where we predicted that the explosive need for electricity from AI would normalize nuclear energy again. Nuclear is expensive and takes a long time because of political choices. China is cranking them out, at a fraction of what it costs to do here. In a in a fraction of the time it takes to do it here. But I do think and as you mentioned at the top, we wrote this piece recently called, Bridge Burning. We're going to bridge the nuclear by burning natural gas. One thing that I think is coming that few people are talking about is there's going to be a decoupling of big tech from the grid. You're going, I think, for example, in the Permian, you'll see enclosed pods where natural gas goes in and data comes out, and it'll be disconnected from the grid. It might be more expensive for them to do it, but if they do all of that work on the grid, it'll be more expensive for everybody, which is going to hurt the poor disproportionately. And so, governments will intervene. Electricity is artificially low for the public and for most industry because, as you said, we were growing at a very reasonable rate, and we could maintain it.

And we had buffer. And it was sort of a public works societal good, like the highway system. The equivalent here is driving giant mining trucks on the highways instead of making mining companies build their own road of resources. Right. And we see roads of resources all over the country and all-over North America because the, you know, they have different needs and we don't want them tearing up, you know, the interstate.

And we're going to see the same thing with AI. We're going to see dedicated SMRs in a few years. Essentially uranium goes into the front end and data comes out. The nice thing about disconnecting from the grid is not only do you shelter society from the marginal cost setting everybody's price, but also you don't have to worry about transmission and grid connection, and those are expensive, for new facilities.

And so, I think we're going to see self-contained big tech campuses, kind of like we have cogeneration facilities at the largest industrial sites all over the country. And many of those are grid connected, but that's more, again, so they could sort of help the grid, because they have a lot less need for stability sometimes. We're going to see dedicated power generation facilities feeding tech farms.

And you might even have campuses where all the companies co-locate, spread the costs like we do at integrated chemical sites today.

19:50 – Jed D

I understand what you're talking about in or I think you do in terms of your position regarding T and D, but I'm wondering, can you just unpack that a little bit more? You know, your comment about co-locating power going in, data coming out and why, because that is somewhat contrarian to the investment decisions that utilities are making around transmission and distribution. So, could you just expand on that point because I think it's an important one.

20:18 – Doomberg

Yeah. It's a prediction. Right. And it's trying to see through what's happening today to what a better state would be. So, we have this mental model that society will organize in a way, whatever means necessary to keep us on that course. Well, an exponential growth and computing curve, if it's not going to work by just adding to the existing grid, then other things will be done.

And in our view, the thermodynamic answer is to have these off grid, self-contained, cost shared power plays that don't require grid transmission and hookup. And if you look at the time it takes to get hookups, like what's the big complaint of many of the renewables is that we've got this whole backlog of projects waiting for grid connection approval.

If you're in Texas and you're in the Permian and projects get promoted, at the state level, because you're not really doing anything that's going to, you know, impact interstate commerce, you can go much quicker. So, one of the reasons why we pivoted from only a nuclear story to also a very important natural gas story, for the same reason you think, I believe, is because speed matters, right?

We're on this treadmill and the treadmill is getting faster and faster and faster. The US is the dominant player in this market, and we will continue to be the dominant player in this market, mostly because we're swimming in dirt cheap natural gas, Can't give it away in some parts of the country. Well, that is an inefficiency that will be solved.

And I think when you line it all up and look at it, yes, grid operators are often publicly traded. Companies want to get in on the action. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. It's kind of like putting too much solar onto a grid. Well, we'll do some of these, but eventually everyone's going to realize that we have to do this separately. That way we own it. We don't need to worry about, you know, if the sun doesn't shine and we have to call big industrial players, which happens today, by the way, that's one of the ways that that we absorb incremental solder. Well, if you think about incremental demand from AI, that is like the hardest of the hardcore baseload, high quality power needs around. And so, we have to do it offline in our view.

And so, I think utilities will be interesting to look at. But and again, this is like seeing through the current trend and where will we will eventually go is one of the things we try to do for our readers. And this is a call I think that not many people are making, but we think will eventually happen.

And by the way, it's so much cheaper to send data around the world than it is to send electricity around the world. And so that's another reason why we think it has to happen.

22:35 – Jed D

Yeah. So, to reframe a little bit, you're making the argument that co-locating where the source of the fuel is and exporting data on fiber makes more sense than moving the fuel to where the generation currently is and laying copper. Right. Is that that's kind of the genesis for the, the argument?

