Gas popsicle
The energy industry's subzero solution
Good morning, energy experts. This is your Stock Market Rundown for June 3rd, 2024. Thanks for joining me. Let’s dig in:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: FRIGID FUEL
How would you ship gas? No, I’m not leading up to a fart joke here—it’s an actual serious question for the natural gas industry.
Energy companies have to move natural gas from producing regions like the Permian Basin in Texas and Bakken Formation in North Dakota, to customers around the world. And you can't ship it in a box, barrel, or shipping container.
Luckily, science has an answer: freeze the gas to negative 260 degrees Fahrenheit, so it turns into a liquid. You definitely wouldn’t want to swig a shot of it, but it’s pretty darn convenient for shipping by sea, where pipelines can’t run.
Thanks to technology like fracking, the US is now the world’s biggest natural gas exporter, surpassing former champion Qatar. That means liquified natural gas (better known as “LNG”) is big business.
Just this week, a new Louisiana LNG project that will export 20 million metric tons a year of super-chilled gas, was approved for construction by federal regulators—despite ferocious opposition from environmental activists.
Predictably, Greenpeace screamed that the project go-ahead is “disastrous” and decried it as a “climate Death Star”. Thing is, though, some of the nations that’ll be supplied with LNG via this project are using coal today.
And natural gas may be a fossil fuel, but it’s not half as dirty as coal. So, if we want to clean up atmospheric pollution, until we can cover the world with solar panels, we’re stuck with the energy industry’s hydrocarbon smoothie.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
Failed crypto exchange FTX has sorted out its bankruptcy with the courts. Customers will only get part of the value of their crypto holdings, but they’ll also receive a free "I survived the FTX collapse" t-shirt.
Cruise liner Carnival beat estimates and raised its profit forecast. During the pandemic I thought nobody would want to board one of those floating petri dishes ever again, but Americans are lined up on the boarding ramps.
Warren Buffett just donated $5 billion to charity, directing it mostly to charities run by his own kids. Oh, to be the child of a billionaire, and set up a nonprofit dedicated to collecting rare pinball machines for my basement collection.
Move over, Tesla: Toyota will launch an electric vehicle with autonomous driving in 2025. A car that lets me skip paying for gas and nap during my commute to the office? Might have to replace my 2005 Corolla.
Wishing you all a wonderful 4th of July, my friends; Stock Market Rundown will be off for the rest of the week. Have yourselves some well-deserved rest and recuperation, and let’s circle back first thing Monday morning. Yours in capitalism, The Axe
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