As someone who’s lived near the Gulf of Mexico virtually my entire life, I can attest that it’s a great place from which to seek energy resources.
The gulf is full of oil and gas, you know. Many fortunes have already been made tapping into the great bounty under the water, and many more will be made in the future — at least when the political leadership isn’t as comically stupid as it is now.
But the current, comically stupid political leadership believes that there are energy fortunes to be made a different way. That belief was challenged a bit last week, however:
The Biden administration’s first-ever auction of offshore wind development rights in the Gulf of Mexico ended with a single $5.6-million winning bid on Tuesday, reflecting meager demand for the clean energy source in a region known for its oil and gas production.
Germany’s RWE won rights to 102,480 acres (41,472 hectares) off Louisiana for $5.6 million, while the other two lease areas on offer off Texas received no bids, according to results posted on the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management website.
RWE’s awarded site is 44 miles off the coast of Louisiana and has water depths of 10-25 meters. The company said that the lease area has the potential to host up to 2 GW of new capacity, enough to power over 350,000 US homes with clean energy. The project is expected to be in operation by the mid-2030s, contingent upon permitting timelines.
RWE said the Louisiana lease was attractive because the state has strong existing coastal port and supply chain infrastructure and a goal to install 5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035. Texas does not have an offshore wind target.
But the overall result only represents a fraction of the billions of dollars of bids secured in an offshore wind lease sale off New York and New Jersey in February 2022, according to a Reuters analysis. Those states have passed laws that require utilities to buy power from offshore wind projects — mandates considered critical for a technology that is estimated to produce electricity at twice the cost of a natural gas plant.
The Germans love their windmills, so much so that they’ve largely returned their economy to a pre-industrial state by attempting to rely on them for energy.
It’s no surprise a German firm would be the only sucker willing to bet on offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Mexico.
Why? Well, the soils under the Gulf’s waters are exceedingly soft and muddy in most places, making the placement of wind turbine towers a shaky prospect. The fact that wind speeds on a normal day in the Gulf aren’t all that high is another not-fantastic circumstance.
Oh, and then there are the hurricanes.
It turns out that on the very day that the lease sale was taking place, there was a Category 4 hurricane churning in the Gulf of Mexico to the east of the lease block.
Hurricane Idalia could have done far more damage than it did, coming ashore in northwestern Florida’s lightly populated Big Bend area, but it didn’t take much imagination to see the footage and picture hundreds of windmills right in the path of that storm, turbine blades snapping off the infrastructure and turning into giant aerodynamic flying sails to be hurled into … whatever.
An oil platform. A ship. Maybe even something onshore, with just the right amount of bad luck.
Anybody who builds giant windmills in the Gulf of Mexico can quite foreseeably be made very sad when a big hurricane comes through.
It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen to those turbines when 100 mph winds howl past — and no, those storms will not produce more electricity out of those wind turbines.
GE is bragging that it’s building wind turbines that can withstand 128 mph winds. Wow, impressive. So all you need is a Category 3 hurricane to trash these new marvels. And regular wind turbines fail when wind speeds hit 94 mph.
This doesn’t account for the wear and tear that repeated storms would do to those turbines. We already know that they don’t stand up to normal weather, much less two or three hurricanes in a particularly active year.
The market knows this. Team Biden does not.
Interestingly, of course, where massive offshore wind farms are being erected off the eastern seaboard, there are now scads of whales and other sea mammals washing up dead onshore.
It’s fairly obvious there is a connection, though your betters at USA Today and elsewhere are merrily scolding the “conspiracy theorists” by screeching there is “No Evidence!” that the wind farms have anything to do with the dozens of whales suddenly washing up on the beaches.
Most stupidly, while Team Biden was preparing its flop of an offshore wind lease sale, it was simultaneously gutting offshore oil production due to a sue-and-settle scam it’d concocted with the Sierra Club.
Last month the administration announced a flaccid Gulf oil lease sale it’d only gone through with because of a court order from a lost lawsuit:
The Sept. 27 auction — currently the last offshore oil sale planned by the US government — is set to be just above a 60-million-acre threshold mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act. A five-year plan for selling new offshore oil and gas leases in US waters expired June 30, and the bureau has not finalized a new one.
Offshore oil advocates questioned the decision to shrink the size of the lease area in some of the most promising swaths in the Gulf of Mexico, which provides about 15% of US crude production.
The move, following the expiration of the leasing plan, erodes “long-term confidence and certainty in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Erik Milito, head of the National Ocean Industries Association. It also poses a “barrier to America’s energy production capabilities at a time when they’re needed more than ever, with inflation driving up the costs of everything for Americans including gasoline at the pump,” he said.