23:03 – Doomberg

In fact, one of the reasons why we wrote that paper is because we did an analysis of major LNG exporters, and wouldn't it make more sense to intercept the fuel before you chill it and put it on a boat and sail it around the world? And sure enough Malaysia, which is sort of a, under the radar energy superpower, I happen to know Malaysia well, traveled there many times in my career. They have enormous resources. And lo and behold, where is Oracle investing $6.5 billion to build a data center? Malaysia. We're seeing it in Qatar. We're going to see it in Saudi Arabia. So, if you're selling LNG at $10 a million BTU landed, that means you're probably producing it for a buck per, you know, per million BTU domestically. And just go put your data center there. And we're seeing it.

And so, I think we're going to see that here in a big way. And again, we have so much gas here, Jed. I was just reading, I have a bunch of sources that I read every day get a sense for the market, there's so much gas on the sidelines, the moment there's incremental demand for gas, they're going to produce more oil in the Permian because of the associated gas issue and all of that stuff. And so, because OPEC is artificially keeping the price of oil high, we have too much gas. And so, the moment there's incremental demand for it, there's going to be a rush to the market to bring new supply on.

The world is swimming in natural gas. So, I'll just give you one example. We wrote a piece about Turkmenistan recently. They have this. They have the same natural gas resources as the US. And they currently produce about 7%, that we do. Just think about how much more gas Turkmenistan could bring to the market and feed China with. Russia is sitting on a giant pile of gas. There's just so much gas in the world. Canada, Monterrey Formation, there's gas everywhere.

24:43 – Jed D

I want to pivot slightly because you're one of the few guests I think I can do this. Before we turn the recording, we were chatting a little bit of in terms of neoclassical economic theory and in the, the failings of, of that heterodox. You know, I think for a lot of people, you talk start talking, if I throw out a big word like neoclassical economics, you know, people's eyes, you know, will tend to glaze over or, or you might find, you know, occasionally a true believer that wants to dig in. And, and until they realize that that's kind of a false narrative.

So, I want to connect with you on the role of energy in our economy. And if we go back to historical classical economic theory, even prior to Adam Smith and the French physiocrats, the role of energy was central because, no surprise, most of the goods and services that were being traded were coming from the ground.

And yet as we kind of went, post-World War Two in our, postmodern idea of the economy, there's been this massive decoupling where energy is seen as infinitely substitutable. Is an input. You mentioned Germany in terms of, you know, deindustrializing. Help us make the connection in terms of the role of energy and our economy and the resources that we have in terms of natural gas, however you see fit.

26:18 – Doomberg

Yeah. So first of all, we like to say, the most important question an analyst should ask themselves when looking at any market is, is this market well-supplied with primary energy or not? Because that's basically two different worlds. And if you're in a world that is swimming in energy abundance, energy can be modeled for a brief period of time as just another input.

It is only when energy is in short supply do you realize the mirage that somehow our energy can just be treated like any other commodity. And so, the thing that I find interesting is everybody knows that if oil spikes to $150 a barrel, we're likely to see a recession. Right? We wrote a piece last year called Slick Landing, where we predicted there would be no recession in the US because we were swimming in cheap hydrocarbons.

So why is it that super high prices of energy trigger recessions, but abundance of cheap energy is not conducive to growth? Energy is life. The human endeavor is a constant, unrelenting struggle against the forces of entropy. You need to waste heat in order to impose order on your local environment. All humans everywhere want a higher standard of living, and that means the demand for energy is basically infinite and it's gated by production. That's a different discussion.

However, the amount of energy you have available defines what you can do as an economy. Now, if you're China and you're net short a bit of energy, i.e., oil, you can secure that energy to close the gap through long term contracts and geopolitics. And you can explain geopolitics through energy. But if you're Korea and you're really short natural gas and you've built this very high-end, South Korea, by the way, I should say, this very high end, advanced manufacturing base. If you are choked off of energy, that base collapses. It just does. Energy is the most important thing that nobody pays attention to because we have so much of it. The dollar is just a means.

Currencies are just a means to do energy transactions. And once you have that worldview, you look at the economy completely differently. And it shocks me.

So, few people do. And the ones that do don't understand energy. And because they haven't spent any time in industry, that's, I think, the inefficiency in the market that Doomberg is happy to occupy with our little blog because we had that industrial experience. And we do have a, you know, a pretty solid foundation of physics on our team.

And you just know intuitively, look, the German business model was cheap natural gas from Russia, cheap labor from Eastern Europe, and really great engineering to make high end products from those two things, they lost their natural gas. You can't have heavy industry with a dumb energy policy. We're not going to have a vibrant steel sector in the UK. You're not going to have a vibrant auto business in Germany, which is why you're seeing VW coming apart at the seams now thermodynamically can't happen. Like you can't pay five times the price of natural gas that your competitors in the US are paying and compete. There's a lot of energy to car. You have to understand what energy markets are doing and once you do that, then the other things become important at the margins. But energy is core.

