By Irina Slav
The other day I sat and wondered what I was going to serve you for Friday breakfast/lunch/dinner. It was a slow news week, which is always the case when something massive happens and all other news somehow stops existing.
Luckily for me, one of my favourite people in the whole world didn’t disappoint. One of my favourite industries in the whole world also served a juicy bit of news for this Friday rant. I always knew I could trust Fatih Birol and offshore wind.
Birol actually outdid himself if such a thing is possible. In an interview with Euractiv, the head of the IEA said he would ask the European Union to provide “clean cooking” options for Africans by backing a same-name initiative.
Here’s what he said, with his typical righteous outrage: “Today in Africa, when it comes to energy and climate, the number one issue is clean cooking,” before going on to cite grim statistics of 3.7 million deaths annually associated with the smoke emitted by firewood and charcoal stoves that most African women use for cooking.
Smoke does kill and it also ties women at home preventing them from pursuing other activities such as education, for example, so the IEA is advocating for giving African women clean cooking stoves.
If you’re anything like me, you’d be wondering already what exact type of clean cooking stoves Birol might have in mind. Well, the Euractiv report was shy about it but it did spill the beans in the last paragraph.
“The IEA estimates that nearly one in three people gaining access to clean cooking in Africa by 2030 will do so via liquified [sic] petroleum gases (LPG), and one in eight thanks to electricity.”
Well, well, WELL. Clean cooking with gas? The same gas that various city and state regulators in the United States want to ban because it kills, causes asthma and probably leads to reproductive problems, back pain, strokes, and piles? Now, isn’t that odd? What presumably kills Americans can save African lives. I don’t know about you but I am mightily confused.
Of course, Birol has not advocated for gas stove bans but he’s not exactly a fan of gas either. In fact, his agency recently said it expected peak gas demand later this decade. Perhaps the IEA and Birol simply forgot, temporarily, how many people in Africa have no access to electricity. I can help: 600 million people. But then they remembered: 70% of Africa’s population has no access to clean cooking fuels, per the IEA.
If the IEA sees gas stoves solving the health problems of a third of these 600 million, then that’s 200 million people switching from firewood and charcoal to gas, and we’re talking daily use. On top of current use, which I see is pretty intense — I mean, TotalEnergies just signed a long-term LNG delivery deal with Qatar.
All this doesn’t sound like a peak to me but I have to admit a sort of a silver lining from the IEA’s perspective: perhaps many Africans won’t be able to afford the gas for their clean cooking gas stoves. But I’m sure it’s the thought that matters.
Incidentally, I also wonder whether this would mean African countries with their own gas resources will get the chance to develop them or the gas will be coming from overseas because that makes so much more economic sense.
Staying with the IEA for a bit longer (it’s hard to let go), it this week released its latest oil market report. Shockingly, it forecast a slump in global oil demand growth next year because of an equally global economy slowdown and high prices. For 2024, the IEA sees oil demand growth at a modest 880,000 bpd. Quite a slowdown it must be expecting.
Hilariously, this month the OMR coincided with OPEC’s MOMR and, what do you know, in it OPEC forecast oil demand growth of 2.4 million bpd for 2024 — an actual upward revision from earlier forecasts. Despite prices. Question for the audience: who do you trust?
The answer, of course, is historical data. And this data shows that last year, when Brent jumped lively over $100 and stayed there for a while, making the 2022 annual average $100 per barrel, global oil demand expanded… by over 2 million bpd.
May I please repeat that because it is so funny? Thank you. In a year when Brent crude prices averaged $100 per barrel, global oil demand grew by over 2 million barrels daily. This year will also see demand growth of a similar size. But the IEA says that in 2024 this will suddenly drop to less than 1 million bpd because of an economic slowdown and EVs. Of course it will.
In other hilarious news this week, Big Oil with Big Wind hopes got a Big Regulator kick in the turbines. The New York Public Service Commission refused to grant BP, Equinor and Orsted higher electricity prices for future contracts to make their offshore projects make economic sense. How unfortunate.
Per the Reuters report on the news, New Yorkers already have some of the most expensive electricity in the country and if the PSC had granted BP, Equinor and Orsted their wish, they’d have seen their bills rise by another 6.7%. Apparently, there is some common sense left in New York regulators.
The Governor, meanwhile, thought it would be smart to put a band aid on a massive gash, saying the state would “launch an accelerated procurement process for offshore and onshore projects “to backfill any contracted projects which are terminated.”
No, I don’t know what that means. I suspect, however, it means New York will try to lure in other wind developers to replace any that give up and go home because of exorbitant costs that render the projects dead on arrival.
How exactly these new ones will be spared by the effects of massive wind power cost inflation is a mystery to me but life’s full of mysteries and that’s what makes it so interesting to experience. Have a lovely weekend, one and all.
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