The terms of the sue-and-settle agreement that manifested itself in the weak oil lease sale had all kinds of punitive restrictions on companies attempting to do oil exploration and production in the Gulf. In certain areas, for example, ships traversing the waters are restricted to traveling at just 10 knots.
Why? You’ll love this.
Because of a whale.
And the oil industry is hauling Team Biden into court:
Major US oil industry players are suing the US Government over six million acres of protected area in the Gulf of Mexico.
The US Government is withdrawing the federally owned area from an upcoming sale in order to protect the Rice’s Whale, one of the most endangered whales in the world.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade group that represents the country’s oil and gas industry, is accusing the government of withholding the full amount required to be auctioned off, along with Chevron and the State of Louisiana. The land was promised by the US Government in a provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
In a press release, senior vice-president of the API Ryan Meyers described the actions of the US Department of the Interior as an “unjustified” attempt to “further restrict American energy access in the Gulf of Mexico”.
“Despite Congress’ clear intention in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has announced a ‘lease sale in name only’ that removes approximately 6 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico from the sale,” Meyers added. A further 67 million acres of government land remains available for lease. The auction is scheduled to take place on 27 September.
The dispute is a result of a 2020 agreement between the Department of the Interior and environmentalist groups that ensured that the habitat of the Rice’s Whale would be protected by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
The National Ocean Industries Association, which serves offshore oil, gas and wind industries, has also called on the government not to implement the actions of the BOEM. The body warns of “significant adverse consequences that could result to offshore safety, emissions, energy security, energy affordability, and national security” in a letter to the Department of the Interior.
The Rice’s Whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico Whale, has been consistently located in the north-eastern area of the Gulf. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there are likely fewer than 100 individuals remaining.
They only even identified the Rice’s whale as a species a year or two ago, and then, of course, it was considered endangered. Which raises the question: How do you know this whale’s population is shrinking when you didn’t even know it existed before?
So Team Biden is going to kneecap oil production in the Gulf, which may or may not be deleterious to the lifestyle of the whales (it is not deleterious to the lifestyles of fish in the Gulf; some of the best fishing you’ll ever do is next to an offshore oil platform), to build giant offshore wind farms that would surely finish off what Rice’s whales are extant.
And when that happens, the federal government and USA Today will shortly come along to declare there is “No Evidence!” that the dead, endangered whales are washing up on the beaches of the northern Gulf Coast because of wind farms.
Or they would, if anyone other than the Germans were interested in building wind farms in Hurricane Alley.
Like I said above, comically stupid.
Oh, yes. The offshore wind lease block nobody wants isn’t quite in the same area as the newly restricted Rice’s whale’s habitat.
Perhaps Biden might propose a fence in the Gulf to ensure the newly found whales won’t wander into the wind zone. To go with the railway bridge across the Pacific that he mutters about often, that is.
Or the border fence he refused to build, preferring open human migration into our homeland. We know so much about Rice’s whale that we discovered only recently that we’re positive this creature is nothing like people from the Third World who are so keen to join us.
And all of this is to fight “climate change,” you guys.
As I said in my last column, this level of suck can’t be sustained, and it will collapse. That’s a small comfort to the whales, to be sure, but to the people, it ought to be a hopeful sign.
If you’re willing to tolerate the damage they’ll do on the way to that collapse, of course.
h/t Steve B.
Read more at American Spectator
The article mentioned mandates to use renewable power in New York and New Jersey. One who comments on this web site insists that renewable energy is far cheaper than that from fossil fuels. If that were true no mandates would be required. Mandates are needed to force the use of a more expensive product.
RWE’s awarded was said to have enough to power for over 350,000 homes. We can be sure that this is the capacity of the peak output. Average output is typically 30% of that value. What is worse is when there is no output on windless days. Then fossil fuel power plants have to kick in to avoid blackouts. These plants must run at idle all of the time like a car idles in order to cut in instantly as needed.
Biden the Blunder dose this out of total politics not science him and the rest of the UN/Globalists want us to depend upon unreliable Wind and Solar which are Not Environmentally Friendly
As the saying goes, “You can’t fix stupid”. Biden and his administration (all of his Cabinet members) are a special class of stupid. As apparently is one German wind turbine company since no other company was stupid enough to even bother bidding. Between a lack of steady winds in the Gulf and the every year threat of hurricanes that can destroy an offshore wind installation in a day only someone Biden-level stupid would try to build there.