29:19 – Jed D

You know, I think it's so important. I would take it one step further, too, in terms of dollar in a service industry, I think is like five megajoules. And I think in a heavy industry is about 11 megajoules. And so, if you're if you're getting into a tighter supply of energy, then you're going to stifle innovation. And the health of your society is actually going to come down. And I think it's fair to probably say that you will see more conflicts, you know, when, when you're, you know, wars tend to break out around tighter energy supply, not, energy surplus. Do you agree disagree with that?

29:59 – Doomberg

100%. And I think also wars are decided by who has who has secure access to cheap energy. Right. This is the fact that we have forgotten all of this in modern economics. Like you turn on CNBC or you read the Financial Times or pick your favorite news outlet. Nobody talks about energy in this way, but it's so fundamentally, provably true.

Look at how we won World War Two. I mean, Germany was starved of energy. It's just that simple. Japan went to war because we embargoed them, their energy supplies. The whole reason they went across the Pacific was to get oil. And if they didn't secure the oil, they couldn't keep their machines running.

Look at the piece we just wrote on Taiwan. They have 11 days of natural gas storage. If China does a naval blockade. Goodbye, semiconductor industry. It's an inverted pyramid. We have the most important industry basically monopolizing the industry in a country that imports 98% of its energy. And we want to pick a fight there? With China? But their supply chains right there. And by the way, they're funding our military machine now, like we joked in one of our pieces, it's kind of weird to say. But the new arsenal democracy is China. All the Western militaries get their weapons from China.

And so, Taiwan with 11% natural gas supply and some maybe 30 days of coal, they're not going to keep those foundries running. They're already having major problems with their electricity grid. When energy is cheap and abundant, you can be a Taiwan and not have to worry about domestic energy sourcing, but once it's in short supply, you're 100% right. Economies collapse, people get upset, and wars happen all the time. History can be understood as a series of energy wars. Daniel Yergin has written a really fantastic book on this, the title of which I forget.

31:39 – Jed D

The New Map, I think, is the title.

31:41 – Doomberg

Yeah, or there's one before that. You know, Oil Through War or War Through Oil or something like that. The History of Oil. Basically walks us through all of the conflicts from the late 1800s to today. And by the way, like US, foreign policy right now, I think is erroneously based on old thinking, born in the 70s when everyone believed in peak cheap oil and that everyone believed that Hubbard's peak was real, and the US would never be an energy superpower again.

All the wars we've got into, there's a pipeline somewhere that we are either opposed to our need or there's, like Iraq. We go to Libya; we go to war because we think we need to control oil in the Middle East. That's what happens. And that thinking that scarcity mindset that US policymakers in, you know, the think tanks of DC, that form the foundation of all of their the axioms of their geological analysis right. And that has changed with the shale revolution. And I don't think the internal dialog has yet changed amongst the thought leaders, quote unquote, of the military industrial complex. We are the US. We eat. Its where I live, we are a global energy giga power now. We don't need to be worrying about who's going to develop what resources, where and who's going to control it. We have it all here. So that hasn't changed yet. And someday I hope it does.

32:59 – Doomberg

Well certainly I think, as Yergin says, you know, being on an island with abundant resources and a relatively low population is probably the quintessential top of that pyramid. Hopefully we, you know, we understand this and as you say, move away from platitudes and come back to physics in terms of how we think about, policies.

Yeah, 100%. Look at Guyana. You are talking about a small country sitting on resources. I mean, they're the fastest growing economy in the world. Let's hope they don't fall victim to Dutch disease. But we shall see. They seem to be doing things well as this. But the US has unlimited supplies of gas, huge amounts of oil, great fertile farmland, 90 nuclear reactors, amazing technology. Deepwater ports. We have it all. Let's stop worrying about what's going on in the Middle East. Let's focus on the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela, Brazil, Guyana, Argentina. There's plenty of things for us to do in the Western Hemisphere. We are totally self-sufficient. You take Canada, the US, Mexico, Latin America, South America. We have so much oil and gas, it's incredible. Let's not worry about going to war to find some more.

34:10 – Jed D

And I think that's a great place to, to end it. So, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate this.

34:16 – Doomberg

Anytime Jed, I always enjoy our conversations. And again, thanks for being a pro subscriber. If anybody wants to find out more, just head over to Doomberg.com. Thanks again.